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 76 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of kind or in the psychological process of imitation. Spencer, however, did point to the continuity of law as is evidenced in the biological and sociological worlds. Instead of an organism he could have used a species with much greater effect, for in a species are found, although in a crude and rudimentary stage, the first beginnings of social life.

One of the most striking, and yet at the same time one of the least observed, facts about specific action is the pre-eminence of the specific as such. The individual is secondary to the species. Instincts, which are characteristically the grand trunk line of transmission and continuity in the lower orders of the zoological series, are peculiar and very important in this, that they are always in their origin and bloom for the benefit of the species to which the animal may belong which possesses the instinct. They are of benefit to the individual only secondarily, in so far as that individual may be of benefit to the species. The mother gives up her life for the child. She dies, but the child, and through it the species, lives. The salmon struggles up the Columbia river for a thousand miles, is torn and battered by the rocks and waterfalls on the long and weary journey, lays its eggs, and dies ; but the race lives on, although at the loss and sacrifice of one of its best members. The long history of the mammalia or mothers is a record of innumerable such examples. Of course, it is not necessarily true that the individual performs an instinctive act in order that the species may be benefited, but the persistent fact remains that in the long run only those species and individuals survive which act in such a way that the species may be further propagated. Instincts are always for species or race preserva- tion. They are specific, altruistic, other-regarding, profoundly social. They may not be all consciously such, but in their origin and bloom they are in their final import intensely social. It is a question of survival. It is a question of propagation and of the safety and welfare of the propagated. The individuals of a species which do not propagate obviously nullify the proba- bility of like descendants. That which militates against the species thereby militates against the survival of the members of that species. The species that survives is characterized by the