themselves to new circumstances
and of organizing according to a new type suited to the coming age that
now opens before us.

Only a part of this last volume was written, that which relates to the
Church and to public instruction. Death intervened and suddenly arrested
the pen. M. Taine, at this moment, was about completing his analysis of
subordinate societies in France.--For those who have followed him thus
far it is already clear that the great defect of the French community
is the fragmentation of the individuals, who isolated, dwindling, and
prostrate at the feet of the all-powerful State, who, due to remote
historical causes, and yet more so by modern legislation, have been made
incapable of "spontaneously grouping around a common interest."
Very probably--and of this we may judge by two sketches of a plan,
undoubtedly provisional, but the ideas of which were long settled in his
mind--M. Taine would have first described this legislation and defined
its principles and general characteristics. He meant to show it more
and more systematic, deliberately hostile to collective enterprise,
considering secondary bodies not as "distinct, special organs,"
endowed with a life of their own, "maintained and stimulated by private
initiation," but as agents of the State "which fashions them after
a common pattern, imposes on them their form and prescribes their
work."--This done, this defect pointed out, the author was to enumerate
the consequences flowing from it, the social body entirely changed, "not
only in its proportions but in its innermost texture," every tendency
weakened by which individuals form groups that are to last longer than
themselves, each man reduced to his own self, the egoistic instinct
enhanced while the social instinct wastes away for want of nourishment,
his daily imagination solely concerned with life-long aims,
incapacitated for politics as he is "lacking spheres of action in which
he may train himself according to his experiences and faculties", his
mind weakening in idleness and boredom or in a thirst for pleasure and
personal success,--in short, an organic impoverishment of all faculties
of cohesion, leading to the destruction of the natural centers of
grouping and, consequently, to political instability.[5102]

One association of special import remains, the most spontaneous, the
deepest rooted, so old that all others derive from it, so essential
that in any attack upon it we see even the substanc