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60 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
feeling in connection with reproduction. The transition from very low forms of life, controlled mechanically by the purely physical stimuli of heat, light, electricity, and acid, 1 to human society, characterized by an increasingly rational control of environment, is dependent on association. This principle of association has two aspects. In its connection with the food process its lowest expression is seen in the hostile coexistence of different species, affording an opportunity to the strong to prey upon the weak, and a higher expression is reached in human societies where division of labor makes a peaceful exchange of products possible. But the association connected with trade and commerce is never truly social ; it is a civilized bellum omnium infer omnes.
Social feeling, as such, originates in the association connected with reproduction, and its physical basis is the anabolic nature of the female. Among the lower animal forms the conversion of the anabolic surplus of the female into offspring involves a great waste of physiological energy on the part of the female, but is followed, by little or no association between parent and offspring. Since, in the absence of social feeling, the larger the number of offspring the larger the chance of survival of some, natural selection has in some cases enormously developed the capacity for physiological waste in the female ; a thousand eggs may be spawned where only a single form comes to life or reaches maturity. But a higher type of development involves a closer association between the parent and offspring, and this is secured through natural selection by a modified structure in the female, culminating among the mammals in the intra-uterine develop- ment of the young and the disposition in the female to care for the young after bringing them forth. The expansion of the abdominal zone in the female in connection with this modifica- tion of her reproductive system is the physical basis of the altru- istic sentiments. Feeling is a physiological change, and its seat is not the encephalon, but the viscera ; the sense organs and the
I J. LOEB, Der Heliotropismus der Thiere und seine Uebereinstimmung mit detn Heliotropismus der Pflanzen, 1890.
