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 he carried over into a habit of 

 persecution which fails to discriminate between helpful 

 innovators and dangerous egoism. Nature allows varia- 

 tions from typeY 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 preservevthe old usage at a sacrifice 

 of new and useful activities-^to persecute for the sake 

 of persecution, f This habit has led one sociologist to 

 say that men try to preserve what nature has ordained 

 to decay.2^ 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."-^ 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* 

 joensity 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 

 Pnature. Morals are socially determined. They are the 

 \ result of social growth and experience. They are the 

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

 { ticular group. Morals are "nothing })ut the conviction 



28 Gumplowicz. ^^ Bagchot, op. cit., p. 54. 



c 



