Progress in personal development consists of increasing extent and accuracy of knowledge, refinement and elevation of emotions, and nobility and reliability of volitions.  Progress in personal development requires the individual to pass from objective heterocratic to subjective autocratic or self-regulative ethical life.  He must pass from the traditional to the enlightened, from the communal to the individualistic stage in ethics and religion.  He must feel with increasing force the binding nature of the supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, accepting the highest dictates of the enlightened moral consciousness as the laws of the universe.  But this means that the individual must secure increasing insight into the immutable and eternal laws of spiritual being and must identify his personal interests, his very self with those laws, with the Heart of the.  Universe, with God himself.  Only so will he become completely autonomous, self-regulative.  Only thus will the individual become and remain an altruistic communo-individual, fitted to meet and survive the relaxation of the historic communal and supra-communal sanctions for communal and individual life, a relaxation induced by growing political liberty and growing intellectual rejection of primitive or defective religious beliefs.

Progress in personality is thus at bottom an ethico-religious process.  The wide attainment of developed personality permits the formation of enlarging highly organized psychic groups, accompanied by increasing specialization of its individual members.  This communal expansion, ramifying organization and individual specialization, secures increasing extensive and intensive intellectual understanding of the universe, and this in turn active mastery of nature, with all the consequences of growing ease and richness of life.

Ethico-religious, autonomous personality is thus the tap-root of highly developed and permanently progressive civilizations.  Personality is, therefore, the criterion of progress.  Mere ease of physical life, freedom from anxiety, light-hearted, care-free happiness, mastery of nature, material civilization, highly developed art, literature, and music, or even refined culture, are partial and inadequate, if not positively false, criteria.

Personality, as a nature, is an inherent psychic heritage shared by all human beings.  It is transmitted only from parents to offspring, and its transmission depends only on that relation.  Personality, as a varying psychic characteristic, is a matter of social inheritance, and is profoundly dependent, therefore, on the nature of the social order and the social evolution.

Religion, as incorporated in life, is the most important single factor determining the personality and character of its adherents, either hindering or promoting their progress.

Japanese social and psychic evolution have in no respects violated the universal laws of evolution.  Japanese personal and other psychic characteristics are the product not of essential, but of social inheritance and social evolution.  Japan has recently entered into a new social inheritance from which she is joyfully accepting new conceptions and principles of communal and individual life.  These she is working into her social organism.