Along with this plastic heredity and inseparable from it we have the social process, which does not antagonize the biological process, or supplant it, but utilizes the change in its character to add a new world of psychical interaction and growth. Like the older process it is continuous through the ages, and builds up vast organic wholes, of which the individual may seem only an insignificant detail. As we have biological types, on the one hand, so, on the other, we now have types of culture and institutions.
Thus the life of humanity comes to be a single vital process having two parallel and interdependent subprocesses, the hereditary and the social. Each of these has a sphere of its own, that of heredity being, in general, the production of physical and mental aptitude, and that of society the creation, by the aid of this aptitude, of a progressing social order.
Each system acts selectively upon the other, determining what will work and what will not. Hereditary types must in some way fit into the social conditions or they cannot propagate themselves and must disappear. If a man cannot, by hook or crook, manage to raise a family, that part of the hereditary stream which flows in him is lost, and the type he represents declines. In like manner, if a race, or a national stock, does not succeed in developing such forms of personality and social organization as to enable it to keep a footing and multiply its kind in the actual conditions of life, it must diminish. The social organization sets standards of fitness which the biological process must meet.
It is equally true, on the other hand, that the biological type acts selectively in determining what social ideas and institutions will work, and how. You may give the same lecture to a hundred students, but what each one makes of it will depend, in part, on his natural gifts. Or you may plant the same ideas of free government among the Americans, the Swiss, the French, the people of the Argentine, and the Liberian Negroes; but their growth will be very different, partly, again, because of a difference in hereditary capacity.
If we wish for analogies to illustrate this relation we must look for them among other cases of distinct but complementary organisms living together in interaction and mutual adaptation, such as man and wife in the family, the nervous and alimentary systems in the body, the state and the church in the social system of mediæval Europe, or the national and State governments in the American commonwealth—organisms which may be regarded either as two or as one, according to the purpose in hand.
There may be a kind of conflict between the biological and the social currents of life, just as there may between almost any two factors in a co-operative whole. Men of genius, for example, rarely leave a normal number of descendants; they develop themselves socially at the expense of reproduction, though, if there is anything in Mr. Galton’s views, reproduction is, in their case, peculiarly desirable.[[51]] The same is perhaps true in general of the more intellectual and ambitious types of men: it might be better for the race stock if they put more of their energy into raising families and less into social achievement. At least, this would be the immediate result: in the long run perhaps the social achievement will indirectly contribute to improve the stock.
A rather striking example of opposition is found in the monastic system. There is little doubt that this sprang from profound needs of the human spirit and, at its best, played a great part in the higher life. But if its social working was good its effect upon the race is believed to have been detrimental, since for centuries it selected the most intellectual and aspiring men and prevented their leaving offspring. Just as hereditary stocks may flourish although bad for society, so social movements may prosper that are bad for heredity.
The practical truth of the matter, from a moral standpoint, may largely be contained in the statement that we get capacity from heredity, conduct from society. The critical thing in the latter is the use that is made of hereditary powers, whether they are to work upward or downward, as judged by social standards. While it is true that no amount or kind of education will take the place of initial capacity, it is true also that there is no source of right development and function except social teaching; the best heredity is powerless in this regard.
The question of crime offers good illustrations. There are kinds of crime which depend upon defective heredity, because they involve incapacity to acquire normal social functions. It is easier to discriminate these in theory than in practice, but it is well known that a considerable portion of our criminals are feeble-minded or ill balanced. But if a criminal has normal capacity, as the majority have, we must attribute his degeneracy to the fact that he has come under worse social influences rather than better. And the more ability he has, the more pernicious a criminal he makes. The same division may be made in any line of human function; we can never dispense with capacity, but there is no capacity of which we may not make a bad use.
While the theory of the matter is not difficult, when one approaches it in this way, the applications are obscure, simply because it is hard to get at the facts. That is, we ordinarily cannot tell with any precision what the original hereditary outfit was, and just how it was developed by social influences. Even if we could study every child at birth it would not help us much, because, although the heredity is there, we have no art to know what it is until it works out in life, and it works out only in social development. Practically the two factors are always found in co-operation, and our knowledge that they are separable is largely derived from the lower forms of life where the social process is absent.