94 WAYS OF THE SIX-FOOTED 



good of the whole ; only those individual traits are 

 allowed to persist that are parallel with the direction 

 of progress of the whole organism. 



Great thinkers, philosophers, and poets, impatient 

 of the restrictions that come from being one cell in 

 a vast organism, have cried out for the divine right 

 of a perfect self-development; many of our socialists 

 and all of our anarchists are animated by this over- 

 whelming longing for perfect self-rounding. But they 

 forget that the monad is an anachronism in society; 

 the only possible chance for the human being to attain 

 the perfect sphere of the individual is to retire to the 

 desert and live a hermit. If he remains a part of the 

 social organism and attempts to swell out the sphere of 

 self to its pristine proportions, he is promptly secluded 

 to four bare walls, where a well-rounded individuality 

 does as little damage to others as possible ; or, escaping 

 this, he goes on fighting fate and disturbing the symme- 

 try of the cells that press upon him for a little time, and 

 is then thrown out by evolution as one of the great unfit. 



All social struggles and revolutions of to-day come 

 from the fact that the areas fiattened by pressure of the 

 several sides of the individual cells of the organism 

 termed "society" are not yet settled and adjusted to the 

 best advantage of the whole. We have only to wait to 

 attain the perfect social mechanism of the bees. 



