The result is that we ordinarily find it most comfortable to associate on a basis of income, combined with and modified by the influence of occupation, culture and special tastes. And yet to do this is perhaps a confession of failure, a confession that we do not know how to cast off the adventitious and meet as men. The most superficial differences, being the most apparent, impose themselves upon our commonly indolent and sensuous states of mind. In proportion to their energy men will always seek power. It is, perhaps, the deepest of instincts, resting directly on the primary need for self-expression. But the kind of power sought will take many forms. Wealth stands, in modern society, for nearly all the grosser and more tangible forms; for power over material goods, primarily, and secondarily over the more purchasable kinds of human activity—hand labor, professional services, newspaper commendation, political assiduity and so on. The class that has it is, in all such matters, the strong class, and naturally our coarser thought concludes that this is the kind of power most worth consideration. In all the obvious details of life, in that seeking for petty advantages and immunities in which most of our time is passed, at the store or the railway station, we are measured by money and are apt to measure others so. The ascendency of wealth is too natural to disappear. Children prize possessions before they can talk, and readily learn that money is possession generalized. Indeed, only the taste for finer possessions can or should drive out that for lower. And yet all clear minds, or rather all minds in their clearer moments, may see that wealth is not the chief good that the commonplace and superficial estimate makes it. It is simply a low form of power, important in measure to the group and to the individual, but easily preoccupying the mind beyond its just claim. If society gets material prosperity too fast, its spiritual life suffers, as is somewhat the case in our day: and the individual is in peril of moral isolation and decay as soon as he seeks to get richer than his fellows.