Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/670

658 Professor Adler's unique individual is further limited as a member of the family, the school, the vocation, the state, the international society, and the ideal religious Society. "The sub-organisms are embraced within the superior organisms." But they are not swallowed up in them: "there are rights of the individual, rights of the family, rights of the vocational group, which the State does not create but is bound to acknowledge and which its power cannot properly infringe" (p. 306). Each sphere has its particular uniqueness, which must be respected. The importance of the vocations (among which motherhood will be recognized) is stressed: "the public good will be consummated when the conditions are furnished necessary and favorable to the development of personality in each of the constituent groups of the social body" (p. 314); indeed, the vocational group is made the basis of political representation. "Vocational representation, in my view of it, is the appropriate expression of the organic idea of the state. The state is the soul. The soul must have a body. Vocational representation is that body." The significance of this view can be fully understood only when we remember that Professor Adler conceives all the social institutions as "successive phases through which the individual shall advance towards the acquisition of an ethical personality" (p. 261). His ideal is the realization and preservation of distinctiveness in the individuals and in the groups, the state included. "The relative independence of the social sub-organism," he says, "is the salient point. This kind of independence is based on the general conception underlying my entire ethical philosophy, that the ethical quality resides in uniqueness in distinctiveness, that ethical progress consists in driving towards individualization in the sense of personalization. This is opposed to those philosophies of life that see the ethical quality in uniformity. Socialism is on the side of uniformity" (p. 274).

What I have been trying to show is that in spite of Professor Adler's occasional exaggeration of the element of uniqueness, he subjects it to limitations: to be ethical, uniqueness must submit to law. Not every kind of difference is moral. The worth of individual uniqueness is determined, among other things, by its fitness to make group-uniqueness possible; and the uniqueness of each sub-group, in turn, is judged by its effect upon that of the successive superior groups. The ethical individual wills to be a member of an organized spiritual world. He wills to be a social personality, which means to be a true individual. He wills the concrete universal. We cannot tear the notions of uniformity and diversity, sameness and difference, society