vn] The Awakening of Personality 2 1 3 



played by external- and by self-determination, in the 

 earliest stages of the development of personality. At 

 first a state lives by a process of barter. Later a token- 

 currency is accepted in lieu of goods in kind, for reasons 

 of practical convenience. This closes the community, 

 making a unit-state, which involves great gain, but also 

 debarring it from any but a very limited trade in kind 

 with other unit-states which have adopted a different 

 currency. An inter-state currency becomes essential. 

 Once this gold basis is established, import and export 

 can be carried on, so long as imports do not exceed ex- 

 ports. When this inter-state currency becomes recog- 

 nised as the only basis of exchange, internally as well 

 as externally, the unit ceases to be isolated, and it can 

 command all commodities. 



Apply this to groups of organisms. Let imports and 

 exports represent the results of freedom issuing in crea- 

 tive work. Let the gold basis be self-determination 

 true choice; the token currency the vital impulse. 



Imagine what would happen if the gold basis were 

 absent, and yet the limitation of natural economic laws 

 did not exist. In exchange for exported necessaries each 

 unit would be flooded with useless tokens which had no 

 relation to the life of the state, and which no one within 

 it would accept. It would also tend to be flooded with 

 imported luxury-articles of no necessary use to itself 

 as well as necessary articles, as inevitably happens in 

 trading, for which it had exchanged the only currency 

 of which its members understood the meaning. The 

 result would be utter chaos. Everything turns upon the 

 international gold basis. 



So with the organism. Till self-determination is won 

 there must be external limitation by rigid laws, or the 

 issue will be chaos. When the meaning of activities is 

 understood as part of a whole; when the ideas of solid- 

 arity, of purpose, of the organic relationship of indi- 



