In order to introduce my thought let me go back to the phrase repeatedly used in Book III—“the task of humanity.” Mankind as a whole, the generations past, present and to come, have a certain work to do, a task to accomplish. A collective obligation rests on our race, spanning the generations. The spiritual conception of the collective task is the basis of the three-fold reverence. The spiritual result, as was said above, is in every instance to be superinduced upon an empirical substratum. The empirical substratum in this case is mankind considered as a developing entity, which partially reproduces in the present the mental and moral acquisitions of ancestors, partially increases the heritage and passes it on to the newcomers. I, as an individual, am also inextricably linked up backward and forward with those who come before and those who are to come after. I cannot take myself out of this web. The task laid upon human society as a whole is also laid upon me. I am a conscious thread in the fabric that is weaving, conscious in a general way of the pattern to be woven. But viewed empirically the development of humanity is haphazard. Much is preserved from the past that ought to be cast aside. Many traces of past error remain unexpunged in the life of the present. A mixed stream, compounded of good and evil, passes through our veins into our successors’. The empirical fact is simply the fact of partial reproduction, partial augmentation and partial transmission. The ethical conception of progress depends on the view that there is an ideal pattern of the spiritual relation in the mind of man, destined to become more explicit as it is tested out and that the present generation ought to appraise the heritage of the past according to this pattern, preserving and rejecting and adding its own quota in such a way as to enable the succeeding generations to sift the worthful from the worthless more successfully, and to see the ideal pattern more explicitly.