BY PROFESSOR JOHN R. COMMONS,
Of Syracuse University, N. Y.
The term “natural selection” is a misnomer, as Darwin himself perceived. It means merely survival. “Selection” proper involves intention, and belongs to human reason. Selection by man we call artificial. Natural selection is the outcome of certain physical facts: 1. Environment: the complex of forces, such as soil, climate, food, and competitors. 2. Heredity: the tendency in offspring to follow the type of the parent. 3. Variation: the tendency to diverge from that type. 4. Over-population: the tendency to multiply offspring beyond the food supply. 5. Struggle for life: the effort to exclude others or to consume others. 6. Consciousness of kind: the tendency to spare and coöperate with offspring and others of like type. 7. Survival of the fittest: the victory of those best fitted to their environment by heredity, variation, numbers, and consciousness of kind.
These biological facts underlie human society, but a new factor enters with novel results. This is self-consciousness. Society is based not merely on consciousness of kind, as worked out by Professor Giddings, but peculiarly on individual self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness is a product of evolution, at first biological as explained by natural selection, and second, sociological. The biological character is the prolongation of infancy, i. e. the prolonged plastic and unfolding state of the brain. This makes possible a new kind of development unknown to the animal, namely, education. Education is preëminently a social activity. I say education instead of environment. In natural selection there is a physical environment which presses upon individuals, and only those survive who are fitted to sustain this pressure. In social selection society enters between the individual and the physical environment, and, while slowly subordinating the latter, transforms its pressure upon the individual, and he alone survives who is fitted to bear the social pressure. This pressure reaches the individual through the educational media of language and social institutions, especially the family, the state, and property. Institutions rest upon ideas and beliefs, and these are epitomized in language. Language in turn, by giving names to things and relations, and by thus transmitting to each individual the accumulated race experience, gradually brings him to the consciousness of himself. This is education.
But self-consciousness is at first only vague, capricious, and unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection. When once liberated it becomes a new selective principle to which all others are subordinated. What, then, are the social conditions which promote or retard the survival of personality?
It is a debated question where we shall place the dividing line between pre-social and social man. In view of what precedes we should look for that line at the point where self-consciousness begins to throw about itself a social covering. This covering is private property. The former view that primitive property was common property is now nearly abandoned. The supposed village communities of free proprietors were really villages of slaves and serfs. The semblance of common property in primitive times belongs to the pre-social or gregarious stage, and differs but little from the common use of a given area by a colony of beavers.
Private property involves two facts: 1. Perception of enduring value in external objects; 2. Exclusive control and enjoyment of those objects. Its psychological basis is therefore self-consciousness, which is the knowledge not of an abstracted and isolated self, but of self as related to external nature and human beings.
The first private property was animals and tools. Artificial selection begins with the domestication of animals. Soon it lays hold on man himself by means of social institutions, all of which originate as private property. The primitive social family was not a state of promiscuity nor even the voluntary pairing of animals and birds, but it was private property in women, beginning as wife-capture and becoming wife-purchase and polygamy. Natural selection, too, is transcended when cannibalism ceases. The self-conscious victor enslaves his enemy and reduces him to property. Next, government arises as private despotism, and with it the land becomes the property of the chief. Thus the family, the state, protracted industry, and the control of social opportunities begin with that artificial selection denoted by private property.