ividual may gradually lose all initiative, and life be
impoverished under a coercive mechanical system.

Socialism in its extreme form might easily become a new kind of tyranny.
By the establishment of collectivism, by making the state the sole owner
of all wealth, the sole employer of labour, and the controller of science
and art, as well as of education and religion, there is a danger of
crushing the spiritual side of man, and giving to all life and endeavour
a merely naturalistic character and content.

{107}

5. It was inevitable that an exaggerated insistence upon the importance
of society should provoke an equally one-sided emphasis upon the worth of
the individual, and that as a protest against the demands of Socialism
there should arise a form of subjectivism which aims at complete
self-affirmation.

(1) This tendency has received the name of _aesthetic-individualism_. As
a conception of life it may be regarded as intermediate between
naturalism and idealism. While rooted in a materialistic view of life,
it is moulded in the hands of its best advocates by spiritual
aspirations. Its standpoint may be characterised as a theory of
existence which seeks the highest value of life in the realm of the
beautiful, and which therefore endeavours to promote the supreme good of
the individual through devotion to art. Not only does the cultivation of
art tend in itself to elevate life by concentrating the soul upon all
that is fairest and noblest in the world, but the best means of enriching
and ennobling life is to regard life itself as a work of art. This view
of existence, it is claimed, widens the scope of experience, and leads us
into ampler worlds of interest and enjoyment. It aims at giving to
personality a rounded completeness, and bringing the manifold powers and
passions of man into harmonious unity. As a theory of life it is not
new. Already Plato, and still more Aristotle, maintained that a true man
must seek his highest satisfaction not in the possession of external
things, but in the most complete manifestation of his faculties.
Individual aestheticism largely animated the Romantic movement of Germany
at the beginning of last century. But probably the best illustration of
it is to be found in Goethe and Schiller; while in our country Matthew
Arnold has given it a powerful and persuasive exposition. It was the aim
of Goethe to mould his life into a work of art, and all his activities
and poetic as