76 Social Environment 



mighty, and the rich are often passed by, while 

 the creative impulse manifests itself in the 

 heart of the poor and despised, who, like 

 garden flowers in the rude competition of the 

 roadside, have hitherto lain crushed and 

 dwarfed. The advancement of science and 

 art and the invention of machinery that have 

 been such marked features of miDdern life have 

 been possible because in some measure the 

 world has first worked out social ideals, achiev- 

 ing a sufficiently stable organization so that 

 the fineness of thought which expressed itself 

 as machinery could grow. Back of the mate- 

 rial changes, then, that modern invention is 

 bringing stand the social ideals that have 

 guided man's crude nature into the path of 

 achievement where he now stands. Not in the 

 stimulating of competition and war, but in the 

 further realization of social idealism, in the 

 making actual of ideals of brotherhood, and 

 in the aesthetic achievements of the social arts, 

 is the path of further progress. 



6. The Social Environment 



So it is that society, though existent at any 

 given moment in the physical bodies and 

 brains of men, is in its essence a body of 



