LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PRESENTED BY ALMA WILLIAMS UCSB ^ STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO.. LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA. LTD. TORONTO Studies in the Theory of Human Society BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, LL.D. PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS. FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSO- CIATION. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published February. 1922. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. SAiSTA BAiiiiAKA PREFACE These consecutive studies are a book of Sociology without the form or the formality of a text. The discursive manner has permitted me to reiterate cardinal ideas and principles, exhibiting them in many lights and relations. I have thought this important in these days of loose thinking on social themes. The theory of human society into which these ideas are or- ganized is stated in Chapter XVI, as follows : "If I can be said to have a system of sociology it is briefly this: "i. A situation or stimulus is reacted to by more than one individual; there is pluralistic as well as singularistic behavior. Pluralistic behavior develops into rivalries, competitions, and con- flicts, and also, into agreements, contracts, and collective enter- prises. Therefore, social phenomena are products of two vari- ables, namely, situation (in the psychologist's definition of the word) and pluralistic behavior. "2. When the individuals who participate in pluralistic be- havior have become differentiated into behavioristic kinds or types, a consciousness of kind, liking or disliking, approving or disapproving one kind after another, converts gregariousness into a consciously discriminative association, herd habit into so- ciety; and society, by a social pressure which sometimes is con- scious but more often, perhaps, is unconscious, makes life rela- tively hard for kinds of character and conduct that are disap- proved. "3. Society organizes itself for collective endeavor and achieve- ment if fundamental similarities of behavior and an awareness of them are extensive enough to maintain social cohesion, while differences of behavior and awareness of them in matters of de- tail are sufficient to create a division of labor. "4. In the long run organized society by its approvals and dis- approvals, its pressures and achievements, selects and perpetuates vi PREFACE the types of mind and character that are relatively intelligent, tolerant, and helpful, that exhibit initiative, that bear their share of responsibility, and that effectively play their part in collective enterprise. It selects and perpetuates the adequate." I have endeavored to bring discussion and exposition to date. The nearly completed first quarter of the Twentieth Century has not been marked by discoveries comparable to those that lifted the second half of the Nineteenth Century above all other years in the history of knowledge; but it has been a time of rectifica- tion in science. Logic has abandoned absolutes for variables, and pigeon hole classifications for frequency distributions. Physics and chemistry have begun to build from electrons. Bi- ology has become experimental and Mendelian. Psychology has become experimental and objective. It has discriminated between reflex and conditioning; between original nature and habit. Anthropology has discovered elements of religion older than ghosts, and found more variates of primitive social organization than Morgan and McLennan knew. These corrections of fun- damental notions and of inductions that are data of sociology have made the revision of sociology obligatory. I offer here an individual contribution to that formidable undertaking. A large part of the content of the volume is entirely new. Materials that in a cruder form have been printed in various journals and pro- ceedings, and a small portion taken over from Democracy and Empire now out of print, have been worked over to the extent of being nearly rewritten. The chapter on "Order and Possibility" is not strictly a part, but it sets forth prolegomena (as I conceive them) of a scientific theory of human society. Many students of both psychology and sociology continue to worry over "determinism," and in par- ticular over "mechanistic" theories of life. Just what happens to their apprehensions when the discriminations of a statistical way of thinking are applied to them has not, I believe, before been pointed out. I am grateful to friends and colleagues for helpful criticisms and suggestions; and especially grateful to student members of my research group for untiring aid in "checking up" and "trying out." CONTENTS I HISTORICAL CHAPTER PAGE I. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE .... 3 II. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE J 9 III. THE ECONOMIC AGES 33 IV. THE QUALITY OF CIVILIZATION 57 V. A THEORY OF HISTORY 66 VI. THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL THEORY 94 II ANALYTICAL VII. ORDER AND POSSIBILITY 127 VIII. A THEORY OF SOCIAL CAUSATION 144 IX. THE MIND OF THE MANY 154 X. THE GROUP-MAKING ROLE OF IDEAS AND BELIEFS 175 XI. FOLKWAYS AND STATEWAYS 190 XII. SOCIAL SELF CONTROL 197 XIII. SOCIAL THEORY AND PUBLIC POLICY 209 XIV. THE COSTS OF PROGRESS 224 III SYNTHETIC XV. PLURALISTIC BEHAVIOR 249 XVI. FURTHER INQUIRIES OF SOCIOLOGY ..... 