Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/841

inquiring into the causes of the selection. From our point of view it is obvious that social selection is exactly analogous to the selection which goes on in the individual through the process of attention in the building up of a new coordination. Society selects ideas and individuals, in other words, upon the basis of their utility in building up or maintaining its coordinations. It is especially in the building up of new social habits that the process of social selection is manifest. A Napoleon could never have been so acceptable to the French people if the nation as a whole had not been striving to build up new and stable institutions after the repeated failures of its revolutionary governments. If a Napoleon had not been found by the French people, some other, inferior individual would have been selected to perform his task. Concerning Cromwell, or any other great historical personage, essentially the same may be said as concerning Napoleon, namely, that he was "called forth," selected, "by the social needs of the hour," the need being the reconstruction of some societary activity. The social selection of ideas is made upon the same basis as that of individuals. Those ideas, beliefs, ideals, philosophies, psychical attitudes, etc., are selected by a society which aid it in building up new coordinations or maintaining old ones. Ideas survive, not because of any inherent fitness to survive, nor yet because of their "fitness for imitative reproduction,"^[1] as some would maintain, but because of their utility^[2] in the social life-process. If it be asked why certain ideas arise and permeate entire societies at certain periods, the answer, from the point of view maintained throughout this paper, must be, because such ideas are selected by the social life-process to aid in building up new coordinations. The genesis of the states of the social mind, in other words, is not different from the genesis of the states of the individual mind. Ideas make and unmake the world, not because they are forces outside of the life-process, but because of their connection with that process;

1. Baldwin's, Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 183.
2. "Utility " must here be taken, of course, in its broadest sense, not as used by the pleasure-pain philosophers, but as simply implying that which favors the constructive process of life.