Though the courageous lives of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity may reveal a nobility that shames us, it still remains true that these lives do not represent the most favourable conditions of the soul.

It is not poverty that matters; but strain and the presence of anxiety and fear, the impossibility of detachment.

Therefore this oppression at least would have to be lightened, before the social conscience could be at ease.
Moreover as society advances along this way, every--even the most subtle--kind of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage obtained to the detriment of other individuals, must tend to be eliminated; because here the drag-back of the past will be more and more completely conquered, its instincts fully sublimated, and no one will care to do those things any more.

Bringing new feelings and more real concepts to our contact with our environment, we shall, in accordance with the law of apperception, see this environment in a different way; and so obtain from it a fresh series of experiences.

The scale of pain and pleasure will be altered.