Thus, when spirit is spiritually discerned, it is seen that man is bound to man in a union closer than any physical organism can show; while “the individual,” in the old sense of a being opposed to society and opposed to the world, is found to be a fiction of abstract thought, not discoverable anywhere, because not real.  And, on the other hand, society is no longer “collective,” but so organic that the whole is potentially in every part—­an organism of organisms.

The influence of this organic idea in every department of thought which concerns itself with man is not to be measured.  It is already fast changing all the practical sciences of man—­economics, politics, ethics and religion.  The material, being newly interpreted, is wrought into a new purpose, and revelation is once more bringing about a reformation.  But human action in its ethical aspect is, above all, charged with a new significance.  The idea of duty has received an expansion almost illimitable, and man himself has thereby attained new worth and dignity—­for what is duty except a dignity and opportunity, man’s chance of being good?  When we contrast this view of the life of man as the life of humanity in him, with the old individualism, we may say that morality also has at last, in Bacon’s phrase, passed from the narrow seas into the open ocean.  And after all, the greatest achievement of our age may be not that it has established the sciences of nature, but that it has made possible the science of man.  We have, at length, reached a point of view from which we may hope to understand ourselves.  Law, order, continuity, in human action—­the essential pre-conditions of a moral science—­were beyond the reach of an individualistic theory.  It left to ethical writers no choice but that of either sacrificing man to law, or law to man; of denying either the particular or the universal element in his nature.  Naturalism did the first.  Intuitionism, the second.  The former made human action the reaction of a natural agent on the incitement of natural forces.  It made man a mere object, a thing capable of being affected by other things through his faculty of being pained or pleased; an object acting in obedience to motives that had an external origin, just like any other object.  The latter theory cut man free from the world and his fellows, endowed him with a will that had no law, and a conscience that was dogmatic; and thereby succeeded in stultifying both law and morality.

But this new consciousness of the relation of man to mankind and the world takes him out of his isolation and still leaves him free.  It relates men to one another in a humanity, which is incarnated anew in each of them.  It elevates the individual above the distinctions of time; it treasures up the past in him as the active energy of his knowledge and morality in the present, and also as the potency of the ideal life of the future.  On this view, the individual and the race are possible only through each other.