There is an interesting theory current which is the direct outcome of the fallacy that the individual originates and society imitates, namely, the great man theory. While it seems absurd in this age to be combating the idea of special creation, yet it is something very like this that one comes up against sometimes in the discussion of this theory. The question is often asked, “Does the great man produce his environment or is he the product of his environment?” Although for my purpose I may seem to emphasize the other side of things, not for a moment do I wish to belittle the inestimable value of genius. But the fact of course is that great men make their environment and are made by their environment. There wells up in the individual a fountain of power, but this fountain has risen underground and is richly fed by all the streams of the common life.[30] I have spoken of fallacies in the individual invention theory and in the struggle theory. But I am using the word struggle as synonymous with strife, opposition, war; effort, striving, the ceaseless labor of adjustment will always be ours, but these two ideas represent opposite poles of existence. In the true theory of evolution struggle has indeed always been adaptation. For many years the “strongest” man has been to science the being with the greatest number of points of union, the “fittest” has been the one with the greatest power of coöperation. Darwin we all know believed that the cause of the advance of civilization was in the social habits of man. Our latest biologists tell us that “mutual aid” has from the first been a strong factor in evolution, that the animal species in which the practice of “mutual aid”[31] has attained the greatest development are invariably the most numerous and the most prosperous. We no longer think of the animal world as necessarily a world of strife; in many of its forms we find not strife but coördinated activities. But to too many people struggle suggests conquest and domination; it implies necessarily victors and vanquished. Some sociologists call the dissimilar elements of a group the struggle elements, and the similar elements the unifying elements. But this is a false distinction which will, as long as persisted in, continue the war between classes and between nations. The test of our progress is neither our likenesses nor our unlikenesses, but what we are going to do with our unlikenesses. Shall I fight whatever is different from me or find the higher synthesis? The progress of society is measured by its power to unite into a living, generating whole its self-yielding differences.