Before the animal could safely be allowed to govern itself intelligently it had to serve a long apprenticeship to reflex action and instinct.  And man’s moral nature had to undergo a 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 enter into the spirit of Socrates and Plato becomes heir to their thoughts and interprets them to us.  And the thought of one man enriches all races and times.