United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But are you so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed? I thought I had observed pardon me for saying it on the two or three occasions we have met, some degenerate signs of individualism? You take pleasure in the old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor people out of the mire in your own way.
His higher activities are spent in the service of the Church, in the service of Art and Science. Treitschke has fought this heresy of individualism in all his writings. The interest of the individual cannot be opposed to the interest of the State. The individual can only realize himself, he can only realize the higher life, in and through the State.
Starting from this principle, such a society would find itself forced from the very outset to abandon all forms of wages. The migrated individualism of the Collectivist system certainly could not maintain itself alongside a partial communism the socialization of land and the instruments of production. A new form of property requires a new form of remuneration.
And even where life becomes relatively secure and individualism possible, the greatest good for the greatest number is attainable only by continual cooperation and mutual sacrifice. So vital is it to each member of the community that selfishness and cruelty in others be repressed, that society cannot afford to leave at least the grosser forms of egoism unpunished.
And so it has come about that the very quality that is his strength and charm as a man his staunch individualism is proving his weakness and reproach as a neighbor and citizen. The virtue of a time out-worn has become the vice of an age new-born. The mountaineers are non-social.
Property had mainly passed into personal possession Society had recrystallized around the individual. Individualism had developed its customary tendencies to inequality. The ancient equality of the free farmers of Israel was already disappearing. Fortunes, undreamed of a couple of centuries earlier, were becoming common. Greed was pushing men beyond legitimate acquisition into respectable robbery.
"These things are cited not because there is any disposition to urge that there should be encroachment by the federal government on local control. It is the healthful, reasonable individualism of American national life that has enabled the people of this country to think for themselves. We have no will to impair their independence.
Therefore a simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals, and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality.
But it is probable that their effects survived in the recognition of the possibility of religious worship apart from the traditional cults, and, more generally, in contributing to the establishment of the principle of individualism in religion. An historical connection between the Greek mysteries and the later individualistic cults is, indeed, not probable.
The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in The Spanish People, upon which I commented in an essay published in La España Moderna. And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical or, rather, metaphysical systems.
Word Of The Day