These mental interactions of human beings are not an artificial construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or any other method. William MacDougall is almost alone in holding that the social sentiments are derived from the self-regarding ones through the operation of the tender emotion and the parental instinct. Hobhouse says:[6] “The conception of a primitive egoism on which sociality is somehow overlaid is without foundation in either biology or psychology.” John Dewey puts this view most forcibly: [7]The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual man, is already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social inheritance and references.... Education, language, and other means of communication are infinitely more important categories of knowledge than any of those exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the methodological battle of instrumentalism is won ... the two services that will stand to the credit of instrumentalism will be calling attention first to the connection of intelligence with a genuine future, and second, to the social constitution of personal, even of private experience, above all of any experience that has assumed the knowledge form. And Ellwood adds—expressing here the general opinion of both sociologists and modern social philosophers—“All human consciousness is socially conditioned.... This is as true of the racially inherited aspects of consciousness—the feeling-instincts—as it is of the acquired traits.” Man is a social animal and his sociality is one of the few unescapable things about him. He is born in some kind of a social group; he gets the most of his ideas from his association with others; his whole development is a give-and-take in which the take is from the first, and often remains, the greater element. But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one explanation of it. We do not need to accept the “consciousness of kind” of Giddings, the “herd instinct” of Trotter, or the “imitation” of Tarde,—in fact, we may very well consider that there is no one principle to explain so universal and complex a phenomenon; that these terms and others like them are in no sense explanations, but merely different words for the same fact, that man is a naturally gregarious or social being. We may rather turn to the more generalized modes of expressing this conception, the group mind or general will, as developed by Durkheim, Wundt and in our day by Baldwin, MacDougall, and others. 2.