Conflict strengthens the fighting groups; imitation welds them together into an overgroup. The American process is one of forming a united people, an integrated, self-conscious group mind, out of the many diverse elements which enter this continent. And this goes on by conscious teaching and unconscious imitation, through social, political and economic motives, everywhere except when interrupted by the counter process of oppression and resistance. We speak nowadays of a Greco-Roman civilization, a direct recognition of the part that imitation played in the Roman empire with all its warlike power. We speak of modern European culture, recognizing that European culture is one, with local variations indeed, and that art, science, philosophy and religion are international, for every group imitates every other. The trend of such a tendency can only lead toward an eventual amalgamation, not by abolishing present languages and parliaments, but by the growth of every sort of international and supernational consciousness, beginning with schools of literature or art, and culminating in a World Court or a League of Nations. 4. This suggests the ideal of society which is implicit in our minds as we study its development by means of conflicting, imitating and overlapping group minds. The desirable qualities which this process evokes are heterogeneity and progress. We thus steer midway between the equal dangers of uniformity and standardization, on the one hand, and the isolation of castes, on the other. The caste system of India provides plenty of heterogeneity, but because the groups are isolated from each other physically and mentally, because of the influence of “untouchability,” the mind of the group has never unified, never presented the possibility of change. The modern movement in India under Ghandi is precisely of this type, to unify India and introduce the concept of progress by a double process, by abolishing “untouchability” within and bringing the caste groups to imitate and emulate each other; by strengthening loyalty through united opposition to the common oppressor. It is a most significant example of the development of the group mind through union of sub-groups and by contrast to another hostile group. On the other hand, the beginning of modernity in Europe meant a radical opposition to the levelling influence of the Church universal, the rise of vernacular tongues, of national governments, of national churches—that is, the dissociation of the medieval mind, which was European, into the sub-groups, which are primarily national. That the reverse movement is now taking place is significant, for this reverse movement is a natural one by imitation and common interests, not forced by the union of the Inquisition and the secular arm. As Bernard Shaw remarks in the preface to “Saint Joan”: