56 INDIVIDUALISM cause is or is not in your opinion worthy, and to begin by considering what good the loyal man gets out of the personal attitude of loyalty, whatever be his cause. Only by thus begin ning can we prepare the way for a higher view of loyalty.
Loyalty, I have said, be the cause worthy or unworthy, is for the loyal man a good, just as, even if his beloved be unworthy, love may in its place still be a good thing for a lover. And loyalty is for the loyal man not only a good, but for him chief amongst all the moral goods of his life, because it furnishes to him a personal solution of the hardest of human practical problems, the problem: "For wrhat do I live? Why am I here? For what am I good? Why am I needed?"
The natural man, more or less vaguely and unconsciously, asks such questions as these. But if he looks merely within his natural self, he cannot answer them. Within himself he finds vague cravings for happiness, a chaos of desires, a medley of conflicting instincts. He has come — 57 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY " Into this universe, the why not knowing, Nor whence, like water, willy-nilly flowing."
He must, then, in any case consult society in order to define the purpose of his life. The social order, however, taken as it comes, gives him customs, employment, conventions, laws, and advice, but no one overmastering ideal. It controls him, but often by the very show of authority it also inflames his self- will. It rebukes and amuses; it threatens and praises him by turns; but it leaves him to find out and to justify the sense of his own life as he can. It solves for him no ultimate problems of life, so long as his loyalty is unawakened.
Only a cause, then, an absorbing and fas cinating social cause, which by his own will and consent comes to take possession of his life, as the spirits that a magician summons might by the magician's own will and con sent take control of the fortunes of the one who has called for their aid, — only a cause, dignified by the social unity that it gives to many human lives, but rendered also vital 58 INDIVIDUALISM 58 INDIVIDUALISM for the loyal man by the personal affection which it awakens in his heart, only such a cause can unify his outer and inner world. When such unity comes, it takes in him the form of an active loyalty. Whatever cause thus appeals to a man meets therefore one of his deepest personal needs, and in fact the very deepest of his moral needs; namely, the need of a life task that is at once voluntary and to his mind worthy.
II So far the former discussion led us. But already, at this point, an objection arises, — or rather, there arise a whole host of objections, -whereof I must take account before you will be ready to comprehend the philosophy of loyalty which I am to propose in later lec tures. These objections, familiar in the present day, come from the partisans of certain forms of Individualism which in our modern world are so prevalent. I shall devote this lecture to a study of the relations of the spirit of loyalty to the spirit of individualism. Individualism 59 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY is as Protean as loyalty. Hence my task in volves meeting various very different objections. Somewhat more than a year since, I was attempting to state in the presence of a com pany of young people my arguments for loyalty. I was trying to tell that company, as I am trying to tell you, how much we all need some form of loyalty as a centralizing motive in our personal lives. I was also de ploring the fact that, in our modern American life, there are so many social motives that seem to take away from people the true spirit of loyalty, and to leave them distracted, unsettled as to their moral standards, uncertain why or for what they live. After I had said my word, my hearers were invited to discuss the ques tion. Amongst those who responded was a very earnest youth, the son of a Russian immi grant. My words had awakened my young friend's righteous indignation. "Loyalty," so he in effect said, "has been in the past one of humanity's most disastrous failings and weak nesses. Tyrants have used the spirit of loyalty as their principal tool. I am glad," he went 60 INDIVIDUALISM 60 INDIVIDUALISM on, "that we are outgrowing loyalty, whatever its forms or whatever the causes that it serves. What we want in the future is the training of individual judgment. We want enlighten ment and independence. Let us have done with loyalty."
I need hardly remark that my opponent's earnestness, his passion for the universal tri umph of individual freedom, his plainness of speech, his hatred of oppression, were them selves symptoms of a very loyal spirit. For he had his cause. That was plain. It was a social cause, — the one need of the many for release from the oppressor. He spoke like a man who was devoted to that cause. I honored his loyalty to humanity, in so far as he understood the needs of his fellows. His spirit, then, as he spoke, simply illustrated my own thesis. He was awake, resolute, eager. He had his ideal. And his loyalty to the cause of the oppressed had given to him this fine self-possession. He was a living instance of my view of the value of loyalty to the loyal man.
61 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY So, in fact, he was not my opponent. But he thought that he was. And his view of loyalty, his conception that loyalty is by its nature, as a spirit of devotion and of self- sacrifice for a cause, necessarily a spirit of sub servience, of slavish submission, — this view, I say, although it was clearly refuted by the very existence of his own loyalty to the cause of the relief of the people from the oppressor, was still a misunderstanding of himself and of life, — a misunderstanding such as is nowa days only too common. Here, then, is one form which current objections to the spirit of loyalty often take.
