4. _Social process and social progress._--Social process is the name for all changes which can be regarded as changes in the life of the group. A group may be said to have a life when it has a history. Among social processes we may distinguish (a) the historical, (b) the cultural, (c) the political, and (d) the economic. a) We describe as historical the processes by which the fund of social tradition, which is the heritage of every permanent social group, is accumulated and transmitted from one generation to another. History plays the rôle in the group of memory in the individual. Without history social groups would, no doubt, rise and decline, but they would neither grow old nor make progress. Immigrants, crossing the ocean, leave behind them much of their local traditions. The result is that they lose, particularly in the second generation, that control which the family and group tradition formerly exercised over them; but they are, for that very reason, all the more open to the influence of the traditions and customs of their adopted country. b) If it is the function of the historical process to accumulate and conserve the common fund of social experience, it is the function of the cultural process to shape and define the social forms and the social patterns which each preceding generation imposes upon its successors. The individual living in society has to fit into a pre-existing social world, to take part in the hedonistic, economic, political, religious, moral, aesthetic, intellectual activities of the group. For these activities the group has objective _systems_, more or less complex sets of schemes, organized either by traditional association or with a conscious regard to the greatest possible efficiency of the result, but with only a secondary, or even with no interest in the particular desires, abilities and experiences of the individuals who have to perform these activities. There is no pre-existing harmony whatever between the individual and the social factors of personal evolution, and the fundamental tendencies of the individual are always in some disaccordance with the fundamental tendencies of social control. Personal evolution is always a struggle between the individual and society--a struggle for self-expression on the part of the individual, for his subjection on the part of society--and it is in the total course of this struggle that the personality--not as a static "essence" but as a dynamic, continually evolving set of activities--manifests and constructs itself.[51]