is force, then any
consideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified, it
is raised instantly into an axiom of life. The community, in that case,
becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence. Socialism,
then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable sequence. That even
the Far Oriental, with all his numbing impersonality, has not touched
this goal may at least suggest that individuality is a fact.

But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?

Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event takes
place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other events sink
into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized and chronicled
by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with action. No one but the
child is aware of its occurrence, and he never speaks of it to others.
Yet to that child it marks an epoch. So intensely individual does it
seem that the boy is afraid to avow it, while in reality so universal
is it that probably no human being has escaped its influence. Though
subjective purely, it has more vividness than any external event;
and though strictly intrinsic to life, it is more startling than any
accident of fate or fortune. This experience of the boy's, at once so
singular and yet so general, is nothing less than the sudden revelation
to him one day of the fact of his own personality.

Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to sensitiveness
as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained by the five bodily
senses is being fused into the wisdom of that mental one we call common
sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to the act of waking up. All at
once he becomes conscious of himself; and the consciousness has about
it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto he has been aware only of matter;
he now first realizes mind. Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered
before being, and stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.

If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is nothing
reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship must last.
For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he cannot shake
off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it. To himself a man cannot
but be at home. For years this alter ego haunts him, for he imagines it
an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid peculiarity he dare not confide
to any one, for fear of being thought a fool. Not till long afterwards,
when he h