Note 78 — ON TRANSFORMATION AND ADAPTATION IN SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT.[69]

We must not be deceived in imagining that the happiness of other people is not a very considerable and essential portion of our own. It is common capital, which cannot be created by the individual, and which does not perish with him. The formal and material limitation of the ego is necessary and sufficient only for the crudest practical objects, and cannot subsist in a broad conception. Humanity in its entirety may be likened to a polyp-plant. The material and organic bonds of individual union have, indeed, been severed; they would only have impeded freedom of movement and evolution. But the ultimate aim, the psychical connexion of the whole, has been attained in a much higher degree through the richer development thus made possible.