Page:Independence, Rectorial address delivered at St Andrews October 10 1923.pdf/41

INDEPENDENCE After all, yourself is the only person you can by no possibility get away from in this life, and, may be, in another. It is worth a little pains and money to do good to him. For it is he, and not our derivatively educated minds or our induced emotions, who preserves in us the undefeated senior instinct of independence. You can test this by promising yourself not to do a thing, and noticing the scandalous amount of special pleading that you have to go through with yourself if you break your promise. A man does not always remember, or follow up, the great things which he has promised himself or his friends to do; but he rarely forgets or forgives when he has promised himself not to do even a little thing. This is because Man has lived with himself as an individual, vastly longer than he has lived with himself under tribal conditions. [29]