THE unification of thought, however, is only a part of the social process. We must consider, besides, the unification of feeling, affection, emotion, desire, aspiration—all that we are. The relation of the feelings to the development of the group has yet to be sufficiently studied. The analysis of the group process is beginning to show us the origin and nature of the true sympathy. The group process is a rational process. We can no longer therefore think of sympathy as “contagion of feeling” based on man’s “inherited gregarious instinct.” But equally sympathy cannot belong to the next stage in our development—the particularistic. Particularistic psychology, which gave us ego and alter, gave us sympathy going across from one isolated being to another. Now we begin with the group. We see in the self-unifying of the group process, and all the myriad unfoldings involved, the central and all-germinating activity of life. The group creates. In the group, we have seen, is formed the collective idea, “similarity” is there achieved, sympathy too is born within the group—it springs forever from interrelation. The emotions I feel when apart belong to the phantom ego; only from the group comes the genuine feeling _with_—the true sympathy, the vital sympathy, the just and balanced sympathy. From this new understanding of sympathy as essentially involved in the group process, as part of the generating activity of the group, we learn two lessons: that sympathy cannot antedate the group process, and that it must not be confused with altruism. It had been thought until recently by many writers that sympathy came before the social process. Evidences were collected among animals of the “desire to help” other members of the same species, and the conclusion drawn that sympathy exists and that the result is “mutual aid.” But sympathy cannot antedate the activity. We do not however now say that there is an “instinct” to help and then that sympathy is the result of the helping; the feeling and the activity are involved one in the other. It is asked, Was Bentham right in making the desire for individual happiness the driving force of society, or was Comte right in saying that love for our fellow creatures is as “natural” a feeling as self-interest? Many such questions, which have long perplexed us, will be answered by a progressive social psychology. The reason we have found it difficult to answer such questions is because we have thought of egoistic or altruistic feelings as preëxisting; we have studied action to see what precedent characteristics it indicated. But when we begin to see that men possess no characteristics apart from the unifying process, then it is the process we shall study.