joy of contemplation; he is strenuous, anxious, vain, or mortified; but when he ceases trying he will be capable, just because of this experience, of a fuller appreciation of beauty in general than he was before. And so of personal affection; the winning of wife, home, and children involves constant self-assertion, but it multiplies the power of sympathy. We cannot, then, exalt one of these over the other; what would seem desirable is that the self, without losing its special purpose and vigor, should keep expanding, so that it should tend to include more and more of what is largest and highest in the general life. It appears, then, that sympathy, in the sense of mental sharing or communication, is by no means a simple matter, but that so much enters into it as to suggest that by the time we thoroughly understood one sympathetic experience we should be in a way to understand the social order itself. An act of communication is a particular aspect of the whole which we call society, and necessarily reflects that of which it is a characteristic part. To come into touch with a friend, a leader, an antagonist, or a book, is an act of sympathy; but it is precisely in the totality of such acts that society consists. Even the most complex and rigid institutions may be looked upon as consisting of innumerable personal influences or acts of sympathy, organized, in the case of institutions, into a definite and continuing whole by means of some system of permanent symbols, such as laws, constitutions, sacred writings, and the like, in which personal influences are preserved. And, turning the matter around, we may look upon every act of sympathy as a particular expression of the history, institutions, and tendencies of the society in which it takes place. Every influence which you or I can receive or impart will be characteristic of the race, the country, the epoch, in which our personalities have grown up. The main thing here is to bring out the _vital_ unity of every phase of personal life, from the simplest interchange of a friendly word to the polity of nations or of hierarchies. The common idea of the matter is crudely mechanical—that there are persons as there are bricks and societies as there are walls. A person, or some trait of personality or of intercourse, is held to be the element of society, and the latter is formed by the aggregation of these elements. Now there is no such thing as an element of society in the sense that a brick is the element of a wall; this is a mechanical conception quite inapplicable to vital phenomena. I should say that living wholes have aspects but not elements.