"You've got one foot straddled into a farm and the other foot straddled into a bank; you ain't even got a good hand-hold where this boy was already an old man long before you damned Sartorises and Edmondses invented farms and banks to keep yourselves from having to find out what this boy was born knowing and fearing too maybe but without being afraid, that could go ten miles on a compass because he wanted to look at a bear none of us had ever got near enough to put a bullet in and looked at the bear and came the ten miles back on the compass in the dark; maybe by God that's the why and the wherefore of farms and banks"(Faulkner in "The Bear").

and Warren's comment:

"...they have cut themselves off from the fundamental truth which young Ike already senses. But the real contamination is that of the pure exploiters, the apostles of abstractionism, those who have the wrong attitude toward nature and therefore toward other men." ("William Faulkner" in Selected Essays, p. 70)

"Bank" and "farm" here are a sort of symbol for human institutions of commerce and ownership that separate humans from "fundamental truth," and worse, cultivate "the wrong attitude toward nature and therefore toward other men."
The 'right' attitude toward nature, and therefore toward other men, is love. Warren teases this conclusion out of Faulkner's writing on the conditions of ownership and possession.

'It was never Father's and Uncle Buddy's to bequeath to me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather's to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never old Ikkemotubbe's to sell to Grandfather for bequeathment and repudiation. Because it was never Ikkemotubbe's fathers' fathers' to bequeath Ikkemotubbe to sell to Grandfather or any man because on the instant when Ikkemotubbe discovered, realized, that he could sell it for money, on that instant it ceased ever to have been his forever, father to father, and the man who bought it bought nothing'(Faulkner in "The Bear")

Warren comments:

"In other words, reality cannot be bought. It can only be had by love."(Essays, p. 71)

and then clarifies with another quote:

God gave the earth to man, we read in 'The Bear,' not 'to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of his face for bread'(Essays, pp. 71-2).

We cannot ever own, then, and our ability to possess is contingent upon our understanding that possession can only happen as an element of "communal anonymity of brotherhood." To possess nature we must understand it in these terms, for "It can only be had by love." And the having of nature includes the having or acceptance of our ties to community. To possess anything really ‹ and to have a sense of self, one must possess something ‹ one must know and accept her relation to nature.
But "If there is glory, the burden...is ours./ If there is virtue, the burden...is ours"(Dragons, p. 211). Nature defines the possibilities and necessities of existence and inter-relation, but we must forge for ourselves glory and virtue in the face of that necessity. Dragons explores the process of reconciliation of self with the dictates of nature, and focuses on the interpersonal definition of self and human contact as the source of meaning ‹ that is, the source of "glory" and "virtue".
Jefferson's character, now somewhat cynical about his life in the world, introduces the problem of personal experience, and the sense of being totally subject to nature:

When the alacrity of blood stumbles and all natural joy
Sees Nature but as mirror for its fear,
And therefore, to be joy, must deny Nature
And leap beyond man's natural bourne and constriction
To find some justification for the natural. [Dragons, p 9]

The "alacrity of blood" is Jefferson carried away or inspired. His character describes the process of making the Declaration of Independence as a blinding blaze of delight that made his heart cry out, "Oh, this is Man!"(pp. 8-9) But though the moment was euphoric, and perhaps seemed an instant of pure, timeless excellence of ideal Man with a capital 'M', yet it was blinding. It took place at the "blind/ Blank labyrinthine turn of [Jefferson's] personal time." It was the act of a man caught up in the movements of History and of other men. One can also be caught up and drawn into an evil act, and it is this realization, forced upon Jefferson by the terrible crime of Lilburn Lewis, his nephew, that causes the alacrity of blood to "stumble." Joy that is natural, or derived from nature, is therefore heir to the same forces as the worst evil, isolation, and despair. Joy, to be joy, must therefore abandon the chief principle of the physiocrats ‹ also a chief principle of Jefferson's: the interpretation of Nature as the source for all subsequent principles ‹ and somehow "leap beyond man's natural bourne and constriction/ To find some justification for the natural."
Though Jefferson's character thus defines the problem, he has grown too cynical to solve it. It is the character of the author himself who offers, ironically, a Jeffersonian solution to the problem of leaping "beyond man's natural bourne." Warren accomplishes this as much negatively as positively, demonstrating the bad effects of isolation from others and denial of interdependence and positing the beneficial effects of a developed sense of brotherhood and an acceptance of interdependence and universal complicity.
Though the final resolution is essentially like the Jeffersonian faith in the mutual dependence of men, it stands precisely against Jefferson's revival of the Classical and his idealization of personal independence. In the same Query in which he lambasts the "mobs of great cities," Jefferson strongly criticizes dependence, saying it "begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." Only those who look "to their own soil and industry...for their subsistence," only those who are capable of life in isolation, will remain virtuous, for they are "the chosen people of God." But what is it in the nature of humanity that makes interdependence dangerous? Why should isolation preserve virtue?
According to Warren, Jefferson hoped that America would provide men the personal freedom necessary to overcome the effects of social-determination. Jefferson's love for the Classical lends some support for this interpretation, and this is where Warren focuses his attack. Warren tries to make Jefferson's dream for freedom from History a misguided fantasy of perfect isolation for every individual:
JEFFERSON:
And the Square House [Nîmes] spoke to my heart of some fair time
Beyond the Roman tax-squeeze, and the imperial
Lecentiousness, and the Gothic dark. It spoke
Of a fair time yet to come, but soon
If we might take man's hand, strike shackle, lead him forth
From his own monstrous nightmare‹then his natural innocence
Would dance like sunlight over the delighted landscape. [p.41]

