You find yourself praying that you may never lose
your hold on it all. A more poetic prayer would be that the
great mother breasts of our common humanity, with its labor and
suffering and its homely comforts, may never be withheld from
you. You turn helplessly to the waiter and feel that it would be
almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you crave because
civilization has placed you apart, but you resent your position
with a sudden sense of snobbery. Literature is full of
portrayals of these glimpses: they come to shipwrecked men on
rafts; they overcome the differences of an incongruous multitude
when in the presence of a great danger or when moved by a common
enthusiasm. They are not, however, confined to such moments, and
if we were in the habit of telling them to each other, the
recital would be as long as the tales of children are, when they
sit down on the green grass and confide to each other how many
times they have remembered that they lived once before. If these
childish tales are the stirring of inherited impressions, just so
surely is the other the striving of inherited powers.
"It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a
sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want
of a proper outlet for active faculties.
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