feeble where the family is rudimentary and gaining strength as the family develops, serves in another way to lessen the sacrifice of the individual to the maintenance of the species, and begins, contrariwise, to make the maintenance of the species conduce to the more prolonged life, as well as to the higher life, of the individual.
A fact not yet named remains. Evolution of the higher types of family, like evolution of the higher types of society, has gone hand in-hand with evolution of human intelligence and feeling. The general truth that there exists a necessary connection between the nature of the social unit and the nature of the social aggregate, and that each continually moulds and is moulded by the other, is a truth which holds of domestic organization as well as of political organization. The ideas and sentiments which make possible any more advanced phase of associated life, whether in the family or in the state, imply a preceding phase by the experiences and discipline of which they were acquired; and these, again, a next preceding phase; and so from the beginning. On turning to the last part of the "Principles of Psychology" (edition of 1872), containing chapters on "Development of Conceptions," "Sociality and Sympathy," "Ego-Altruistic Sentiments," "Altruistic Sentiments," the reader will find it shown how the higher forms alike of intellect and feeling, made possible only by the social environment, evolve as this environment evolves—each increment of advance in the one being followed by an increment of advance in the other. And carrying out this doctrine he will see that since altruism plays an important part in developed family life, the higher domestic relations have become possible only as the adaptation of man to the social state has progressed.[1]
In considering deductively the connections between the forms of domestic life and the forms of social life, and in showing how these are in each type of society related to one another because jointly related to the same type of individual character, it will be convenient to deal simultaneously with the marital arrangement, the family structure, the status of women, and the status of children.
Primitive life, cultivating antagonism to prey and enemies, brute or human—daily yielding the egoistic satisfaction of conquest over alien beings which prove to be weaker, daily gaining pleasure from acts which entail pain—maintains a type of nature which generates coercive rule, social and domestic. Brute strength glorying in the predominance which brings honor, and unchecked by regard for others' welfare, seizes whatever women fancy prompts, adding to them and changing them at will. And children, at the mercy of this utter self-
- ↑ As included in the general theory of the adaptation of organic beings to their circumstances, this doctrine that the human mind, especially in its moral traits, is moulded by the social state, pervades social statics; and is especially insisted upon in the chapter entitled "General Considerations."
