that this change of emphasis has taken place, and selfsacrifice has yielded to self-fulfilment as the law of the moral life.

2. The law of moral progress: the discovery of the individual. Sir Henry Maine has formulated the law of social progress in the memorable words that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract." 1 "The individual is

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steadily substituted for the family, as the unit of which civil laws take account.' In the recognition of the power of contract this distinguished student of ancient law finds the first clear perception of the individual as a separate and responsible agent, who occupies henceforth in the eyes of the law the place hitherto occupied by society. It seems to me that the fundamental law of moral progress, whether in the race or in the individual, may be stated in essentially the same form. That progress is, in sum and substance, the progressive discovery of the individual. It is difficult for us to realise that the idea of individual moral independence and responsibility is the product of long centuries of moral development. The ethical unit of earlier times is the tribe or the family; later it becomes the State; later still perhaps the caste or class; and, last of all, the individual. It is long before, from the tribe and the family, from the State and the class, the individual emerges in the completeness and independence of his moral being. And even when the individual has differentiated himself from the larger social whole, it is long before he comes to a true understanding of himself and of his relation to society. An abstract and extreme Individualism invites a return to the no less abstract extreme of Socialism. The true nature of the individual answers to the true nature of society, and with the self-discovery of the former comes the self-discovery of the latter.

1 Ancient Law, ch. v. p. 170 (11th edition).

2 Ibid., p. 168.

Of the solidarity, in ancient society, of the family and the individual, we have a striking illustration in the patria potestas of the Romans. The paternal authority vested in the head of the family was absolute, and against it the individual had no rights. Of the solidarity of the State and the individual, the grand illustration is that of the Hellenic city-states. Plato, in his Republic, gives expression to this ideal. So confident is he in the ethical supremacy of the State, so convinced of the absoluteness of its value, that he would make it the sole criterion of individual virtue. The State is the ethical unit, and its claim upon the service of the individual is absolute. Plato cannot conceive any distinction or antagonism between the good of the individual and that of the State, between the ethical and the political point of view. The measure of ethical and political wellbeing is the same. The life of citizenship is an exhaustive expression of the moral nature of its citizens; there is no distinction between the citizen and the man. Those who cannot discharge the duties of citizenship-the helplessly weak and the incurably sick-have no raison d'être, and ought not to be allowed to live, a burden and an evil to the State. The entire education of the individual is an education in citizenship. The family and private property are disallowed, as inconsistent with a perfect loyalty to the State. And while the Platonic State is doubtless an idealisation of the actual Greek State, it is yet only the extreme logical development of the Greek view of the State as the true ethical unit and norm.

This absolute confidence in the State did not last long. Its ethical inadequacy soon began to appear, and the peril of staking their moral well-being upon the wellbeing of the State soon became manifest to the more reflective minds among the Greeks. In Aristotle we see the beginning of the change of standpoint from the State to the individual. For him the individual has become clearly an end-in-himself, and the State but the medium of

his ethical life. While the State is chronologically prior to the individual, the individual is logically prior to the State, which exists for the sake of the distinction between good and evil, justice and injustice, and the like. It is the means, he is the end. Aristotle still maintains, however, like Plato, that man is a 'political animal,' and that the individual apart from the State would not be a moral being. The man without a State is either below or above man as we know him in his civilised condition, is either a brute or a god. Aristotle's empirical faithfulness to the individual, indeed, colours his ethics as well as his metaphysics. He believes that 'there is a superiority in the individual as against the general methods of education." As "a teacher of boxing does not teach all his pupils to box in the same style, it would seem that a study of individual character is the best way of perfecting the education of the individual." Yet for Aristotle as for Plato ethics is only a part of politics; in the one we see the good writ large, in the other it is writ small. "For although the good of an individual is identical with the good of a State, yet the good of the State, whether in attainment or in preservation, is evidently greater and more perfect. For while in an individual by himself it is something to be thankful for, it is nobler and more divine in a nation or State." 2

This belief in the inherent divinity or naturalness' of the State had been undermined by the Sophists, who saw in it only an artificial product of human convention, and pointed to the individual, in ethics as in metaphysics, as the only reality. The early Socratic schools had also sought for a merely private and individual good, the salvation of the individual soul. The ineffectiveness and disappointing failure of the actual State, and the growing despair of its future, led to a revival of political scepticism in the post-Aristotelian period; and the 1 Nic. Eth., bk. x. ch. x. 2 Ibid., bk. i. ch. i.

waning confidence in the State meant an increasing confidence in the individual. Thus it was only the break-down of the State itself that compelled the individual to look within himself for the good which he could no longer find without. The Stoics still believe

in the ideal State, but it has become for them a city of God' which can never be realised on earth, a spiritual community, a Church rather than a State-the Church invisible of the wise and good. The ideal of the Epicureans is frankly unpolitical; friendship takes the place of citizenship as the bond between man and man, and the medium of the highest life in the individual. If we feel that in both cases, as well as in the case of the Academic Sceptics, a negative has been substituted for a positive ideal, that the rest and peace of the individual soul has taken the place of the full and engrossing activity of the life of citizenship, we also feel that a new value is found in the individual, and that the man behind the citizen has at last been discovered.

That the moral or practical individualist should be no less extreme in his appreciation of the individual and in his depreciation of the State than is the intellectual or metaphysical individualist in his exaltation of the perceptual above the conceptual, need not surprise us. On the other hand, there is a great positive advance in this moral individualism of the later Greeks. So long as the political and the ethical points of view were identified, not only was the life of the individual citizen inadequately interpreted, but the life of the individual who was not a citizen found no interpretation at all. If the man behind the citizen remained undiscovered, the man who was not a citizen was not regarded as an ethical being. He was simply an instrument of the State; the ethical life of the State rested upon an unethical, because an unpolitical, basis. Not only the woman and the slave, but, in Sparta at least, the artisan and the labourer, too, were thus excluded from the moral world, because they were excluded

from the political. But the Stoic city of God includes the slave as well as the free man, the 'barbarian' as well as the Greek. The ethical franchise does not depend upon the political; it belongs to every man, to man as man. Thus the discovery of the individual meant a great widening, as well as a great deepening, of the moral consciousness of the Greeks.

It was political adversity that taught the Hebrews the same lesson; for them also the dissolution of the State wrought the moral emancipation of the individual. Their conscience was, like that of the Greeks, essentially political; and as long as the State remained, they saw in it the unit of responsibility. The nation as a whole sinned and was punished, or followed righteousness and was rewarded. This sense of a corporate life and responsibility extended backward over the past and forward over the future generations of Israel. The life of the nation was continuous, and the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. It came to them at last with all the surprise of a fresh discovery that responsibility is an individual affair, and that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die."

Christianity taught with a new emphasis the supreme value of the individual as a moral being. Its chief interest was in the salvation of the individual soul, and its message came as a veritable gospel to men who had already learned that their soul's good was not to be found without but within themselves. It recognised no distinction between the rich and the poor, the cultured and the uncultured, the freeman and the slave; or if it did, it was primarily to the poor, the uncultured, and the downtrodden that its gospel came. It might well have seemed impossible that the importance of the individual should ever again be forgotten, or subordinated to that of the State. Yet such a return to the older view is not so surprising as it might at first sight appear.