first
actually taken, and how it is maintained and extended to-day, we shall
consider in a later chapter. In the present place its importance for
us is twofold. First we must realize the logical difficulty of the
step--its apparently self-contradictory nature. And secondly we need
to see that fully developed and continuously progressive national life
is impossible without it. The development of a nation under the
communal principle may advance far, even to the attainment of a
relatively high grade of civilization. But the fully centralized and
completely self-conscious nation cannot come into existence except on
the basis of this last step of communo-individualism. The growth of
nationalism proper, and the high development of civilization through
the rise of the sciences and the arts based upon individualism, all
await the dawn of the era of which communo-individualism is the
leading, though at first unrecognized, characteristic.

This individualistic development of the communal principle is its
intensive development; it is the focalizing and centralizing of the
consciousness of the national unity in each individual member. The
extensive process of communal enlargement must ever be accompanied by
the intensive establishment in the individual of the communal ideal,
the objective by the subjective, the physical by the psychical, if the
accidental association for individual profit is to develop into the
permanent association for the national as well as the individual life.
The intensive or subjective development of the communal principle
does, as a matter of fact, take place in all growing communities, but
it is largely unconscious. Not until the final stages of national
development does it become a self-conscious process, deserving the
distinctive name I have given it here, communo-individualism.[CG]

The point just made is, however, only one aspect of a more general
fact, too, of cardinal importance for the sociologist and the student
of human evolution. It is that, throughout the entire period of the
expansion of the community, there has been an equally profound,
although wholly unconscious, development of the individual. This fact
seems to have largely escaped the notice of all but the most recent
thinkers and writers on the general topic of human and social
evolution. The fact and the importance of the communal life have been
so manifest that, in important senses, the individual has been almost,
if not wholly, dropp