Note 238 — LECTURE XV. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS.

1st Series, vol. iii., p. 265: "What!" somewhere says Montesquieu, "man is everywhere in society, and it is asked whether man was born for society! What is this fact that is reproduced in all the vicissitudes of the life of humanity, except a law of humanity? The universal and permanent fact of society attests the principle of sociability. This principle shines forth in all our inclinations, in our sentiments, in our beliefs. It is true that we love society for the advantages that it brings; but it is none the less true, that we also love it for its own sake, that we seek it independently of all calculation. Solitude saddens us; it is not less deadly to the life of the moral being, than a perfect vacuum is to the life of the physical being. Without society what would become of sympathy, which is one of the most powerful principles of our soul, which establishes between men a community of sentiments, by which each lives in all and all live in each? Who would be blind enough not to see in that an energetic call of human nature for society? And the attraction of the sexes, their union, the love of parents for children,—do they not found a sort of natural society, that is increased and developed by the power of the same causes which produced it? Divided by interest, united by sentiment, men respect each other in the name of justice. Let us add that they love each other in virtue of natural charity. In the sight of justice, equal in right, charity inspires us to consider ourselves as brethren, and to give each other succor and consolation. Wonderful thing! God has not left to our wisdom, nor even to experience, the care of forming and preserving society,—he has willed that sociability should be a law of our nature, and a law so imperative that no tendency to isolation, no egoism, no distaste even, can prevail against it. All the power of the spirit of system was necessary in order to make Hobbes say that society is an accident, as an incredible degree of melancholy to wring from Rousseau the extravagant expression that society is an evil."