If thou hast union now, thou shalt have it hereafter. _Kabir._
Without social life no one of the peculiarly human powers of a man comes to fruition. He may chatter, for example; he cannot speak. He has all the necessary organs and all the necessary power, but man-language is part of an inheritance stored up for him in community life. It is stored up there, just as clinging with his hands and sucking with his lips are stored up ready for him at birth, in his body. Society is for him an immense extension of his body, and therefore a further means of extension for his spirit. It is also an immense extension of the bodies and spirits of other men with whom he may enter upon relations. You may look on it as supplying a brain common to all men which all may use together, and in which their activities should find not only a recording medium but an unfailing stimulus and contributory aid. But the social brain is in a peculiar sense men's own making, as free and capable creators. They have come to be owners of life and directors of its course in a degree they certainly had not attained when their bodily brains were slowly growing to be what they are. This brain of theirs, used in community, is as truly built by their own efforts as are the houses in which they live. The evolution of man has to all intents of spirit ceased to advance by changes in his body, but it goes on by incessant change and enormous amplification in his community life.
Here, too, in this many-bodied and many-souled community, as well as in the individual man's life, function determines structure. But function has there become self-conscious and world-conscious, aware of the many bodies and the many souls, aware of their needs and dangers, aware of their giving and their gaining. Men have societies within the community such as on the whole their conscious desires and purposes, their attitude towards their fellows, their sense of responsibility and obligations, their aims and ideals, demand. We have indeed the societies we deserve. We may well ask ourselves why we deserve to have them as they are; we may well say to ourselves—'"Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?"' And the answer is clear, convicting not only of error but of what some of us have learnt to know as actual sin, sin against the call and promise of life. '"It was I," said the prisoner ... "when at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip."'