.

{64}

CHAPTER IV

MONISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL

When Tennyson, in _Locksley Hall_, wrote the line declaring that "the
individual withers and the world is more and more," he might have been
inditing a prophecy summing up those modern tendencies which have
engaged our attention in preceding chapters. And there are perhaps few
more important questions before us to-day than this--whether Tennyson's
prophecy is to be fulfilled, whether the individual is to be allowed to
"wither," and the world to become more and more. There are those who
hold that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; there are those
who regard any movement making in such a direction with something more
than suspicion.

Let us say at once that in discussing the status of the individual, we
are not referring--at least, not directly--to the struggle between
Individualism and Socialism. We know that individualists express the
fear that under a socialist _regime_ there would be an end to
individual initiative, while socialists retort that the chief sin of
the competitive system is {65} that it crushes and destroys
individuality; but between the contentions of these rival schools of
economics we are not attempting to adjudicate. Perhaps we cannot
better indicate the scope of our subject than by quoting from two
recent theological works, written from such widely differing points of
view as Professor Peake's _Christianity: Its Nature and its Truth_,
and Professor Bousset's _The Faith of a Modern Protestant_:--

"It is only in it"--_viz._, in Christianity--says the learned Primitive
Methodist theologian, "that the individual has received his true place.
In antiquity the worth of the individual was greatly under-estimated;
he was unduly subordinated to the community. But the Christian
religion, by insisting on the infinite value of each human soul, and by
asserting the greatness of its destiny, supplied an immense incentive
to the attainment by each of the highest within reach. The doctrine of
the worth of man is, to all who accept it, a powerful stimulus in the
struggle to a fuller and deeper life. An interest in mankind in the
mass is compatible with heartless indifference to the lot of
individuals" (p. 88).

"The Gospel," declares the Goettingen modernist, "announces a God who
seeks and desires above all else the individual human soul. It unites,
in a security and closeness hitherto unknown, belief in God with the
importance of the