118 SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



Usages give solidarity and coherence to the group. 

 The unity secured by loyalty to its traditions makes sur- 

 vival assured. But if there is to be further progress and 

 continuing success in the struggle, the restraint of dis- 

 loyal members must not be carried over into a habit of 

 persecution which fails to discriminate between helpful 

 innovators and dangerous egoism. Nature allows varia- 

 tions from type. When these variations give advantage, 

 natural selection secures the preservation of those indi- 

 viduals which possess them. Yet among men there is 

 often a tendency to preserve the old usage at a sacrifice 

 of new and useful activities to persecute for the sake 

 of persecution. This habit has led one sociologist to 

 say that men try to preserve what nature has ordained 

 to decay. 28 The result is a retarded state of culture. 

 "In certain respects each born generation is not like the 

 last born ; and in certain other respects it is like the last. 

 But the peculiarity of arrested civilization is to kill out 

 varieties at birth almost ; that is, in early childhood, and 

 before they can develop. The fixed custom which public 

 opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether 

 it suits them or not." 29 Those primitive groups that 

 clung blindly to their superstitions and imposed their 

 customary discipline upon their innovating members by 

 terrible sanctions, killed out of the whole society the pro- 

 pensity to variation which was the principle of progress. 



If association is responsible for the intellectual facul- 

 ties of man, it is doubly responsible for his moral 

 nature. Morals are socially determined. They are the 

 result of social growth and experience. They are the 

 rules of life found to work in the evolution of any par- 

 ticular group. Morals are nothing but the conviction 



28 Gumplowicz. 29 Bagehot, op. cit., p. 54. 



