TRIAL AND ERROR 279 



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 per- 

 formed. 



In man and perhaps in some of the higher animals the same gen- 

 eral 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 

 remotelv 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. Ii 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 wel- 

 comed 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 appre- 

 ciation. 



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 ex- 

 plained is not the persistence of the traditional conduct, but the de- 



