The relationship described in Chapter 10 has another side to it. Every friendship and serious relationship with another person, which you enter into deliberately on the basis that it will be temporary, you enter into for what you can get out of it. I am not of course referring to business or professional partnerships which are entered into for mutual convenience, and are governed presumably by the rules of the Social Contract. I am referring to serious personal relationships; they are either intended to be permanent, or they are egotistical to some degree. In analytical terms what I am saying amounts to an assertion that there is a relationship between the hardening of a person's consciousness into egotism, which is exterior observation, and the thoughts he thinks within, which is interior observation. This would seem likely, since the consciousness is the framework within which the mind does all its thinking. In human terms it amounts to an assertion that a yearning for immortality is so built into our nature that an acceptance of mortality is an aberration. Let us try to see whether the assertion is true, by considering man's attitude to the passing of time.