Another and a decidedly different objection to my own views about loyalty was expressed to me, also within the past year, by a friend high in official position in a distant community, — a teacher who has charge of many youth, and who is profoundly concerned for their moral welfare. "I wish," he said, "that, if you address the youth who are under my charge, you would tell them that loyalty to their vari ous organizations, to their clubs, to their secret 62 INDIVIDUALISM 62 INDIVIDUALISM societies, to their own student body generally, is no excuse for mischief-makers, and gives to loyal students no right to encourage one an other to do mischief, and then to stand to gether to shield offenders for the sake of loyalty. Loyalty hereabouts," he in substance went on, speaking of his own community, " is a cloak to cover a multitude of sins. What these youth need is the sense that each individ ual has his own personal duty, and should de velop his own conscience, and should not look to loyalty to excuse him from individual re sponsibility."
The objection which was thus in substance contained in my friend's words, was of course partly an objection to the special causes to which these students were loyal; that is, it was an objection to their clubs, and to their views about the special rights of the student body. In so far, of course, this objection does not yet concern us; for I am not now estimating the worth of men's causes, but am considering only the inner value of the loyal spirit to the man who has that spirit, whatever be the cause 63 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY to which this man is loyal. In part, however, this objection was founded upon a well-known form of ethical individualism, and is an objec tion that does here concern us. For his own good, so my critic seemed to hold, each man needs to develop his own individual sense of personal duty and of responsibility. Loyalty, as my critic further held, tends to take the life out of a young man's conscience, because it makes him simply look outside of himself to see what his cause requires him to do. In other words, loyalty seems to be opposed to the development of that individual auton omy of the moral will which, as I told you in the last lecture, Kant insists upon, and which all moralists must indeed emphasize as one of our highest goods. If I look to my cause to tell me what to do, am I not resigning my moral birthright? Must I not always judge my own duty? Now, does not loyalty tend to make me ask my club or my other social cause simply to tell me what to do?
And yet, as you see, even the objector who 64 INDIVIDUALISM pointed out this difficulty about loyalty cannot have been as much my opponent as he seemed to believe that he was. For he himself, by virtue of his own autonomous choice of his career, is a very loyal teacher, devoted to his office, and loyal to the true welfare of his stu dents as he sees that welfare. I am sure that his spirit must be the very loyalty which I have been describing to you. He is an inde pendent sort of man, who has chosen his cause and is now profoundly loyal. Otherwise, how could he love, as he does, the hard tasks of his office and live, as he does, in his devotion to that office, accepting its demands as his own? He works like a slave at his own task, — and of course he works lovingly. Yet he seemed to condemn the loyalty of his students to their clubs as essentially slavish. Is there not some misunderstanding here?
But yet another, and once more a very dif ferent form of individualism I find, at times, opposed by my objectors to the loyalty whose importance I am maintaining. The objection here in question is familiar. It may be stated THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY thus: The modern man --yes, the modern woman also, as we sometimes are told — can be content only with the completest pos sible self-development and the fullest self- expression which the conditions of our social life permit. We all of us have individual rights, so such an objector vigorously insists. Duties, perhaps, as he adds, we also occa sionally have, under rather exceptional, per haps abnormal and annoying, conditions. But whether or no the duties get in our way and hinder our growth, the rights at least are ours. Now, there is no good equal to win ning what is your right; namely, this free self-expression, this untrammelled play of the spirit. You have opinions; utter them. They are opposed to current moral traditions; then so much the better; for when you utter them you know, because of their unconventional sound, that they must be your own. Even so, your social ties prove irksome. Break them. Form new ones. Is not the free spirit eternally young? From this point of view loyalty does indeed appear to be slavish. Why sacrifice the 66 INDIVIDUALISM one thing that you have, — your chance to be yourself, and nobody else?
I need not further pursue, at the moment, the statement of the case for this special type of modem individualism. In this form indi vidualism does not stand, like the enthusiasm of my young Russian, for sympathy with the oppressed, but rather for the exuberance of the vitality of certain people who, as I shall here after try to show, have not yet found out what to do with themselves. In any case, individ ualism of this sort, as I have said, is familiar enough. You know it well in recent literature. Plays, romances, essays, embody its teachings. You know this form of individualism also in real life. You read of its doings in the current newspapers. As you go about your own daily business, it sometimes, to show its moral dig nity, jostles you more than even our modern congestion of population makes necessary; or it passes you by all too swiftly and perilously, in its triumphant and intrepid — self-assertion. In brief, the people who have more rights than duties have gained a notable 67 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY and distinguished ethical position in our mod ern world. The selfish we had always with us. But the divine right to be selfish was never more ingeniously defended, in the name of the loftiest spiritual dignity, than it is sometimes defended and illustrated to-day.
