given social
relation or group of relations.

For the present purpose, however, the question as to the nature of the
adaptive process--whether it is chiefly a selection between stable types
of temperament and character, or chiefly an adaptation of men's habits
of thought to changing circumstances--is of less importance than the
fact that, by one method or another, institutions change and develop.
Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they are
of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli
which these changing circumstances afford. The development of these
institutions is the development of society. The institutions are,
in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular
relations and particular functions of the individual and of the
community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate
of institutions in force at a given time or at a given point in the
development of any society, may, on the psychological side, be broadly
characterized as a prevalent spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of
life. As regards its generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory
of life is in the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type
of character.

The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through
a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men's habitual view
of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental
attitude banded down from the past. The institutions--that is to say the
habits of thought--under the guidance of which men live are in this way
received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in
any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past.
Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past
circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the
requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of
selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing
situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for
the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the
adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each
successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence
as soon as it has been established. When a step in the development has
been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which
requires a new adaptation; it becomes