onvergent_ and toward Consolidation, Centralization,
Order, or, in one word, _Unity_; with a minor reference only to Freedom,
Independence, or Individuality. A change then took place, and the
Tendency to Unity began to yield, as the _major_ or _chief_ tendency in
society, to the opposite or divergent drift toward Disunity or
Individuality, which gradually came to be pre-eminently active. The
Spirit of Disintegration which thus arose, has exhibited and is still
exhibiting itself in Religious affairs, by the destruction of the
integrality of the Church, and its division into numerous sects; and in
the State, by the Democratic principle of popular rule, as opposed to
the Monarchical theory of the supremacy of one.
We have now arrived, in the course of our development as a race, at the
culminating point of the second Stage of Progress--the Era of
_Individuality_. The predominant tendency of our time in things
Religious, Governmental, Intellectual, and Practical, is toward the
utter rejection of all clogs upon the personal freedom of Man or Woman.
This is seen by the neglect into which institutions of all kinds tend to
fall, and the disrespect in which they are held; in the movements for
the abolition of Slavery and Serfdom; in the recognition of the people's
right of rule, even in Monarchical countries; more radically in the
Woman's Rights Crusade, and in the absolute rejection, by the School of
Reformers known as Individualists, of all governmental authority other
than that voluntarily accepted, as an infringement of the individual's
inherent right of self-sovereignty.
This Spirit of Individuality, this desire to throw off all trammels, and
to live in the atmosphere of one's own personality, exhibits itself in a
marked degree in the literature of our day. It is the animating spirit
of John Stuart Mill's work 'On Liberty'--a work which, as the writer has
elsewhere shown, was substantially borrowed, although without any openly
avowed acknowledgment of indebtedness, from an American publication. It
is this spirit which has inspired some of the most remarkable of Herbert
Spencer's Essays; and is distinctively apparent in the Fourth one of the
Propositions which Mr. Buckle affirms to be 'the basis of the history of
civilization;' and in the general tenor of Prof. Draper's _Intellectual
Development of Europe_.
The gist of this doctrine of Individuality, as it is now largely
prevalent in respect to the institutions of the Ch
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