The enormous power of varied reaction possessed by man must render necessary for his attainment of the full advantages of the gregarious habit a power of intercommunication of absolutely unprecedented fineness. It is clear that scarcely a hint of such power has yet appeared, and it is equally obvious that it is this defect which gives to society the characteristics which are the contempt of the man of science and the disgust of the humanitarian.
We are now in a position to understand how momentous is the question as to what society does with the raw material of its minds to encourage in them the potential capacity for intercommunication which they undoubtedly by nature possess. To that question there is but one answer. By providing its members with a herd tradition which is constantly at war with feeling and with experience, {63} society, drives them inevitably into resistiveness on the one hand, or into mental instability on the other, conditions which have this in common, that they tend to exaggerate that isolation of the individual which is shown us by the intellect to be unnatural and by the heart to be cruel.
Another urgent question for the future is provided by the steady increase, relative and absolute, of the mentally unstable. The danger to the State constituted by a large unstable class is already generally recognized, but unfortunately realization has so far only instigated a yet heavier blow at the species. It is assumed that instability is a primary quality, and therefore only to be dealt with by breeding it out. With that indifference to the mental side of life which is characteristic of the mentally resistant class, the question as to the real meaning of instability has been begged by the invention of the disastrous word “degenerate.” The simplicity of the idea has charmed modern speculation, and the only difficulty in the whole problem has come to be the decision as to the most expeditious way of getting rid of this troublesome flaw in an otherwise satisfactory world.