That superstitious respect for the aged which distinguishes China is giving way to a respect for wisdom, for knowledge, for judgment, and ability wherever manifested; and if we swing too far toward honour for the young, it is a healthy extreme to counterbalance the huge and heavy back action of the past. The mind of man is now being opened to perceptions of facts as he finds them, rather than the retention of old stories, and is exercised more in free, responsible action during its early years. We are beginning to learn now something of the true history of our race—what we rose from, and how we have risen; what forces urged us most, what conditions helped us most. We are seeing with increasing clearness the desirable lines of action, and how best to follow them. Alert, intelligent, and active among the great currents of social evolution, we can do much to promote their effects. Here we can let them alone, there we can oppose our allied wills against some eddy of reversionary tendency, or check the growth of some disadvantageous excess; we can use our consciousness to choose between the varying forces, and such individual power as we possess to steer among them. To see our line of progress, to see the tremendous currents that push us upward and take advantage of them; to see also the pitfalls and stumbling-blocks, the reaction and inertia to which mere genetic progress is exposed; and then to use our telic energy to assist nature and go farther—that will make man a far more useful factor in social evolution. III: CONCEPT AND CONDUCT _Summary_ _Human evolution. New faculties and instincts. Egoistic concept useful to individual animal. Disadvantage of outgrown ideals. Persistence of social rudiments explained. Need of social scrap-heap. Social relations psychic. Despot only a concept. Concepts internal environment. Shipwreck and character. Maternal and sex instinct and concepts. Negro hero, power of concept on conduct. Man’s efforts to check his growth. Prejudice a physical brain condition. Healthy brain must be used. Virtue of “believing.” Natural organic tendency to consistency,—how perverted. Belief in luck. Charades. Basic concepts wrong. Superior past traditions. Ancestor worship. Fanaticism. Forced inconsistency. Concepts antedate facts. French Revolution. Slavery. Undertow of old brain habits. Increase of social convenience. Brain as developed by natural selection, by social selection. Apparent injustice. Individual hunter. On his own head. Mistakes most possible in highest grades. Peasant grade always preserved. Rub out and do over. Society the best culture for fools. Present concepts in economics, primitive, false, injurious. Ego concept. If bees were “idiots.”_ III CONCEPT AND CONDUCT