ich all the oceans in vain
lave with their antiseptic waters, and all the winds of heaven cannot
purify. It is only in the unextinguished spark of reason within him that
salvation for man may ever be found, in the realization that he is his
own star, and carries in his hands his own fate. The impulses of
Individualism and of Socialism alike prompt us to gain self-control and
to learn the vast extent of our responsibility. The whole of humanity is
working for each of us; each of us must live worthy of that great
responsibility to humanity. By how fine a flash of insight Jesus
declared that few could enter the Kingdom of Heaven! Not until the earth
is purified of untold millions of its population will it ever become the
Heaven of old dreamers, in which the elect walk spaciously and nobly,
loving one another. Only in such spacious and pure air is it possible
for the individual to perfect himself, as a rose becomes perfect,
according to Dante's beautiful simile,[261] in order that he may spread
abroad for others the fragrance that has been generated within him. If
one thinks of it, that seems a truism, yet, even in this twentieth
century, how few, how very few, there are who know it!

This is why we cannot have too much Individualism, we cannot have too
much Socialism. They play into each other's hands. To strengthen one is
to give force to the other. The greater the vigour of both, the more
vitally a society is progressing. "I can no more call myself an
Individualist or a Socialist," said Henry George, "than one who
considers the forces by which the planets are held to their orbits could
call himself a centrifugalist or a centripetalist." To attain a society
in which Individualism and Socialism are each carried to its extreme
point would be to attain to the society that lived in the Abbey of
Thelema, in the City of the Sun, in Utopia, in the land of Zarathustra,
in the Garden of Eden, in the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a kingdom, no
doubt, that is, as Diderot expressed it, "diablement ideal." But to-day
we hold in our hands more certainly than ever before the clues that were
imperfectly foreshadowed by Plato, and what our fathers sought
ignorantly we may attempt by methods according to knowledge. No Utopia
was ever realized; and the ideal is a mirage that must ever elude us or
it would cease to be ideal. Yet all our progress, if progress there be,
can only lie in setting our faces towards that goal to which Utopias and
ideals