fragment, a participant in the animating principle of the universe--and
that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and person,
but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of the
individual soul from the soul of the world. The body is the form or
vessel which vouchsafes to the soul individual existence, and which the
soul, by its very impulse to activity, wears out and destroys. Birth is
a prophecy of destruction and a doom to death.

But life is activity, the soul is a motive force, self-assertion and
self-preservation are heaven's first law. Self-assertion, however, is
nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and
self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender.
Self-preservation is impossible; self-assertion is a challenge to the
assertiveness of other selves, as well as a hastener of dissolution. The
self follows its native bent, and its native impulse is for expansion;
but it thus, as a fraction, leaves, on its centrifugal path, the course
of the great world spirit from which it separates; and as both a
separate entity and a member of a community it must, in its attempt at
self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only
object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all
within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is
positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible
reconciliation--at most a compromise--so that in the last analysis it
appears that the assertion of individual will as such is immoral, that
is, contrary to the will of the community; and is sinful, for it is not
the will of God, but the will of a particularized individual, however
godly he may be. There are differences in degree, but not in kind, among
immoralities and sins, with corresponding degrees of punitive
repression; but the potential tragic conflict is constant, and there is
as little doubt about the eminent domain of the State as about the