I believe that such attempts to _depersonalize_ humanity are consciously or unconsciously motivated by the wish to avoid the recognition of the possibility of superiority in an age when the values of civilization are largely committed to the tender custody of man acting as mass in the struggle for power. Whether distinctions of worth are recognized or not, deny that they may exist, deny that men may have greater or less worth in themselves, and human achievement becomes merely the attainment of bodily comfort, or social power, or satisfaction of egoistic desires. There are many who would hold that such is the case. But our existence is not measured by what we can get or what we can do, but by what with our getting and doing we may _become_. Mankind differs from other animals not merely in getting and doing, man is himself different, and is more than they. It is in this that his evolution is seen. The same is true of the individuals in the mass; some are more in themselves than others. So obvious a truth would never require statement except in a standardized, crowd-manipulating age in which there is much that encourages the inferior to abound. I am not suggesting that we devise some plan for picking out all the superior individuals for preferment and honor, or that we weed out the inferior ones by some process of elimination, or that the educated man should or could pose as a superior person. He who must make an effort to exhibit any excellence has attained little of it. If the world is spiritually right side up, people will be selected by the standards of value that prevail. When you buy a newspaper, vote a party ticket, go to a theatre, listen to a lecture, read a book, express a moral sentiment or show any preference whatever, you are doing more than just that thing. Our daily choices determine what we ourselves become, and they do something else also; the total of them has survival value for some particular type of man. We are thus daily deciding whose dilemmas shall determine the quality of living, and what kind of human life is to be lived on this planet, and who shall thrive and who shall perish. Human progress is not something we achieve directly by joining a movement and forcing our convictions upon others. It is something we help determine every day in the choices we make. The elements of it come like the variations which appear in the structure of plants and animals. And as Darwin said it is the function of the environment, in causing modifications of species, to select certain variants for survival and to eliminate others; so also in the progress of civilization do our daily preferences operate. Natural selection and primitive custom operate blindly and automatically and without reason. It is because education improves judgment and the appreciation of value that Thomas Davidson spoke of it as “conscious evolution.”