Another difficulty in the pathway of sound social thinking is found in an absence of proper backgrounds. People are prone to offer solutions for social questions without first equipping themselves with a knowledge of foundational elements. Moreover, they are often unwilling to acquaint themselves with these necessary factors. It is only by accident, however, that current social movements can be understood unless the historical sequences of social cause and effect are perceived. Nearly all social problems are essentially the outcroppings of tendencies which have had a long human history. A current social maladjustment is generally indicative of a long line of antecedent factors. A knowledge of societary fundamentals is essential to sound thinking about present-day evils. A history of social thought furnishes a minimum social background for the understanding of current social processes and problems. Social thought, as distinguished from individual thought, treats of the welfare of one’s associates and of groups. It may be very simple, merely observational, the result of daily experience, or it may be a scientific study of social processes. Sociology as an organized science has developed only during the past few decades. Inasmuch as sociology has simply begun its work of formulating the principles of societary progress, a large proportion of the thinking that has thus far been done in human history about the welfare of _socii_ or associates is either individual or social, rather than sociological. A history of social thought, therefore, includes the larger social field as well as the more specific one of recent development, namely, the sociological. The time is hardly ripe for a history of distinctly sociological thought. Social thought, as here used, is a synthesis of the observations of individuals about the welfare of other individuals, considered as individuals or as groups. The focus of social thought is not the welfare of the ego but of the alter, not of the self but of others, not of the individual but of the class, group, organization, or process. Social thought draws from the thought-life of persons who have done unselfish thinking and who have focalized their attention upon the nature and principles of associative activities. It tests group progress by the degree in which human personalities secure constructive, co-operative expression. It measures the individual in his relationships to the social whole, whether that unit be the family, school, church, state, or the world society. It rates the individual in terms of a functioning unit in group life. It evaluates the group both in regard to the quality of the personalities which it produces in its membership, and to the loyalty which it manifests as a unit of a larger group, even of human society itself.