s of that
primordial and fundamental function, which Aristotle designated by the
name of _ctesi_--the conquest of food.

But all individuals have to live in society because a second fundamental
requirement of life imposes itself upon the individual, _viz._, the
reproduction of beings like himself for the preservation of the species.
It is this life of relationship and reproduction (sexual and social)
which gives birth to the moral or social sense, which enables the
individual not only _to be, but to co-exist with his fellows_.

It may be said that these two fundamental instincts of life--bread and
love--by their functioning maintain a social equilibrium in the life of
animals, and especially in Man.

It is love which causes, in the great majority of men, the principal
physiological and psychical expenditure of the forces accumulated in
larger or smaller quantities by the consumption of daily bread, and
which the daily labor has not absorbed or which parasitic inaction has
left intact.

Even more--love is the only pleasure which truly has a universal and
equalitarian character. The people have named it "the paradise of the
poor;" and religions have always bidden them to enjoy it without
limits--"be fruitful and multiply"--because the erotic exhaustion which
results from it, especially in males, diminishes or hides beneath the
pall of forgetfulness the tortures of hunger and servile labor, and
permanently enervates the energy of the individual; and to this extent
it performs a function useful to the ruling class.

But indissolubly linked to this effect of the sexual instinct there is
an other, the increase of the population. Hence it happens that the
desire to eternize a given social order is thwarted and defeated by the
pressure of this population which in our epoch assumes the
characteristic form of the _proletariat_,--and the social evolution
continues its inexorable and inevitable forward march.

It follows from our discussion that while at the end of the eighteenth
century it was thought that Society was made for the individual--and
from that the deduction could be made that millions of individuals could
and ought to toil and suffer for the exclusive advantage of a few
individuals--at the end of our century the inductive sciences have
demonstrated, just the opposite, that it is the individual who lives for
the species and that the latter is the only eternal reality of life.

There we have the starting-point o