2. The system of social conduct, or common good. Moral conduct springs from the faith that all right action is social and its purpose is to justify this faith by working out the social values involved. The term 'moral community' can mean only a unity of action, made what it is by the co-operating activities of diverse individuals. There is unity in the work of a factory, not in spite of, but _because of_ the division of labor. Each workman forms the unity not by doing the same that everybody else does, or by trying to do the whole, but by doing his specific part. The unity is the one activity which their varied activities make. And so it is with the moral activity of society and the activities of individuals. The more individualized the functions, the more perfect the unity. (See section LII.) The exercise of function by an agent serves, then, both to define and to unite him. It makes him a _distinct_ social member at the same time that it makes him a _member_. Possession of peculiar capacities, and special surroundings mark one person off from another and make him an individual; and the due adjustment of capacities to surroundings (in the exercise of function) effects, therefore, the realization of individuality--the realization of what we specifically are as distinct from others. At the same time, this distinction is not isolation; the exercise of function is the performing of a special _service_ without which the social whole is defective. Individuality means not separation, but defined position in a whole; special aptitude in constituting the whole. We are now in a position to take up the consideration of the two other fundamental ethical conceptions--obligation and freedom. These ideas answer respectively to the two sides of the exercise of function. On the one hand, the performing of a function realizes the social whole. Man is thus 'bound' by the relations necessary to constitute this whole. He is subject to the conditions which the existence and growth of the social unity impose. He is, in a word, under _obligation_; the performance of his function is duty owed to the community of which he is a member. But on the other hand, activity in the way of function realizes the individual; it is what makes him an individual, or distinct person. In the performance of his own function the agent satisfies his own interests and gains power. In it is found his _freedom_. Obligation thus corresponds to the _social_ satisfaction, freedom to the _self_-satisfaction, involved in the exercise of function; and they can no more be separated from each other than the correlative satisfaction can be. One has to realize himself as a member of a community. In this fact are found both freedom and duty. CHAPTER II.--THE IDEA OF OBLIGATION. XLII. Theories Regarding Moral Authority.