is desirable to enforce social
duties, or to trust them to the unfettered social conscience of
mankind, is a theoretical question which, for our practical purposes, we
need not here discuss.

No man liveth unto himself. No man ought to be satisfied with a good
which is peculiar to himself, from which mankind as a whole are
excluded. No man can be so satisfied. Ignorance, prejudice, selfishness,
pride, custom, blind men to this common good, and prevent them from
making the efforts and sacrifices necessary to realize it. But the man
who could deliberately prefer to see the world in which he lives going
to destruction would be a monster rather than a man.

+This common life of humanity in which each individual partakes is
society. Society is the larger self of each individual. Its interests
and ours are fundamentally one and the same.+--If the society in which
we live is elevated and pure and noble we share its nobleness and are
elevated by it. If society is low, corrupt, and degraded, we share its
corruption, and its baseness drags us down. So vital and intimate is
this bond between society and ourselves that it is impossible when
dealing with moral matters to keep them apart. To be a better man,
without at the same time being a better neighbor, citizen, workman,
soldier, scholar, or business man, is a contradiction in terms. For life
consists in these social relations to our fellows. And the better we
are, the better these social duties will be fulfilled.

Society includes all the objects hitherto considered. Society is the
organic life of man, in which the particular objects and relations of
our individual lives are elements and members. Hence in this chapter,
and throughout the remainder of the book, we shall not be concerned with
new materials, but with the materials with which we are already
familiar, viewed in their broader and more comprehensive relationships.

THE DUTY.

+In each act we should think not merely "How will this act affect me?"
but "How will this act affect all parties concerned, and society as a
whole?"+--The interests of all men are my own, by virtue of that common
society of which they and I are equal members. What is good for others
is good for me, because, in that broader view of my own nature which
society embodies, my good cannot be complete unless, to the extent of my
ability, their good is included in my own. Hence we have the maxims laid
down by Kant: "Act as if the maxim of thy actio