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