The author presents an organic view of social life, arguing that institutions, customs, and ideas develop by adaptive, tentative growth through interaction between personal and impersonal forms. He analyzes organization, cycles, conflict and cooperation, and how competitive impulses, opportunity, success, fame, emulation, and discipline shape individual and collective behavior. Later sections consider degeneration and its causes, the social control of biological survival including poverty and class effects on reproduction, and the dynamics of group and international conflict. A sustained treatment of valuation examines pecuniary standards and their expansion, while the closing chapters treat intelligence, public opinion, standards for rational control, social science, progress, and art as facets of social life.