Note 255 — Front matter (continued 6)

In the introduction to my earliest book, The New Spirit (1889), I set forth this position, from which I have never departed: "While we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life." No doubt such a point of view was implicit in Ruskin and other previous writers, just as it has subsequently been set forth by Ellen Key and others, while from the economic side it has been well formulated by Mr. J.A. Hobson in his Evolution of Capital: "The very raison d'être of increased social cohesiveness is to economize and enrich the individual life, and to enable the play of individual energy to assume higher forms out of which more individual satisfaction may accrue." "Socialism will be of value," thought Oscar Wilde in his Soul of Man, "simply because it will lead to Individualism." "Socialism denies economic Individualism for any," says Karl Nötzel ("Zur Ethischen Begrundung des Sozialismus," Sozialistische Monatshefte, 1910, Heft 23), "in order to make moral intellectual Individualism possible for all." And as it has been seen that Socialism leads to Individualism, so it has also been seen that Individualism, even on the ethical plane, leads to Socialism. "You must let the individual make his will a reality in the conduct of his life," Bosanquet remarks in an essay already quoted, "in order that it may be possible for him consciously to entertain the social purpose as a constituent of his will. Without these conditions there is no social organism and no moral Socialism.... Each unit of the social organism has to embody his relations with the whole in his own particular work and will; and in order to do this the individual must have a strength and depth in himself proportional to and consisting of the relations which he has to embody." Grant Allen long since clearly set forth the harmony between Individualism and Socialism in an article published in the Contemporary Review in 1879.