ions are reached, they are simple and instructive
indeed. Being here, we cannot escape our personal obligations as living
things or our equally clear duties as members of our community. These
facts being as they are, what must we do? Self-interest is rightly to be
served, otherwise we would be incapable of discharging our secondary
tasks, namely, those of service to others in ways that are determined by
hereditary endowment and conditional circumstances. The difficulty is to
find the right compromise between the two sets of obligations; but the
right balance must be found, or else the health of the community is
impaired. Should any class demand more than its just dues, others must
suffer through the diversion of what they require, and the well-being of
the selfish class is jeopardized to some degree, so closely interwoven are
the interests of all. Freedom of opportunity within the limits of ability
and efficiency is the right of every one, but freedom of conduct must
never result in trespass upon the equal rights of others to make the most
of their abilities and opportunities.

To summarize, then, social evolution is a continuous process accomplished
through differentiation and division of labor among the components of
biological associations. Although the total form remains the same
everywhere, progress has been made in content through the further
subordination of selfish to altruistic conduct; only by this means does an
individual gain liberty to pursue the social task for which he is best
fitted by nature.

VIII

EVOLUTION AND THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE

We have now reached the last division of the large subject that has
occupied our thoughts for so long. The present title has been chosen
because the questions now before us relate to the highest human ideas
belonging to the departments of ethics, religion, theology, science, and
philosophy. These matters may seem at first sight to be far removed from
the territory of the naturalist as such, and quite exempt from the control
of laws which determine the nature and history of the human individual in
physical, mental, and social respects. Yet one reason alone would impel us
onward: we cannot close the present examination into the basic facts of
evolution and into the scope of the doctrine without asking to what extent
a belief in its truth may affect our earlier formed conceptions of nature
and supernature. Heretofore these possible effects upon what may be dearly