of life, acting of his own free will, although he knew that the conditions under which he had to work would make the achievement of any satisfactory result a slow, laborious and painful business. [2] Mr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See _God the Invisible King_, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40. "But sympathy!" it may be said--"You have left sympathy out of the reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of "individuation." Our nearest and dearest are simply factors in our environment, most influential factors, but as external to us as the trees or the stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away their pains and add them to our own, any more than they, in their turn, can relieve us of our toothache or our sciatica. They are the points, doubtless, at which our environment touches us most closely, but neither incantation nor Act of Parliament, neither priest nor registrar, can make even man and wife really "one flesh." It was necessary for the conservation of the species that a strict limit should be set to the operation of sympathy. Had that emotion been able to pierce the shell of individuality, so that one being could actually add the sufferings of another, or of many others, to his own, life would long ago have come to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama, the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before us.