Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/483

Rh —to draw a sharp line between the social and the anti-social. That psychology of individual differences which might enable us to grade men and women into distinct ethical types is still in process of creation. Yet in a broad empirical way it is easy to distinguish the moral qualities favorable to communal life. The complete social person is marked, fundamentally, by industry, self-control, kindliness, perseverance and the ability to subordinate present pleasure to future welfare. Anti-social persons embody the opposite characteristics—shiftlessness, violence, brutality, predatory tendencies, viciousness and impatience at restraint. Of course these qualities, social and anti-social, combine in all sorts of mixtures in all sorts of persons. But the principle is clear. As nature's standards of fitness become progressively more civil the social qualities stand a better and better chance, in contrast with their opposites, of perpetuation.

One reason thinkers have overlooked the existence and operation of this selective factor has been a too great preoccupation with the question of intellectual and moral improvement. This, as we shall note later, has led to wrong inferences from the data. The problem, in fact, is not one of advance, but one of change. Another source of error has been a confinement of attention to group selection, leading to excessive emphasis of the importance of military success, and neglect of internal selective processes in semi-military communities.

It has long been recognized, of course, that before the emergence of civilizations along the Nile and the Euphrates the race had been subjected to discipline for hundreds of thousands of years. Men lived in groups where tribal custom was supreme. The necessity of prolonged care during infancy had sifted out the gentler mothers and fathers. The clans, moreover, waged incessant war among themselves; and fighting strength and pugnacity being equal, the clan most solidly cemented by fellow feeling succeeded in the conflict with less adhesive clans. Social solidarity, crystallized and preserved in the "cake of custom," stood at a survival premium. Therefore at the beginning of civilization selection had already picked out and conserved a certain minimum of tractability.

Was this rôle of selection dropped with the passing of the predatory pastoral stage and the setting up of orderly communal life? Has the capital of cooperative spirit, acquired before the pyramids, sufficed for all subsequent elaborations? Is not the truth rather that, although the mode of eliminating the anti-social elements has altered, the process has been continuous? Men began to be graded into classes, into occupations and castes. Up to that time man's nature had been clan-hewn. Thereafter selection worked on the individuals within the group, sifting them out in their extensive variety.