The life of Society is higher and wider yet. Here are the separate animal constituents whose life processes must be kept going, and here are the wholly new social life processes to be carried on. Human life involves the performance of the complex social life processes. The plant has poking, absorbing, circulating, breathing, and reproducing to do. That is plant life. The animal similarly circulates, breathes, and reproduces, but he “pokes” in a much more elaborate manner, developing also new methods of offence and defence in maintaining these essential functions. That is animal life. Man, as an animal, breathes, circulates, and reproduces in humble pursuance of previous methods, but as a social being not only has his nutritive process become of enormous organic complexity, but there have appeared also vast and subtle developments of special functions hitherto unknown: industry, trade, commerce, art, science, education, government,—all that we call Work. In this development is human life. I do not mean that it is essential to human life, it is human life. If the gathering and circulating of nutrition, the absorption of air, the blossoming and fruition of a tree are “essential to the tree’s life,” pray, what remains as “the life” of the tree to which they are essential? You may truly say that breathing, circulating, and reproducing are “essential” to an animal’s life; that life, as distinct from other lives, being the more special activities he has developed. So with the human creature. It is essential to his animal life that he breathe, circulate, and reproduce; it is essential to his human life also that he perform enough varied physical activity to keep him in good form; but it is his human life to be “doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” or whatever is his department in the social economy. Work is human life. Thus, as health, happiness, and beauty are found in lower forms in perfect performance of their simpler life processes, so in Society we find health, happiness, and beauty in proportion to our performance of these our life processes; a greater, far greater health, happiness, and beauty in the magnificent spread and range of these processes; a far more terrible record of disease, misery, and horrid ugliness as we fail of fulfilment. A defective, sick, or dead plant is an unpleasant sight. A defective, sick, or dead animal is a more unpleasant sight. But the depth and ramifications of misery and horror in a defective, sick, or dead society,—this is what has made us call this fair world “a vale of tears.”