§ 11.

There is another form under which civilization can be generalized. We may consider it as a progress towards that constitution of man and society required for the complete manifestation of every one’s individuality. To be that which he naturally is—to do just what he would spontaneously do—is essential to the full happiness of each, and therefore to the greatest happiness of all. Hence, in virtue of the law of adaptation, our advance must be towards a state in which this entire satisfaction of every desire, or perfect fulfilment of individual life, becomes possible. In the beginning it is impossible. If uncontrolled, the impulses of the aboriginal man produce anarchy. Either his individuality must be curbed, or society must dissolve. With ourselves, though restraint is still needful, the private will of the citizen, not being so destructive of order, has more play. And further progress must be towards increased sacredness of personal claims, and a subordination of whatever limits them.

There are plenty of facts illustrating the doctrine that under primitive governments the repression of individuality is greatest, and that it becomes less as we advance. Referring to the people of Egypt, Assyria, China, and Hindostan, as contrasted with those of Greece, Mr. Grote says, “The religious and political sanction, sometimes combined and sometimes separate, determined for every one his mode of life, his creed, his duties, and his place in society, without leaving any scope for the will or reason of the individual himself.” The ownership of people by rulers, from its pure form under Darius, through its various modifications down to the time of “L’etat c’est moi,”Edition: current; Page: [435] and as even still typifed amongst ourselves in the expression, “my subjects,” must be considered as a greater of less merging of many individualities into one. The parallel relationships of slaves or serfs to their master, and of the family to its head, have implied the same thing. In short, all despotisms, whether political or religious, whether of sex, of caste, or of custom, may be generalized as limitations of individuality, which it is in the nature of civilization to remove.

Of course, in advancing from the one extreme, in which the state is everything and the individual nothing, to the other extreme, in which the individual is everything and the state nothing, society must pass through many intermediate phases. Aristocracy and democracy are not, as they have been called, separate and conflicting principles; but they and their various mixtures with each other and with monarchy mark the stages in this progress towards complete individuality. Nor is it only by amelioration of governmental forms that the growth of private claims as opposed to public ones is shown. It is shown, too, by the alteration in voluntary unions—in political parties, for instance; the manifest tendency of which is towards dissolution, by internal divisions, by diminution of power over their members, by increasing heterogeneity of opinion; that is—by the spread of a personal independence fatal to them. Still better do the changes in religious organizations illustrate this law. That multiplication of sects which has been going on in these latter times with increasing rapidity, and which is now so abundantly exemplified by the severing of the Establishment into Evangelical, High Church, and Puseyite; again, by the Free Church secession; again, by the schism of the Methodists; again, by Unitarian differences; again, by the splitting-off of numberless local congregations not to be classed; and, again, by the preaching that identity of opinion should not be the bond of union—the universal tendency to separate thus exhibited, is simply one of the ways in which a growing assertion of individuality comes out. Ultimately, by continual sub-division, what we call sects will disappear; and in place of Edition: current; Page: [436] that artificial uniformity, obtained by stamping men after an authorized pattern, there will arise one of nature’s uniformities—a general similarity, with infinitesimal differences.