According to religion one should seek to unite with a something that is set above both man and nature, whether this something is called God as in Christianity or simply the Law as in various philosophies of the Far East.[259] The most severe penalty visited on the man who transgresses is that he tends to fall away from this union. This is the element of truth in the sentence of Diderot that Rousseau took as a personal affront: “Only the wicked man is alone.” Rousseau asserted in reply, anticipating Mark Twain,[260] that “on the contrary only the good man is alone.” Now in a sense Rousseau is right. “Most men are bad,” as one of the seven sages of Greece remarked, and any one who sets out to follow a very strenuous virtue is likely to have few companions on the way. Rousseau is also right in a sense when he says that the wicked man needs to live in society so that he may have opportunity to practice his wickedness. Yet Rousseau fails to face the main issue: solitude is above all a psychic thing. A man may frequent his fellows and suffer none the less acutely, like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” from a ghastly isolation. And conversely one may be like the ancient who said that he was never less alone than when he was alone. Hawthorne, who was himself a victim of solitude, brooded a great deal on this whole problem, especially, as may be seen in the “Scarlet Letter” and elsewhere, on the isolating effects of sin. He perceived the relation of the problem to the whole trend of religious life in New England. The older Puritans had a sense of intimacy with God and craved no other companionship. With the weakening of their faith the later Puritans lost the sense of a divine companionship, but retained their aloofness from men. Hawthorne’s own solution of the problem of solitude, so far as he offers any, is humanitarian. Quicken your sympathies. Let the man who has taken as his motto _Excelsior_[261] be warned. Nothing will console him on the bleak heights either of knowledge or of power for the warm contact with the dwellers in the valley. Faust, who is a symbol of the solitude of knowledge, seeks to escape from his forlornness by recovering this warm contact. That the inordinate quest of power also leads to solitude is beyond question. Napoleon, the very type of the superman, must in the nature of the case have been very solitary.[262] His admirer Nietzsche wrote one day: “I have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child.” Carlyle, whose “hero” derives like the superman from the original genius[263] of the eighteenth century, makes the following entry in his diary: “My isolation, my feeling of loneliness, unlimitedness (much meant by this) what tongue shall say? Alone, alone!”[264]