Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/283

 Rh a selection in terms of the chemical constitution of the organism. Each adaptation here is without influence upon later reactions, but each must be hit upon anew each time the circumstances arise. There is no learning. At the next stage again the response is brought about by chance, and the selection determines the process in its completeness, but there is here, on the one hand, a conscious pleasure and pain, and what is more certain and more important as an objective criterion, there is a permanent effect left upon the organism by the action once performed.

In man and perhaps in some of the higher animals the same general processes hold, but in addition to immediate organic processes of pleasure and pain there are new elements added to the selecting agencies, which may ultimately become pleasure and pain, but are only remotely organic in their origin. These in some way all seem to originate in the social milieu, all seem to have their origin in the phenomena connected with the living of man in groups. There are many things which seem indifferent to racial survival or to immediate pleasure and pain that will always and at once be repressed in terms of good manners or good form. Some traditional virtues strike one who has been reared in a given society as just as fundamental as others which can be shown to possess survival values, but we find civilizations of high rank which survive just as well without them. So, if an Anglo-Saxon were to select the fundamental virtues, modesty would be one of them. But let him consider for a moment the customs of the Japanese, and their national success, and then modesty would not seem so fundamental as it did at first sight.

These more subtle selecting agents act in the same way as the cruder. When any individual by chance departs from the traditional line of conduct, he is at times made to feel by popular attitude that he himself or his conduct is not welcome. It is not merely departure from the social norm that is repressed, but departure in certain ways that can not be foretold in advance of trial. Some innovations are welcomed and accepted and the discoverer made a social hero, exceptional man or genius. Others are checked in one or more of the insidious ways that in society are more effective than the arm of law. What determines this social selection, however, is not evident. In extremes it may be racial survival, in minor cases it may be what passes for esthetic appreciation, although esthetic appreciation can probably be reduced to social selection as well as social selection to esthetic appreciation.

One thing seems fairly evident, and this is that imitation does not play the important part in social selection or in any form of learning that has been supposed. In these higher forms, what we want explained is not the persistence of the traditional conduct, but the