32 A TIIEOEY OP LIFE DEDUCED 



through the instrumentality of justice and sympathy in 

 their most highly developed and most completely diversified 

 form in a word, through the moral perfection of the 

 human race. ^ 



The political creed of the philosophical evolutionist, then, 

 is the doctrine of individualism. Not crude, anarchistic, or 

 anti-social individualism, however; for society, as we have 

 seen, cannot attain perfection until its units are bound 

 together by the closest ties of sympathy. The individualism 

 which the philosophical evolutionist advocates fully recog- 

 nizes the brotherhood of man ; and, in order that due 

 prominence may be assigned to its cooperating character, 

 it might be designated as social individualism, to indicate 

 more clearly the distinctive features of the ideal state from 

 the standpoint of political evolution. This term has, too, 

 the advantage of indicating on its face that the philosophi- 

 cal evolutionist recognizes that modicum of truth contained 

 in the perverted notions of the anarchists, on the one hand, 

 and the exaggerations of the socialists, on the other. That 

 men ought to be perfectly free, as Anarchy asserts, and 

 that the freedom of each ought to be regulated for the 

 benefit of all, as Socialism maintains, are propositions which 

 the philosophical evolutionist admits when conjoined with 

 the all-essential further truth that human beings never can 

 be perfectly free, nor can the freedom of each ever be 

 completely under the regulative control of all, until men 

 are perfectly moral. When we will not do what we ought 

 not to do, while yet having complete freedom to do it; 

 when liberty, externally uncontrolled, is internally controlled; 

 when we have only such desires, hopes, or ambitions as 

 belong to the ideal man, then ought we to be, and shall we 

 be, perfectly free ; then ought we to feel, and shall we feel, 

 constrained to work for the welfare of humanity .> 



