Which has the better chance of survival:--a society of “good” men or a society of intelligent men? So far as a man is “good” he merely obeys, he does not initiate. A society of “good” men is necessarily stagnant; for in such a society the virtue most in demand, as Emerson puts it, is conformity. If great men emerge through the icy crust of this conformity, they are called criminals and sinners; the lives of great men all remind us that we cannot make our lives sublime and yet be “good.” But intelligence as an ethical ideal is a progressive norm; for it implies the progressive coördination of one’s life in reference to one’s ultimate ideals. The god of the “good” man is the _status quo_; the intelligent man obeys rather the call of the _status ad quem_. Observe how the problem of man _versus_ the group is clarified by thus relating the individual to a larger whole determined not by geographical frontiers, but by purposes born of his own needs and moulded by his own intelligence. For as the individual’s intelligence grows, his purposes are brought more and more within the limits of personal capacity and social possibility: he is ever less inclined to make unreasonable demands upon himself, or men in general, or the group in which he lives. His ever broadening vision makes apparent the inherent self-destructiveness of anti-social aims; and though he chooses his ends without reference to any external moral code, those ends are increasingly social. Enlightenment saves his social dispositions from grovelling conformity, and his “self-regarding sentiments” from suicidal narrowness. And now the conflict between himself and his group continues for the most part only in so far as the group makes unreasonable demands upon him. But this, too, diminishes as the individuals constituting or dominating the group become themselves more intelligent, more keenly cognizant of the limits within which the demands of the group upon its members must be restricted if individual allegiance is to be retained. Since the reduction of the conflict between the individual and the community without detriment to the interests of either is the central problem of political ethics, it is obvious that the practical task of ethics is not to formulate a specific moral code, but to bring about a spread of intelligence. And since the reduction of this conflict brings with it a better coördination of the members of the group, through their greater ability to perceive the advantages of communal action in an intelligently administered group, the problem of social coherence and permanence itself falls into the same larger problem of intellectual development.