We grow up in the home that society has shaped or coerced our parents into accepting, we adopt the customs and language and utensils that have established themselves for our present through a long process of survival and invention and change. We take the education that is given us, and finally the jobs that are handed out to us by society. As adults, we act in the way that society expects us to act; we submit to whatever regulations and coercions society imposes on us. We live almost entirely a social life, that is, a life as a constituted unit in society, rather than a free and personal one. Most people live a life which is little more than a series of quasi-official acts. Their conduct is a network of representations of the various codes and institutions of society. They act in such a way in order that some institutional or moral scripture may be fulfilled, rather than that some deep personal direction of growth should be realized. They may be half aware that they are not arrived at the place towards which their ardors pointed. They may dimly realize that their outward lives are largely a compulsion of social habit, performed, even after so many years, with a slight grudgingness. This divorce between social compulsion and personal desire, however, rarely rises to consciousness. Their conscious life is divided between the mechanical performance of their task, the attainment of their pleasures, and the wholly uncriticized acceptance and promulgation of the opinions and attitudes which society provides them with. The normal, or the common, relation between society and the individual in any society that we know of is that the individual scarcely exists. Those persons who refuse to act as symbols of society’s folk-ways, as counters in the game of society’s ordainings, are outlawed, and there exists an elaborate machinery for dealing with such people. Artists, philosophers, geniuses, tramps, criminals, eccentrics, aliens, free-lovers and free-thinkers, and persons who challenge the most sacred taboos, are treated with great concern by society, and in the hue and cry after them all, respectable and responsible men unanimously and universally join. Some are merely made uncomfortable, the light of society’s countenance being drawn from them; others are deprived of their liberty, placed for years in foul dungeons, or even executed. The heaviest penalties in modern society fall upon those who violate any of the three sacred taboos of property, sex and the State. Religion, which was for so many centuries the most exigent and ubiquitous symbol of society’s demand for conformity, has lapsed in these later days and bequeathed most of its virus to the State. Society no longer demands conformity of opinion in religion, even in those countries where nominal adherence is still required.