nd ideals. In the adult, habits are already set physiologically,
and kept rigid by the demands of economic life. In
the young there is a "fairer and freer" field. Through education
the immature may be taught to approve ways of action
more desirable than those which have become habitual with
their adult contemporaries. The children of to-day may
acquire habits of action, feeling, and thought that will be their
enlightened practice as the adults of to-morrow. All great
social reformers, from Plato to our own contemporaries like
Bertrand Russell, have seen in education, therefore, the chief
instrument, as it is the chief problem, of social betterment.
We may train the maturing generation to approve modes of
behavior which the best minds of our time may have found
reason to think desirable, but which could not be substituted
immediately for the fixed habits of the already adult generation.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY, AND THE SOCIAL MOTIVE. In our analysis of
the social nature of man we have, thus far, been dealing with
his specific social tendencies. But apart from these, or rather
as an outgrowth of these, men exhibit what Professor Woodworth
has well described as a gift for "learning" social behavior.

Possessing, as he eminently does, the capacity for group activity,
man is interested in such activity. He needs no ulterior motive to
attract him to it. It is play for him.... The social interest is part
and parcel of the general _objective_ interest of man.[1]

[Footnote 1: Woodworth: _Dynamic Psychology_, pp. 202, 203.]

In other words, the activity of man as an individual is
not simply deflected a little by man's native gregariousness,
sympathy, and susceptibility to praise and blame. Rather,
group activity becomes to the gregarious human, born into an
environment where he must act with and among other human
beings, an interesting and exciting activity in and for itself.
Men enjoy working in a group or a society for joint and common
objects just as they enjoy food or musical composition
or golf.

The social motive is of the same order as the musical or mathematical
motive. Just as one who has the musical gift takes to music
naturally and finds it interesting for its own sake, so the socially
gifted individual understands other people, sees the possibilities of
collective activity, and the ways of cooerdinating it, and enters
into such doings with gusto.... The social gift is a capacity for
_learning_ social behavior. Indiv