i. e. the
prolonged plastic and unfolding state of the brain. This makes
possible a new kind of development unknown to the animal, namely,
education. Education is preeminently a social activity. I say
education instead of environment. In natural selection there is a
physical environment which presses upon individuals, and only those
survive who are fitted to sustain this pressure. In social selection
society enters between the individual and the physical environment,
and, while slowly subordinating the latter, transforms its pressure
upon the individual, and he alone survives who is fitted to bear the
social pressure. This pressure reaches the individual through the
educational media of language and social institutions, especially the
family, the state, and property. Institutions rest upon ideas and
beliefs, and these are epitomized in language. Language in turn, by
giving names to things and relations, and by thus transmitting to each
individual the accumulated race experience, gradually brings him to
the consciousness of himself. This is education.

But self-consciousness is at first only vague, capricious, and
unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and
conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and
of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call
personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection.
When once liberated it becomes a new selective principle to which all
others are subordinated. What, then, are the social conditions which
promote or retard the survival of personality?

It is a debated question where we shall place the dividing line
between pre-social and social man. In view of what precedes we should
look for that line at the point where self-consciousness begins to
throw about itself a social covering. This covering is private
property. The former view that primitive property was common property
is now nearly abandoned. The supposed village communities of free
proprietors were really villages of slaves and serfs. The semblance of
common property in primitive times belongs to the pre-social or
gregarious stage, and differs but little from the common use of a
given area by a colony of beavers.

Private property involves two facts: 1. Perception of enduring value
in external objects; 2. Exclusive control and enjoyment of those
objects. Its psychological basis is therefore self-consciousness,
which is the knowledge not of an ab