or self-regulative ethical life.
He must pass from the traditional to the enlightened, from the
communal to the individualistic stage in ethics and religion. He must
feel with increasing force the binding nature of the supra-communal
sanctions for communal and individual life, accepting the highest
dictates of the enlightened moral consciousness as the laws of the
universe. But this means that the individual must secure increasing
insight into the immutable and eternal laws of spiritual being and
must identify his personal interests, his very self with those laws,
with the Heart of the. Universe, with God himself. Only so will he
become completely autonomous, self-regulative. Only thus will the
individual become and remain an altruistic communo-individual, fitted
to meet and survive the relaxation of the historic communal and
supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, a
relaxation induced by growing political liberty and growing
intellectual rejection of primitive or defective religious beliefs.

Progress in personality is thus at bottom an ethico-religious process.
The wide attainment of developed personality permits the formation of
enlarging highly organized psychic groups, accompanied by increasing
specialization of its individual members. This communal expansion,
ramifying organization and individual specialization, secures
increasing extensive and intensive intellectual understanding of the
universe, and this in turn active mastery of nature, with all the
consequences of growing ease and richness of life.

Ethico-religious, autonomous personality is thus the tap-root of
highly developed and permanently progressive civilizations.
Personality is, therefore, the criterion of progress. Mere ease of
physical life, freedom from anxiety, light-hearted, care-free
happiness, mastery of nature, material civilization, highly developed
art, literature, and music, or even refined culture, are partial and
inadequate, if not positively false, criteria.

Personality, as a nature, is an inherent psychic heritage shared by
all human beings. It is transmitted only from parents to offspring,
and its transmission depends only on that relation. Personality, as a
varying psychic characteristic, is a matter of social inheritance, and
is profoundly dependent, therefore, on the nature of the social order
and the social evolution.

Religion, as incorporated in life, is the most important single factor
determining the pe