234 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



be classified for logical purposes, but Professor Ward seems to 

 identify the product of logical classification with ontological 

 reality. 



4. Approaching social philosophy from the point of view of 

 biology and individual psychology, and an individualist much 

 like Spencer, his philosophy culminates in an emphasis on pleas- 

 ure and consumption which on the whole seems to be its weakest 

 point. Although in Pure Sociology abundance of life is set forth 

 as the apparent end of cosmic evolution, 1 in Dynamic Sociology, 

 pleasure is given a place of pre-eminence, this being correlated 

 with increase in the complexity of organisms. 2 This emphasis, 

 however, does not grow out of his system necessarily, indeed 

 seems almost to have been grafted on. If abundant life is the 

 end; if adaptation is the means to abundant life, as he holds, and 

 if pleasure and pain are sign-boards indicating the ways of life and 

 death, 3 as he shows also, the end of telic endeavor should be 

 adaptation, not pleasure; and the test of progress should likewise 

 be adaptation and abundance of life, an objective test which 

 Spencer insisted rightly was necessary for science. This error, if 

 it be one, is the result of his thesis that feeling is the dynamic 

 agent in social progress. \_I)esire, with him, is the mainspring of 

 human endeavor. 4 Modern functional psychology, on the con- 

 trary, makes organic reactions the fundamental phenomena7 

 sensations of pleasure and pain being considered as arising in 

 connection with these reactions because of their adaptive value. 

 The organic needs that impel to activity may well be termed 

 " interests " as with Ratzenhofer. 



1 Pure Sociology, p. 114; cf. p. i. 



2 Dynamic Sociology, ii, pp. 1 73 f . Cf . Pure Sociology, p. 1 26, where feeling is 

 considered as an end. 



3 Pure Sociology, p. 130. 



4 " Preservation, continuation, and augmentation are the three aspects of the 

 cosmic end. . . . But it merely happened that at a certain point it became neces- 

 sary, in order to secure these ends ... to furnish . . . later creations with some 

 form of interest that should enable them to assist in the prosecution of the plan. 

 Hitherto the products of creative synthesis had been passive. Henceforth they 

 were to become active. . . . The form which this interest took was the faculty 

 of feeling, whereby these tocogenetic creations were made to care for themselves. 

 . . . Henceforth there was to be animated nature. ... In it [feeling] were 

 contained the psychic world and the moral world. With it came pleasure and pain 