But even now I have not done with stating the case of my objectors. Still another form of modern individualism exists, and this form is again very different from any of the fore going forms. Yet once more I must let a friend of mine state the case for this sort of individualism. This is no longer the enthu siastic revolt against the oppressor which my young Russian expressed; nor is it the interest in moral independence of judgment which the teacher of youth emphasized; nor is it the type of self-assertion which prefers rights to duties; it is, on the contrary, the individualism of those who seek, and who believe that they find, an interior spiritual light which guides them and which relieves them of the need of any loyalty to externally visible causes. Such people might themselves sometimes speak of 68 INDIVIDUALISM 68 INDIVIDUALISM their fidelity to their inner vision as a sort of loyalty. But they would not define their loyalty in the terms which I have used in de fining the loyal spirit. The friend of whom I have spoken stated the case for such people by saying: "Loyalty, such as you define, is not a man's chief good. Spirituality, contempla tive self-possession, rest in the light of the truth, interior peace — these constitute, if one can attain to them, man's chief good. Good works for other men, and what externally appears as loyal conduct — such things may and will result from the attainment of inner perfection, but will so result merely because the good soul overflows, just as, to adapt the famous metaphor of Plotinus, just as the sun shines. The true good is to be at one with yourself within. Then you are at the centre of your world, and what ever good deeds you ought to do will result from the mere fact that you are thus self-possessed, and are therefore also in possession of light and peace. It is, then, spirituality rather than loy alty which we principally need." Thus, then, my friend's objection was stated.
69 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY I have thus let four different kinds of indi vidualism state their case, as against my own thesis that loyalty is man's chief moral good. Perhaps the foregoing objections are the prin cipal ones which my thesis in the present day has to meet; although, as I said, a host of special objections can be made merely by varying the form of these. The objections, as you will have observed, are founded upon very various and mutually conflicting prin ciples. Yet each one of them seems somewhat formidable, especially at this stage of my argu ment, where I am maintaining, not that loyalty is good because or in so far as its cause is objectively and socially a good cause, but that loyalty is a centrally significant good for the loyal man himself, apart from the cause to which he is loyal, and so apart from the use fulness to other people which his loyalty may possess.
Ill The scholastic philosopher, Thomas Aqui nas, in his famous theological treatise, the Summa, always, in each one of the articles 70 INDIVIDUALISM into which his work is divided, gives his opponents the word before he states his own case. And after thus setting forth in order the supposed reasons for the very views which he intends to combat, and immediately before beginning his detailed argument for the theses that he proposes to defend, he confronts his various opponents with some single counter- consideration, — a Scriptural passage, a word from the Fathers, or whatever brief assertion will serve his purpose, — as a sort of indica tion to all of his opponents together that they somehow must be in the wrong. This brief opening of his confutation is always formally introduced by the set phrase: Sed contra est, "But on the contrary stands the fact that," etc.
And so now, having sketched various objec tions, due to equally various forms of individ ualism, I may venture my own Sed contra est before I go on to a better statement of my case. Against all my four opponents stands the fol lowing fact: - A little while since the Japanese won much 71 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY admiration from all of us by the absolute loyalty to their own national cause which they displayed during their late war. Hereupon we turned for information to our various au thorities upon things Japanese, and came to know something of that oj[pljnojral_cpde Bushido which Nitobe in his little book has called the Soul of Japan. Well, whatever our other viewsregarding Japanese life and policy, I think that we have now come to see that the ideal of Bushido, the ancient Japanese type of loyalty, despite the barbarous life of feuds and of bloodshed in which it first was born, had very many elements of wonderful spiritual power about it. Now, Bushido did indeed in volve many an ti -individualistic features. But it never meant to those who believed in it any sort of mere slavishness. The loyal Japanese Samurai, as he is described to us by those who know, never' lacked his own sort of self-asser tion. He never accepted what he took to be tyranny. He had his chiefs; but as an indi vidual, he was proud to serve them. He often used his own highly trained judgment regard- 72 INDIVIDUALISM 72 INDIVIDUALISM ing the^y^pjications of the complex_code_of honor under which he was reared. He was fond of what he took to be his rights as a man of honor. He made much, even childlike, dis play of his dignity. His costume, his sword, his bearing, displayed this sense of his im portance. Yet his ideal at least, and in large part his practice, as his admirers depict him, involved a great deal of elaborate cultivation of a genuine spiritual serenity. His whole early t raining Jnvolved a __rjepressipn _of _£rj vate emotions, a control over his moods, a deliberate cheer a£dje^aj^jofjnmd,_all of which he con ceived to be_a,_necessary part of his knightly equipment. Chinese sages, as well as Buddh- Tstic traditions, influenced his views of the cultivation of this interior self-possession and serenity of soul. And yet he was also a man of the world. RWflrri or. an aranper nf insults to his hopgr; and above allLbe ygg loval.1 His loyalty, in fact, consisted of all these personal and social virtues together.