291 INDEX 303 PART I HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY CHAPTER I THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE REVOLUTIONIZING as the life work of Charles Darwin was in the fields of biology and psychology, one may doubt if his writings disturbed the intellectual peace anywhere more profoundly than in the already perturbed realms of pre-Darwinian social philos- ophy. Borrowing a shocking thought from the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, Mr. Darwin, in due course of time, gave it back to Malthusians and Godwinites, to Ricardians and Ruskinites, to Benthamites and Owenites, with a new and terrific voltage. Nine years before The Origin of Species was published, Herbert Spencer, in the concluding chapters of Social Statics, had offered an explanation of society in terms of a progressive human nature, adapting itself to changing conditions of life. These chapters are the germ of that inclusive conception and theory of evolution which were elaborated in the ten volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Five years later, or four years be- fore The Origin of Species saw the light, Mr. Spencer, in the first edition of his Principles of Psychology, set forth an original interpretation of life, including mental and social life, as a cor- respondence of internal relations to external relations, initiated and directed by the external relations. Finally, in April, 1857, Mr. Spencer published, in The Westminster Review, the provo- cative paper on "Progress : Its Law and Cause," in which a law of evolution was partially formulated, and evolution was declared to be the process of the universe and of all that it contains. 3 4 STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY Mr. Spencer thus had seen evolution comprehensively, as adap- tation and differentiation. He had not yet mentally grasped the universal redistribution of energy and matter, wherein every finite aggregate of material units, radiating energy into surrounding space, or absorbing energy therefrom, draws itself together in order-making coherence, or distributes itself abroad in riotous disintegration. That universal equilibration, which in fact is the beginning and the end of material transformation, was the aspect of the world which in thought Mr. Spencer arrived at last of all. It is not given to any one human intellect to discover all truth, and there is more in evolution than even Mr. Spencer perceived, either at the beginning of his great work, or in the fulness of his powers. 1 Intent upon the broader aspects of cosmic change, his mind did not seize upon certain implications of rearrangement. In the concrete world of living organisms, equilibration becomes the relentless struggle for existence, in which the weakest go to the wall. Natural selection follows. It was this intensely con- crete aspect that Mr. Darwin saw, and intellectually mastered. The distinction here indicated between evolution as a universal process, comprehensively described by Spencer, and Darwinism, or Mr. Darwin's account of one vitally important and concrete phase of that process, has often been noted, and is usually ob- served by careful writers. It is of particular importance in any discussion of social evolution. One cannot hope to get far in a theoretical study of human society if he does not heed the extent to which our explanations of social origins, our philosophies of history and of human institutions, have become not only evolution- ist, in the Spencerian sense of the word, but also Darwinian. It was not until the publication of The Descent of Man, in 1871, when controversy over The Origin of Species had raged through twelve years of intellectual tempest, that the full signifi- cance of natural selection for the doctrine of human progress was apprehended by the scientific world. Mr. Spencer saw it when 1 And he did not finally reduce his general formula to its lowest terms. As "universal," evolution is but a progressive emergence of order out of turbulence, and therefore a progressive complication of relationships. All other aspects of evolution are particularistic, for example, they are astro- nomical or biological, or psychological or political, and no two of them are of quite identical pattern. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE 5 The Origin of Species appeared. Mr. Darwin himself had per- ceived that he must offer a credible explanation of the paradox that a ruthless struggle for existence yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness. But it was neither Mr. Spencer, nor Mr. Dar- win, who first recognized the specific phase of the life struggle in which the clue to the mystery might be sought. The gifted thinker who made that discovery was Walter Bagehot, editor of the Lon- don Economist, whose little book on Physics and Politics or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of Natural Selec- tion and Inheritance to Political Society, was published first as a series of articles in The Fortnightly Review, beginning in Novem- ber, 1867. Mr. Darwin rightly calls these articles "remarkable." Revised and put together in book form they made a volume of only two hundred and twenty-three small pages in large type, but no