As civilization increases,
so does his complexity: with the result that man's originality
strengthens and his sensitivity become keener; from which it follows
that the more civilized he becomes, the greater his repugnance to
constraint and uniformity.
At the present day, (1880), each of us is the terminal and peculiar
product of a vast elaboration of which the diverse stages occur in
this order but once, a plant unique of its species, a solitary
individual of superior and finer essence which, with its own inward
structure and its own inalienable type, can bear no other than its own
characteristic fruit. Nothing could be more adverse to the interest
of the oak than to be tortured into bearing the apples of the apple
tree; nothing could be more adverse to the interests of the apple tree
than to be tortured into bearing acorns; nothing could be more opposed
to the interests of both oak and apple tree, also of other trees, than
to be pruned, shaped and twisted so as all to grow after a forced
model, delineated on paper according to the rigid and limited
imagination of a surveyor. The least possible constraint is,
therefore, everybody's chief interest; if one particular restrictive
agency is established, it is that every one may be preserved by if
from other more powerful constraints, especially those which the
foreigner and evil-doer would impose.
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