Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/93

 THE BASIS OF SOCIALITY 8 1

also a biological truth that the struggle is greatest between the members of the same species. It is also not necessary that each individual partner should be conscious of the common goal, pro- vided his conduct tends that way. His motives may be wrong, but his conduct must be right. Correct motives provide, how- ever, some guarantee of persistency of conduct. The individual lives for himself, but in so doing must serve others. Selfishness necessarily generates altruism. The chalk cliffs of the infusoria are the result of the individualistic action of each of the infusoria, the infusorium being typical of egoism. 1 Baldwin discriminates between the substance, content, stuff, or material of society, and the functional method or process of organization of the social material. He describes the social substance or content as fol- lows : "The matter of social organization consists of thoughts; by which is meant all sorts of intellectual states, such as imagi- nation, knowledge, and informations." This " matter," he thinks, is found only in social groups, which alone, therefore, can be called societies. Animal communities he would call "compa- nies." The functional method or process of organization of the social material he finds in the process of imitation which is sub- jectively contained in the "dialectic of personal growth."

It is evident that the " substance, content, stuff, or material " of society is not the consciousness of kind, as Giddings affirms ; neither can it be said that the functional method or process of organization of the social material is mainly a process of imita- tion, as Baldwin asserts. The process is rather that of division of labor, using that term to indicate both the process of differen- tiation and integration. The transmission of the social heritage, the introduction of the young into adult social ways, may and does involve a large amount of imitation, but even there, again, it should be remarked that imitation is but one subdivision of the larger process of suggestion. Suggestion may be one of the methods by which the young acquire social ways, but it does not therefore rise to the supreme rank and importance of the social way itself. Again, imitation, and in a still larger way suggestion in all its forms, is one method of social service, as, for instance, in

'IHERING, Der Zweck im Recht, 3d ed. (Leipzig, 1893), P- 4*>7'