analyzed,
and is perhaps wholly unable to analyze, the discovery that he is not
a thing among things; his life has a universal aspect. He lives more
and more the universal life, subjecting the demands of the once
domineering present to decisions of a cool judgment that looks back
into the past and carefully weighs the interests of the future,
temporal and eternal. Every advance made by the community is thus
stored up to the credit of its individual members. So far, then, from
the development of the communal principle consisting of and coming
about through a limitation of the individual, it is exactly the
reverse. Only as the individual develops are communal unity and
progress possible. And on the other hand, only where the communal
principle has reached its highest development, both extensively and
intensively, do we find the most highly developed personality. The one
is a necessary condition of the other. The deepest, blackest
selfishness, even, can only come into existence where the communal
principle has reached its highest development.

The preceding statement, however, is not equivalent to saying that
when communalism and individualism arose in human consciousness they
were both accepted as equally important. The reverse seems always to
have been the case. As soon as the two principles are distinguished in
thought, the communal is at once ranked as the higher, and the
individual principle is scorned if not actually rejected. And the
reason for this is manifest. From earliest times the constant foe
which the community has had to fight and exterminate has been the
wanton, selfish individual. Individualism of this type was the
spontaneous contrast to the communal life, and was ever manifesting
itself. No age or race has been without it, nor ignorant of it. As
soon as the two principles became clearly contrasted in thought,
therefore, because of his actual experience, man could conceive of
individualism only as the antithesis to communalism; it was felt that
the two were mutually destructive. It inevitably followed that
communalism as a principle was accepted and individualism condemned.
In their minds not only social order, but existence itself, was at
stake. And they were right. Egoistic individualism is necessarily
atomistic. No society can long maintain its life as a unified and
peaceful society, when such a principle has been widely accepted by
its members. The social ills of this and of every age largely arise