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Human evolution involves the development of a number of individual animals into specialised functionaries of organic social life. This requires the gradual assumption of new faculties, new desires, new instincts, and new activities; and the gradual disuse and discarding of older ones. The egoistic mental make-up of a solitary animal, of a low savage, of any reversionary self-supporting human hermit, is advantageous to him as a separate creature; but disadvantageous to a society to which he might become attached, and, if he was so attached, to himself.

A given society, in any age, possesses certain dominant ideas and feelings proper to it; and the individuals manifesting most of those ideas and feelings are most beneficial to that society and so to themselves. But if members of a given society persist in maintaining and acting upon social ideals of a previous age, they are injurious to their society and so to themselves. Social evolution, in any given place and time, is visibly checked by the number of persons who do not keep up with it; but insist on feeling and thinking after long-past standards, and trying to act on that basis.