FROM PASSIVE TO ACTIVE ADAPTATION 217 
ment and maintenance of family life, a training school of greatest 
value in social adjustment. 
With the genesis of permanent family relation, according to 
our author, the evolution of man may be said, in a certain 
sense, to have been completed. We thus have three stages in 
biological evolution, the organic, including the development of 
the brain, the psychical beginning in the organic and continuing 
to the establishment of the family including the training of 
children, and the social, having to do primarily with man in his 
extra-family relations. 
Fiske has contributed to our subject by the comprehensive 
way he has used the concept of adaptation to explain social 
evolution, although almost entirely in the passive sense, clarifying 
and expanding some of Spencer’s unclear statements and making 
many valuable additions. He places more stress than the latter 
on the power of the great man 1 though he believes that this power 
is limited by the general trend of the age and character of the 
group to which the man belongs, and gives greater prominence 
to man’s control over nature.” 
Our author applies the doctrine we are considering to man’s 
adjustment to his social environment using the phrase moral 
adaptation, also to man’s knowledge and use of natural law under 
the term intellectual adaptation, — here approaching the use of 
the concept in its active sense. Finally, he applies the theory to 
man’s conscious endeavor to harmonize his life with the cosmic 
spirit, —a process he discusses under the caption “ Religion 
as Adjustment,” though his God is not more definite than Spen- 
cer’s Unknowable.t His chief contribution, however, as already 
intimated, is his analysis of the sociological significance of the 
prolongation of infancy. 
1 Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 183 f. 3 Cosmic Philosophy, ii, p. 252. 
2 Destiny of Man, p. 33. 4 Ibid., pt. iii, ch. V. 
