224 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



retrograde at all, but perish as they were, being simply crowded 

 out of existence. What persist are the unspecialized forms of the 

 same type that were contemporary with the specialized ones, but 

 escaped competition because not specialized." 1 Ward goes on 

 to show how this principle applies to races. 



Races and nations become overgrown and disappear. Peoples become 

 over specialized and fall an easy prey to the more vigorous surrounding ones, 

 and a high state of civilization is always precarious. Races and peoples are 

 always giving off their most highly vitalized elements and being transplanted 

 to new soil, leaving the parent country to decline or be swallowed up. . . . 

 Race and national degeneration or decadence means nothing more than this 

 pushing out of the vigorous branches or sympodes at the expense of the 

 parent trunks. The organicists see in colonization the phenomenon of social 

 reproduction. This is at least a half truth. Colonization often means 

 regeneration; it means race development; it means social evolution. 2 



Thus from England has grown the United States, Canada, 

 Australia, South Africa. Even should England perish as a 

 nation, her civilization, her ideals, her achievements would live 

 on. With Ward this social process and social progress is more 

 important than the continued existence of the sovereign group. 



2. Creative Synthesis. — This contribution of Professor Ward 

 comes next in order in Pure Sociology and introduces us to his 

 cosmic philosophy. He compares cosmic creation to chemical 

 combination which results apparently in something different 

 from a sum of the causes that enter into the compound. " The 

 only rational or thinkable idea of creation," he says, " has always 

 been that of putting previously existing things into new forms." * 



Ward assumes that the initial force differentiates and that later 

 portions come together forming ever new combinations and that 

 thus the cosmic order is ultimately evolved culminating in the 

 free intelligence of man. 



The synthetic creations of nature have their characteristic properties or 

 modes of acting, and it is through these that they produce effects. Taken 

 together these active properties constitute the forces of nature. These 

 separate and apparently different forces are, however, only so many modali- 

 ties of the one universal force, but it is not only convenient but practically 

 correct to treat them as distinct. . . . Man possesses feeling in common with 



1 Pure Sociology, p. 78. Such analogical reasoning, while suggestive, turns the 

 attention away from a study of the real social causes that produce the results. 



2 Ibid., p. 70. z Ibid., p. 81. 



