The Story of the Mind

by James Mark Baldwin

THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY—SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.

THE series of questions which arise when we consider the individual as a member of society fall together under the general theory of what has been called, in a figure, Social Heredity.

The treatment of this topic will show something of the normal relation of the individual's mind to the social environment; and the chapter following will give some hints as to the nature and position of that exceptional man in whom we are commonly so much interested—the Genius.

The theory of social heredity has been worked up through the contributions, from different points of view, of several authors. What, then, is social heredity?

This is a very easy question to answer, since the group of facts which the phrase describes are extremely familiar—so much so that the reader may despair, from such a commonplace beginning, of getting any novelty from it. The social heritage is, of course, all that a man or woman gets from the accumulated wisdom of society. All that the ages have handed down—the literature, the art, the habits of social conformity, the experience of social ills, the treatment of crime, the relief of distress, the education of the young, the provision for the old—all, in fact, however described, that we men owe to the ancestors whom we reverence, and to the parents whose presence with us perhaps we cherish still. Their struggles, the orator has told us, have bought our freedom; we enter into the heritage of their thought and wisdom and heroism. All true; we do. We all breathe a social atmosphere; and our growth is by this breathing-in of the tradition and example of the past.

Now, if this be the social heritage, we may go on to ask: Who are to inherit it? To this we may again add the further question: How does the one who is born to such a heritage as this come into his inheritance? And with this yet again: How may he use his inheritance—to what end and under what limitations? These questions come so readily into the mind that we naturally wish the discussion to cover them.

Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance? This heir to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a will, it is true; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or law. But there are exceptions. And before we seek the marks of the legitimacy of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of accumulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us. They are those who people our asylums, our reformatories, our jails and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by demands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by isolation in institutions; indeed, some who are born to fail in this inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social inheritance, is now their resting place. Society then is, when taken in the widest sense, made up of two classes of people—the heirs who possess and the delinquents by birth or conduct who have forfeited the inheritance.

We may get a clear idea of the way a man attains his social heritage by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the terms of plain natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded the law of Natural Selection the word Variation has been current in the sense explained on an earlier page.

The student in natural science has come to look for variations as the necessary preliminary to any new step of progress and adaptation in the sphere of organic life. Nature, we now know, is fruitful to an extraordinary degree. She produces many specimens of everything. It is a general fact of reproduction that the offspring of plant or animal is quite out of proportion in numbers to the parents that produce them, and often also to the means of living which await them. One plant produces seeds which are carried far and near—to the ocean and to the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may take root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. Animals also produce more abundantly, and man has children in numbers which allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and yet increase the adult population from year to year. This means, of course, that whatever the inheritance is, all do not inherit it; some must go without a portion whenever the resources of nature, or the family, are in any degree limited and when competition is sharp.

Now Nature solves the problem among the animals in the simplest of ways. All the young born in the same family are not exactly alike; "variations" occur. There are those that are better nourished, those that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the air, the water—this is left to itself. The best of all the variations live, and the others die. Those that do live have thus, to all intents and purposes, been "selected" for the inheritance, just as really as if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to enforce it. This is the principle of "Natural Selection."