Never hit at a hornet unless you are sure of killing it. Never notice a social scandal about yourself unless you can refute it absolutely. A weak defense is more damaging than silence.
It is a much admired art to turn the weaknesses of others to our own profit. How sublime would be the science which would direct their strength to their own true interests!
IV. On Fellowship, Comradeship and Friendship.
Man is slow to understand how human he is. He thinks he can measure himself by other standards than himself, but all his circuits lead him home again; his most positive knowledge is of himself, and by analogy of his own kind. With a wise recognition of the limits of his own nature he should seek happiness in the conditions of existence known to him and especially among his own species, where alone he can find beings whose endowments are the same, and whose affinities and sympathies respond to his own.
Society, as I have said, is the common field of intercourse in civilized life, and it makes for itself its own various limitations and restrictions. Other methods of Association are based on quite different principles, but have all been organized with the aim of increasing happiness, and all therefore deserve the cultivation of him who is sedulous about his own. The two motives which give them origin are, the one, Interest; the other, Sympathy. The former I may call Fellowships; the latter, Comradeships.
Fellowships, composed of those who follow the same business, trade, or profession, and thus have an interest in
common,—this is what the word means. They are the guilds, unions, lodges, clubs, societies, associations, companies, which swarm so in our day, whose members are held together by a desire of mutual assistance in making money, or raising wages, or providing against misfortune, or maintaining privileges, or buying cheap, or paying each other’s funeral expenses, or in a thousand other ways advancing the interests, and thus relieving the burdens and increasing the enjoyment, of their members. I knew a man who belonged to over three hundred such associations, and as he was in other respects a sensible person, he probably found a profit in this multiplication of ties.