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The Ideal Law of Social Development 69the Indian; if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, byanother he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even thereis a part of him, the greatest, which is not limited by humanity;he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and tothe godheads of the future. He has indeed the tendency of selflimitationand subjection to his environment and group, buthe has also the equally necessary tendency of expansion andtranscendence of environment and groupings. The individualanimal is dominated entirely by his type, subordinated to hisgroup when he does group himself; individual man has alreadybegun to share something of the infinity, complexity, free variationof the Self we see manifested in the world. Or at leasthe has it in possibility even if there be as yet no sign of it inhis organised surface nature. There is here no principle of amere shapeless fluidity; it is the tendency to enrich himself withthe largest possible material constantly brought in, constantlyassimilated and changed by the law of his individual nature intostuff of his growth and divine expansion.Thus the community stands as a mid-term and intermediaryvalue between the individual and humanity and it exists notmerely for itself, but for the one and the other and to helpthem to fulfil each other. The individual has to live in humanityas well as humanity in the individual; but mankind is or hasbeen too large an aggregate to make this mutuality a thing intimateand powerfully felt in the ordinary mind of the race, andeven if humanity becomes a manageable unit of life, intermediategroups and aggregates must still exist for the purpose ofmass-differentiation and the concentration and combination ofvarying tendencies in the total human aggregate. Therefore thecommunity has to stand for a time to the individual for humanityeven at the cost of standing between him and it and limiting thereach of his universality and the wideness of his sympathies. Stillthe absolute claim of the community, the society or the nation tomake its growth, perfection, greatness the sole object of humanlife or to exist for itself alone as against the individual and therest of humanity, to take arbitrary possession of the one andmake the hostile assertion of itself against the other, whether