and society is an organism, of which the life of the indi-
vidual is a temporary function. Society, in other
words, is the concrete reality, of which the individual
is a mere abstraction.

We are therefore prepared to hear from contemporary
ethics that "all morality is social"; that goodness is
synonymous with altruism; and that reason and duty
can now dictate nothing but self-sacrifice for the good
of society and of the race. And logic tells the same story.
For truth is also social; it turns out now to be nothing
but the opinion of the race as against that of the indi-
vidual. Along the same line history, economics, and
sociology treat the individual as an episode in a social
and economic movement, a merely passing detail of
an essentially social process. Likewise for psychology
mental development is social. The individual is the
product of society. Through heredity society provides
him with a set of "social" instincts to begin with, and
then carefully guides the development of these instincts
into a "socially-formed" personal character. Child-
psychology, so-called, fairly wallows in the social, and
condemns the poor child to an exclusively social life. I
have somewhere seen a pedagogical treatise in which the
child rose in the morning, donned his social vestments,
ate a social breakfast, and went about his social occupa-
tions, indulging later in the day in some social recreation
and some further social refection, -- after which, I
should say, it remained only to put on his social night-
gown and tuck him into his social bed.

The term "social" has thus become only a piece of
academic slang. Yet beneath this indiscriminateness
of usage there is implied still an antithesis and con-
tradiction between the social and the individual, to the
disadvantage of the individual. As the social has come

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