SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 323 



We agree with Giddings, Baldwin and others that society is a 

 psychological organization but insist that " society " must be 

 given content and interpreted so as to include these various con- 

 flicting, co-operating, combining unities, each a quasi-organism 

 with a super-organic environment to which it must adjust itself, 

 each a potential quasi-personality. We agree, too, with Schaffle 

 who holds that the individual should seek to find his place in 

 society, fit himself to function there as efficiently as possible 

 and that society should assist in this process. We hold that the 

 same should be true of every social unity, — of the family, of 

 the church, of the club, political party or state. 



Just as individual personality, then, is not only socially condi- 

 tioned but has a social goal, viz., to function as efficiently as possible 

 in ever enlarging social unities, — so should each of these social 

 unities as it attains quasi-personality seek to function as efficiently 

 as possible in the more inclusive social organizations of which it 

 forms an integrating part. 



Approaching this same problem from another point of view, 

 we have seen that social evolution reveals an ever increasing 

 power of active adaptation and of progress by co-operation, inno- 

 vation and reflective imitation rather than by struggle for exist- 

 ence and survival. Now that which is increasingly imitated is 

 personal and group adaptive activity; i. e., as the normal physical 

 organism is continually reacting to stimuli along the line felt to 

 be life-preserving and life-enlarging, so the conscious personality, 

 in so far as guided by real interests, imitates, with adaptive 

 variations, other persons in the line of increasing well-being; and 

 groups, in proportion as organized and directed by intelligence, 

 also imitate other groups in their adaptive activities. The 

 individual, moreover, has as a copy for imitation not only the 

 real but the ideal which, as Baldwin has shown, is a social product. 

 So every quasi-personal social unity may form a group-ideal, — 

 as in the case of labor unions, fraternities, communities, — which 

 is far above the real of present attainment. This group-ideal, 

 too, is a social product and one in which the super-organic 

 environment plays a most important part, and usually this ideal 

 includes not only the welfare of its members, but also that of a 



