So ill-adapted is the natural, undomesticated man to the social order into which he is born, so out of harmony are all the native impulses of the ordinary healthy human with the demands which society imposes, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if his childhood is spent mainly in learning what he must not do, his youth will be devoted mainly to rebellion. As to the remainder of his life—his recreations will very likely turn out to be some sort of vacation and escape from this same social order to which he has finally learned to accommodate, but not wholly reconcile, himself. So far is this description true that our ancestors, living under a sterner discipline and in a moral order less flexible and accommodating than our own, were so impressed with the innate cantankerousness of ordinary mankind that they were driven to the assumption that there was something fundamentally diabolical in human nature, a view which found expression in the well-known doctrine of the “natural depravity of man.” One reason why human beings, in contrast with the lower animals, seem to be so ill-adapted to the world in which they are born is that the environment in which human beings live is so largely made up of the experience and memories and the acquired habits of the people who have preceded them. This experience and these memories—crystallized and embodied in tradition, in custom, and in folkways—constitute the social, as distinguished from the biological, environment; for man is not merely an individual with certain native and inherited biological traits, but he is at the same time a person with manners, sentiments, attitudes, and ambitions. It is the social environment to which the person, as distinguished from the individual, responds; and it is these responses of the person to his environment that eventually define his personality and give to the individual a character which can be described in moral terms. II. SOCIETY AND THE SOCIAL MILIEU This social environment in which mankind has acquired nearly if not all the traits that we regard as characteristically human is what we call society, society in the large; what Comte called “humanity.” When, however, we attempt to consider a little more in detail this society which ideally includes all mankind, we discover that it is composed of a number of smaller groups, little societies, each of which represents some single aspect or division of this all-enveloping social milieu in which we live and of which we are at the same time a part. The first and most intimate portion of man’s social environment, strange as the statement may at first seem, is his own body. After that, his clothing, tools, and property, which are in some sense a part of his personality, may, under certain circumstances, be regarded as a part of his environment. They become part of his social environment as soon as he becomes conscious of them; as soon as he becomes self-conscious.