SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 327 
why of that process at least in its higher phases. As to the first: 
social evolution is the process of the formation and progressive 
adaptation of social unities to their ever changing physical and 
spiritual environment. As to the second, the “how,” this 
process may be described in terms of the “ dialectic of growth ” 
or a “ give-and-take ” between the psychical unities and their 
physical and spiritual environment. The evolution of every social 
group is like an ascending spiral in the form of an ellipse with 
two foci, the socius and the various associational groups that are 
gradually formed by the process of differentiation and integration. 
In this process the conflict of interests and mal-adaptations on 
lower planes of life result in co-operation, in higher adaptations, 
and in the organization of interests both individual and social. 
But the process thus described in thought terms does not ade- 
quately represent the real life of values given in experience which 
is too rich and too large to be subjected to such an analysis. Life 
must be experienced and appreciated, not merely analyzed and 
described. 
Viewed historically, this process of experience and appreciation 
shows development in three directions: (1) the self-conscious 
personality has attained greater power over self, nature, and 
fellow-man, and in its search for the true, the beautiful and the 
good, has come to believe in a Final Cause which it tends to per- 
sonify in exaggerated terms of its own powers and values, and to 
worship as God; (2) the self-conscious personality has enlarged 
in interest, in sympathy, in purpose, in self-feeling, till it in- 
cludes in certain experiences all humanity. Now this self- 
conscious personality in these experiences of power, of intuition, 
of evaluation, of up-reach and out-reach, is the highest form of 
reality that can be grasped by consciousness, but there is reason 
for belief that the God of idealization, and the socius of religious 
feeling, is a still higher form of reality and personality, though 
impossible of expression in terms of discursive thought; (3) 
experience and appreciation, though in the last analysis personal, 
have a social basis and a social outlook. Out of this fact have 
developed social organizations with common interests and a 
common goal. Such interest groups, as we have seen, may 
