all eternity he cannot live alone; he cannot support himself; he stands
in continual need of the assistance of all around him, for body, and
soul, and spirit; he needs clothes, which other men must make; houses,
which other man must build; food, which other men must produce; he has to
get his livelihood by working for others, while others get their
livelihood in return by working for him. As a child he needs his parents
to be his comforters, to take care of him in body and mind. As he grows
up he needs the care of others; he cannot exist a day without his
fellow-men: he requires school-masters to educate him; books and masters
to teach him his trade; and when he has learnt it, and settled himself in
life, he requires laws made by other men, perhaps by men who died
hundreds of years before he was born, to secure to him his rights and
property, to secure to him comforts, and to make him feel comfortable in
his station; he needs friends and family to comfort him in sorrow and in
joy, to do for him the thousand things which he cannot do for himself.
In proportion as he is alone and friendless he is pitiable and miserable,
let him be as rich as Solomon himself. From the moment, I say, he is
born, he needs continual comforts and comforters for his body, and mind,
and heart. And then he fancies that, though his body and his mind cannot
exist safely, or grow up healthily, without the continual care and
comforting of his fellow-men, that yet his soul, the part of him which is
at once the most important and the most in danger; the part of him of
which he knows least; the part of him which he understands least; the
part of him of which his body and mind cannot take care, because it has
to take care of them, can live, and grow, and prosper without any help
whatsoever!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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