ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries established authority came under criticism from many points of view. The authority of the church was challenged by the claims of conscience; the authority of law and government was opposed by the natural right of the individual. Presently the whole social structure, the notions of political prosperity and national well-being were scrutinized in. the interest of the happiness of individual men and women. It is not my purpose here to trace the movements of these theories, nor to show how in some forms they were brought round to a justiW20Cion of the social order, while in others they issued in a more or less revolutionary ideal. I call attention only to the tendency to judge the state, the fabric of law and government, the structure of social institutions in terms of and by reference to the conscience or the rights or the happiness of individuals. This tendency is not very happily or fairly described when it is called a tendency to put the individual above society. This suggests a kind of egoism, as though one man counted for more than millions. It is more fairly to be described as an effort to go back from institutions, laws and forms, to the real life that lay behind them, insisting that this was a life of individual men and women with souls to be saved, with personalities to be respected, or simply with capacity for feeling anguish or enjoying their brief span of life. The danger was that the emphasis on personality might be exaggerated to the point of depreciating the common life, that criticism might degenerate into anarchy, and what was valuable in the social tradition might be thrown away along with what was bad. The natural man might be endowed with none of the vices and all the virtues of his civilized counterpart, and it might be supposed that, if left to himself, or enabled to start afresh without the incubus of the established order upon him, he would build up a new life incomparably more free and beautiful. The exaggeration of revolution is the opportunity of reaction, and in the new world of theory, partly A4X42C8ng, partly anticipating the world of action, exaggerated individualism paved the way for reconstructions. Of these the most far-reaching and in the end the most 8=XD4=C8al was the metaphysical theory which challenged the whole assumption, tacit or avowed, of the critical school in all its forms, by setting up the stale as a greater being, a spirit, a superpersonal entity, in which individuals with their private consciences or claims of right, their happiness or their misery, are merely subordinate elements.
