The sentiment of mutual kindness or brotherhood is a simple and widespread thing, belonging not only to man in every stage of his development, but extending, in a crude form, over a great part of animal life. Prince Kropotkin, in his Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution, has collected illustrations of its universality and significance. “... the necessity of communicating impressions,” he says, “of playing, of chattering, or of simply feeling the proximity of other kindred living beings pervades nature, and is, as much as any other physiological function, a distinctive feature of life and impressionability.”[94] Darwin perceived, what Kropotkin and others have illustrated with convincing fulness, that this fusing kindliness underlies all higher phases of evolution, and is essential to the coöperative life in which thought and power are developed. The popular notion that kindly sentiment can only be a hindrance to the survival of the fittest is a somewhat pernicious misapprehension. This sentiment flourishes most in primary groups, where, as we have seen, it contributes to an ideal of moral unity of which kindness is a main part. Under its influence the I-feeling becomes a we-feeling, which seeks no good that is not also the good of the group. And the humanism of our time strives with renewed energy to make the we-feeling prevail also in the larger phases of life. “We must demand,” says a writer who lives very close to the heart of the people,[95] “that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many.” Huxley at one time felt this so strongly as to say, “If I had 400 pounds a year I would never let my name appear to anything I did or shall do.”[96] Such utterances, though significant, are one-sided, and it is perhaps more in the way of real progress to demand, not that the sense of personal achievement shall be given up, but that it shall be more allied with fellow-feeling. The sort of ambition congenial to the we-feeling is one directed toward those common aims in which the success of one is the success of all, not toward admiration or riches. Material goods, one feels, should not be appropriated for pride or luxury, but, being limited in amount, should be used in a consciousness of the general need, and apportioned by rules of justice framed to promote a higher life in the whole. Much might be said of the we-feeling as joy: Perchè quanto si dice piu li nostro, Tanto possiede piu di ben ciascuno, E piu di caritate arde in quel chiostro.[97] For there, as much the more as one says _Our_, So much the more of good each one possesseth, And more of charity in that cloister burns.[98]