246 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
his view, has issued in man who is not merely the product of 
passive adaptation, but who is able to react on that process and 
guide it within certain limits in the interest of increased well- 
being, his cosmology is anthropocentric, or better, perhaps, 
socio-centric, for while recognizing that the individual has a 
metaphysical reality such as cannot be posited of any other 
creature or of society, yet with him the sovereign group is the 
sociological unit and its success necessary to the well-being of the 
individuals that constitute the group. 
His strong neo-Darwinism is indicated by the choice of selec- 
tions in his Sociology and Social Progress and shown conclusively 
in The Religion Worth Having! and Essays in Social Justice? in 
which the biological doctrine of struggle and survival is applied 
rigidly to human life and progress with emphasis, however, on the 
struggle between sovereign groups. 
The key to Professor Carver’s social philosophy as suggested in 
our Introduction is the doctrine of adaptation, as set forth in the 
following scheme: * — 
ENVIRONMENT 
Kind of aa 
Adaptation Material Social 
Baie { Biological Moral development 
Evolution Education 
3 Industrial Social Control 
Active 
Progress 
Professor Carver follows Weismann closely in his interpretation 
of the doctrine of selection, holding that the ill-adapted are 
eliminated only “ by-and-large and in the long run,” and that the 
struggle is chiefly between species. He believes with all biological 
sociologists that the highest human powers and faculties and 
institutions have been evolved by an analogous process. 
In social development the group corresponds to the biological 
species and although the primordial struggle for existence pre- 
vailed among primitive groups this has been supplanted by a 
struggle between nations for the markets of the world. Within 
the group there is struggle for wealth, place, power, etc., and this 
1 The Religion Worth Having, pp. 20 f., 42-45, 88 ff. 
2 Essays in Social Justice, ch. I. 
3 Class lectures; cf. Sociology and Social Progress, pp. 9, 10. 
