Science has now laid a broad road and is leading the plodding crowd where the keen feet of Pegasus have always carried the subtle minded, whatever the contemporary creed. “Darwin” writes a popular social psychologist “in the _Descent of Man_ (1871) first enunciated the true doctrine of human motives, and showed how we must proceed, relying chiefly upon the comparative and natural history method, if we would arrive at a fuller understanding of them. * * * Social Psychology has to show how, given the native propensities and capacities of the individual human mind, all the complex mental life of societies is shaped by them and in turn reacts upon the course of their development and operation in the individual. * * * The fundamental problem of social psychology is moralization of the individual by the society into which he is born as a creature in which the non-moral and purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altruistic tendencies.”[64] That is to say the problem which social psychology must solve is the problem of how this moralization is brought about. The significance of such doctrine for social work is in its entire discrediting of any naive individualism and its indication that man being an animal that lives not solitary but in groups some form and degree of interdependence is, for him, in the first order of nature. The interests and inclinations corollary to that interdependence are inescapable for him. If this is the case objection to the social work we have defined could not be “on principle” but must be to special forms of service on specific grounds of inexpediency or because of the manner or quality of the service. Although it is the manner and quality of service which make the social work of any given time and place what it is they are nevertheless incidentals entirely separable from its nature and principles. Objections are brought on specific grounds of expediency by those who claim that social work does too much and these objections will be considered in their turn. Objection is also made to the manner and quality of the social workers’ services and it is this objection which really animates the charge against the altruism of social work. This study is an analysis of the nature and functions, not the performance of social work. It must, however, consider a general objection to the nature and quality of the social workers’ services which so often passes for an objection to social work itself. This vague distrust of social work which we have just been considering, this dislike of it as something sentimental or undemocratic, is really a dislike of these incidentals which social work has a perfect right to disclaim if it can. It is a moral and aesthetic repulsion, an aversion for the sort of thing which social work sometimes seems to be.