Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/88

84 social evolution from all that precedes it and prepares for it? And what is the precise discrimination needful of things social from things merely organic or psychological? The modes and the phases of the struggle for existence suggest intelligible answers.

Quite obviously the struggle for safety is the shaping cause of our esthetic life, the life of sensitiveness and of appreciation. On this point Mr. Darwin's data and conclusions are exhaustive. Instant reaction, if the organism is unconscious, discrimination if it is conscious, and due estimate of light and shade, of color and form, of sound and of pressure, in all their objective degrees and proportions, dissonances and harmonies—these are the readiness and the responsiveness requisite for safety from each instant of life to the next. Obviously, moreover, the esthetic life, so understood, is elemental and precedent. For an organism must in fact survive from moment to moment before it can have further need or power, even to eat.

The struggle for subsistence initiates and broadens into the economic life. The struggle for adaptation becomes the ethical life. For adaptation, in its beginnings a mere taking on or perfecting of useful characters, develops, in time, into self-control, self-direction and self-shaping.

Between adaptation and adjustment, no distinction whatever has been made by a majority of evolutionist writers. Spencer uses the word "adjustment" to include all that biologists and psychologists commonly mean by adaptation. Yet the two things are not at all the same. The struggles which they involve are not identical struggles, and, for the purposes of sociological theory, the distinction is of fundamental importance.

Adaptation—which, as it goes on, widens into and includes the ethical life, at first is a mere conforming of the organism through variation, selection and inheritance, to the physical conditions under which it happens to live; that is to say, to altitude, temperature, light or darkness, dryness or moisture, enemies, food supply, and so on. Through adaptation, and because non-adaptation means extinction, the individuals of any given species congregated and dwelling in any given region where adequate food supplies are found become increasingly alike, and the first two conditions of social life, as Mr. Bagehot rightly explained it, namely, grouping and substantial resemblance, are provided. But, since they are alike, individuals of the same variety or race, so brought together in one habitat, necessarily want the same things, and in like ways try to get them. They may compete in obtaining those things which each is able to get by his own efforts, or they may combine their efforts to obtain those things that no one could get unaided. In either case their interests and activities sooner or later must fall into adjustment. And, since any failure of adjustment may be as fatal as non-adaptation or starvation, there will be a struggle, at