That release from the trammels of selfhood is to be found in some sort of self-identification with other selves is one of the surest insights men have achieved through millennial ponderings upon the meaning of life. But the nature and the process of this mingling of personalities have been variously conceived. Sympathy, particularly with sufferers; oneness with a congregation of worshippers; obedience, as of soldiers to a commander; fellowship through common loyalty to a person, a cause, or an institution; friendship and affection; “letting go” in a crowd, as in religious frenzies ancient and modern, in drinking bouts, or in a football game--all these have recommended themselves as modes of emancipation. All of them do in fact bring a sense of enlargement; we are here on track of some conceivably universal good. Yet the contrasts and the clashes between these heterogeneous modes of self-enlargement warn us to think twice. When we do think twice, we shall ask from what we need to be released, and into what, and what is the final result of each of these types of experience. As a rule, we struggle to be released without first inquiring into the nature of our bondage, and as a result we hail as salvation almost any experience that promotes the flow of self-forgetting emotion. Real release, in any large and permanent sense, must be that which brings to fruition the motive that is in all and through all our motivation--to be a rational, self-guiding self in a society of such selves; and the chains that must be struck off are the specific ones that we ourselves have forged through partial and defective self-activity in the past. I shall take for granted, without devoting a section to discussing the point, that current thought is right, along with considerable ancient thought, when it values friendship, affection, and generally sympathetic relations between individuals as, in some degree, the actual attainment of the life of reason. The same is true of the experience of beauty, of delight in truth, and of play. All these are genuinely emancipating experiences. They are a rational good in themselves, and they fit into the framework of rationality in the larger relations. It is in these larger relations that our problem is, in practice, farthest from solution. In the modern world the individual is obliged to make specific reactions to extensive social masses and forces; further, many of these reactions must be made by the individual as a member of some class, organization, or institution. Here is where the shoe of precedent pinches most; here is where the capacity of the individual to achieve any large freedom is most in question.