The goal set by “modern ideas” would seem to be not the attainment of a higher level of values, not greater personal worth among men, but the more complete supremacy of man as mass. Recognition of personal worth is discouraged, for it necessitates the admission that some persons are by nature, or as a result of effort, superior to others. Such an admission is contrary to the idealization of the mass, which is the worship of the power of numbers. Personal distinction is frowned upon and discounted. Differences of superiority or inferiority are, if grudgingly admitted, said to be the result not of difference in native endowment or of individual achievement, but mere products of environment. Hence human excellence is an accident. There is a wide-spread tendency to minimize and deny the significance of personality. An advanced school of psychology holds that belief in the existence of personality is a superstition. Personality is simply the way the nervous organization works and is similar to the running of a gas engine. Any hereditary differences of capacity or of teachableness are negligible. All individual traits are reducible to conditioned reflexes which are what they are because of the coincidence of certain stimuli. I am what I am because somebody co-operating with the environment conditioned me in this way. I have absolutely nothing to do with the matter. Consciousness, interest, attention, will, have no place in this psychology. The same may be said of all attempts to explain the phenomena of life in mechanistic terms. Historic movements are explained as if individuals had nothing to do with them. Social change is said to be the product of impersonal economic forces, and progress the result of mass action. Thus the Great Man at best only represents the mass tendencies of his times. Even for discoveries in science and creative achievement in the arts, the mass is given credit although it may have resisted these things when they were new.