3IO ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



as in the spiritualistic monism of Fiske, but again in belief in 

 and worship of the first cause considered to be a self-conscious 

 personality, as with Baldwin. 



Idealization must by its very nature be accompanied by some 

 sort of emotional experience and a volitional tendency to satisfy 

 the interest through which, alone, the process could have been 

 initiated and carried to completion; i. e., the ideal is formed in 

 response to felt need. It grows out of the experience of mal- 

 adjustment with the spiritual (including social) environment, and 

 is a force drawing the individual into assimilation with the ideal 

 life of interest and desire. The mal-adjustments which lead to 

 the formation of ideals are manifold, arising chiefly from the fact 

 that the individual has many conflicting interests within his own 

 personal life (as between the desire to satisfy hunger and the 

 desire for intellectual or aesthetic enjoyment), and from the fact, 

 also, that he is a member of various social unities with conflicting 

 " mores " and conflicting ideals. But this very conflict of ideals 

 and interests, is, as we have seen, the condition of development. 

 As friction between the wheels and track is necessary for progress 

 by the locomotive; as consciousness itself is born out of the fric- 

 tion developed in the process of personal growth, 1 so the higher 

 reaches of intellectual and moral power are the outcome of con- 

 flicts won in struggles on the lower planes of living. This leads 

 us to formulate the law that mal-adaptation on the lower planes 

 of life is essential to progress to a higher plane. To use another 

 illustration: as biological progress is marked by the development 

 of " inhibitors " or factors that control or prevent the functioning 

 of other factors or "characters," 1 so social and moral evolution is 

 marked by the development of self-control, and self-control, both 

 individual and social, is secured only by the experience of conflict 

 and victory, — of mal-adaptation leading to a higher form of 

 adaptation. 2 



1 Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 15. 



2 Professor C. B. Davenport would seem to make self-control wholly a matter of 

 the presence of " inhibitors " in the germ plasm which under normal conditions 

 come to expression and prevent anti-social conduct. In a letter to the author he 

 says, " In the development of the child, the inhibitors develop one after the other in 

 those who are self-controlled and fail of development in those who lack self-control "; 



