It is now an old story for us, but an important one, that there must be society. A genuine individuality requires society. Society is a medium not by which something is added to individual life, but by which something in individual life is kept real and manifest. By maintaining, as it were always from without, the natural tension of individual life, it ensures to the individual the constant growth that is his legitimate inheritance. The doubter is a social creature. The free thinker accepting his ideas only tentatively, though at the same time using them hopefully, sure that they will lead somewhere, is a social creature; and the mechanic is a social creature, being one with others for whom life is not routine but growth, and among whom the growth in which each has his part induces constant tension, the tension of difference, the tension of opposition and competition, the tension of mutual correction and compensation, the tension, finally, of reality refusing to be bound. Not the individual's provisional standpoint, nor yet the machinery that he employs and that sooner or later must go to pieces, not these alone, I must therefore reiterate, make the individual effectively [p.232] active in a growing world, make him a worthy creature doing the work of nature or of God; these have their place and part; but constant relation to other individuals, the objects not less of hate than of love, not less of rivalry than of friendship, is also essential. In the so-called material world all things, in and by themselves unreal, get reality, yes, get individual reality, only as through their very differences they work together for what is real. In the world of mind, or thought, if this can be imagined apart from the world of things, all thoughts or ideas, in and by themselves untrue for being subjective, relative, and partial, get truth only as also through their differences, so tense and interactive, they work together for what is true. And, likewise, in the world of persons, if indeed this can be imagined apart from the world of thought, all individuals, call them now mechanics or what you will, though in and by themselves without personal worth or real individuality, without freedom or immortality, get genuine worth and are assured even immortality only as shoulder against shoulder they work together for a life that is true and real, worthy and genuine.