ancient and more sacred, the unfettered
rights of the individual or the welfare of the community? Can anyone
take this question seriously who is accustomed to look at the life and
development of society in the light of facts? Individualism and
Altruism are as inseparably connected as light and darkness, as day
and night. The individualistic and the social sense in human society
correspond to the centrifugal and centripetal forces in the universe,
or to the forces of attraction and repulsion that govern molecular
activity. Their movements must be regarded simply as manifestations of
forces in the direction of the resultants, whose components are
Individualism and Altruism. If, to use a metaphor from physics, one of
these forces was excluded, the body would either remain stock-still,
or would fly far away into infinity. But such a case is, in society as
in physics, only possible in imagination, because the distinction
between the two forces is itself only a purely mental separation of
one and the same thing.

This is all that can be said either for or against the exclusive
accentuation of any one single social force. All the endeavours to
create a realm of unlimited and absolute freedom have only as much
value as the assumption, in physics, of space absolutely void of air,
or of a direction of motion absolutely uninfluenced by the force of
gravity. The force which sets a bullet in motion is certainly
something actual and real; but the influence which would correspond to
this force, this direction in the sense in which the physicist
distinguishes it, exists only in theory, because the bullet will, as
far as all actual experience goes, only move in the direction of a
resultant, in which the impetus given to it and the force of gravity
are inseparably united and appear as one. If, therefore, it is also
clear that the endeavour to obtain a realm of unconditional freedom
contradicts _ipso facto_ the conception of life, yet all such
endeavours are by no means valueless for our knowledge of human
society, and consequently for society itself; and even if social life
is always only the resultant of different forces, yet these forces
themselves remain something real and actual, and are no mere fiction
or hypothesis; while the growing differentiation of society shows how
freedom, conceived as a force, is something actual, although as an
ideal it may never attain full realisation. The development of society
has proceeded hand in han