enth century closed with the exclusive glorification of the
individual, of the _man_--as an entity in himself. In the works of
Rousseau this was only a beneficent, though exaggerated re-action
against the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages.

This individualism led directly to that artificiality in politics, which
I will consider a little further on in studying the relations between
the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling
classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic
anarchists,--since both alike imagine that the social organization can
be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,--more or less
murderous.

Modern biology has radically changed this conception of the _individual_
and it has demonstrated, in the domain of biology as in that of
sociology, that the individual is himself only an aggregation of more
simple living elements, and likewise that the individual in himself, the
_Selbstwesen_ of the Germans, does not exist in independent isolation,
but only as a member of a society (_Gliedwesen_).

Every living object is an association, a collectivity.

The monad itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of
biological individuality, is also an aggregate of various parts
(nucleus, _nucleole_, protoplasm), and each one of them in its turn is
an aggregate of molecules which are aggregates of atoms.

The atom does not exist alone, as an individual; the atom is invisible
and impalpable and it does not live.

And the complexity of the aggregation, the federation of the parts
constantly increases with the ascent in the zoological series from
protozoa to Man.

Unifying, Jacobin artificiality corresponds to the metaphysics of
individualism, just as the conception of national and international
federalism corresponds to the scientific character of modern socialism.

The organism of a mammal is simply a federation of tissues, organs and
anatomical machinery; the organism of a society can consist of nothing
but a federation of communes, provinces and regions; the organism of
humanity can be nothing but a federation of nations.

If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head should have to move
in the same fashion as the extremities and all of whose extremities
would have to perform the same motions simultaneously, there is no less
absurdity in a political and administrative organization in which the
extreme northern province or the mou