It will be observed at once that the power of attention to meet crises is largely an individual matter and that the rôle of the individual is very important. The group level of culture limits the power of the mind to meet crises and to make adjustments.[XVIII-42] The mind is limited by the psychic fund which the group already possesses. If there is no knowledge of mathematics in the group, then a large banking system is impossible. Crises, attention, control--these are the three leading concepts in Thomas’ theory of social origins. Control is the object of all purposeful activity.[XVIII-43] It is the end, and attention is the means. An animal differs from a plant in that it has a superior control over a larger environment than does the plant. “It does not wait for food, but goes after it.” Man differs from an animal partly in the fact that his fore limbs are free to secure new and varied forms of control. Moreover, man through his mind has a superior instrument of control. By the use of knowledge, mind is effective in controlling factors that are present in neither time nor space. Through its inventions, such as language, religious creeds, mechanical appliances, forms of government, man has risen to a high level of civilization. Thomas has analyzed the social process in terms of social attitude and social values. An attitude is a process of individual consciousness that determines “the real or possible activity of the individual in the social world.”[XVIII-45] A social value, on the other hand, is any datum that has an empirical content accessible to the members of a social group and a meaning which may make it an object of activity. Activity is thus the bond between a social attitude and a social value. The value is the meaning which a material or spiritual datum may have. An attitude is a real or implied going out after value. Social psychology is the science of social attitudes. At this point anthropologic social thought has merged into social psychology. Until twenty-five years ago, anthropology interpreted societary origins pretty largely in terms of the individual. With the use of a social psychology such as Cooley represents, “anthropology has given more accurate explanations and become essentially a social anthropology.” Before we discuss the different phases of psycho-sociologic thought, it will be well to make clear the recent advances that have been made in the biologic phases of social thought. The center of attention in this field is the relation of the laws of heredity to human progress, which constitutes the problem in eugenics. A discussion of eugenic social thought will bring forward in a scientific way the chief elements of an intellectual situation that was left, in Chapter XVI, in the unsatisfactory Spencerian formulae. A presentation of eugenic social thought will give a valuable background to the discussion which follows concerning psycho-sociologic thought. CHAPTER XIX EUGENIC SOCIOLOGY