“The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptations, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank–all this is to be found as social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world–and only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one’s pursuers and be favored in the pursuit of one’s prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their coloring to the coloring of their surrounding…, pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colors of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus….Thus [too] the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘man,’ or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place….”

—Dawn, sec. 26.