ABSTRACT
The confusing succession of new social discoveries in pre-modern Europe, and the discoveries of the facts of nature in our own time obscured the fundamental dependence of all civilization upon labour. It is now realized as a fact which was hardly noticed before, although it was fundamental in the very earliest civilization. The freedom which is necessary for the exercise of labour or thought has been as little understood as labour itself. It has been assumed that freedom means the absence of limitation, which is correct but misleading; for it explains by a negative, and has therefore led to the absurdities of individualism. In that theory the free man was the man without a setting, for it was forgotten that the value of freedom lies in the original impulse, and not in the absence of an obstacle. The positive conception of freedom displaces the idea of limitation by that of natural growth.
