CHAPTER XX

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL

=Object of Part and Chapter.=--The history of morals manifests a twofold movement. It reveals, on one side, constantly increasing stress on _individual_ intelligence and affection. The transformation of customary into reflective morals is the change from "Do those things which our kin, class, or city do" to "Be a person with certain habits of desire and deliberation." The moral history of the race also reveals constantly growing emphasis upon the _social_ nature of the objects and ends to which personal preferences are to be devoted. While the agent has been learning that it is his personal attitude which counts in his deeds, he has also learnt that there is no attitude which is exclusively private in scope, none which does not need to be socially valued or judged. Theoretic analysis enforces the same lesson as history. It tells us that moral quality _resides in_ the habitual dispositions of an agent; and that it _consists of_ the tendency of these dispositions to secure (or hinder) values which are sociably shared or sharable.

In Part One we sketched the historical course of this development; in