I had a few thousand guilders that
belonged to me and a few hundred from Elsje. We had selected the
cheapest travelling accommodations and would live very simply. I hoped
to have enough for us to live on until I should have found a means of
subsistence and a field for my labors. I had plenty of acquaintances in
the most distinguished circles, but I knew how little I could count on
them. Yet I had to try to find among them the few that were susceptive
to original thoughts and had the ability to turn them into deeds.
I argued thus: that all individuals live in an invincible group-union
of morals, customs, traditions and institutions, which originated
wholly beyond their reasonable will and which are mostly in conflict
with their own deeper convictions. That they live thus is the result of
their nature and character as group-creatures. They cannot do otherwise
and may not do otherwise. No individual can live apart, he must have a
group or grouplet, no matter how small, whose ideas, customs and morals
he shares.
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