3i8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ciety is looking for. Indeed, this is the only way to describe the 

 man — to actually find him. Society is essentially a growing, 

 shifting thing. It changes from age to age, from country to 

 country. The Greeks had their social conditions, and the Romans 

 theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn differently, somewhat, 

 here and there ; and in a low stage of civilization a man may pass 

 for normal who, in our time, would be described as weak in mind. 

 This makes it necessary that the standards of judgment of a 

 given society should be determined by an actual examination of 

 the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of variation 

 which society in general will tolerate must be this or that. 



We may say, then, that the man who is fit for social life must 

 he horn to learn. The need of learning is his essential need. It 

 comes upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social 

 function which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of ver- 

 bal accomplishment — reading and writing. This brings to the 

 front the great method of all his learning — imitation. In order 

 to be social he must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must 

 realize for himself by action the forms, conventions, require- 

 ments, co-operations of his social group. All is learning; and 

 learning not by himself and at random, but under the leading of 

 the social conditions which surround him. Plasticity is his safety 

 and the means of his progress. So he grows into the social or- 

 ganization, takes his place as a socius in the work of the world, 

 and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis of which his 

 own contributions — if he be destined to make contributions — to 

 the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This great fact 

 that he is open to the play of the personal influences which are 

 about him we call, in psychology, his " suggestiveness," and the 

 influences themselves " suggestions " — social suggestions. These 

 influences differ in different communities, as we so often remark. 

 The Turk learns to live in a very different system of relations of 

 " give and take " from ours, and ours differ as much from those 

 of the Chinese. All that is characteristic of the race or tribe or 

 group or family — all this sinks into the child and youth by his 

 simple presence there in it. He is suggestible, and here are the 

 suggestions ; he is made to inherit, and he inherits. So it makes 

 no difference what his tribe or kindred be ; let him be a learner 

 by imitation, and he becomes in turn possessor and teacher. 



An entire department of so-called genetic pyschology is being 

 written on this topic — the mode and method of the child's learn- 

 ing to be a man and a social man. I need not dwell upon it 

 further here. But the case becomes more interesting still when 

 we give the matter another turn, and say that in this learning all 

 the members of society agree ; all must he horn to learn the same 

 things. They enter, if so be that they do, into the same social in- 



