The Mind Is Not A Hermit's Cell,

It Happens From Time To Time In Every Complex And Active Society, That Certain Persons Feel The Complexity And Insistence As A Tangle, And Seek Freedom In Retirement, As Thoreau Sought At Walden Pond. They Do Not, However, In This Manner Escape From The Social Institutions Of Their Time, Nor Do They Really Mean To Do So; What They Gain, If They Are Successful, Is A Saner Relation To Them.

Selfishness Of The Stable Or Rigid Sort Is As A Rule More Bitterly Resented Than The More Fickle Variety, Chiefly, No Doubt, Because, Having More Continuity And Purpose, It Is More Formidable.

I Is A Militant Social Tendency, Working To Hold And Enlarge Its Place In The General Current Of Tendencies. So Far As It Can It Waxes, As All Life Does. To Think Of It As Apart From Society Is A Palpable Absurdity Of Which No One Could Be Guilty Who Really Saw It As A Fact Of Life.

We Cannot Feel Strongly Toward The Totally Unlike Because It Is Unimaginable, Unrealizable; Nor Yet Toward The Wholly Like Because It Is Stale - Identity Must Always Be Dull Company. The Power Of Other Natures Over Us Lies In A Stimulating Difference Which Causes Excitement And Opens Communication, In Ideas Similar To Our Own But Not Identical, In States Of Mind Attainable But Not Actual.

The Imaginations Which People Have Of One Another Are The Solid Facts Of Society.