are always looking for some form of
excitement, of the strongest kind they can bear--the excitement of
being with people of like nature with themselves; and if they fail
in this, their mind sinks by its own weight, and they fall into a
grievous lethargy.[1] Such people, it may be said, possess only a
small fraction of humanity in themselves; and it requires a great many
of them put together to make up a fair amount of it,--to attain any
degree of consciousness as men. A man, in the full sense of the
word,--a man _par excellence_--does not represent a fraction, but a
whole number: he is complete in himself.

[Footnote 1: It is a well-known fact, that we can more easily bear up
under evils which fall upon a great many people besides ourselves.
As boredom seems to be an evil of this kind, people band together to
offer it a common resistance. The love of life is at bottom only the
fear of death; and, in the same way, the social impulse does not rest
directly upon the love of society, but upon the fear of solitude; it
is not alone the charm of being in others' company that people seek,
it is the dreary oppression of being alone--the monotony of their own
consciousness--that they would avoid. They will do anything to escape
it,--even tolerate bad companions, and put up with the feeling of
constraint which all society involves, in this case a very burdensome
one. But if aversion to such society conquers the aversion to being
alone, they become accustomed to solitude and hardened to its
immediate effects. They no longer find solitude to be such a very bad
thing, and settle down comfortably to it without any hankering after
society;--and this, partly because it is only indirectly that they
need others' company, and partly because they have become accustomed
to the benefits of being alone.]

Ordinary society is, in this respect, very like the kind of music to
be obtained from an orchestra composed of Russian horns. Each horn has
only one note; and the music is produced by each note coming in just
at the right moment. In the monotonous sound of a single horn, you
have a precise illustration of the effect of most people's minds. How
often there seems to be only one thought there! and no room for any
other. It is easy to see why people are so bored; and also why they
are sociable, why they like to go about in crowds--why mankind is so
_gregarious_. It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man
find solitude intolerable. _