What has social life done for man intellectually?  Much.  It gives him schools and colleges.  But are our systems of education an unmixed good?  How many of our schools and colleges are places where men are stuffed with facts until they have no time nor inclination to think?  They may turn out learned men; do they produce thinkers?  And how about the spread of knowledge?  Is it not a spread of information?  And most of what goes forth from the press is not worthy of even that name, or is information which a man had better be without.  We are proud of being a nation of readers.  And reading is good, if a man thinks about what he reads; otherwise it is like undigested food in the stomach, an injury and a curse.  A dyspeptic gourmand is helped by “cutting down his rations.”  In our mental disease we need the same course of treatment.  Let us read fewer books and papers and think more about what we do read.

Society may foster original thinking; it is none the less opposed to it.

“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

This is the motto of all great parties in Church and State.  Still social life has undoubtedly fostered thought.  We think vastly more and better than primitive man; still we have much to learn.  Society puts the experience of centuries at the service of every individual.  Poor and unsatisfactory as are our modes of education, they are a great blessing intellectually and will become more helpful.  And, after all, the friction of mind against mind in social life—­provided social intercourse is this, and not the commingling of two vacua—­is a continual education of inestimable advantage.  And all these advantages would without language have been absolutely impossible.  Intellectually our debt to society is inestimable.

And how does social life aid man morally?  I cannot help believing that primitive society was the first school of the human conscience.  It was a rude school, but it taught man some grand lessons.

The primitive clan would seem to have existed as a rude army for the defence of its members and for offensive operations against enemies.  Individual responsibility on the part of its members was slight for offences against individuals of other clans, or against the gods.  For any such offence of one of its members the whole clan was held, or held itself, largely responsible.  If one man sinned, the clan suffered.  It could not therefore afford to pardon wilful disobedience to regulations made by it or its leaders.  Its very existence depended on this strict discipline.  And much the same stern discipline has to be maintained in our modern armies or they become utterly worthless.