Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/746

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which adopted the superior form. Moreover, the feelings and impulses which led to the formation of monogamic unions, having been found favorable to race survival, have tended more and more to become fixed by heredity, inasmuch as those indi- viduals who did not possess these feelings and impulses would leave no offspring to survive. Thus the picture of the evolution of the family which we obtain from ethnology shows us, not merely the continued imitation of a primitive pattern, but also the constant elimination of those who do not conform to the pat- tern, plus the fixing in the race of those instinctive impulses which make conformity to the pattern easy.

Almost any practical social problem would serve for further illustration. Let us take the drink problem. Many social thinkers hold that families which have the appetite for the stronger and more harmful alcoholic drinks are being steadily eliminated, and that a state of society will soon result in which there will survive practically no individuals with the " drink- crave." This theory seems to get some inductive support from the fact that those countries which have had the longest experi- ence with alcoholic beverages have little or no drunkenness. In this case, then, as in the evolution of the family, the process of natural selection appears to come in to limit and control the process of imitation. Like the "consciousness of kind," it serves to make the process of imitation definite or within cer- tain limits. Men imitate one act rather than another, and one mental attitude rather than another, because it is of life-saving advantage to do so. Moreover, and most important of all, the individuals who do not select the right models for imitation are constantly eliminated, and thus natural selection fixes in the race a larger and larger number of instinctive impulses which tend to discharge themselves along one line rather than along another.

The whole drift of our argument against the imitation theory of social order and progress must now be apparent. It divorces the social process from the life-process as a whole. It takes no sufficient account of those deeper characteristics of species and race which come to light in the psychical life of the indi- vidual and in the psychical processes of society. It matters