SOCIAL EVOLUTION 77 



as make note of the terrific struggles for control of food-getting oppor- 

 tunities that occur among individuals or between groups of the same 

 species, variety or race. Conflict among men of the same cultural 

 attainments Mr. Spencer thought of only as prompted by surviving 

 savage instincts, engendered by predatory habits, in the lawless youth 

 of the race. 



It was specifically the phenomena of group solidarity and of col- 

 lective conflict, in distinction from a merely individual struggle for 

 existence, which Mr. Bagehot selected for examination, and his mind 

 penetrated directly to the essential conditions of the problem. He said : 



The progress of man requires the cooperation of men for its development. 

 . . . The first principle of the subject is that man can only make progress in 

 "cooperative groups"; I might say tribes and nations, but I use the less com- 

 mon word because few people would at once see that tribes and nations are 

 cooperative groups, and that it is their being so which makes their value; that 

 unless you can make a strong cooperative bond, your society will be conquered 

 and killed out by some other society which has such a bond; and the second 

 principle is that the members of such a group should be similar enough to one 

 another to cooperate easily and readily together. The cooperation in all such 

 cases depends on a felt union of heart and spirit; and this is only felt when 

 there is a great degree of real likeness in mind and feeling, however that like- 

 ness may have been attained. 2 



Addressing himself to the question how the necessary likeness in mind 

 and feeling are produced, Mr. Bagehot answers: By one of the most 

 terrible tyrannies ever known among men, namely, the authority of 

 customary law; and in accounting for the origin and force of custom, 

 he develops a theory of the function of imitation which anticipates 

 much, but by no means all, of the sociological theory of Gabriel Tarde. 

 Custom, however, tends to create a degree of similarity among social 

 units, and an unchanging way of life, fatal to further progress. To 

 reintroduce and to maintain certain possibilities and tendencies toward 

 variation is, as Bagehot sees the process, one of the chief uses of conflict. 

 Social evolution thus proceeds through the conflict of antagonistic 

 tendencies, on the one hand toward uniformity and solidarity; on the 

 other hand toward variation and individuality. In some groups, one 

 of these tendencies predominates. Contending together, group with 

 group, in the struggle for existence, those groups survive in which the- 

 balancing of these tendencies secures the greatest group efficiency. It 

 is not too much to say that in this interpretation, Mr. Bagehot arrived 

 at conclusions which to-day we recognize as belonging to the theoretical 

 core of a scientific sociology. 



Mr. Darwin, in those chapters of " The Descent of Man " in which 

 he treats of the origin of social instincts and the moral faculties, adopts 

 in substance the conclusions of Mr. Bagehot, and with his keen sense 

 for what is essential, lays emphasis upon four facts, namely: (1) the- 



2 "Physics and Politics," pp. 212, 213. 



