Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/194

182 of successful adaptation. Now such survival involves the gradual origination and slow upbuilding of a system of related parts so operating as to insure integral functioning. That is, each organic survival is an aggregate issuing out of a long process of assimilation and integration. The combinations which so behave as to secure preservation and perpetuation are therefore aggregates functioning on the basis of a mechanical substructure, which is simple or complex as the organism is low or high in the scale of evolution. It follows then that a compact and integral mechanism must constitute the preponderant mass in all successful functioning; that the free play admissible is relatively small; and that excessive increase in either must imperil all functioning. Application of the organic conception to the individual man has given the fruitful view of a great organism whose several and manifold parts so function as to guarantee the survival of the whole. Similarly its application to man in the corporate or collective sense has proved most illuminating, and there is ample data to show that the social organism has succeeded in its adaptation only by virtue of a basis sufficiently stable to insure integral operation. The development of customs and institutions represents essentially the elaboration of this mechanical groundwork as underlying condition of survival. Family, clan, tribe, marriage, judiciary, education, religion: These are all so many wheels and cogs and shafts and pins in the machinery that has been stable enough to enable the evolution of the social organism. They belong in reality to an integral whole, though they may be separated out for purposes of study and description. Thus in both individual man and collective man survival by successful functioning presupposes a mass of mechanical substructure enormously preponderant over existing free play. In the individual man the free play appears as freedom, in the rôle of guide for seeing and doing; in the collective man it appears as personal initiative in contrast with institutional life. So free play and mechanism develop together, with the latter predominant; when the former is minimal, movement is impeded, and when it is maximal, integral functioning is impaired. This reciprocal process constitutes the history of retrogression or of progress according as mechanism or free play is regnant. Hence