Our social consciousness is of slow and partial development, as is easily explicable. The highly developed personal consciousness which the most primitive savage brought with him into social relation, and which occupies the same field of sensation as the wider social consciousness, has operated to prevent easy recognition of the latter. The social pleasures and the social pains we took to be personal and sought or avoided them as such. Even the most sublimated and morbidly acute social consciousness, as shown in a passionate philanthropy, is still diagnosed by some as a form of self-gratification, so persistent is the dominance of the egoistic concept. Another reason is that as our external activities, requiring conscious cerebration, are more perceptible than our internal ones, so we were far more easily impressed by the external activities of Society than by its deep-seated organic processes; these external ones were more telic, partook more of the nature of personal actions, and were readily thought to be such. A third and very strong force operating against our recognition of social consciousness is that it so generally hurts. So long as our organic social processes went on normally they were unconscious. Individual man, well fed, well guarded, reproducing the race in peace and comfort, sported in the sea of social well-being and failed to observe that there was such a thing. But let any industry become inflamed, or paralysed, or arrested, and the pain is felt far and wide. No one likes to be hurt. The more socially we felt our pain the more it hurt, of course, being bigger. To be hungry one’s self is one thing—to _feel a famine_ is another. People with the most social consciousness suffered most, so long as social processes were not healthy; and, therefore, our effort has been to resist the increase of social consciousness. We say “mind your own business”—“don’t concern yourself about other people,” “let the other man walk.” We try _not_ to feel the famine in India, the flood in China, the ignorance in Russia, the cruelty in Armenia, the crimes and casualties, the deformities and diseases of our own great cities. But in spite of our natural reluctance to a widening of the sensorium that thrills most to pain, it is widening in spite of us. More and more every year we are feeling common evils, and seeking to remove them. It is not that “I” am seeking to relieve “my” distress and improve “my” conditions, but that “we,” in institute and association, club, congress, and convention, are rousing more and more to a consciousness of “our” distress, and seeking methods by which “we” may improve “our” conditions. This marks the growth of social consciousness. A pleasant thought here is that as fast as social conditions improve so fast does social consciousness become an avenue of pleasure instead of pain, and so we shall encourage instead of oppose it; thus the improvement will widen more and more rapidly.