Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/82

 of the interplay of individual and social motives was the key to the social thinking of Hobhouse. His stress on personality as the end and object of all social processes carried a denial of any group or social mind other than the orderly interplay of individual minds and reduced such a term as “esprit de corps” to a personal feeling common to the members of a co-operative group. To him there was nothing possible or desirable for man in the communism of a beehive or an anthill where the individual welfare of the several members was subordinated to, controlled by, and consisted of the general welfare of a social organism. In any human society evolving into such an organism, the whole value of free personality would be lost.

Though Hobhouse, of course, fully admitted the effects of social institutions and intercourse in helping to mould the character of a person, nobody in close acquaintance with him could fail to perceive that his will-power for self-determination in all affairs down to the smallest home detail was unusually strong, and that while freely expending his energy for his own conception of the good of others, he did not easily yield to the efforts of others to influence his line of conduct. This supremacy of a personal rational will over all the impulses and emotions which seek their separate expression was the core not only of his thinking but of his feeling. Its validity is not impaired by the special force of his personal psychical make-up, but the latter