234 SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL 



society is essentially individual or " personal," if that 

 more highly favoured and less accurate term be preferred. 

 I do not mean by this that society as it approaches its ideal 

 becomes more like a physical organism in having one brain 

 or one centre of self-conscious activity. The idea of 

 organism thus metaphorically used has really very little 

 value ; and we contribute little to the solution of social 

 problems by multiplying ingenious analogies between 

 physiological and social tissues, organs and functions. 

 Society is a hyper-organism. It shows a tendency to be 

 all in every part, in a way to which the physical organism 

 furnishes no adequate parallel. A society has not reached 

 its ideal until it has as many centres of conscious activity 

 as it has members. To the individual who does not com- 

 prehend his relations to his fellows, the community is a 

 mechanical system and a hard taskmaster. He is implicitly 

 at war with it, and a public danger. And a society be it 

 a family, a municipality, a church or a state is really one 

 only if all that are in it are also of it ; only if its meaning 

 is open to all its members and its purposes beat in every 

 one of its organs. The truth of individuality is thus to 

 be found in a fully organized society ; and of society in 

 a fully developed individual. 



I find this truth very generally acknowledged in our 

 day in a manner. No doubt what strikes us, when we 

 first contemplate modern social life, is its apparently irre- 

 concilable internecine conflicts. These conflicts, moreover, 

 are reflected into the doctrines of thinkers upon this subject, 

 as well as into the proposals of practical reformers ; so that 

 the difference between Socialist and Individualist has 

 become more immediately important, as well as more 

 passionate, than perhaps any other. Nevertheless, we 



