would seem to them to have reached the
highest ideal. The same people admire an old French garden, with its
clipped yew-trees, forming artificial walls and towers and pyramids, far
more than the giant yews which, like large serpents, clasp the soil with
their coiling roofs, and overshadow with their dark green branches the
white chalk cliffs of the Thames. But those French gardens, unless they
are constantly clipped and prevented from growing, soon fall into decay.
As in nature, so in society, uniformity means but too often stagnation,
while variety is the surest sign of health and vigor. The deepest secret
of nature is its love of continued novelty. Its tendency, if unrestrained,
is towards constantly creating new varieties, which, if they fulfil their
purpose, become fixed for a time, or, it may be, forever; while others,
after they have fulfilled their purpose, vanish to make room for new and
stronger types.

The same is the secret of human society. It consists and lives in
individuals, each meant to be different from all the others, and to
contribute his own peculiar share to the common wealth. As no tree is like
any other tree, and no leaf on the same tree like any other leaf, no human
being is, or is meant to be, exactly like any other human being. It is in
this endless, and to us inconceivable, variety of human souls that the
deepest purpose of human life is to be realized; and the more society
fulfils that purpose, the more its allows free scope for the development
of every individual germ, the richer will be the harvest in no distant
future. Such is the mystery of individuality that I do not wonder if even
those philosophers who, like Mill, confine the use of the word _sacred_
within the very smallest compass, see in each individual soul something
sacred, something to be revered, even where we cannot understand it,
something to be protected against all vulgar violence.

Where I differ from Mill and his school is on the question as to the
quarter from whence the epidemic of uniformity springs which threatens the
free development of modern society. Mill points to the society in which we
move; to those who are in front of us, to our contemporaries. I feel
convinced that our real enemies are at our back, and that the heaviest
chains which are fastened on us are those made, not by the present, but by
past generations--by our ancestors, not by our contemporaries.

It is on this point, on the trammels of individual f