238 SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL 



individuals with individuals and of class with class, it is 

 not easy to maintain one's faith in the reality of the moral 

 cosmos. It is more easy to sympathize both with the 

 Socialists and with the Individualists who, for different and 

 even opposite reasons, despair of reconciling the two 

 primary conditions of man's welfare, and of identifying 

 public and private good. Instead of the reconciliation of 

 these two vital elements, they would postpone, even if they 

 do not desire to suppress, one element in favour of the 

 other. They differ only in regard to what shall be put in 

 the fore and what in the back ground. The Socialist, 

 weary of the strain and the strife of the competitive world 

 of private interests, would take away the occasion of these 

 apparent evils, or as much of it as is supposed to lie in 

 the unrestricted possession and use of wealth, in order 

 to secure a closer social unity. The Individualist, on the 

 other hand, would resist what seems to him to be the 

 mechanization of society and of the individuals which con- 

 stitute it, in order to maintain that personal independence 

 and enterprise to which he is prone to attribute social 

 advance so far as it has been secured. As a matter of 

 theory they might both be equally ready to admit that, in 

 an ideal state of matters, the intimate unity of the whole 

 and the independence of the parts would coexist. But in 

 practice they despair of this ideal. They cannot see that, 

 as we have shown, this ideal is in process of being actual- 

 ized, and that the evolution of both individual character 

 and of such social communities as the State, are simply 

 evidences of its operation. They see only the imperfectly 

 unified elements of the ideal ; and they assume an attitude 

 of negation and antagonism to either the one or the other 

 of them. They fall into the service of an abstraction, and 



