Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/226

Rh forgetfulness of the defect, we pass from capricious criticism to something higher. We accept with agony the point of view of the one who stands outside of us. And, so doing, we pass in effect to the acceptance of the demands of the universal will. If there were a will that included in one consciousness all our separate wills, it could not will our individual defects as such. It woid.d be absolute critic, as well as absolute harmonizer, of all of us. It would tear down these individual barriers of our petty lives, as the corporation of a great city may tear down wretched old rookeries. It would demand that we be one in spirit, and that our oneness be perfect. But if we experience this universal will, we experience that hedonism, whose life-blood is the insistence upon individual states as such, cannot be upheld by the moral insight, either now, or at any future stage of our human life on this earth. We perceive too that we all have a deep desire for self-destruction, in so far as we recognize that our self-love means absence of perfection.

We have seen in general the moral outcome of individualism. Let us study some of its forms and fortunes more in detail. Individualism, viewed as the tendency to hold that the ideal of life is the separate happy man, is itself yery naturally the normal tendency of unreflecting strong natures, to whom happiness has been in a fair human measure already given. Children and child-like men, full of vigor, are innocently selfish; or, when they act unselfishly, their