194 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
In the reflective or social group we have not merely instinctive or 
unconscious imitative activity, but “an intelligent judgment 
made with a view to consequences to be attained.” Here, alone, 
according to our author, do we find a group of activities that may 
properly be called social. In this group of intelligent acts of 
co-operation he notes the following characteristics: (1) They are 
social novelties, yet on the whole progressive and constructive in 
contrast to mob action which comes under the second mode; 
(2) these issue in a “ solidarity of intelligence, of conviction, of 
higher sentiment, . . . [which] takes the place of the solidarity 
of mere instinct or blind feeling ’’; and (3) the result is a solidarity 
of conscious intention and voluntary co-operation. 
These three modes are not mutually exclusive or definitely 
demarked. The instinctive issues in the plastic and this in the 
social yet all three are co-existent and overlap. 
Professor Baldwin’s genetic approach to social philosophy and 
the gist of his theory including the inter-relation of the individual 
and society, the dialectic of personal growth and the all-impor- 
tant function of imitation cannot be stated better than in his own 
words as found in his latest work The Individual and Society. 
The individual comes into the world with the impulse of the history of the 
race behind him. He has few perfect instincts, such as many of the animals 
show. He is, on the contrary, plastic and educable. But his development 
is nevertheless to be a compromise between the two tendencies which 
throughout all his life represent individualism and collectivism. He has 
distinctly egoistic and individualistic impulses, but with them he has also 
positive predispositions to social life. These two germinal tendencies are to 
receive their more perfect adjustment, or at least a working relation, in his 
education and training in the habits and usages of the social group. 
It is not necessary to dwell upon the more individualistic factor in his 
heredity; it is summed up in the word “‘ appetite.” He has a mass of ten- 
dencies which are necessary to the preservation and advancement of his 
vegetative and animal life. These are of necessity direct, strong, and self- 
seeking. 
But over against these we find certain positive impulses which are of a 
quasi-social or gregarious sort, ready soon after birth to develop the other 
side of his nature. Bashfulness, shame, jealousy, are some of the more 
fundamental tendencies rooted in the organic structure of the human babe, 
which seem to reveal ancestral conditions of collective life and habit. 
1 The Individual and Society, pp. 36 f. (italics as in text). 
