ed out of sight. The individual has been
conceived to have been from the very beginning of social evolution
fully endowed with mind, ideas, and brains, and to be perfectly
regardless of all other human beings. The development of the community
has accordingly been conceived to be a progressive taming and subduing
of this wild, self-centered, primitive man; a process of eliminating
his individualistic instincts. So far as the individual is concerned,
it has been conceived to be chiefly a negative process; a process of
destroying his individual desires and plans and passions. Man's
natural state has been supposed to be that of absolute selfishness.
Only the hard necessity of natural law succeeded in forcing him to
curb his natural selfish desires and to unite with his fellows. Only
on these terms could he maintain even an existence. Those who have not
accepted these terms have been exterminated. Communal life in all its
forms, from the family upward to the most unified and developed
nation, is thus conceived as a continued limiting of the individual--a
necessity, indeed, to his existence, but none the less a limitation.

I am unable to take this view, which at best is a one-sided statement.
It appears to me capable of demonstration, that communal and
individual development proceed pari passu; that every gain in the
communal life is a gain to the individual and vice versa. They are
complementary, not contradictory processes. Neither can exist, in any
proper sense, apart from the other; and the degree of the development
of the one is a sure index of the degree of the development of the
other. So important is this matter that we must pause to give it
further consideration.

Consider, first, man in his earliest stage of development. A
relatively segregarious animal; with a few ideas about the nuts and
fruits and roots on which he lives; with a little knowledge as to
where to find them; the subject of constant fear lest a stronger man
may suddenly appear to seize and carry off his wife and food;
possessing possibly a few articulate sounds answering to words; such
probably was primitive man. He must have been little removed from the
ape. His "self," his mind, was so small and so empty of content that
we could hardly recognize him as a man, should we stumble on him in
the forest.

Look next upon him after he has become a family-man. Living in the
group, his life enlarges; his existence broadens; his ideas multiply;
his vocabu