Only the hard necessity of natural law succeeded in forcing him to curb his natural selfish desires and to unite with his fellows.  Only on these terms could he maintain even an existence.  Those who have not accepted these terms have been exterminated.  Communal life in all its forms, from the family upward to the most unified and developed nation, is thus conceived as a continued limiting of the individual—­a necessity, indeed, to his existence, but none the less a limitation.

I am unable to take this view, which at best is a one-sided statement.  It appears to me capable of demonstration, that communal and individual development proceed pari passu; that every gain in the communal life is a gain to the individual and vice versa.  They are complementary, not contradictory processes.  Neither can exist, in any proper sense, apart from the other; and the degree of the development of the one is a sure index of the degree of the development of the other.  So important is this matter that we must pause to give it further consideration.

Consider, first, man in his earliest stage of development.  A relatively segregarious animal; with a few ideas about the nuts and fruits and roots on which he lives; with a little knowledge as to where to find them; the subject of constant fear lest a stronger man may suddenly appear to seize and carry off his wife and food; possessing possibly a few articulate sounds answering to words; such probably was primitive man.  He must have been little removed from the ape.  His “self,” his mind, was so small and so empty of content that we could hardly recognize him as a man, should we stumble on him in the forest.

Look next upon him after he has become a family-man.  Living in the group, his life enlarges; his existence broadens; his ideas multiply; his vocabulary increases with his ideas and experiences; he begins to share the life and thinking and interests and joys and sorrows of others; their ideas and experiences become his, to his enormous advantage.  What he now is throws into the shade of night what he used to be.  So far from being the loser by his acceptance of even this limited communal life, he is a gainer in every way.  He begins to know what love is, and hate; what joy is, and sorrow; what kindness is, and cruelty; what altruism is, and selfishness.  Thus, not only in ideas and language, in industry and property, but also in emotions, in character, in morality, in religion, in the knowledge of self, and even in opportunity for selfishness, he is the gainer.  In just the degree that communal life is developed is the life of the individuals that compose it extended both subjectively and objectively.  Human psychogenesis takes place in the communal stage of his life.  Human association is its chief external cause.