provide for the conservation of many an innovation which might otherwise pass unnoticed, exhibit a type of social control which, while still largely in the social unconsciousness, marks an advanced stage in socialization, because here the social sanction often counterbalances the organic and activity valuations. Diffusion by education. attempts to lay hold of the natural means of psychic appropriation, but adds artificial stimuli as well. Attractive leadership, the glamor of place and rank, and the prestige of success afford "radiant centers of suggestibility" for the aspiring members of the group. Besides intensifying certain stimuli by special devices for securing vividness and frequency, primacy and recency, the group narrows the range of conflicting influences by contracting the range of stimulation. The emphasis of a small religious community such as the Shakers upon its distinctive peculiarities of conversation and dress as well as its withdrawal from the allurements of the outside world illustrates the endeavor made by every group to maintain its integrity. In the methods adopted for securing the diffusion of knowledge and opinion by education we have the conscious control by the group of the process of conservation, an advance made possible by the attainment of the conscious stage of socialization. Word of mouth and oral tradition, the written manuscript and the printed book, the church and the school constitute the social media in which the achievement of one generation becomes the social heritage of the next. This organization of conservation through the agency of specialized groups and methods not only facilitates the rapidity of diffusion, but offers a secure basis for change. Thus we see that, while the appropriation of a cultural element implies at least a minimum of socialization, the diffusion of knowledge, even by the most attractive methods, requires a higher type of socialization.

The fundamental element in the conserving process is the appreciation by the group of the value of the innovation to the group. Whether this valuation be unconscious or conscious, individual or collective, subjective or objective, it is social, either in its formation or its criterion, or in both origin and purpose. Sumner has

"Vincent, "The Rivalry of Social Groups," in the American Journal of Sociology, XVI (1910-11), 481.

"Cf. Ross, Social Control, 1901, chap. IX, "The Radiant Points of Social Control."

Folkways, 1906, p. 30.

emphasized the function of the feeling of rightness or of group welfare in perpetuating ways of thinking and acting. The value attached to an idea, mode of action, or appliance may be predominantly habitual, fetishistic, supernatural or functional. The rôle of these factors in the beginnings of culture is well set forth by McGee' in his study of the Seri Indians, a tribe of the lowest cultural development in North America. So elementary are almost all their industrial implements that there is much to be said for the contention that their appliances are mere improvisations immediately reflecting the physical environment. The dwellings of the families are temporary bowers; the source of the clothing was probably once exclusively, as now chiefly, pelican skins; a shallow bowl of water serves as a mirror for the Seri belle; mollusc shells take the place of cups; the agave thorn with the attached fibers is the prototype of our needle and thread. Marine shells, in addition to their use as utensils and receptacles, are employed in scraping skins, in digging graves, in propelling the Seri boat, and in shaping the reeds required for the manufacture of arrows and harpoons. Stones of all kinds from pebbles to boulders are used for functions as diverse as manual implements and anvils. While McGee makes clear that the use of shells and the largest proportion of stone implements is fortuitous and impromptu, he points out that the modification which they receive by repeated use enhances their value in the opinion of their user and insures their continued preservation. The survival of the serviceable appliance is due to the emotional value which attaches to its altered form. This sentiment which extends the self-feeling of the user to objects in customary use and to the familiar and the habitual in general becomes an important element in the fixation and conservation of the function and form of objects, inasmuch as the habits of individuals tend to become the customs of the group. The fact that the general features of the crude bower, which serves merely as the temporary dwelling, are invariably uniform and conventional1o is only one illustration of the many which might be cited to show the dominance of the folk-mind over individual initiative and caprice. McGee sums up the problem as follows: "Even the improvisations are made in accordance with regular custom, firmly fixed by associations quite in the way, indeed, of primitive life generally, and of the physiologic and psychic processes from which

9Supra, p. 10.

10Op. cit.,

pp. 221-22.

11

primitive custom is so largely borrowed." " Thus, in general, the habitual sanction resolves into the customary sanction, inherited by the individual because of his membership in a mental community; as in the adoption of every innovation, the process is reversed, and the habit of the individual becomes the custom of the group.