more original, brilliant or, as far as it goes, satisfactory exami- nation of the deeper problems of social causation has ever been offered from that day until now. It anticipated much that is most valuable in later exposition. In the Social Statics, Mr. Spencer had shown that primitive man, subsisting upon inferior species and contending with them for standing room and safety, necessarily developed a human nature adapted to the task of slaughter, cruel, therefore, and un- scrupulous ; but that triumphant posterity, inheriting a subjugated world, and no longer bound to kill, might become sympathetic enough to cooperate successfully in peaceful activities. The exact relation, however, of this process to group formation or to the collective activity of a cooperating group when formed, Mr. Spencer at this time certainly did not see. For, incredible though it may seem, Mr. Spencer did not at this time so much as make note of the terrific struggles for control of food-getting oppor- tunities that occur among individuals or between groups of the same species, or variety. Conflict among men of the same cul- tural attainments Mr. Spencer thought of only as prompted by surviving savage instincts, engendered by predatory habits, in the lawless youth of the race. It was specifically the phenomena of group solidarity and of col- lective conflict, in distinction from a merely individual struggle for existence, which Mr. Bagehot selected for examination, and 6 STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY his mind penetrated directly to the essential conditions of the problem. He said: "The progress of man requires the cooperation of men for its develop- ment. . . . The first principle of the subject is that man can only make progress in 'cooperative groups'; I might say tribes and nations, but I use the less common word because few people would at once see that tribes and nations are cooperative groups, and that it is their being so which makes their value; that unless you can make a strong cooperative bond, your society will be conquered and killed out by some other society which has such a bond; and the second principle is that the members of such a group should be similar enough to one another to cooperate easily and readily together. The cooperation in all such cases depends on a felt union of heart and spirit; and this is only felt when there is a great degree of real likeness in mind and feeling, however that likeness may have been attained." l Addressing himself to the question how the necessary likeness in mind and feeling is produced, Mr. Bagehot answers: By one of the most terrible tyrannies ever known among men, namely, the authority of customary law ; and in accounting for the origin and force of custom, he develops a theory of the function of imi- tation which anticipates much, but by no means all, of the socio- logical theory of Gabriel Tarde. Custom, however, tends to create a degree of similarity among social units, and an unchanging way of life, fatal to further progress. To reintroduce and to maintain certain possibilities and tendencies toward variation is, as Bagehot sees the process, one of the chief uses of conflict. Social evolu- tion thus proceeds through the conflict of antagonistic tendencies, on the one hand toward uniformity and solidarity; on the other hand toward variation and individuality. In some groups, one of these tendencies predominates. Contending together, group with group, in the struggle for existence, those groups survive in which the balancing of these tendencies secures the greatest group effi- ciency. It is not too much to say that in this interpretation, Mr. Bagehot arrived at conclusions which to-day we recognize as be- longing to the theoretical core of a scientific sociology. Mr. Darwin, in those chapters of The Descent of Man in which he treats of the origin of social habits and the moral facul- ties, adopts in substance the conclusions of Mr. Bagehot, and with 1 Physics and Politics, pp. 212, 213. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE 7 his keen sense for what is essential, lays emphasis upon four facts, namely : ( I ) the importance of group or tribal cohesion as a factor of success in intertribal struggle, (2) the importance of sympathy as a factor in group cohesion, (3) the importance of mutual fidelity and unselfish courage, and (4) the great part played by sensitiveness to praise and blame in developing both unselfish courage and fidelity. In terms of these four facts, Mr. Darwin finds an answer to the question, how, within the condi- tions fixed by a struggle for existence, social and moral qualities could tend slowly to advance and to be diffused throughout the world. That the studies of both Mr. Bagehot and Mr. Darwin left much still to be said on the subject of group feeling and coopera- tive solidarity was shown when, in 1890, Prince Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin published in The Nineteenth Century his fascinating articles on Mutual Aid among Animals, afterwards supple- mented by studies of mutual aid among savages and among bar- barians. These articles contained nothing essentially new in theory, but they contributed to our knowledge an imposing mass of facts demonstrating how great has been the part played by sympathy and helpfulness in the struggle for existence, and how inadequate would be any interpretation of natural selection which accounted for it wholly in terms of superior strength, cruelty and cunning. Mr. Darwin never claimed to offer an adequate explanation of the variations which natural selection preserves or rejects. He sometimes took them for granted, he sometimes spoke of them as accidental or fortuitous. 