Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/438

424 the welfare of society, are not those which would favor his continuance as an abstract unit apart from the group, the qualities or habits must first be acquired or learned, and made organic to the individual's own ends in the situation in which he is placed before they can be of service to society.

Natural selection is, it is true, an 'automatic' process, but this only means that by the elimination of those variations which are unserviceable to the type, or species, natural selection so operates as to group individuals about a mean. And it is just the preservation of this mean that among human beings constitutes the essential condition of moral progress and individual development.

We have only to look to recent idealistic theories in confirmation of this. The individual does not come into the world a full-fledged personality. His personality is admittedly an achievement, a social product. He "feeds upon social models," and by imitation and counter-imitation, trial and repetition, grows into a knowledge of himself. As he goes out into the world the social models, by reference to which his growing body of judgments is socially constituted, are enlarged and become more complex, approaching more nearly the group-concept of his class, community or people. And however much individuality he may display, his life as an individual is lived in constant reference to this mean of thought and belief which has established itself and in the past found outward expression in recognized customs, beliefs, and institutions. The establishment of such a mean is the condition of the life and growth of the individual, though in its growth deviation from the norm may be as rigorously excluded here as are unfavorable variations in the infra-human world. And if the objection be raised that a mean which represents a community of judgments or belief, a social standard to which the individual must approximate, is something very different from a mathematical mean, the reply is, that natural selection signifies merely that groups of 'natural' (as opposed to supernatural) causes cooperate in the production of an effect; it is not a theory of the nature of these 'natural' causes or of the mean established by their operation.

And it seems unnecessary that, granting the process, it should