Franklin Henry Giddings

“ The gods are credited with righteous impulses, and a desire to have men do right. Society has become congenial, and religion ethical.
The supreme struggle remains—the struggle for supremacy. To conquer, to dominate, to exploit—this alone can satisfy the state that has become strong enough to impose its yoke upon environing peoples. Armies are mustered and drilled, coercive rule and regimentation transform the domestic order. Society becomes despotic, and, since the gods of the conquerors must be worshipped by the conquered, religion becomes authoritative. ”

“ What are the true relations of esthetic and economic, of ethical and social phenomena to one another, and to life in its wide inclusiveness? What, especially, is the precise point of departure of 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ever-recurring conflicts between group and group call forth leadership, establish the simpler forms of personal government and mark out the elementary social distinctions. It is now that ideas of spirits separable from material bodies, and, as ghosts surviving bodily death, begin to take shape. Religion becomes spiritistic. The habit of making obeisance to the powerful or the clever, and of propitiating them, which has grown up step by step with leadership and personal government, is transferred to the realm of shades. ”

“ Obviously, while no family stock or race at any time existing can certainly know, or, while it remains still vigorous, find sufficient ground to believe that it is doomed to perish, neither can it certainly know that it is indefinitely to survive. It does live, struggle, plan and achieve not altogether by knowledge or by reason, but also in part by faith. ”

“ Since natural selection saves the few and kills the many, why does not the great majority of mankind try to curb competition and put an end to progress? Thus presented, Mr. Kidd's question is the radical and fearless form of a question which socialism asks in a form that, by comparison, is conservative and half-hearted. And Mr. Kidd's answer, not so much as tainted with socialism, is as fearless as his question. Progress has no rational sanction. ”

“ It assembles and mingles the human elements for an evolution of civil society.
When the struggle for place and opportunity has been won, and command of territory has been achieved, every energy is enlisted in the economic struggle for abundance. The new social order is not yet established. Miscellaneous men jostle each other, as in a mining camp. Each lives among his fellows on sufferance, or toleration. Society is merely approbational, and its interests are purely materialistic. The deities are gods of crops and generation. ”

“ Group safety is the first consideration. It is attained through unity of action, a prerequisite of which is the sense of solidarity. To the making of solidarity, everything that we are in the habit of calling conventionality contributes. Not only the fundamentally important conventions of language, but also those of manners, of costume and of ceremonial have here an essential function.
Doubtless it is at this initial stage of the collective struggle, when life is a day by day hazard, and man's overmastering emotion is dread, that religion acquires its first intellectual coefficient. ”

“ I might say tribes and nations, but I use the less common 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 ”

“ Conscious of the usefulness of solidarity, the group, as it becomes self-conscious, endeavors by definite policies so far to prescribe individual conduct as to control and limit variation from type. Society thus becomes a type-conforming group of associates, endeavoring, by self-instituted discipline, to maintain, as a type, its distinctive characteristics.
To observe the successive stages, and the complications of man's collective struggle for existence, is to examine the evolution of tribal society and to follow the history of civilization—a large undertaking. ”

“ It is not given to any one human intellect to discover all truth, and there is more in evolution than even Mr. Spencer perceived, either at the beginning of his great work, or in the fulness of his powers. Intent upon the broader aspects of cosmic transformation, his mind did not seize upon certain implications of universal rearrangement. In the concrete world of living organisms, equilibration becomes the relentless struggle for existence, in which the weakest go to the wall. Natural selection follows. It was this intensely concrete aspect that Mr. Darwin saw, and intellectually mastered. ”

“ For an organism 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 economic 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. ”

“ To show how despotic society breaks down, how in such frontier outposts as were the islands and shores of the Ægean Sea, intellect at last becomes dynamic, and political habit revolutionary, and how, under the hammering of these forces, society becomes contractual or constitutional, and religion rationalistic, would be to tell an enthralling story, for which no time remains. In one favored place, the Athenian city state, society became for a brief time idealistic, that is to say, its bonds were those of a common purpose, or ideal, and religion became non-theological. ”

