Social Control; A Survey of the Foundations of Order (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ROLE OF SYMPATHY Sympathy, Sociability, Justice ? these are the "mothers" to which, Faust-like, we must repair for the secret of natural goodness. For we are no longer free to reduce altruism to an extremely refined egoism, or to pronounce illusory the pains and pleasures felt on beholding the experiences of another. The metaphysical, strictly egoistic " self " of Helvetius or D'Holbach turns out to be a myth. Those cunning architects, Selection and Heredity, are quite competent to build into the nervous system sympathetic promptings as well as selfish appetites. In the light of the facts collected by many workers, it is no longer difficult to trace the slender stem of altruism rising from the lower levels of mammalian life side by side with the thicker and rougher trunk of egoism. The beginnings of sympathy lie in the later developments of the reproductive function. With the advent of the helpless mammalian young, sympathy acquires a high value for survival and is . rapidly generated. In the human species the dependence of the young on the self-sacrifice of the parents is great, and the feeling of tenderness for the helpless becomes all-important. Those lacking in this quality do not leave so many children as the self-sacrificing, and so are crowded out and replaced. Thus has been developed in woman, in connection with her child-rearing func don, a power of sympathy so great that travellers among savages have learned to throw themselves, when in straits, on the pity of females. Besides family selection, social selection works in many ways to put a premium on the more amiable type of man. We know that women, being less quarrelsome, learned to associate before their male companions did. It is probable that, likewise, the more peaceable strains of men b...