(_a_) It may be urged against this view that the antithesis which it implies between the individual and the group is fallacious. For the group is composed of individuals and it cannot have a conscious end except in the minds of the individuals who compose it. There is a degree of truth in speaking of the “personality” of a group so long as the analogy is not pressed too far. A group may have a common thought and may unite in a collective act; but to say that a group has a definite “personality” of its own is to carry the process of abstraction too far. A group attains to consciousness only in the several minds of its members. Moreover social ends must take shape in individual lives. That the individual should serve a social end is true; it is equally true that the social aim must be achieved in the character and experience of individuals. For if they are not realised in persons, where shall they be realised? If our ultimate social aims do not become effective in the single life, they remain mere abstractions, existing only in a speculative thought and never reaching the point of actuality. But it serves us as little to insist on the converse of this view and to assert that the end of society is the individual. The truth would rather appear to be that the individual is to reach his own end in and through a society which it is his first business to create. Personal self-realisation and social integration will proceed _pari passu_. The individual and the group will find themselves in each other; the great soul and the great society will arrive together. But from the nature of the case, we must seek the clue to the character of right social aims through a study of personality, and of what is involved in its self-realisation. (_b_) A further objection to this view is that it subordinates personality to aims that are limited and sectional. In practice it may make good Germans, but almost certainly it cannot make good men. While it is better for a man to serve the narrowest social group than to serve his self-regard, yet the exclusiveness of the social group as it is identified with the state or the nation is hostile to that increasing social integration which is implied in a self-consistent sociology. The current conceptions of the state and the nation must undergo some revision if they are to be made congruous with a fruitful social polity. The nation represents a stage in the social education of the race, in that discipline whereby the caveman grows into a citizenship of the world; and in no sense can the nation be ethically regarded as constituting an adequate end for the individual, except as the nation in its turn is consciously seeking its own end in the service of the whole.