1 He would have been the last to pretend *It was left for the post-Darwinians, and in particular DeVries, to demonstrate the distinction between "mutations" (variations large or small that are inherited) and "fluctuations" (variations large or small that are not inherited) and to apprehend its significance. The fact of mu- tation (often large and conspicuous) ; the law of heredity discovered by Mendel; the continuity of germ plasm discontinuous with somatic cells and the fact that traits acquired by an individual after birth do not descend in heredity, established by Weismann; have displaced both the hypothesis of pangenesis and Darwin's view of the transformation of species by cumulative variation ; but they have not touched essential Darwinism, namely, recognition of the fact and the function of selective death-rates among mutants. There is no evidence that Malthus saw, or if he saw attached importance to the fact, that death-rates are selective. 8 STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY that he had told us all that we should like to know about the be- ginnings of herd habit, of sympathy or of sensitiveness to praise or blame. But, starting from herd habit, sympathy and the desire for approval as traits that may actually be observed, and that presumably have somehow had a natural origin, Darwin and Kropotkin convincingly demonstrate that groups possessing these qualities have a certain advantage in the struggle for life. To account more fully for the origins, in distinction from the natural selection of the social qualities, was the problem that John Fiske attacked in his theory of the effects of prolonged infancy, first published in the North American Review of October, I873, 1 and a year later in the Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy. Fiske discriminates between "gregariousness" and "sociality," without, however, sufficiently analyzing the one or the other, or quite de- fining the difference. 2 By sociality he seems to mean a relatively high development of sympathy, affection and loyalty to kindred or comrades. He argues that sociality has its origin in small and permanent family groups. These are not necessarily monogamous at first. They may be polygamous or polyandrian, and may broaden out into clans. But they must be more enduring than matings observed in the merely gregarious herd. The cause of both definiteness and permanence he finds in the prolongation of infancy, necessitating a relatively long-continued parental care of offspring. The relations so established among near kindred have conserved and strengthened the feelings of affection and the sense of solidarity. Mr. Darwin recognized Mr. Fiske's theory as an important contribution to the subject. It must be said in criticism, however, that Mr. Fiske did not see all the implications of prolonged infancy, or develop his theory into all its possibilities. Admitting that the prolongation of infancy was probably a factor in the evolution of stable family relationships, and therefore played a part in strengthening the social sentiments, we must re- member that the collective life and solidarity of the gregarious group was probably a chief cause of the prolongation of infancy itself. Demanding, as it did, relatively complex habits and ad- 1 Under the title: The Progress from Brute to Man. 'Nevertheless, the discrimination is one of the most significant that had so far been made in sociology. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE 9 justments, it operated to select for survival those individuals that varied in the direction of high brain power and its correlated long infancy. But this is to say that the collective struggle for exis- tence was a factor in the evolution of man before man became a factor in the evolution of society, and the fact is important. Moreover, Mr. Fiske's theory no more explained the actual origins of sympathy and cooperation than Bagehot's and Dar- win's theories had done. Neither, for that matter, did Suther- land's account of The Origin and Growth of the Moral In- stinct? although Sutherland got somewhat further back when he called attention to the reaction of parental care of offspring upon the evolution of ganglia making up the sympathetic nervous system. At this stage the Darwinian interpretation of social origins had arrived when, in 1894, there was published a work which had an almost sensational reception. Hailed as a new gospel by minds desiring above all things to find some solid ground for religious convictions that had seemingly suffered violence in the course of evolutionist warfare, this book was treated by scientific critics with scant respect. The critics, I venture to think, were in error. For, in fact, the Social Evolution of Benjamin Kidd raised a profoundly important question, and gave an answer to it which, while half wrong, was probably half right, and the half that was right was a real and important contribution