ABSTRACT
To put the historical movement in perspective, you first have to define your perspective. In the history of ideas everything is related to everything else, but to keep his exercise within manageable bounds the historian has to set some limits. Take, for example, the idea of individuality. The sense of the significance of the individual in history is particularly characteristic of the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, reaching its extreme form in the cult of the hero as we find it in the thought of Fichte or Carlyle. But we can trace the concept of individuality back, in both secular and religious forms, to its remote origins — through, for example, Montaigne’s amiable egocentrism and the Renaissance quest for completeness of individual culture, on the one hand, and the protestant stress on personal faith and Luther’s notion of the Wundermann, God’s instrument to change the world, on the other. From the powerful egotism of Abelard and the intense subjectivity of Augustine, we can push the idea of individuality back to the New Testament’s concern for the individual who must work out his own salvation. But why stop there? To complete the picture, one would need to look also at the classical antecedents of the Renaissance and the Old Testament background of the New.
