84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



social evolution from all that precedes it and prepares for it? And 

 what is the precise discrimination needful of things social from things 

 merely organic or psychological? The modes and the phases of the 

 struggle for existence suggest intelligible answers. 



Quite obviously the struggle for safety is the shaping cause of our 

 esthetic life, the life of sensitiveness and of appreciation. On this 

 point Mr. Darwin's data and conclusions are exhaustive. Instant re- 

 action, if the organism is unconscious, discrimination if it is conscious, 

 and due estimate of light and shade, of color and form, of sound and of 

 pressure, in all their objective degrees and proportions, dissonances and 

 harmonies — these are the readiness and the responsiveness requisite for 

 safety from each instant of life to the next. Obviously, moreover, the 

 esthetic life, so understood, is elemental and precedent. For an organ- 

 ism must in fact survive from moment to moment before it can have 

 further need or power, even to eat. 



The struggle for subsistence initiates and broadens into the eco- 

 nomic life. The struggle for adaptation becomes the ethical life. For 

 adaptation, in its beginnings a mere taking on or perfecting of useful 

 characters, develops, in time, into self-control, self-direction and self- 

 shaping. 



Between adaptation and adjustment, no distinction whatever has 

 been made by a majority of evolutionist writers. Spencer uses the 

 word " adjustment " to include all that biologists and psychologists 

 commonly mean by adaptation. Yet the two things are not at all the 

 same. The struggles which they involve are not identical struggles, 

 and, for the purposes of sociological theory, the distinction is of funda- 

 mental importance. 



Adaptation — which, as it goes on, widens into and includes the 

 ethical life, at first is a mere conforming of the organism through 

 variation, selection and inheritance, to the physical conditions under 

 which it happens to live ; that is to say, to altitude, temperature, light 

 or darkness, dryness or moisture, enemies, food supply, and so on. 

 Through adaptation, and because non-adaptation means extinction, the 

 individuals of any given species congregated and dwelling in any given 

 region where adequate food supplies are found become increasingly 

 alike, and the first two conditions of social life, as Mr. Bagehot rightly 

 explained it, namely, grouping and substantial resemblance, are pro- 

 vided. But, since they are alike, individuals of the same variety or 

 race, so brought together in one habitat, necessarily want the same 

 things, and in like ways try to get them. They may compete in obtain- 

 ing those things which each is able to get by his own efforts, or they 

 may combine their efforts to obtain those things that no one could get 

 unaided. In either case their interests and activities sooner or later 

 must fall into adjustment. And, since any failure of adjustment may 

 be as fatal as non-adaptation or starvation, there will be a struggle, at 



