If this view does not recommend itself to common-sense I do not know that elaboration will be of much avail. It simply means the application at this point of the idea that society and individuals are inseparable phases of a common whole, so that wherever we find an individual fact we may look for a social fact to go with it. If there is a universal nature in persons there must be something universal in association to correspond to it. What else can human nature be than a trait of primary groups? Surely not an attribute of the separate individual—supposing there were any such thing—since its typical characteristics, such as affection, ambition, vanity, and resentment, are inconceivable apart from society. If it belongs, then, to man in association, what kind or degree of association is required to develop it? Evidently nothing elaborate, because elaborate phases of society are transient and diverse, while human nature is comparatively stable and universal. In short the family and neighborhood life is essential to its genesis and nothing more is. Here as everywhere in the study of society we must learn to see mankind in psychical wholes, rather than in artificial separation. We must see and feel the communal life of family and local groups as immediate facts, not as combinations of something else. And perhaps we shall do this best by recalling our own experience and extending it through sympathetic observation. What, in our life, is the family and the fellowship; what do we know of the we-feeling? Thought of this kind may help us to get a concrete perception of that primary group-nature of which everything social is the outgrowth. FOOTNOTES: [6] The History of Human Marriage. [7] A History of Matrimonial Institutions. [8] Newer Ideals of Peace, 177. [9] De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. i, chap. 5. [10] These matters are expounded at some length in the writer’s Human Nature and the Social Order. [11] The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Compare also Darwin’s views and examples given in chap. 7 of his Descent of Man. CHAPTER IV PRIMARY IDEALS NATURE OF PRIMARY IDEALISM—THE IDEAL OF A “WE” OR MORAL UNITY—IT DOES NOT EXCLUDE SELF-ASSERTION—IDEALS SPRINGING FROM HOSTILITY—LOYALTY, TRUTH, SERVICE—KINDNESS—LAWFULNESS—FREEDOM—THE DOCTRINE OF NATURAL RIGHT—BEARING OF PRIMARY IDEALISM UPON EDUCATION AND PHILANTHROPY. Life in the primary groups gives rise to social ideals which, as they spring from similar experiences, have much in common throughout the human race. And these naturally become the motive and test of social progress. Under all systems men strive, however blindly, to realize objects suggested by the familiar experience of primary association.