We may trace this suffering from work denied through all the uneasy contortions of “the leisure class” to the final surrender to that social paralysis, _ennui_. Healthy physical impulses, checked in natural expression, twitch and cramp the unused member. Healthy social impulses, checked in natural expression, twitch and cramp in similar agony and distortion. Always the impulse to do—the human instinct, the social passion. Then the inhibition from mistaken theories and false ideas, the individual checking his healthy social impulses as perversely as the religious ascetic checks his healthy physical impulses. And as the ascetic, bottling his life up, froths off in wild visions and fanatical activity, so the social ascetic lives in a whirling rush of useless exertion and excitement, always seeking in what he calls “society” that true social contact and social action which he never finds. And as the body of the ascetic wastes and dwarfs and deforms under the unnatural life his gross delusions bring him to, so does society suffer under the diseased conditions engendered by this fatuous mistake. More firmly and reassuringly we can trace the social passion in its true expression. Clear and strong it has left its mark on every age, and rises steadily with our rising socialisation. The co-consciousness with its beautiful result in love; “a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind”; “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin”; the co-activity and its resultant virtues and abilities; the need for expression of those “co-abilities”; the urge toward exertion, ultimately seen to be in the social interest, but pushing from within as a passion; this feeling it is which made Palissy the Potter break up his furniture to insure his glaze; which drove Galileo to his studies in defiance of the Church; which fed the fire with prohibited books and gave up martyrs by the score to die because they would let out what was in them; they must. We see it clearest in the arts and sciences, in the inventor, the explorer, the teacher of new truth. But what drives these conspicuously specialised social servants to their work is the same force which holds the steersman to his wheel, the engineer to his lever, the sentry to his post: the power of functional expression; stronger in us than any other force, as our social nature is stronger in us than the nature of the beast. If we would recognise our “human nature” to be our “social nature,” and that what we have so scorned and pitied as “poor human nature” is not human at all, but merely animal,—ego-nature,—it would alter our whole range of thought on this vital matter. The social spirit is not “poor,” but bounteously rich and strong. It rises grandly to meet great emergencies, but is felt most continually in our impulse to work, to do what we are made for, what we are together for; that which constitutes the primal condition and line of development for human life.