The question of personal degeneracy is a phase of the question of right or wrong and is ultimately determined by conscience. A degenerate might be defined as one whose personality falls distinctly short of a standard set by the dominant moral thought of a group. It is the nature of the mind to form standards of better or worse in all matters toward which its selective activity is directed; and this has its collective as well as its individual aspect, so that not only every man but every group has its preferences and aversions, its good and bad. The selective, organizing processes which all life, and notably the life of the mind, presents, involve this distinction; it is simply a formulation of the universal fact of preference. We cannot view things in which we are interested without liking some and disliking others; and somewhat in proportion to our interest is our tendency to express these likes and dislikes by good and bad or similar words. And since there is nothing that interests us so much as persons, judgments of right and wrong regarding them have always been felt and expressed with peculiar zest and emphasis. The righteous and the wicked, the virtuous and the vicious, the good and bad under a hundred names, have been sharply and earnestly discriminated in every age and country. Although this distinction between personal good and bad has always been a fact of human thought, a broader view of it is reached, in these days, through the idea of evolution. The method of nature being everywhere selective, growth is seen to take place not by making a like use of the elements already existing, but by the fostering of some to the comparative neglect or suppression of others. Or, if this statement gives too much the idea of a presiding intelligence outside the process itself, we may simply say that the functions of existing elements in contributing to further growth are extremely different, so much so that some of them usually appear to have no important function at all, or even to impede the growth, while others appear to be the very heart of the onward or crescent life. This idea is applicable to physiological processes, such as go on within our bodies, to the development of species, as illustrated with such convincing detail by Darwin, and to all the processes of thought and of society; so that the forces that are observed in the present, if viewed with reference to function or tendency, never appear to be on the same level of value, but are strung along at different levels, some below a mean, some above it. Thus we not only have the actual discrimination of good and bad in persons, but a philosophy which shows it as an incident of evolution, a reflection in thought of the general movement of nature.