[Footnote 1:  Paradoxa Stoidorum:  II.]

I have said that people are rendered sociable by their ability to endure solitude, that is to say, their own society.  They become sick of themselves.  It is this vacuity of soul which drives them to intercourse with others,—­to travels in foreign countries.  Their mind is wanting in elasticity; it has no movement of its own, and so they try to give it some,—­by drink, for instance.  How much drunkenness is due to this cause alone!  They are always looking for some form of excitement, of the strongest kind they can bear—­the excitement of being with people of like nature with themselves; and if they fail in this, their mind sinks by its own weight, and they fall into a grievous lethargy.[1] Such people, it may be said, possess only a small fraction of humanity in themselves; and it requires a great many of them put together to make up a fair amount of it,—­to attain any degree of consciousness as men.  A man, in the full sense of the word,—­a man par excellence—­does not represent a fraction, but a whole number:  he is complete in himself.

[Footnote 1:  It is a well-known fact, that we can more easily bear up under evils which fall upon a great many people besides ourselves.  As boredom seems to be an evil of this kind, people band together to offer it a common resistance.  The love of life is at bottom only the fear of death; and, in the same way, the social impulse does not rest directly upon the love of society, but upon the fear of solitude; it is not alone the charm of being in others’ company that people seek, it is the dreary oppression of being alone—­the monotony of their own consciousness—­that they would avoid.  They will do anything to escape it,—­even tolerate bad companions, and put up with the feeling of constraint which all society involves, in this case a very burdensome one.  But if aversion to such society conquers the aversion to being alone, they become accustomed to solitude and hardened to its immediate effects.  They no longer find solitude to be such a very bad thing, and settle down comfortably to it without any hankering after society;—­and this, partly because it is only indirectly that they need others’ company, and partly because they have become accustomed to the benefits of being alone.]

Ordinary society is, in this respect, very like the kind of music to be obtained from an orchestra composed of Russian horns.  Each horn has only one note; and the music is produced by each note coming in just at the right moment.  In the monotonous sound of a single horn, you have a precise illustration of the effect of most people’s minds.  How often there seems to be only one thought there! and no room for any other.  It is easy to see why people are so bored; and also why they are sociable, why they like to go about in crowds—­why mankind is so gregarious.  It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable. Omnis stultitia laborat fastidio sui:  folly is truly its own burden.  Put a great many men together, and you may get some result—­some music from your horns!