his energy and intensifies his personal initiative.  The kind of individuals created by such an economic system are not distinguished one from another by any special purpose.  They are distinguished by the energy and success whereby the common purpose of making money is accompanied and followed.  Some men show more enterprise and ingenuity in devising ways of making money than others, or they show more vigor and zeal in taking advantage of the ordinary methods.  These men are the kind of individuals which the existing economic system tends to encourage; and critics of the existing system are denounced, because of the disastrous effect upon individual initiative which would result from restricting individual economic freedom.

But why should a man become an individual because he does what everybody else does, only with more energy and success?  The individuality so acquired is merely that of one particle in a mass of similar particles.  Some particles are bigger than others and livelier; but from a sufficient distance they all look alike; and in substance and meaning they all are alike.  Their individual activity and history do not make them less alike.  It merely makes them bigger or smaller, livelier or more inert.  Their distinction from their fellows is quantitative; the unity of their various phases a matter of repetition; their independence wholly comparative.  Such men are associated with their fellows in the pursuit of a common purpose, and they are divided from their fellows by the energy and success with which that purpose is pursued.  On the other hand, a condition favorable to genuine individuality would be one in which men were divided from one another by special purposes, and reunited in so far as these individual purposes were excellently and successfully achieved.

The truth is that individuality cannot be dissociated from the pursuit of a disinterested object.  It is a moral and intellectual quality, and it must be realized by moral and intellectual means.  A man achieves individual distinction, not by the enterprise and vigor with which he accumulates money, but by the zeal and the skill with which he pursues an exclusive interest—­an interest usually, but not necessarily, connected with his means of livelihood.  The purpose to which he is devoted—­such, for instance, as that of painting or of running a railroad—­is not exclusive in the sense of being unique.  But it becomes exclusive for the individual who adopts it, because of the single-minded and disinterested manner in which it is pursued.  A man makes the purpose exclusive for himself by the spirit and method in which the work is done; and just in proportion as the work is thoroughly well done, a man’s individuality begins to take substance and form.  His individual quality does not depend merely on the display of superior enterprise and energy, although, of course, he may and should be as enterprising and as energetic as he can.  It depends upon the actual