362 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



was no longer limited to the individual. We find all tliose 

 elements which appertain to life in society beginning to develop 

 themselves — customs, beliefs, regulations — all of which marked 

 the solidarity which bound the various individuals of the tribe 

 to each other. And all these primary institutions signified the 

 greater expansion of individual life ; they signified the com- 

 mencement of what we call social life, which is an extension, an 

 expansion, of individual life. 



" No savage," says Sir John Lubbock, " is free. All over the 

 world his daily life is regulated by a complicated, and appar- 

 ently most inconvenient, set of customs as forcible as laws."^ 

 Herbert Spencer remarks that " advance from the lowest social 

 groups, hardly to be called societies, to groups that are larger, 

 or have more structure, or both, implies increased co-operation. 

 This co-operation may be compulsory or voluntary, or it may be, 

 and usually is, partly the one and partly the other." ^ Mr. 

 Benjamin Kidd writes : " We are beginning to understand that 

 it is these customs of savage man, strange and extraordinary 

 as they appear to us, that in great measure take the place of the 

 legal and moral codes which serve to hold society together and 

 contribute to its further development in our advanced civilisa- 

 tion."^ Viewed from our standpoint, all these facts have the 

 same significance : the customs of the savage, his co-operation, 

 which increases as his social development increases, the legal 

 and moral codes of advanced civilisation — all these are necessi- 

 tated by social evolution ; and the latter is but a necessary 

 result of the conditions of existence, which demand ever-increas- 

 ing expansion of life. The social group, at first small and 

 unstable — among the Andamanese, who are limited to a strip 

 of shore backed by impenetrable bush, forty is about the number 

 that can find prey without going too far from their temporary 



1 Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation, p. 301. 



2 Spencer, Principles of Sociology, i. 749. 



3 B. Kidd, Social Evol-ution, p. 108. MacmiUan. 



