168 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
out of a social movement, is a psychical deposit of the social life of 
the group and a result of the manifold adaptations of the indi- 
vidual to itt. Arbitrary freedom is an illusion.2 Morality is 
nothing but the reflection in the individual mind of what has been 
considered useful for the group.? There is no right or justice 
apart from the might of the ruling class in the sovereign state, or 
as an abstract ideal formed by the oppressed classes as a means of 
securing liberation.” 4 
Nowhere is the passive, purely mechanical character of social 
evolution better expressed than in these words: “ Out of frictions 
and struggles, out of separations and unions of opposing ele- 
ments, finally come forth as new adaptation products the higher 
socio-psychical phenomena, the higher cultural forms, the new 
civilizations, the new state and national unities . . . and this 
merely through social action and reaction, entirely independent 
of the initiative and will of individuals, contrary to their ideas 
and wishes and social striving.” ® 
To Gumplowicz is to be given credit for a clean-cut demarca- 
tion and study of the sociological field, — the field consisting of 
the two-fold mechanical process by which all the modern races 
and social groups with their socio-psychical products have been 
evolved, on the one hand by inter-group conflict, and on the other 
by intra-group differentiation and struggle. His power of keen 
analysis is revealed in his discussion of the meaning of the term 
“society” which with him is always either a concrete natural, or 
interest group, or else a class term including all such groups.® 
He is worthy of commendation, also, for his consistency, on the 
whole, in carrying to a logical conclusion his fatalistic determin- 
ism, issuing in atheistic free-thought and stoical resignation to the 
inevitable. He is open to criticism along the following lines: — 
1. He makes large use of biological analogies but as his biol- 
ogical interpretations are unsatisfactory his analogies fail to be 
1 Soztologie und Politik, p.94. Cf. Grundriss, pp. 174 £. 
2 Grundriss, pp. 167, 215. 
3 Ibid., pp. 179 f. 
4 [bid., pp. 114 f., 189 f., 237. 
5 Soziologie und Politik, p. 94. 
8 Grundriss, pp. 139 f.; Soziologie und Politik, pp. 49 f. 
