SOCIAL EVOLUTION 85 



first perhaps unconscious, but in course of time becoming conscious, to 

 maintain adjustment and to perfect it. This struggle for adjustment 

 is the beginning of social life and is the differentiating mark of all true 

 social phenomena. 



Or, to put the matter in slightly different words, while the struggle 

 for safety develops the esthetic life, and the struggle for subsistence 

 becomes the economic life, and the struggle for adaptation broadens into 

 the ethical life, the struggle of resembling creatures to adjust their 

 similar adaptations to one another, is the beginning and the continuing 

 process of the social life. 



Through success in all these struggles, and not in any one alone, 

 there results a survival of the fit, that is, of those organisms that are so 

 equipped with proper parts and habits that they on the whole fit into 

 and conform to all the essential conditions of life provided by the 

 environment in which they are forced or elect to dwell. 



Holding their own in such unremitting and remorseless contests, 

 those among them in whom consciousness has awakened, inevitably come 

 to feel a certain sense of vital adequacy, a will and power to live, and 

 an assurance of unexhausted opportunity. There is born in them a 

 faith, inarticulate at first but effective, in the possibilities of life. 

 Impelled by this faith and equipped with social instinct, man, out- 

 stripping all other creatures, presses forward into the wider conflicts of 

 a collective struggle for existence. 



Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, 

 which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle 

 and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to 

 sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted 

 purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the com- 

 munity controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social 

 organization ? 



These questions are not really so difficult as some others. "We have 

 seen that adjustment arises because like creatures want the same things 

 and in like ways try to get them. Now, wanting the same things, and 

 trying in like ways to get them, are essentially psychological phenomena, 

 and under analysis they resolve into one elementary phenomenon in 

 particular, namely, like response to the same, or to similar, or to com- 

 mon stimulation. Besponding in like ways to the same, or to common 

 stimulation, associating individuals, acting upon one another also by 

 suggestion and example, and imitating one another in a thousand ways, 

 have identical feelings and develop identical or closely resembling ideas. 

 Sympathy and understanding, as the psychologist explains, are by- 

 products of all these things. Sympathy and understanding, supple- 

 mented by communication, and backed up by the enormous mass of 

 common feelings and ideas, find expression in those common and usual 



