it must be noted that the personal affections are
stronger than the social affections, and that personal affections give
aim and direction to our social actions. This is necessary, for all
ideas of public good must be inferred from the ideas of private
advantage, and if it were possible to repress our personal affections,
our social affections, deprived of necessary inspiration and direction,
would become vague and ineffective. In the precept that bids us love our
neighbours as ourselves the personal instinct is suggested as the
pattern for the social. The only thing to be regretted is that the
personal affections are apt to override, instead of stimulating, the
social affections.

Increase of intelligence must mean greater capacity for social
affection, because of the discipline it imposes on the personal
affections; and for the same reason increase of the social instinct is
favourable to intelligence. To strengthen this reciprocal action of the
intellect and the social affections is the first task of universal
morals. And the double opposition between man's moral and material need
of intellectual toil and his dislike of it, and again between man's
moral and material need of the social affections, and the subjection of
these to his personal instincts, discloses the scientific germ of the
struggle which we shall have to review, between the conservative and the
reforming spirit; the first of which is animated by purely personal
instincts, and the other by the spontaneous combination of intellectual
activity with the various social instincts.

Society, however, cannot be regarded as composed of individuals. The
true social unit is the _family_; it is essentially on the plan of the
family that society is constructed. In a family the social and the
personal instincts are blended and reconciled; in a family, too, the
principle of subordination and mutual co-operation is exemplified. The
domestic is the basis of all social life. The modern tendency,
therefore, to attack the institution of the family is an alarming
symptom of social disorganisation.

The sociological basis of the family depends on subordination of sexes
and of ages.

Marriage at once satisfies, disciplines, and harmonises the strongest
and most disorderly instinct of our animal nature; and though it may be
attacked by the revolutionary spirit because of its theological
implications, yet the institution is based on true principles, and must
survive. No do