小群体的行为可以受一致同意的目标或其成员意志的引导，而同样作为一个“社会”的扩展秩序，它形成了一种协调的结构，却是因为其成员在追求不同的个人目标时，遵守着相同的行为规则。用“泛灵论”的态度看待这样一个“社会”，或是把它人格化，赋予它一种意志、一种意图或计划，却会把人引入歧途。

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom， we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years， we'll not only synthesize it， but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne， Mark Twain， Galileo， Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization， we will have so many gifts， just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

你们的聪明才智必定会派上用场，因为你们将在一片充满奇迹的土地上行进。我们人类，尽管跬步前行，却终将令自己大吃一惊。我们能够想方设法制造清洁能源，也能够一个原子一个原子地组装微型机械，使之穿过细胞壁，然后修复细胞。这个月，有一个异常而不可避免的事情发生了——人类终于合成了生命。在未来几年，我们不仅会合成生命，还会按说明书驱动它们。我相信你们甚至会看到我们理解人类的大脑，儒勒·凡尔纳，马克·吐温，伽利略，牛顿——所有那些充满好奇之心的人都希望能够活到现在。作为文明人，我们会拥有如此之多的天赋，就像是坐在我面前的你们，每一个生命个体都拥有许多独特的天赋。