bad for life, attempt to reform the rest.
They, too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the past.

So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. The
instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some insight into
the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, and the way he
comes to live it.

Passing on to take up the second of the informal topics suggested, we
have to find the best description that we can of the social man--the
one who is fitted for the social life. This question concerns the
process by which any one of us comes into the wealth of relationships
which the social life represents. For to say that a man does this is
in itself to say that he is the man society is looking for. Indeed,
this is the only way to describe the man--to actually find him.
Society is essentially a growing, shifting thing. It changes from age
to age, from country to country. The Greeks had their social
conditions, and the Romans theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn
differently, somewhat, here and there; and in a low stage of
civilization a man may pass for normal who, in our time, would be
described as weak in mind. This makes it necessary that the standards
of judgment of a given society should be determined by an actual
examination of the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of
variation which society in general will tolerate must be this or that.

We may say, then, that the man who is fit for social life _must be
born to learn_. The need of learning is his essential need. It comes
upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social function
which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of verbal
accomplishment--reading and writing. This brings to the front the
great method of all his learning--imitation. In order to be social he
must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must realize for himself
by action the forms, conventions, requirements, co-operations of his
social group. All is learning; and learning not by himself and at
random, but under the leading of the social conditions which surround
him. Plasticity is his safety and the means of his progress. So he
grows into the social organization, takes his place as a Socius in the
work of the world, and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis
of which his own contributions--if he be destined to make
contributions--to the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This
great fact that he is open to the play of th