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The Age of Individualism and Reason 21by a law, a truth of things, an order and principles which allcan observe and verify in their ground and fact and to whichtherefore all may freely and must rationally subscribe, is theculminating movement of European civilisation. It has been thefulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of human society;it has seemed likely also to be its end, the cause of thedeath of individualism and its putting away and burial amongthe monuments of the past.For this discovery by individual free-thought of universallaws of which the individual is almost a by-product and bywhich he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actuallyto govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordancewith the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically tothe suppression of that very individual freedom which madethe discovery and the attempt at all possible. In seeking thetruth and law of his own being the individual seems to havediscovered a truth and law which is not of his own individualbeing at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass.The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistiblyto be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigideconomic or governmental Socialism in which the individual,deprived again of his freedom in his own interest and that ofhumanity, must have his whole life and action determined forhim at every step and in every point from birth to old age bythe well-ordered mechanism of the State. 1 We might then have acurious new version, with very important differences, of the oldAsiatic or even of the old Indian order of society. In place of thereligio-ethical sanction there will be a scientific and rational ornaturalistic motive and rule; instead of the Brahmin Shastrakarathe scientific, administrative and economic expert. In the placeof the King himself observing the law and compelling with theaid and consent of the society all to tread without deviation1 We already see a violent though incomplete beginning of this line of social evolutionin Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia. The trend is for more and morenations to accept this beginning of a new order, and the resistance of the old orderis more passive than active — it lacks the fire, enthusiasm and self-confidence whichanimates the innovating Idea.