Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    36/284 (page 24)
    beings. Primitive man accordingly starts off with a lesser inheritance of instincts than his forbears.1 He is born less completely adapted, and is able to learn by degrees what to do as he grows up. The whole development of homo sapiens, and therefore of his social institutions, is one long replacing of animal instincts by feelings and thoughts, leading to an ever-greater elaboration of social relations. Among the social institutions believed to be derived ultimately from animal instinct are such varied forms as the family with all the developments of blood relationship; the horde, the tribe, and the mob; territorial jurisdiction and sovereignty, with their derivatives of government and law; some would add the acquisitiveness manifested in the conception of property; and with this most of the economic relations dealt with by the abstract economies of the nineteenth century. It is per¬ haps more accurate to say that the animal kind of behaviour, whilst being typical of all the in¬ stitutions of primitive man, is subconsciously present also in the relationships set up by the social institutions falling into the other classes. For, even 1 The question of how much has been derived from our animal ancestry, and how much is to be ascribed to human discovery, cannot be said to be decided. “I am inclined to the view”, wrote one of the ablest of Ameri¬ can sociologists, “that man is not naturally a social being; that he has descended from an animal that was not even gregarious by instinct, and that human society ... is purely a product of his reason, and arose by insensible degrees, pari passu, with the development of his brain. In other words, I regard human association as the result of the perceived advantage which it yields, and as coming into existence only in proportion as that advantage was perceived by the only faculty capable of perceiving it, the intellect.” (Outlines of Sociology, by Lester F. Ward, 1898, pp. 90-91.)