FROM PASSIVE TO ACTIVE ADAPTATION 21? 



ment and maintenance of family life, a training school of greatest 

 value in social adjustment. 



With the genesis of permanent family relation, according to 

 our author, the evolution of man may be said, in a certain 

 sense, to have been completed. We thus have three stages in 

 biological evolution, the organic, including the development of 

 the brain, the psychical beginning in the organic and continuing 

 to the establishment of the family including the training of 

 children, and the social, having to do primarily with man in his 

 extra-family relations. 



Fiske has contributed to our subject by the comprehensive 

 way he has used the concept of adaptation to explain social 

 evolution, although almost entirely in the passive sense, clarifying 

 and expanding some of Spencer's unclear statements and making 

 many valuable additions. He places more stress than the latter 

 on the power of the great man * though he believes that this power 

 is limited by the general trend of the age and character of the 

 group to which the man belongs, and gives greater prominence 

 to man's control over nature. 2 



Our author applies the doctrine we are considering to man's 

 adjustment to his social environment using the phrase moral 

 adaptation, also to man's knowledge and use of natural law under 

 the term intellectual adaptation, here approaching the use of 

 the concept in its active sense. 3 Finally, he applies the theory to 

 man's conscious endeavor to harmonize his life with the cosmic 

 spirit, a process he discusses under the caption " Religion 

 as Adjustment," though his God is not more definite than Spen- 

 cer's Unknowable. 4 His chief contribution, however, as already 

 intimated, is his analysis of the sociological significance of the 

 prolongation of infancy. 



1 Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 183 f. 3 Cosmic Philosophy, ii, p. 252. 



2 Destiny of Man, p. 33. * Ibid., pt. iii, ch. V. 



