To-day, it is necessary to see, that one cannot form any judgment adequate to the facts, without going back to those primal creative thoughts which underlie all social institutions. The body social requires a constant fresh supply of the forces that reside in these primal thoughts; and if the suitable channels are not there, through which these forces can flow, then social institutions assume forms which impede life, instead of furthering it. But although the conscious thoughts of men may go astray, although they may,--and have,--created facts that impede life, yet these primal thoughts live on in men's instinctive impulses. Tumultuously and destructively they break against the world of established facts that hem them in; and these primal thoughts it is, which open or disguised, find their way out in convulsions that threaten to overthrow the social order. Such revolutionary convulsions will not cease to occur, until the body social takes a form, in which there may be always both an inclination to notice when any institution is beginning to deviate from its first intention in those primal thoughts, and at the same time the possibility of counter-acting every such deviation before it becomes strong enough to be a danger. In our times, the actual conditions, throughout a wide range of human life, have come to deviate very widely from what the primal thoughts require. And these primal thoughts, as they live on in the impulses of the human soul, are a commentary,--a commentary that voices itself loudly enough in facts,--of what has been taking shape in the body social during the last few centuries. What is wanted, is good will and vigorous resolution to turn again to these primal thoughts. We must not be blind to the mischief that is done, especially at this moment, by dismissing these primal thoughts from the field of actual life as "unpractical generalities." The facts of life itself, and the claims of the working-class masses, afford a practical commentary on what the modern age has made of the body social. The task of our age, in face of these facts, is not merely to criticise, but to set about remedying them; which means going to the primal thoughts for the direction in which we must now consciously guide them. For the time is gone by, when the old instinctive guidance could suffice for mankind; what it could accomplish up till now, is now no longer enough.