neral be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences
between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant
circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused.
If positive well-wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement,
those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman
beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the lives of other
men, and there is no saying... what the effects might be: they
might conceivably transform the world.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 283.]

Dislikes, disagreements, native antipathies are not to be
abolished, human differences being ineradicable and human
interests, even in an ideal society, being in conflict. But a
keener appreciation of other viewpoints, which is possible
through education, a less violent concern with one's own
personal interests to the exclusion of all others, may greatly reduce
the amount of hate current in the world, and free men's
energies in passions more positive in their fruits.

CHAPTER VII

THE DEMAND FOR PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALITY

PRIVACY AND SOLITUDE. Although one of man's most powerful
tendencies, as has already been pointed out, is his desire to
be with his fellows, this desire is not unqualified. Just as men
can be satiated with too much eating, and irritated by too
much inactivity, so men become "fed up" with companionship.
The demand for solitude and privacy is thus fundamentally
a physiological demand, like the demand for rest.
"The world is too much with us," especially the human world.
Companionship, even of the most desirable kind, exhausts
nervous energy, and may become positively fatiguing and
painful. To crave solitude is thus not a sign of man's
unsociability, but a sign merely that sociability, like any other human
tendency, becomes annoying, if too long or too strenuously
indulged. Much of the neurasthenia of city life has been
attributed to the continual contact with other people, and the
total inability of most city dwellers to secure privacy for any
considerable length of time. In some people a lifelong habit
of close contact with large numbers of people makes them
abnormally gregarious, so that solitude, the normal method of
recuperation from companionship, becomes unbearable. Few
city dwellers have not felt after a period of isolation in some
remote country place the need for the social stimulus of the
city. But a normal human l