“ The struggle for abundance begets the struggle for efficiency. Ideas and standards of efficiency appear. The efficient find each other out. They like each other and each other's ways. They dislike the inefficient, and begin in all possible ways to make life unpleasant for them. ”

“ And, since any failure of adjustment may be as fatal as non-adaptation or starvation, there will be a struggle, at 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. ”

“ Darwin's data and conclusions are exhaustive. Instant reaction, 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. ”

“ The fallacy consists in an unwarranted assumption that individuals and families marked for extermination in the struggle for existence are, in their own lifetime, aware of their impending doom. Let us suppose that, of one hundred families now flourishing, ninety will become extinct in the tenth generation, their places being filled by a corresponding number of new families branching from the one successful line. This would be natural selection at a rapid rate. Yet to maintain this rate, only ten families have to drop out in any one generation, and ten new ones to appear. ”

“ So believing, I accept as a positive contribution to the theory of human evolution Mr. Kidd's proposition that religion, a thing deeper and more elemental than reason, has been a chief factor in social evolution. ”

“ Within each group, the adaptation of individuals to prevailing life conditions is furthered by the folkways, imposing upon every person a common morality, and, through initiation ceremonies, or other formidable disciplines, developing in him some power of self-control. Prom experiences of discipline received and imparted, and of self-mastery, springs a crude theory of personal power or agency. Here, probably, is the true origin of animism as a theory of causation, and from this point religion tends to become animistic. ”

“ Through all these struggles, adaptations and adjustments, the fit that survive become in a degree socialized, and in the degree that they become social they become better assured of further survival. By the integration of small hordes of kindred into tribes, and the combination of tribes into federations, ethnic society is evolved. The ghosts of tribal chieftains are supposed to be more powerful and important than ordinary ghosts; they enjoy, therefore, extraordinary honor and attention. They become gods. Religion becomes theistic.
The struggle for existence has now been won. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Man goes on multiplying, competing, fighting and making progress because he is not rational and has no desire to be. He lives not by reason, but by faith. He crucifies and kills himself to improve the race, not because he is scientific, but because he is religious. ”

“ Admitting that the prolongation of infancy was probably a factor in the evolution of stable family relationships, and therefore played a part in strengthening the social sentiments, we must remember that the actual social life and solidarity of the gregarious group was probably a chief cause of the prolongation of infancy itself. ”

“ Darwin recognizes the utility of group solidarity, he, by implication, takes account of a struggle on the part of associating individuals to adjust their interests and their activities to one another in such wise that group life may be maintained. ”

“ The distinction here indicated between evolution as a universal process, comprehensively described by Spencer, and Darwinism, or Mr. Darwin's account of one vitally important and concrete phase of that process, has often been noted, and is usually observed by careful writers. It is of particular importance in any discussion of social evolution. To indicate how far our theories of social origins, our philosophies of history and of human institutions, have become not only evolutionist, in the Spencerian sense of the word, but also Darwinian, is the purpose of my lecture this afternoon. ”

“ This means that, at any given time, a ninety per cent, majority of all persons at the moment living have an expectation of further life, the termination of which can not be foreseen. The large majority, therefore, at any given time existing think of themselves not as the unfit that must perish, but rather as the fit selected to survive. ”

“ Darwin often means, not a struggle for food or against the elements, but a struggle to avoid being converted into food. "Very frequently," he writes, "it is not the obtaining of food, but the serving as prey to other animals, which determines the average numbers of a species." ”

“ Perhaps if we could more adequately account, in terms of the struggle for existence, for actual social origins, and for successive stages of social evolution, the various fragments of theory which we now possess would fall into orderly correlation. ”

“ Socialists, however, propose to limit within healthy bounds the rewards of natural superiority and the advantages of artificial inequality. The victory of the more capable, or the more fortunate, must not involve such a defeat of the less capable, or the less fortunate, that social stability is endangered by the misery produced. ”