ACTIVE SOCIAL ADAPTATION 



evokes sympathy because it promises the highest joys of life. 1 

 But to raise inter-group conflict to this peaceful, intellectual plane, 

 there must first be a general recognition of the fact that power 

 comes from wealth and wealth from intelligence and morality. 2 

 Success in the inter-group struggle for existence is thus dependent 

 on psychic factors, but so is it also, according to our author, 

 among animals. 



Beings possessed of a brain have triumphed over those which did not have 

 one. At the moment when animals appeared on the earth endowed with a 

 nervous system, they formed some conception of the universe. It is thus 

 possible to say that struggle between species is at bottom a struggle between 

 different conceptions of the universe. 8 



Almost no one today would agree with Novicow in thus 

 attributing to the lower orders a power of abstraction so potent 

 in the struggle for life. A life philosophy is potent, however, in 

 the social struggle. India and China, for example, can never 

 become progressive so long as they are dominated the one by 

 mysticism, the other by ancestor worship. 



As adaptation is synonymous with intelligence, according to our 

 author, and as intelligence is continually increasing, we have in 

 this fact a test of progress. Indeed this increase of intelligence 

 is progress. 4 The connection between intellectual progress, 

 struggle and adaptation is expressed thus: 



The more perfect a species becomes the more the individuals composing 

 it multiply (human beings, for example, are far more numerous than other 

 mammals), and the greater is the rivalry. The more violent the conflict, 

 the more rapid are the physiological and psychological changes because of 

 the importance for success of each point of advantage. That is, progress is 

 in direct ratio to competition. 6 



Novicow sounds a new note in sociological discussion in his 

 doctrine that the way for a society to preserve its national type 

 is through imitation. 



1 Les Luttes, pp. 178 f. 2 Ibid., p. 182. * Ibid., p. 188. 



* Or, comme adaptation est synonyme d'intelligence, on voit que c'est en vertu 

 des lois universelles de la nature, que 1'intelligence va toujours en s'accroissant. 

 Get accroissement s'appelle le progres. Ibid., p. 188. 



8 Ibid., p. 189. This is a misstatement, for as Spencer has shown, reproduction 

 decreases with biological evolution. 



