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the effort of my personal salvation are the social and the individual aspect of essentially the same desire.[15] But it must not be thought that this is a matter of mere creature comfort, of distributing staple {168} benefits for which men already have the appetite. For every step in the organization of life is attended with the growth of new interests, and especially of interests fostered or directly evoked by principles that have proved their moral virtue. Thus the forms of prudence and justice are supported by the immediate love of these things. And a growing rationality involves an increasing subtlety and delicacy in desires, the enrichment of life through the multiplication of such sources of satisfaction as are consistent with order and liberality. The true democracy is considerate not only of present interests, but also of the potentiality and promise of life. Only when the imagination pictures life in these terms is it possible to avoid a sense of ignominy and irresponsibility. And, contrary to a common misconception, there is no other attitude that can reconcile one to the unavoidable participation in the common life of all men. Only when thus united with one's fellows in a spirited and ennobling enterprise can one endure their fellowship. Comrades in arms are not fastidious. If one confines one's self, on the other hand, to a cultivation of one's rarity, or to a company of choice spirits, not only do these values themselves grow stale and vanish away, but the remainder of mankind becomes a crowd, and civilization a tumult. The collective life of {169} mankind ceases to be jarring and repugnant only at the moment when one enters into it and becomes infused with its morale. There will be some in whom this prospect arouses no eagerness. The wise men of any day are, of course, agreed among themselves that the times are bad--that they are likely to be still worse after they, the remnant, have departed. But this is an opinion which most men acquire when they attain to maturity, and happily the world has long since seen that they cannot help it, and learned on that account not to take it to heart. The part of Cassandra is always being played somewhere by a gentleman of middle age with a ripe experience of life. But in any serious judgment concerning progress this bias of maturity must be overcome by the use of the imagination, by a rational estimate of human affairs in their broad sweep, or, if n
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