WARREN:
For if responsibility [total freedom from the social conditioning of history] is not
The thing given but the thing to be achieved,
There is still no way out of the responsibility [the socially-developed directive]
Of trying to achieve responsibility.
So, like it or lump it, you are stuck. [p. 112]

Jefferson's character contrasts the clarity and self-evident structure of Nîmes with the "blind lobby, hall, enclave,/ Crank cul-de-sac, couloir, or corridor of Time"(p. 7). There is a conflict in Jefferson's thought between the timeless isolation of the Classical and the time-laden interdependence of the ideosyncratic or vernacular. Warren highlights the conflict and discards the Classical in favor of the ethics of interdependence that may be forged from the confrontation with one's unsavory history ‹ "imperial licentiousness" and "Gothic dark" ‹ and one's "monstrous nightmare" ‹ the fact that we all have "lain on the bed and devised evil in the heart;" the fact that we all have "stood in the sunlight and named the bad thing good and the good thing bad"(p. 214).
Warren defines evil as the attempt to isolate one's self. It is actually a noble effort, but because it is impossible, the effort often becomes a very radical resort to terrible acts ‹ deeds performed precisely because they are against all society and might therefore be the way to isolation. So, while Warren critiques the side of Jefferson that wants total independence, he does not blame Jefferson. Indeed, he asserts our universal complicity in such efforts as a prime means of achieving the glory and virtue of brotherly interdependence. For Warren, "every act is but a door/ Between two rooms, on equal hinges hung"(p. 55): with the same act, one may increase her sense of isolation, or work to establish brotherhood. This is one source of the complicity he talks about, for it means that everyone is necessarily capable of the worst evils, as well as the greatest goods. The structure of possibility dictates this. Thus, the universality of momentary isolation makes the human bond identifiable.
Warren uses his own life to support this claim. He describes his acceptance of his father's reconciliation with Nature, justifies the reconciliation in terms of the human effort to maintain hope through one's fellows, and shows that even such a "sweet" moment holds the potential for isolation:
And thus I saw [my father's] life a story told,
Its glory and reproach domesticated,
And for one moment felt that I had come
To that most happy and difficult conclusion:
To be reconciled to the father's own reconciliation. [p. 28]

There's worse, I guess, than in the end to offer
Your last bright keepsake, some fragment of the vase
That held your hopes, to offer it to a child.
And the child took the crazy toy, and laughed.
I wish you could tell me why I find this scene so sweet. [p. 31]

I have been stranger at the breaking of bread.
I have been stranger at the monstrous conversation of ocean,
And when the pretty child laid a hand on my knee.
I have, in other words, shared the most common
Human experience, which makes all mankind one,
For isolation is the common lot,
And paradoxically, it is only by
That isolation that we know how to name
The human bond and thus define the self. [p. 205]

Our common liability to isolation is the fiber from which human bonds are spun, but isolation itself can go too far. Pursued too single-mindedly, independence from the world leads to hopeless anguish:

And strange: For love was all he asked, yet love
Is the intolerable accusation of guilt
To all the yearning Lilburns who cannot love,
So must destroy who loves, and achieve at last
The desiderated and ice-locked anguish of isolation. [p. 113]

Isolation feeds on itself. To one who has isolated herself, the hand outstretched in love says only, "Love is unconditional and selfless. Your isolation requires my sacrifice of self. You are guilty for my sacrifice!" Taken to its limits, Jefferson's philosophy of independence leads to this prison-like state of isolation.
Warren's alternative relies on the assumption that the fulfillment of being is the same for all humans. Brother to Dragons goes far toward demonstrating aspects of experience that are universally human, and shows us that we are all liable to the same acts of isolation. This is to be the "common lot" within which we build a sense of self and of virtue's possibility. Warren:
In so far as man has the simplest vanity of self,
There is no escape from the movement toward fulfillment.
And since all kind but fulfills its own kind,
Fulfillment is only in the degree of recognition
Of the common lot of our kind. And that is the death of vanity,
And that is the beginning of virtue.

The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence.
The recognition of necessity is the beginning of freedom.
The recognition of the direction of fulfillment is the death of the self,
And the death of the self is the beginning of selfhood.
All else is surrogate of hope and destitution of spirit. (p. 214)

Jefferson's philosophy of independence tries to effect the "beginning of selfhood" by making the self the beginning and end of all action. Jeffersonian independence requires a denial of nature. On the contrary, Warren's extension and elaboration of Jefferson's ethics of interdependence requires a reconciliation with nature's power, "the recognition of necessity." This reconciliation, in turn, requires the Faulknerian 'right attitude' of humility toward nature. It requires also the recognition of human fulfillment as a communal endeavor, and the concomitant recognition of our universal complicity in the crimes of individuals and in the crimes of history. Warren's position takes the philosophy of independence into account, making it a key means of achieving a sense of "common lot," but Warren's principles and the ideals of absolute independence are thoroughly incompatible.

Warren, Robert Penn, Selected Essays
Kingsport, TN, 1951 by Kingsport Press, Inc. for Random House, Inc.

Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia, "Query XIX".
[from a photocopy: edition unknown]