to knowledge. Stated in the fewest possible words, Mr. Kidd's query was this : Since natural selection saves the few and kills the many, why does not the great majority of mankind try to curb competition and put an end to progress ? Thus presented, Mr. Kidd's question is the radical and fearless form of a question which socialism asks in a form that, by comparison, is conservative and half-hearted. And Mr. Kidd's answer, not so much as tainted with socialism, is as fearless as his question. Progress has no rational sanction. It is irrational and, from the standpoint of reason, absurd. Man goes on multiplying, competing, fighting and making progress be- cause he is not rational and has no desire to be. He lives not by 1 Published in 1898, a worthy product of Australian scholarship, which its author described as largely a detailed expansion of the fourth and fifth chapters of The Descent of Man. io STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY reason, but by faith. He crucifies and kills himself to improve the race, not because he is scientific, but because he is religious. Perhaps it was because Mr. Kidd's thesis was paradoxical, that theologians found something tangible in it while scientific men did not. It should be possible now to look back upon it without prejudice. On the face of it, it is an obvious fallacy, but back of fallacy lies a truth. The fallacy consists in an unwarranted assumption that indi- viduals and families marked for extermination in the struggle for existence are, in their own lifetime, aware of their impending doom. Let us suppose that, of one hundred families now flourish- ing, ninety will become extinct in the tenth generation, their places being filled by a corresponding number of new families branching from the one successful line. This would be natural selection at a rapid rate. Yet to maintain this rate, only ten fam- ilies have to drop out in any one generation, and ten new ones to appear. This means that, at any given time, a ninety per cent, majority of all persons at the moment living have an expectation of further life, the termination of which cannot be foreseen. The large majority, therefore, at any given time existing think of themselves not as the unfit that must perish, but rather as the fit selected to survive. This way of stating the problem, however, brings us face to face with a peculiarly interesting truth, for the apprehension of which we rightly may give generous credit to Mr. Kidd. Ob- viously, while no family stock or race at any time existing can certainly know, or, while it remains still vigorous, find sufficient ground to believe that it is doomed to perish, neither can it cer- tainly know that it is indefinitely to survive. It struggles instinc- tively and it achieves not altogether by knowledge or by reason, but also in part by faith. It impulsively goes forward and it hopes, it expects to endure. It believes in its future. Therefore the ongoing drive by which a race, a family, or an individual lives, is not anti-rational, nor yet super- rational. It is rather sub-rational or proto-rational. It is deeper and more ele- mental than reason. It is the will to "carry on" sustained by faith in the possibilities of life. The question, therefore, which Mr. Kidd should have asked, and which we, reviewing his work, THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE n must ask in his stead, is this : May we identify our ongoing will with what men in all lands and times have called "the soul," and merge our elemental faith in the possibilities of life in the tre- mendous social phenomenon of religion, which, in all the ages of man's progress, has been one of his supreme interests ? Shall we perhaps find that, when reduced to its lowest terms, to its essential principle, religion is not, as has been supposed, so much a belief in gods, or in a supernatural, in any way conceived, as an endeavor to sustain and "save" the soul (i. e. to fortify the ongoing will) and to nourish that primordial faith in the possibilities of life which was born, and generation after generation is re-born, of success in the struggle for existence; which may gather about itself all manner of supplementary beliefs, including a belief in spirits and in gods, but which will persist after science has stripped away from it all its mystical and theological accretions ? If we may and should, we can accept as a positive contribution to the theory of human behavior Mr. Kidd's proposition that relig- ion, a thing deeper and more elemental than reason, has been a chief factor in social evolution. The mention of socialism, when referring to the theories of Benjamin Kidd, may serve to remind us of two further contribu- tions to the Darwinian theory of society still to be mentioned. William Hurrell Mallock's American lectures on socialism, 1 did not enhance his reputation as a competent student of social phe- nomena. Before passing judgment, however, one should examine Mr. Mallock's Aristocracy and Evolution, a suggestive and really important work, published in 1898. In this book Mr. Mai- lock rises above his habit of literary trifling, and digs somewhat below his prejudices, to examine not only fairly, but also cogently, and with illumination, the phenomenon of personal ability as a factor of social achievement. Distinguishing between a struggle for existence merely, and a struggle for domination, he contends that progress in any legitimate sense of the word is attributable to the struggle for domination. No one, I think, can go far in sociological study without seeing that this is a significant distinc- tion for purposes of historical interpretation. 