310 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
as in the spiritualistic monism of Fiske, but again in belief in 
and worship of the first cause considered to be a self-conscious 
personality, as with Baldwin. 
Tdealization must by its very nature be accompanied by some 
sort of emotional experience and a volitional tendency to satisfy 
the interest through which, alone, the process could have been 
initiated and carried to completion; i.e., the ideal is formed in 
response to felt need. It grows out of the experience of mal- 
adjustment with the spiritual (including social) environment, and 
is a force drawing the individual into assimilation with the ideal 
life of interest and desire. The mal-adjustments which lead to 
the formation of ideals are manifold, arising chiefly from the fact 
that the individual has many conflicting interests within his own 
personal life (as between the desire to satisfy hunger and the 
desire for intellectual or aesthetic enjoyment), and from the fact, 
also, that he is a member of various social unities with conflicting 
“mores ” and conflicting ideals. But this very conflict of ideals 
and interests, is, as we have seen, the condition of development. 
As friction between the wheels and track is necessary for progress 
by the locomotive; as consciousness itself is born out of the fric- 
tion developed in the process of personal growth,! so the higher 
reaches of intellectual and moral power are the outcome of con- 
flicts won in struggles on the lower planes of living. This leads 
us to formulate the law that mal-adaptation on the lower planes 
of life is essential to progress to a higher plane. To use another 
illustration: as biological progress is marked by the development 
of “ inhibitors ” or factors that control or prevent the functioning 
of other factors or “characters,” ! so social and moral evolution is 
marked by the development of self-control, and self-control, both 
individual and social, is secured only by the experience of conflict 
and victory, — of mal-adaptation leading to a higher form of 
adaptation? 
1 Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 15. 
2 Professor C. B. Davenport would seem to make self-control wholly a matter of 
the presence of “ inhibitors” in the germ plasm which under normal conditions 
come to expression and prevent anti-social conduct. In a letter to the author he 
says, ‘‘ In the development of the child, the inhibitors develop one after the other in 
those who are self-controlled and fail of development in those who lack self-control”; 
