318 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



feeling and volition as to warrant the application of such terms as 

 social organism, social consciousness and even social personality. 



The next line of development considered was through those 

 social philosophers who had emphasized an inductive study of the 

 social process, dividing the writers into three groups: the an- 

 thropological, dealing largely with primitive man and the begin- 

 nings of social evolution, the historical, endeavoring to analyze 

 the forces at work in the progress of civilization and trace the 

 causal nexus, and another group attempting to explain social 

 evolution in terms of some one law or principle. We noted the 

 large use of the concept of adaptation by Sumner and Boas, the 

 one interpreting social progress almost entirely in terms of natural 

 selection, the other, in terms of environmental influences, and 

 showed how useful this concept had been in explaining ethnic and 

 social origins. We saw how Gumplowicz by his teaching con- 

 cerning progress by inter-group conflict and cross-fertilization of 

 cultures, and Ratzenhofer by his theory of interests had enriched 

 our knowledge of progressive social adaptation, and finally how 

 through the contributions of the third group of writers we had 

 been enabled to understand the process of association and 

 integration within each society. 



As a net result of our study of the phenomena of association up 

 to this point, we have reached the concept of society as a psycho- 

 logical organization with some sort of self -consciousness and will, 

 revealed at least on occasion; we have seen how societies are 

 evolved, on the one hand, by such inner forces and processes as 

 social and sexual selection, division of labor, consciousness of kind 

 and consciousness of supplementary difference, sympathy, mutual 

 aid, suggestion, imitation and social constraint, — by a process, 

 that is, of inner co-adaptation (largely passive), and we have 

 noted, on the other hand how such societies are evolved by a 

 process of progressive adjustment to their geographical and super- 

 organic environments by natural selection and acclimation, 

 by inter-group contacts and conflicts, by racial and cultural 

 assimilation and amalgamation, by social suggestion, imitation 

 and constraint, — by a process, that is, of outer adaptation, — and 

 this, too, largely passive. 



