252 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
portance of the issue. The selective process by which specific types of life are formed from life-stuff on this planet, may oper- ate on individual units directly; or it may operate indirectly through the medium of communities upon which the selective process acts, conditioning the activities of the unit life of the community by the incidental stresses; or it may operate partly in one way and partly in the other. Among all gregarious beings — animal packs, bird rookeries, insect swarms, schools of fish — the individual incidence of the selective process is doubtless modified by the habit of communal life, but the community is so intermittent and incoherent that its influence is comparatively feeble as a condition molding individual structure. There are, however, beings whose life-principle is developed under condi- tions of established collectivism. There are concrete forms of this permanent community — such as corals and sponges; there are discrete forms — such as numerous species of ants, bees, and wasps generally designated as the social insects. In the case of individual units belonging to this order of beings it is conceded that their structure has been shaped by their functional activities as members of the community and that they have organs and organic proclivities which cannot be interpreted on the principle of individual advantage, but only from the point of view of the advantage of the community.
Now, in adopting "the natural-science view of human so- ciety" the first thing to be determined is to which order of life we must assign the human species: (i) to that in which the selective process operates directly in the formation of the indi- vidual, or (2) to that in which the selective process operates directly upon the community, which serves as the matrix of the individual and fashions his structure, under the stresses trans- mitted by it, in the course of its own evolution. Darwin gives reasons for regarding the human species as animals belonging to the second category. He mentions the non-gregarious gorilla as a typical animal of the class which has developed on lines of individual competency. In "the natural-science view" the gorilla stands to the human animal in about the same relation as the solitary bee does to the community bee. They have a generic
