ABSTRACT
The primal social bonds, parental and sexual, are intermittent; life may go on when they have snapped. Even hunger and thirst seem assaults of a tyrant as soon as spirit, kindled within the organism, turns it into a transcendental centre from which all surrounding forces are measured and judged. Many of these foreign impacts or attractions are greedily welcomed; yet a living creature is happiest in the interludes when, enriched by those trials, it breathes again in peace.. Unfortunately the highest organisms, being the most complicated, bring the most trials upon themselves. So it happens in society where each individual is congenitally a vital centre, yet is aware of neighbours that cross its path and cut off its light. The material obstacles to freedom become less, or are more easily surmounted in society than they would be in solitude; but mean-time society has itself imposed a net of duties and prohibitions and petty quarrels that the single explorer or hermit would have 68escaped. Industry has supplied from the beginning, as it does to-day, new instruments and fresh occasions for artificial demands and unnecessary subjections. Men and women are braver when so armed and banded together; their servitude to fate has receded into the background, to reassert itself only in the great crises of life; but their joint labours and cohabitation have surrounded them with exactions, compulsions, critics, and spies, and made them the slaves of custom.
