us is twofold.  First we must realize the logical difficulty of the step—­its apparently self-contradictory nature.  And secondly we need to see that fully developed and continuously progressive national life is impossible without it.  The development of a nation under the communal principle may advance far, even to the attainment of a relatively high grade of civilization.  But the fully centralized and completely self-conscious nation cannot come into existence except on the basis of this last step of communo-individualism.  The growth of nationalism proper, and the high development of civilization through the rise of the sciences and the arts based upon individualism, all await the dawn of the era of which communo-individualism is the leading, though at first unrecognized, characteristic.

This individualistic development of the communal principle is its intensive development; it is the focalizing and centralizing of the consciousness of the national unity in each individual member.  The extensive process of communal enlargement must ever be accompanied by the intensive establishment in the individual of the communal ideal, the objective by the subjective, the physical by the psychical, if the accidental association for individual profit is to develop into the permanent association for the national as well as the individual life.  The intensive or subjective development of the communal principle does, as a matter of fact, take place in all growing communities, but it is largely unconscious.  Not until the final stages of national development does it become a self-conscious process, deserving the distinctive name I have given it here, communo-individualism.[CG]

The point just made is, however, only one aspect of a more general fact, too, of cardinal importance for the sociologist and the student of human evolution.  It is that, throughout the entire period of the expansion of the community, there has been an equally profound, although wholly unconscious, development of the individual.  This fact seems to have largely escaped the notice of all but the most recent thinkers and writers on the general topic of human and social evolution.  The fact and the importance of the communal life have been so manifest that, in important senses, the individual has been almost, if not wholly, dropped out of sight.  The individual has been conceived to have been from the very beginning of social evolution fully endowed with mind, ideas, and brains, and to be perfectly regardless of all other human beings.  The development of the community has accordingly been conceived to be a progressive taming and subduing of this wild, self-centered, primitive man; a process of eliminating his individualistic instincts.  So far as the individual is concerned, it has been conceived to be chiefly a negative process; a process of destroying his individual desires and plans and passions.  Man’s natural state has been supposed to be that of absolute selfishness.