If, then, society is not a true organism, on the one hand, or an anarchistic aggregation of human beings on the other, it must, nevertheless, be viewed as a going concern having an existence of its own quite apart from that of the individuals who, at a given moment, compose it. Tribe and nation endure, though their individual members perish. Not only is this so, but while they endure, they envelop the life of their members in a scheme of rights and duties, a code of legal and moral rules, a set of social values and objects of emotional loyalties that give order, limit, and definite pattern to individual life and personality. It is, therefore, a perennial problem, with which all the social sciences wrestle, to determine when, to what extent, and for what purposes the individual may be freed from group domination to pursue his own wayward and centrifugal tendencies. The political scientist debates the reconciliation of liberty with authority; the economist, the merits of individualism versus socialism and communism; the ethical philosopher, the limits of egocentrism and of ethnocen-trism, of pacificism and of patriotism; the psychologist, the impulses of self-assertion versus the impulses of self-abnegation and gregariousness. Similarly, the sociologist contrasts the phenomena of individual ascendancy with those of group ascendancy, and dreams of that perfect society in which that social progress, which is so obviously rooted in individual variability and men of genius, shall be as rapid as possible without destroying the delicately balanced and finely integrated relationships among socii which give to society the verisimilitude of an organic unity.

Nothing illustrates this integrated character of a society better than the disaster that attends any disruption, disintegration, or unbalance of social solidarity. In our own society we are familiar with the demoralizing consequences of industrial depression for the welfare of millions of citizens. Crime, poverty, physical and moral degradation stalk in the wake of such imperfections of social adjustment. In Russia, a decade ago, the collapse of the established order, in consequence of war and revolution, led to the deaths of millions through disease and starvation. Transportation and communication were upset, unitary control disappeared, and there was a reversion to primitivism and localism unparalleled in modern times. In Spencerian terms, the sustaining, circulatory, and regulatory systems broke up, with the result that the elaborate cooperation necessary to the life of the people as a whole collapsed, destroying the delicate web of relationships that bound city to city and city to village and forcing local units back to a basis of self-dependence. While such extreme cataclysms are convincing evidence that orderly continuous variation in social evolution must be - in terms of life values - enormously superior to explosive mutations, and while they reveal how small is the actual control of society over its own development, the processes of orderly change are themselves so little understood as to produce the endless debate between individualism and collectivism. The material progress of the last century and a half seems convincing evidence that a considerable degree of individualism is justified by its fruits. However, the student of society cannot overlook the fact that such rapid change leaves in its wake an appalling amount of poverty, maladjustment, and degeneracy. The greater the speed of change, the greater the strain upon individuals to make adjustment to the ever new conditions. The system of free enterprise and voluntary inter-relationships has resulted in an almost dizzying rate of invention and economic improvement for society as a whole; but it also produces alternating periods of prosperity and depression with unemployment, crime, suicide, and nervous collapse for many. These evils may be looked upon, in large part, as the price we pay for liberty and its dynamic effects. Like all selective processes in nature, those of a competitive society are rough and ready, and do damage along with benefit. The problem of the social engineer is to preserve the latter while reducing the former.

Spencer's organismic analogies thus made it clear that society is a special order in nature whose structure and evolution must be studied from a "natural history" viewpoint. Darwin showed that man, and hence society, are products of evolutionary processes. They do not, therefore, escape the action of that struggle, selection, survival, and adaptation characteristic of all living things. On the human plane all these take on a somewhat special character. This would be expected in view of man's special qualities. As related to this particular matter, these special qualities would seem to be his superior brain power and his natural defenselessness.

This latter attribute should be as obvious as the former. Man has neither tusks nor claws, neither thick hide nor furry coat. He is devoid of specialized anatomical structures for offense or defense. These his ancestor did not need so long as he was a tree-dwelling, fruit-eating animal. But the transformation of this ancestor into a land ape was a momentous step, for otherwise he must have remained immured in the tropical forests and could never have begun his conquest of the globe. But with this descent from the trees he must soon have perished had he not acquired distinctive ways of maintaining himself. Moreover, the human infant, as John Fiske long ago pointed out, is not only extremely helpless, but reaches self-dependence at a later age than any other creature in the animal kingdom. Human survival, therefore, required mutual aid or cooperative effort, first, between parents in the rearing of offspring; and second, between fellows, in the chase and in warfare. This situation has given rise to an enormous literature discussing the questions whether man has a parental instinct, maternal and paternal, and a gregarious instinct. Suffice it here to say that the parental patterns, however much they may differ from group to group in consequence of cultural differences, seem everywhere to be based on clearly marked instinctive tendencies. Even male man everywhere reveals a tender regard for children and an easily developed willingness to labor for their maintenance. In the earliest stages of human culture, except in extremely favorable habitats, it seems difficult to account for the preservation of mother and infant in the absence of an instinctive tendency of the male to remain close at hand to ward off enemies and to assist in maintenance. It is true that he might have done so out of a desire for companionship or as a consequence of habit and the memory of moments of sex gratification. But whatever theory one may adopt, the facts remain that the family unit is found on the very lowest levels of existing culture where there is every evidence of its primeval character, and that prehistoric man developed habits of maintenance and preservation that enabled him to spread to habitats of every kind. Finally, we may note here, that so important did the family appear as the primary unit of social life and racial reproduction that man very early surrounded it with the most inviolate mandates of his highly variable moral codes.