But the necessity of solitude is deeper than we have said, and is organic.  I have seen many a philosopher whose world is large enough for only one person.  He affects to be a good companion; but we are still surprising his secret, that he means and needs to impose his system on all the rest.  The determination of each is from all the others, like that of each tree up into free space.  ’Tis no wonder, when each has his whole head, our societies should be so small.  Like President Tyler, our party falls from us every day, and we must ride in a sulky at last.  Dear heart! take it sadly home to thee, there is no cooeperation.  We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy fraternity that shall combine for the salvation of men.  But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve, and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.  The cooeperation is involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his prerogative.  ’Tis fine for us to talk:  we sit and muse, and are serene, and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction.

Though the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a moral union of two superior persons, whose confidence in each other for long years, out of sight, and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing joyful emotions, tears, and glory,—­though there be for heroes this moral union, yet they, too, are as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the cooeperation of a ship’s company, or of a fire-club.  But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know!  Nor dare they tell what they think of each other, when they meet in the street.  We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies!

Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary.  We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost.  They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities.  They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears,—­where the question is, Which is first, man or men?—­where the individual is lost in his source.