"Not for the human race only, but for every race, there are laws of right living. Given its environment and its structure, and there is, for each kind of creature, a set of actions adapted in their kinds, amounts, and combinations, to secure the highest conservation its nature permits." Yet in man we find an additional factor in the formula for life: for man is sociable to a degree not found anywhere else among animals. The conditions of the associated state have therefore called for an emphasizing of those restraints on conduct entailed by the presence of fellow-men. "From the sociological point of view, then, Ethics becomes nothing else than a definite account of the forms of conduct that are fitted to the associated state, in such wise that the lives of each and all may be the greatest possible, alike in length and breadth." "But here we are met by a fact which forbids us thus to put in the foreground the welfare of citizens, individually considered, and requires us to put in the foreground the welfare of the society as a whole. The life of the social organism must, as an end, rank above the lives of its units." These two ends are not harmonious at the outset, since as long as communities are endangered by rival communities, a sacrifice of private to public claims is necessary. When, however, antagonism between communities shall cease, there will cease to be any public claims at variance with private claims; the need for the subordination of individual lives to the general life will cease, and the latter, having from the beginning had furtherance of individual lives as its ultimate purpose, will come to have this as its proximate purpose. Between the commands of duty towards members of the same community and towards those of different communities as between the sentiments answering to these relations, there is, at present, conflict. In the course of evolution, however, the various forms of subjection countenanced by a warlike regime--slavery, the subjection of women to men, and paternal absolutism, become more and more unpopular, and are done away with. For each kind and degree of social evolution, there is an appropriate compromise between the moral code of enmity and that of amity; this is, for the time being, authoritative.[45] But such compromise belongs to incomplete conduct; the end of evolution is in the annihilation of enmity between societies as between individuals. Nor is a mere abstinence from mutual injury enough. Without cooeperation for satisfying wants the social state loses its _raison d'etre_. In all efforts for cooeperation equivalence of exchange is a necessary basis; all failure to fulfil such equivalence causes antagonism and thus a diminution of social coherence; in the social, as in the animal organism, waste without repair destroys the equilibrium of the parts; fulfilment of contract is, therefore, the primary condition of the welfare of society.