individual human life. It {66} is the religion of
religious individualism raised to its highest point." (p. 36).

Such concurrence of testimony from two such different quarters is as
remarkable as it is significant; and this brings us to our point. The
question with which we are confronted to-day, and which our
civilisation must either answer aright or perish, is not whether an
individualist or a socialist state would be more conducive to the
individual's self-realisation, but whether Christianity is right or
wrong in its doctrine of the individual's paramount importance. The
issue, as we shall try to show, lies between Christianity on the one
hand and Monism on the other. From the Christian point of view the
individual matters supremely; from that of Monism the beginning of
wisdom is that the individual should recognise and acquiesce in his
utter insignificance.

As in our last chapter we glanced at the monistic ethics, so in the
present one we propose to inquire briefly first into the social and
then into the religious implications of this theory, which it must be
remembered is receiving a good deal of support, and meeting with a
large measure of acceptance just now. Turning, then, to the social
side first of all, no one, of course, would say that Socialism as such
was monistic; on the other hand it is easy to understand the attraction
of Socialism for those whose philosophy is Monism. They will embrace
the economic teachings of Collectivism the more {67} eagerly in exact
proportion to their root-conviction that the only thing that matters is
the totality of things, while the individual, _per se_, does not count
at all. That is the conception which underlies the Socialism of a
writer like Mr. Wells, who is in nothing more emphatic than in
asserting that the individual as such has no value at all. "Our
individualities," he says, "are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon
the great stream of the blood of the species." "The race is the drama,
and we are the incidents." "In so far as we are individuals . . . we
are accidental, disconnected, without significance." And when we ask
for what we should strive and labour, if not for the good of individual
men and women, his answer is that we ought to work for the Species, for
the Race, for what he calls a great physical and mental being, to wit,
Mankind.

Now we believe that this philosophy, consistently embraced, is utterly
devoid of the dynamic which can genera