We may, however, take the argument in a less mythological form than is found in the current appeal to social instincts of one sort or another. The activities of animals, like those of minerals and plants, are correlated with their structure. Quadrupeds run, worms crawl, fish swim, birds fly. They are made that way; it is “the nature of the beast.” We do not gain anything by inserting instincts to run, creep, swim and fly between the structure and the act. But the strictly organic conditions which lead men to join, assemble, foregather, combine, are just those which lead other animals to unite in swarms and packs and herds. In describing what is common in human and other animal junctions and consolidations we fail to touch what is distinctively human in human associations. These structural conditions and acts may be _sine qua nons_ of human societies; but so are the attractions and repulsions which are exhibited in inanimate things. Physics and chemistry as well as zoölogy may inform us of some of the conditions without which human beings would not associate. But they do not furnish us with the _sufficient_ conditions of community life and of the forms which it takes. We must in any case start from acts which are performed, not from hypothetical causes for those acts, and consider their consequences. We must also introduce intelligence, or the observation of consequences _as_ consequences, that is, in connection with the acts from which they proceed. Since we must introduce it, it is better to do so knowingly than it is to smuggle it in in a way which deceives not only the customs officer--the reader--but ourselves as well. We take then our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others. Following this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public. When indirect consequences are recognized and there is effort to regulate them, something having the traits of a state comes into existence. When the consequences of an action are confined, or are thought to be confined, mainly to the persons directly engaged in it, the transaction is a private one. When A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a trans-action: both are concerned in it; its results pass, as it were, across from one to the other. One or other or both may be helped or harmed thereby. But, presumably, the consequences of advantage and injury do not extend beyond A and B; the activity lies between them; it is private. Yet if it is found that the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two