The fetishistic or magical potence attributed to an object, even more than the habitual sanction, is a socio-psychic product and is employed with constant reference to the group welfare. Frazer in The Golden Bough has indicated the significance attached in primitive groups to sympathetic magic for the control of life. The survival, if not the origin of many elements of culture, is to be traced to the common consciousness of the ill luck that would come to the group by the slightest deviation from the conduct sanctioned by the conscience of the group. Among the Seri the origin of clothing is attributed to fetishistic motives in connection with the ritual of the tribe. The protection of turtle-shells and pelican pelts in battle is symbolic, and the wearing of textile clothing is evidently an elabora. tion of hair necklaces first worn ceremonially. Even in this tribe of low culture the practice of magic had developed into a cult in the hands of the old women. The arrow poison compounded by these old dames is a preparation more revolting in the details of its composition than that of the ingredients of the mixture of the cauldron of the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The magical appropriation of an alien cultural element constitutes the lowest stage of acculturation.12 Thus the shamanistic chipping of arrows which are not to be put to practical use in battle and the employment of the white man's Winchester as a fetish and not as a weapon in the fight indicate the nature of the process in which even hostile contact may occasion the development of a social valuation of the worth of. novel objects and methods for group survival and success. While the sense of lack of control and reliance upon the efficacy of magic is the mental correlate of magical practices, the specific fetish employed is a social development with an origin and a function connected with group crises and owing its survival and efficiency to the mental attitude of the group.

11Op. cit., p. 233.

12Cf. McGee, "Piratical Acculturation," in the American Anthropologist, XI (1898), 243-49.

The supernatural sanction, although more often negative than positive, has always had reference more to the socializing than to the technical aspect of life and has demanded a higher integration and specialization of the social consciousness. The religious life of every people has centered1s about the development of a deity or polytheistic hierarchy whose command enforced systems of hygiene and morality before a functional standard was recognized. Thus, bathing and purification had a magical1 significance long before the perception of their relation to health had any compelling power over human conduct. With the breakdown of the tribal form of socialization and the emergence of the community and national types, the solidarity of the people came to express itself in a spontaneous way in worship and in ritual. In contemporary society we may discover the vestiges of this alleged divine sanction for social institutions. Every assault against the existing order finds the conservatives making their last stand on the "divine right of kings" or the "sacred rights of property" or upon the constitution and the courts as the "Ark of the Covenant" of society.

2. In the preceding paragraphs, evidence has been brought forward to demonstrate that the essential element in the habitual, fetishistic, and religious sanctions has been an appreciation of the social value of the activity of the object in question, and that the development of this social valuation has been the outcome of the mental interrelations of the individuals, living and dead, who constitute the psychic community. With this examination of the positive function of conservation we now turn to a consideration of its negative rôle for the purpose of discovering in how far the integration of the ideas, feelings, and activities of persons in that functional unity which we name the "social mind" represses variation and innovation.

The rôle of conservation in inhibiting invention is homologous to the resistance which an old muscular co-ordination or habit of thought offers to the development of a conflicting series of move

13 Wallis in his Sociological Study of the Bible, 1912, develops the thesis that the Bible and the Christian religion are the product of a socializing process.

14 Stern, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Russland, 1907, I, 434-37; see also Frazer, The Golden Bough, (3d ed., 1911), “The Magic Art," I, 277; II, 157.

ments or to a radically different train of ideas. The ideas and sentiments of the group tend to become stratified in definite layers of conventionality and to assume a rigidity which serves as a protection against social change. Superstitious fears of change, the dread of supernatural vetoes, and the resistance of vested interests are typical forms of social inertia which have put brakes on progress.

Superstitious aversion to change refers to the uneasiness, not to be accounted for on functional grounds, felt by a person in abandoning a socially sanctioned practice. The record that no sound of tools of iron was heard in the building of Solomon's temple,1 and the fact that as late as the fall of the Roman Republic no bolts of iron16 were allowed in the repair of the Sublician Bridge across the Tiber hark back to the prehistoric struggle between bronze and iron, and testify to the deep-set prejudice with which the users of bronze and stone regarded the advent of iron. The reason that the cassock of the clergyman of today was the ordinary dress of the Elizabethan gentleman1 is due not only to the conservative character of the profession, but also to the strong lay opposition to the least deviation from propriety by the priest. The paralyzing effect upon progress of a supernatural veto has been strikingly indicated by Professor Thomas: "Among the Hebrews a religious inhibition-thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image'-was sufficient to prevent anything like the sculpture of the Greeks; and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body in the early Christian church, and the teaching that man was made in the image of God, formed an almost insuperable obstacle to the study of human anatomy." 18

If a religious prohibition and a dogma were sufficient to inhibit an art and to arrest the development of a science, popular prejudice and superstition have exercised, in more recent times, a deterrent effect upon the diffusion of an invention. So set were the eighteenthcentury English villagers in the agricultural practices of their ancestors that after five years of persistent effort to introduce the potato among his tenants, Sir Edward Coke of Norfolk, an enthusi

151 Kings 6:7. The Mormon temple at Salt Lake City was built without iron.

16 Elworthy, The Evil Eye, 1895, p. 220, note.

17 Cutts, Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages, 1886, p. 225.

18 Thomas, Sex and Society, 1907, p. 283.