The debate regarding the comparative influences of nature and nurture has been long and bitter. It may be said here that both heredity and environment are more or less equally essential in the development of human personality. Without inherited factors in the individual the environment has nothing upon which to work. Without a stimulating environment the inherited traits will remain dormant. Each human being has inherited factors which, if played upon by certain environmental factors, may lead the individual to try to wreck society or himself or both. Every person, also, has traits which, if stimulated by the proper environmental elements may cause him to develop into a useful member of society. While the environment cannot change the inherited potentialities very much, if any, it is a prime factor of vast importance in determining which inherited tendencies will never find expression, which will be expressed in modified ways, and which will reach full fruition. Eugenics insists with increasing force that educational programs shall provide that every child be not only well reared but also well born. A weakness in eugenic thought is that it implies that sound racial stock is sufficient to guarantee progress; it tends at times to overstress an aristocracy of racial stock. It sometimes detracts from the importance of character and moral discipline as essential elements in social progress. CHAPTER XX CONFLICT THEORIES IN SOCIOLOGY The concept of social conflict has already been introduced to the reader. In the chapter on Individualistic Social Thought the prolonged struggle between individual rights and genuine social control was analyzed. Malthus described the conflict between population and the means of subsistence. Comte insisted that man is not naturally a social being. Hence this unsocial nature of mankind is a fruitful source of human conflict. Marx pictured the class struggle; and Darwin elaborated the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The slightest grasp of social thought reveals the fact that human association is characterized at times by deep-seated and subtle conflicts; and at other times by a fundamental co-operative spirit. Some sociological writers have seen only or chiefly the conflicts of life; others have sought out the co-operative activities; still others have tried to discover the relationships between conflict and co-operation in societal development. This chapter will deal with the concept of social conflict, while the next chapter will be centered on the ideal of social co-operation and upon the relationship of conflict to co-operation in group processes.