The social consciousness is the widest and most sensitive receiver and transmitter so far produced. “We look before and after, and pine for what is not.” This is a social quality. As man grouped and grew together came that development of race memory which gives to family, to nation, to Humanity itself, its dignity and power. It is “Our” past, “Our” present, “Our” future. The life of Humanity is one, and it is that life which we as individuals feel; which makes us able to suffer more, enjoy more, and do more than any other kind of living thing. In failing to recognise the real nature of society and put ourselves in right relation to it, we have largely checked the flow of social energy and perverted the social instincts and social processes; therefore, to our morbid egos, social relation often seems to bring us more pain than pleasure. We admit that we cannot live out of it—the sufferings of the hermit are greater than those of the misplaced social constituent; but we live in it blindly, in cramped and distorted positions, rendering our social service under the crushing pressure of the egoistic concept, and getting but a faint and occasional sense of the potent joy of true social relation. The transcendent happiness possible to Humanity, to all humanity, by virtue of its humanness, is a thing of which we practically know nothing. Consider the range of sensation in an individual animal. This is most strictly limited to his physical activities and such psychic impressions and expressions as pertain to his narrow field of being. The female animal has the joy of the maternal function, that great first step beyond the Ego-consciousness; a pleasure and a pride partly physical and partly psychic, but limited forever to the individual young. The male animal sometimes shares a fraction of this parental feeling. In certain creatures which live in groups or herds there seems to be a very vivid common consciousness on some lines, as shown by the instantaneous nervous transmission in a stampede; and in the highly socialised bee and ant there appears as highly developed a collective sensorium. But, though collective, it is on a low plane; the impressions it receives and the expressions resultant all pertain to the physical wants of the individual constituents, however elaborately these wants are met. With us, in our social relation, there is an enlargement of the sensorium past any measurement we can yet make. The _size_ of our sensations increases as more and more individuals are tuned to respond to the same stimulus. There is room in what we call “the human heart” for a passionate exaltation of feeling that finds no parallel below us. This immense influx of stimulus prompts us, yes, forces us, to a commensurate expression; and if this expression be true, it puts in concrete form the intense feeling and then continually transmits it to as many people as are sensitive to that form of expression.