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Tragic Sense Of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
page 61 of 397 (15%)
instinct of perpetuation?

Human society, as a society, possesses senses which the individual, but
for his existence in society, would lack, just as the individual, man,
who is in his turn a kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the
cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim
consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the
visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps
deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while
the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world
which the hearing cells create.

We have remarked before that the parasites which live in the intestines
of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals
supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the
visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a
certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the
animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and
hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the
extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social
parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably observes,[10] who, receiving
from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct,
deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for
good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them
the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can
endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort
believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives
the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honour is,
even in non-Christians, a Christian product. And I will say further,
that if there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purity
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