We have laid down certain propositions in the preceding chapters, namely, that men are part of a great Social Organism; that as parts of it they are continually supplied with its stimulus and nourishment; that as parts of it so nourished and so stimulated, they must discharge the swelling current of social energy in social action, which is Work; and that the business of a conscious and intelligent Society is so to produce and distribute social wealth as to maintain and increase this flood of energy, the discharge of which in our highly specialised industries is supreme delight. Against these propositions will be at once erected that common bulwark of ancient superstition, man’s selfishness. We generally believe, and as generally act on the belief, that the individual selfishness of man is such that nothing would induce him to act for the good of society, even though that good plainly included himself. This theory of our selfishness is not borne out either by the scientific facts of our sociological position or the everyday facts of life about us. The theory dates from a time when men were still mainly individual animals, when it was true. Being imbedded in that heavy, slow-going, ancient brain, and hammered in by each subsequent generation, it has remained with us until to-day. What we need to realise is that social development has brought with it other feelings, quite the opposite of selfishness, but equally natural, which are found in us all in varying degree; which we see at work about us, and yet which we refuse to admit into our “minds” as facts. On the contrary, we sturdily maintain in our minds the false ideas and act upon them, working much evil thereby. The organic connection of human beings develops among them those social instincts which are necessary to promote their common good, a class which we, seeing their pre-eminent value, have classed as “virtues,” calling the disproportionate action of more primitive individual instincts “vices.” Neither term is true. Egoism was a virtue in the individual status; altruism, or rather, omniism, is a virtue in the social status; both are natural. Our misinterpretation and false naming have prevented our easy assumption of the new qualities, that is all, the past concept being more potent to our minds than the present fact. Among the group of root errors still retarding our development, none is more mischievous than that wherein we assume pleasure to lie mainly in impression rather than expression. We believe that what we get makes us happy rather than what we do, and therefore consider our doing as a means of getting. Perhaps this idea antedates even the Want theory; but it is needless to grope too critically among the errors of the remote past, they are all old enough.