in a large family,
and in intimate association with companions of his own age, the individual
child has the fullest and most rapid development of all his powers. There
is, indeed, in the lives of many children, a period when the presence of
strangers is unwelcome; but this state of feeling--seldom of long
duration--can in most instances be traced to some sudden fright, harsh
voice, or imagined neglect or unkindness.

The natural course of human life proves that man is by the necessity of
his nature a social being. The young of other animals are at a very early
period emancipated and forsaken by their parents, while the human child
has many years of dependence, and is hardly prepared to dispense with the
shelter and kind offices of his native home, when he is moved to create a
new home of his own.

There is no pursuit in life in which a community of interest fails to give
added zest and energy. There is no possible ground of association on which
societies are not formed, and the trivial, fictitious, or imaginary
pretences on which men thus combine, meet, and act in concert, are
manifest proofs of a social proclivity so strong as to create reasons for
its indulgence where such reasons do not already exist. Even in science
and in the most abstruse forms of erudition, men of learning seek mutual
countenance and encouragement, and readily suspend their solitary research
and study for the opportunity of intercommunication on the subjects and
objects of their pursuit. The cases in which society is voluntarily
shunned or forsaken are as rare as the cases of congenital disease or
deformity; and for every such instance there may generally be assigned
some grave, if not sufficient, cause. Religious asceticism has, indeed,
induced many persons, especially in the early Christian ages, to lead a
solitary life; but the coenobites have always vastly outnumbered the
hermits; _monasteries_ (solitary abodes) have become _convents_
(assemblages); and those who are shut out from the rest of the world find
comfort in social devotion, in the common refectory, and in those seasons
of recreation when the law of silence is suspended. For prisoners solitary
confinement has been found deleterious both to body and mind, and this
system, instituted with philanthropic purpose, and commended on grounds
that seemed intimately connected with the reformation of the guilty, is
now generally repudiated as doing violence to human nature. Even for the
insan