INDIVIDUALISM 455 



decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence." ^ Here we are far 

 from the imperative which Kant, the founder of philosophic 

 LiberaUsm, enunciated as a maxim for the State : " Treat every 

 man as an end in himself, not as a means to an end." 



To recapitulate what we have said so far, we may say that 

 two fundamental ideas underlie Liberal polity— the rights of the 

 individual as an individual, and the unrestricted competition 

 between individuals. The second condition is supposed to 

 render the fulfilment of the first condition possible. Let us 

 briefly inquire whether these two fundamental notions of Liberal 

 pohty are consistent with each other. 



Every individual, according to the tenets of Liberalism, brings 

 into the world with him certain inherent rights — rights which he 

 is possessed of as an individual, as a citizen of the State. Accord- 

 ing to Kant, as we saw, these rights are summed up in the ideas 

 of hberty, equality, and the faculty of disposing of his welfare 

 as he pleases ; and this doctriae of Kant's is that of Liberalism 

 in general. Individuahsm, accordiag to Dietzel, is constituted, 

 as a philosophy, by the combination of all those social theories 

 which regard the individual as an end in himself, and all the social 

 institutions, such as the family, the professions, the State, the 

 different rehgions, the law, morahty, as means created for the 

 benefit of the individual, by whom they are preserved and 

 modified. 2 Thus, every individual is possessed of rights as 

 individual and citizen ; and the first of these rights, as we have 

 seen, is the freedom to develop his personality to the utmost of 

 his power, in the manner in which he thinks best. But every 

 individual being possessed, as individual and citizen, of a similar 

 right, it follows that the rights of the difierent individuals 

 mutually limit each other. Here, then, we meet with a restric- 



^ Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, p. 67. 

 * H. Dietzel, article Individwdismiis in Handworterbuch der Staatswis- 

 senschaften, vol. v., p. .564. Jena, 1892. 



