"Love your enemies!" Mark you not simply those who do not happen to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, in so far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general 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