ngs. And even the mean and insignificant man is what he is,
in virtue of the humanity which is blurred and distorted within him; and
he can shed his insignificance and meanness, only by becoming a truer
vehicle for that humanity.

Thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound
to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while "the
individual," in the old sense of a being _opposed_ to society and
_opposed_ to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought,
not discoverable anywhere, because not real. And, on the other hand,
society is no longer "collective," but so organic that the whole is
potentially in every part--an organism _of_ organisms.

The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which
concerns itself with man is not to be measured. It is already fast
changing all the practical sciences of man--economics, politics, ethics
and religion. The material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a
new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation.
But human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new
significance. The idea of duty has received an expansion almost
illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and
dignity--for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man's chance
of being good? When we contrast this view of the life of man as the life
of humanity in him, with the old individualism, we may say that morality
also has at last, in Bacon's phrase, passed from the narrow seas into
the open ocean. And after all, the greatest achievement of our age may
be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has
made possible the science of man. We have, at length, reached a point of
view from which we may hope to understand ourselves. Law, order,
continuity, in human action--the essential pre-conditions of a moral
science--were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory. It left to
ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or
law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in
his nature. Naturalism did the first. Intuitionism, the second. The
former made human action the _re_action of a natural agent on the
incitement of natural forces. It made man a mere object, a _thing_
capable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being
pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an
ext