similar
apprenticeship to tribal regulation and tribal conscience. Only
slowly was instinct modified and replaced by intelligent action. And
how this old tribal conscience persists. Often for good, although
there it were better replaced by an individual conscience working
for right. But how slowly you and I learn that there is a higher
responsibility than to party or class. How often my vote and action
are controlled, not by my own conscience, but by the opinion of my
fellows, or the feeling that, if my party suffers defeat, God's work
will suffer at the hands of my opponents. And what is all this but
the survival in a very degenerate form of the old tribal conscience
of primitive man? And he knew, and could know, nothing better: I can
and do.

But society slowly works for unselfishness. The love learned in the
family manifests itself in ever-widening circles; it must do so if
it is the genuine article. It works for neighbors and friends, then
for the poor and helpless of the community. Then it spreads to other
communities and nations. For genuine love recognizes no bounds of
time or place. Slowly we learn that we are our brother's keepers,
and that the brotherhood cannot stop short of the human race.
Goodness and kindness radiate from one, perhaps unknown, member of
the community to his fellows, and thence all over the world. And the
world is the better for his one action.

Primitive society was thus the best possible school of conscience;
and the family and it are the great school of unselfishness. But
society is even more and better than this. It is the medium through
which thought, power, and moral and religious life can spring from
man to man. This is its last and culminating advantage: it is that
for which society really exists.

For, in the close bonds of family and social life, a new possibility
of development has arisen based upon articulate speech. We might
almost call it a new form of heredity, independent of all
blood-relationship. Progress in anatomical structure in the animal
kingdom was slow, because any improvement could be transmitted only
to the direct descendants of its original possessor. But in all
matters pertaining to or based upon mind, a new invention, or idea,
or system becomes the property of him who can best appreciate it.
The torch is always handed on to the swiftest runner. Thus Socrates
is the true father of Plato, and Plato of Aristotle. Whoever can
best understand and appreciate and