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The first, and here assumed to be the basic error in the human mind, the parent of almost all the others, is the Ego concept. This is the universal assumption, based on a pre-human status when it was true, that human beings are separate entities, like the lower animals.

As animals we are separate, and, when we first began to think, the animal life was so enormously preponderant, and the human life so weak, so vague, so intermittently realised, that it was quite natural we should carry over the sense of personal entity into the social entity. That we have a separate personal consciousness is not denied, but it is not humanity. The human consciousness is collective, as we shall see later.

Our mistake has been, not in retaining the Ego concept, which is as necessary in its place as the concept of a leg or a liver, but in failing to grasp the larger inclusive Social concept. All the complex organic phenomena of social life we have continually tried to construe in terms of the individual. The distinctive features of human life are invariably social. No one trait or power of our great race but what must be accounted for in its development and understood in its use as a social factor.