In designating the social institutions as an ethical series, care must be taken not to confound the terms of the series as now existent with the terms as they would be did they conform to their ethical functions. For instance, even the monogamic family is as yet only in part ethically organized. School and university are adrift as to their ethical purpose. The majority of mankind are engaged in occupations which it would be absurd to call vocations, and the international group exists as yet barely in embryo. Hence when we speak of the social institutions as a progressive series through which the individual is to advance towards personality, we are describing the aim of social reconstruction, not the present state of things. The spiritual nature of man must create for itself appropriate social organs. It has been painfully engaged in the attempt to do so since the existence of our race on earth. In each of the social institutions we are to distinguish between the empirical substratum and the spiritual imprint which it is to receive. We find in each ready to hand some natural non-moral motive or set of motives of which we are to avail ourselves in the endeavor to evoke the spiritual result. Thus in the family the non-moral motive is affection due to consanguinity; in the school sociality, the school society being the first society into which the child enters; in the vocation there is the craving for mental self-expression, in the state, patriotism, or the feeling we have for the larger whole in which we are included on the basis of similarity of language, historic tradition, etc. The natural basis of the international group of society is the empirical, and as yet in no way ethical, fact of the commercial and industrial interdependence of the different countries, a fact used by M. Bloch and his more recent followers as an argument against war. In popular literature the empirical substratum and the spiritual relation to be produced by means of it are constantly confused. In any genuinely ethical system they must be carefully discriminated.[69] In each of the social institutions, or, as we may now call them, the phases of life experience through which the individual must pass on the way toward personality, the winning of the ethical result depends on observance of _the three-fold reverence_. What I mean by the three-fold reverence must be explained in some detail, especially as the reader might otherwise be led into identifying my view with that expressed by Goethe in _Wilhelm Meister_. The three modes of reverence mentioned by Goethe in his sketch of the “pedagogical province” have for their background the poet’s pantheism. The view here set forth is based on ethical idealism.