freedom of observation and imagination involved in
the modern scientific revolution were not easily secured; they had to be
fought for; many suffered for their intellectual independence. But, upon
the whole, modern European society first permitted, and then, in some
fields at least, deliberately encouraged the individual reactions which
deviate from what custom prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new
lines, inventions, finally came to be either the social fashion, or in
some degree tolerable. However, as we have already noted, philosophic
theories of knowledge were not content to conceive mind in the
individual as the pivot upon which reconstruction of beliefs turned,
thus maintaining the continuity of the individual with the world of
nature and fellow men. They regarded the individual mind as a separate
entity, complete in each person, and isolated from nature and hence from
other minds. Thus a legitimate intellectual individualism, the attitude
of critical revision of former beliefs which is indispensable to
progress, was explicitly formulated as a moral and social individualism.
When the activities of mind set out from customary beliefs and strive
to effect transformations of them which will in turn win general
conviction, there is no opposition between the individual and the
social. The intellectual variations of the individual in observation,
imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the agencies of
social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of social
conservation. But when knowledge is regarded as originating and
developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of
one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.

When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied,
it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual
with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious
separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion
that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed
continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of
everybody else. But when men act, they act in a common and public world.
This is the problem to which the theory of isolated and independent
conscious minds gave rise: Given feelings, ideas, desires, which have
nothing to do with one another, how can actions proceeding from them
be controlled in a social or public interest? Given an egoist