Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/63

Rh of my affections, of my religious faculty—my soul. Conscience, when awakened, commands this. Prophets of the Old Testament, and apostles of the New Testament, martyrs of all the churches under heaven, are historical witnesses to this instinct of human nature. Millions of soldiers have been found ready to sacrifice the life of their body to the integrity of their spirit: they would die, but not run.

Man is social by nature: gregarious by instinct, he is social with self-conscious will. To develop the individual into the perfect man, men must mix and mingle. Society is the condition of individual development. Moses or Newton, living all alone, would not have attained the human dignity of a clown or a savage; they would never have mastered articulate speech: the gregarious elephant, the lonely eagle, would surpass these men, born to the mightiest genius. Society, companionship of men, is both a necessity and a comfort, a good in itself, a means to other good.

As the great purpose of human life is to develop the individual into the complete and perfect man in body and spirit, so the purpose of society is to help furnish the means thereto; to defend each, and furnish him an opportunity and all possible help to become a complete and perfect man. Individuals are the monads, the primitive atoms, of which society is composed: its power, its perfection, depend primarily on the power and perfection of the individuals, as much so as the weight of a pendulum or of Mount Sheehallin depends on the primitive atoms thereof. Destroy the individuality of those atoms, human or material, all is gone. To mar the atom is to mar the mass. To preserve itself, therefore, society is to preserve the individuality of the individual.

Such is its general purpose: this involves several particulars. One is purely negative in its form, to prevent men from hurting one another. In early ages that was the chief business of society which men had become conscious of. Society was recognised as an instrument to help accomplish two things: first, to defend itself against other societies or collections of men, and so preserve the integrity of the mass. This was done by means of armies, forts, fleets, and all the artillery of war. The next thing