Page:Jay William Hudson - America's International Ideals (1915).djvu/23

 self which we popularly think of as his person. The modern man can well put to himself this question: Where do I end? And when he asks this question intelligently, he must answer it by acknowledging that he involves, yea, includes, in his very complex life and in his far-reaching actual and potential interests, all that has been, is, or shall be. It is in this sense that every person is an infinite person. In one sense society includes him, but in another sense just as real he includes all society.

Nothing has better taught us this absolute interdependence of all things human than modern science, which teaches us that there is no event that is not vitally related to every other event in the universe of time and space. The history of evolution is wrongly read if it is supposed that it is a history of individual struggling with individual for the survival of mere individuals. No, the evolution of human beings, at any rate, is the story of the increased co-operation of individuals in their common struggle for a common life, a common welfare, and a common ideal. The higher one goes in the scale of evolution, the more one finds that the struggle for existence is the co-operative struggle of all human society for the sake of the realization of the human aspirations of the individuals that compose it, who in turn grow more and more altruistic, even for the sake of their own welfare, which they growingly conceive to include the welfare of all men.

This age-long struggle for the socializing of the individual, while yet maintaining the reasonable liberty of the individual, has come nearer attainment in America than anywhere else. While insisting upon the value of the individual and his freedom, Americans have always emphasized the fact that the liberty of democracy by