Source identified1
Image design Golden Hour
Read & copy
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
Meaning & context
Addams argues that private advantages remain fragile when they are disconnected from the shared conditions of the wider community.
Source details
Twenty Years at Hull-House, Project Gutenberg #1325. Addams is describing the democratic and social motives that drew young reformers toward settlement work; the sentence belongs to a historical argument for common civic life rather than a neutral empirical law.