Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/89

Rh first perhaps unconscious, but in course of time becoming conscious, to maintain adjustment and to perfect it. This struggle for adjustment is the beginning of social life and is the differentiating mark of all true social phenomena.

Or, to put the matter in slightly different words, while the struggle for safety develops the esthetic life, and the struggle for subsistence becomes the economic life, and the struggle for adaptation broadens into the ethical life, the struggle of resembling creatures to adjust their similar adaptations to one another, is the beginning and the continuing process of the social life.

Through success in all these struggles, and not in any one alone, there results a survival of the fit, that is, of those organisms that are so equipped with proper parts and habits that they on the whole fit into and conform to all the essential conditions of life provided by the environment in which they are forced or elect to dwell. Holding their own in such unremitting and remorseless contests, those among them in whom consciousness has awakened, inevitably come to feel a certain sense of vital adequacy, a will and power to live, and an assurance of unexhausted opportunity. There is born in them a faith, inarticulate at first but effective, in the possibilities of life. Impelled by this faith and equipped with social instinct, man, outstripping all other creatures, presses forward into the wider conflicts of a collective struggle for existence.

Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization?

These questions are not really so difficult as some others. We have seen that adjustment arises because like creatures want the same things and in like ways try to get them. Now, wanting the same things, and trying in like ways to get them, are essentially psychological phenomena, and under analysis they resolve into one elementary phenomenon in particular, namely, like response to the same, or to similar, or to common stimulation. Responding in like ways to the same, or to common stimulation, associating individuals, acting upon one another also by suggestion and example, and imitating one another in a thousand ways, have identical feelings and develop identical or closely resembling ideas. Sympathy and understanding, as the psychologist explains, are byproducts of all these things. Sympathy and understanding, supplemented by communication, and backed up by the enormous mass of common feelings and ideas, find expression in those common and usual