by natural selection. Different smells for food, larvæ, outgoing and incoming paths, for nest-mates and foreigners make possible this marvellous insect society.

Likewise the social life of the higher animals, while including purely psychological elements, is mainly instinctive and irrational. Cries and calls and other forms of sign language are essentially instinctive. The farmer who replied to the child's question, "What makes the old sow grunt and the piggies sing and whine?" by saying, "I suppose they does it for company, my dear," was essentially correct. Such sounds are not uttered with the conscious purpose of establishing intercommunication. They are congenital and hereditary in their origin. Hence they arouse similar affective states and similar behaviour in all the members of the group by which group solidarity and welfare are furthered.

The rationalisation of instinct as it has taken place in man is necessary to social progress. Instinct is purposive, but not consciously so. The affective life is formless. It looks neither before nor after. Only in so far as sentiment and emotion are shot. through with ideas do they have point and direction. Hence any mental content that is proposed as a basis for action must have at least an ideational framework. It must point somewhither, foreshadow some goal

1 Morgan, Animal Behaviour, p. 195.

of action. The more primitive and powerful instincts, which at lower levels were a help to man in his struggle for existence, are now often a constant menace in our highly civilised society. They are strongly aroused by rape, murder, grave-robbing, wife-beating, and the like. The welfare of a delicately adjusted social order demands their stern inhibition in favour of rationally thought out action.

The effect of the increasing complexity of modern society is to emphasise ideas as the basis of social activities. "The reality of this close-knit life," writes Professor Ross, "is not to be seen and touched; it must be thought. The sins it opens the doors to are to be discerned by knitting the brows rather than opening the eyes. It takes imagination to see that the bogus medical diploma, lying advertisement, and fake testimonial are death-dealing instruments. It takes imagination to see that savings-bank wrecker, loan shark, and investment swindler, in taking livelihoods take lives. It takes imagination to see that the business of debauching voters, fixing juries, seducing lawmakers, and corrupting public servants is like sawing through the props of a crowded grandstand. Whether we like it or not we are in the organic phase, the thickening perils that beset our path can be beheld only by the mind's eye."

1 Sin and Society, p. 40.

This increased emphasis upon the abstract mental processes as the basis of social solidarity is of firstrate importance for the student of race questions. It indicates that the measure of efficient democracy is found in the extent to which the rank and file of citizenship make the ideals embodied in democratic institutions real in actual life. This is difficult when race differences encourage ignorance and group antipathies. Efficient democracy is practically impossible of attainment where we have present a large group, differing fundamentally in race traits, to a large extent illiterate, lacking in the sober sense of responsibility that comes with the possession of property, often devoid of patriotism local or national, and with no clear ideas on social or political issues.

History teaches us that the conditions most favourable to an efficient democracy exist where the group is relatively small, intelligent, ethnically homogeneous, and united by common economic, religious, and political interests. Possibly this ideal has been most closely approximated in the townships of New England. The section most unfavourable to the realisation of efficient democracy in this country is the "black belt" of the far South, where almost all these conditions are lacking.

Race traits become of more practical significance when we come to examine the process by which the

individual makes himself social and solid with his fellows. The new-born child, as a potentially social creature, falls heir to a twofold inheritance. He inherits an instinctive equipment from his ancestors to which allusion has already been made. He gradually appropriates also a social heritage, the legacy of group traditions and ideals. The basis of the first is physical, that of the second mental and social. The social heritage represents so many possible ways for the spiritual development of the individual's instinctive equipment. It is the legacy left the child by the gradual crystallisation of human thought and experience in the permanent forms of political institutions, religion, art, language, science, or philosophy. It is essentially a heritage of ideas. Back of the creed, political platform, or business corporation are ideas which represent to the individual instruments for social activity and so many possible ways for developing his powers. A social institution is not in reality a separable entity. It is rather composed of a body of ideas which a group of men share in common. It is on the basis of these common ideas that they engage in the corresponding social activities. In this sense a church or a business organisation is purely mental. It has no existence apart from the minds of the men who are loyal to it and coöperate to make the ideas underlying it real in life and conduct.

The process by which the child lives himself into the civilisation he has inherited is essentially an imitative one. Since persons, particularly within the family group, are the source of his pleasures and pains, he early begins to attend to them and imitates their actions. This process of imitation includes a great deal more than the mere external appropriation of the acts and words of others. By placing himself imitatively in the same position as others the child reinstates in his own consciousness their feelings and ideas. There are therefore no limits to the extent to which the average individual may appropriate the cultural experience of the group stored up in language, literature, political and religious institutions. The cultured man may unconsciously have woven into the fabric of his personality the moral and spiritual gains of an entire civilisation.

A question of fundamental importance in this connection is the extent to which the appropriation of the social heritage is conditioned by the instinctive equipment. It is evident that the successful candidate for social assimilation must come into the world. equipped with hereditary instinctive tendencies which do not run counter to the customs and ideals of the group where his lot is cast. If he is born with abnormally developed impulses and appetites which lead him to develop dangerous anti-social tendencies,