the response to an abnormal number of individual claims with the
response to the social claim. An exaggerated personal morality is often
mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a
social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt to
attain a social morality without a basis of democratic experience
results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and ends
in an exaggerated individual morality but not in social morality at all.
We see this from time to time in the care-worn and overworked
philanthropist, who has taxed his individual will beyond the normal
limits and has lost his clew to the situation among a bewildering number
of cases. A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end
must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant
correction of his process. He must not only test and guide his
achievement by human experience, but he must succeed or fail in
proportion as he has incorporated that experience with his own.
Otherwise his own achievements become his stumbling-block, and he comes
to believe in his own goodness as something outside of himself. He makes
an exception of himself, and thinks that he is different from the rank
and file of his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary to know of the
lives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in their
integrity, which is after all but the first beginnings of social
morality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity for
ourselves or any such hope for society.




CHAPTER VI

EDUCATIONAL METHODS