'Delivered in 1906; published 1907 as A Critical Examination of Socialism, 12 STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY One need not, however, draw the conclusion that democracy is necessarily antagonistic to progress, as Mr. Mallock does. He says: The human race progresses because and when the strongest human powers and the highest human faculties lead it ; such powers and faculties are embodied in and monopolized by a minority of exceptional men ; these men enable the majority to progress, only on condition that the majority submit themselves to their control. 1 No student of social evolution would be less likely to dispute these propositions than Francis Galton would be if he were now living. In his studies of natural inheritance and hereditary genius, Galton did more than any investigator before him to establish them on a broad inductive basis. Since Galton, no investigator has made more valuable studies in this field than Karl Pearson, and no one more unreservedly than he accepts the conclusion that superiority is necessary to social advance and that personal superi- ority is a fact of heredity. Yet Mr. Pearson contends that to add artificial advantage to natural superiority is fatal, because su- periority cannot be maintained unless the herd, as well as the superior individual, is carefully looked after and improved. The superiority that achieves leadership and domination is usually the power to do some particular thing exceptionally well. It is ex- treme individuation, and it often is purchased at the cost of race vitality. It is as necessary to maintain the one as to develop the other. Mr. Pearson therefore finds the socialistic program not incompatible with continuing progress by selection and inheri- tance. 2 "To 'wage war against natural inequality' is clearly a reductio ad absurdum of the socialistic doctrine. So far as I understand the views of the more active socialists of to-day, they fully recognize that the better posts, the more lucrative and comfortable berths, must always go to the more efficient and more productive workers, and that it is for the welfare of society that it should be so. Socialists, however, propose to limit within healthy bounds the rewards of natural superiority and the advantages of artificial inequality. The victory of the more capable, or the more fortunate, must not involve such a defeat of the less capable, 1 Aristocracy and Evolution, p. 379. 'The Chances of Death, Vol. I., pp. 112, 113. Rejecting socialism myself and defending a creed of socialized individualism, I have thought it worth while to quote the exact words in which Mr. Pearson summarized his argument. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE 13 or the less fortunate, that social stability is endangered by the misery produced. At the present time a failure of the harvest in Russia and America simultaneously, or a war with a first-class European power, would probably break up our social system altogether. We should be crushed in the extra-group struggle for existence, because we have given too much play to intra-group competition, because we have proceeded on the assumption that it is better to have a few prize cattle among in- numerable lean kine than a decently-bred and properly-fed herd with no expectations at Smithfield." From this too brief account of the applications thus far made of Darwinian theory to the problems presented by social relation- ships, including human institutions, we may turn to the question of further scientific possibilities in this direction. It will have been noted that the theories reviewed are not as they now stand entirely consistent with one another, and that none of them carries ex- planation back to the actual beginnings and causes of group for- mation. Perhaps if we could more adequately account, in terms of the struggle for existence, for actual social origins, and for successive stages of social evolution, the various fragments of theory which we now possess would fall into orderly correlation. Possibly also the most promising starting point for any new attempt to achieve these ends may be found in a careful scrutiny of what is involved in the struggle for existence itself. Close readers of The Origin of Species know that although Mr. Dar- win, when employing the phrase "a struggle for existence," usu- ally meant by it a struggle for subsistence, he uses it also to mean a struggle with the physical conditions of life, to which an or- ganism that would survive must be or must become adapted. "Two canine animals in a time of dearth," he remarks, "may truly be said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture." * Also, "climate plays an impor- tant part in determining the average numbers of a species, and periodical seasons of extreme cold or drought seem to be the most effective of all checks." 2 Yet further, "when we reach the Arctic regions, or snow capped summits, or absolute deserts, the struggle 1 The Origin of Species, p. 78.