ope of preserving the savor of the salt of knowledge. Thus he says:

I thought that the sciences contained in books, (such of them at least
as are made up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations),
composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals
massed together, are farther removed from truth than the simple
inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced
judgment draws respecting the matters of his experience.[3]

Spinoza, who both abandoned the world and was abandoned by it, sought
an individual philosophy of life that should be more universal than the
opinion of the world on account of its greater truth. "Further
reflection convinced me, that if I could really get to the root of the
matter I should be leaving certain evils for a certain good." [4]

This was the impulse in which modern tolerance of individual opinion
and appeal to {36} individual conscience originated. It was a protest
not against order, but against the disheartening drag, the heavy and
dull constraint, of an order externally imposed. Freedom was valued
not for the sake of lawlessness, but for the sake of a clearer
recognition of the proper laws of things, of the principles that lie in
nature and civilization and control them inherently.

Individualism in this sense is not sceptical. Even a charge that
existing codes of morality and systems of thought are largely matters
of social habit, or rules devised by church and state to maintain an
arbitrary and profitable power, does not justify the inference that
there is no truth. For there is no dilemma between public tyranny and
private caprice. On the contrary, it means that tyranny is itself a
form of caprice, and that caprice in any form must give way before
reason and experiment. Certain contemporary popular philosophers, such
as Wells and Shaw, appear to believe that to repudiate the rigid
conventions of the day means to abolish absolute distinctions utterly
and fall back upon a general laxity and vagueness. But this is to
throw out the baby with the bath. The evil in convention is the
substitution of merely _habitual_ distinctions for real distinctions,
and the only justification for an assault on convention is the bringing
of such real distinctions to light.

{37}

The individualist virtually claims that an individual's belief, if it
be critical, is entitled to precedence over public belief, simply
because the individual mind is a