This Japanese loyalty of the Samurai was trained by tne ancient customs of Bushido to 73 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY such freedom and plasticity of conception and expression that, when the modern reform came, the feudal loyalties were readily trans formed, almost at a stroke, into that active devotion of the individual to the whole nation and to its modern needs and demands, — that devotion, I say, which made the rapid and wonderful transformation of Japan possible. The ideal of Bushidp, meanwhile, spread from the old military class to a great part of the nation at large. It is plainly not the only Japanese ideal. And I am not disposed to exaggerate what I hear of the part that the old Japanese loyalty actually plays in deter mining the present morality of the plain people of that country. But there can be no doubt that Bushido has been an enviable spiritual possession of vast numbers of Japanese. / It is indeed universally agreed that this ideal of loyalty has been conceived in Japan as requiring a certain impersonalism^ a certain disregard of the central importance of the ethical individual. And I myself do not be-i lieve, in fact, that the Japanese have rightly 74 INDIVIDUALISM 74 INDIVIDUALISM conceived the true jvorth of the individual. And yet, after all, is not this Japanese ideal of loyalty a sort of counter-instance which all the various opponents of loyalty, whose cases have heretofore been stated, ought to consider? For Japanese loyalty has not been a mere tool for the oppressors_to use^ Herein it has indeed strongly differed from that blind and pathetic loyalty of the ignorant Russian peas ant, which my young friend had in mind when he condemned loyalty. Japanese loy alty has led, on the contrary, to a wonderful and cordial solidarity of national spirit. _If_ it has discouraged strident self-assertion, it has not suppressed individual judgment. For the modern transformation of Japan has surely depended upon a vast development of personal ingenuity and plasticity, not only in tellectual but moral. This loyalty has not: made machines out of meiu It has given rise to a wonderful development of individual talent. Japanese loyalty, furthermore, if in deed strongly opposed to the individualism which knows its rights rather than its duties, 75 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY has expressed itself in an heroic vigor of life which the most energetic amongst those who love to assert themselves might well envy. And meanwhile this loyalty, in some at least of its representatives, has included, has used, has elaborately trained an inner serenity of individual self-control, a spiritual peace and inner perfection which I find enviable, and which many of our own nervous wan derers upon the higher plane might find indeed restful if they could attain to it. There is, then, not so much opposition be tween the good which the loyal may win, and the various personal goods which our par tisans of individualism emphasized. I do not believe that the Japanese ought to be our models. Our civilization has its own moral problems, and must meet them in its own way. But I am sure that our various partisans of ethical individualism, when they conceive that they are opponents of the spirit of loyalty, ought to consider those aspects of Japanese loyalty which most of us do indeed find en- \ viable. This counter-instance serves to show 76 INDIVIDUALISM that, at least in some measure, the various personal goods which the different ethical individualists seek, have been won, and so can be won, by means of the spirit of loyalty.
IV With this counter-instance once before you, I may now go on to a closer analysis of the rational claims of ethical individualism.
Whether he takes account of the physical or of the natural world, every man inevitably finds himself as apparently occupying the centre of his own universe. The starry heavens form to his eyes a sphere, and he him self, so far as he can ever see, is at the centre of that sphere. Yes, the entire and infinite visible world, to be even more exact, seems to each of you to have its centre about where the bridge of your own nose chances to be. What is very remote from us we all of us find it diffi cult to regard as real in the same warm and vital sense in which the world near to us is real. It is for us all a little hard to see how 77 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY the people who live far from our own dwelling- place, say, the Australians or the Siberians, can really fail to observe how distant they are from the place where, after all, it is from our point of view most natural to have one's abiding-place. And the people of alien races must surely feel, if they share our so natural insight regarding them, that they are indeed a strange sort of folk.
This inevitable illusion of perspective is, of course, responsible for what is called our natural selfishness. But on the other hand, this illusion is no mere illusion. It suggests, even while it distorts, the true nature of things. The real world has a genuine relation to the various personalities that live in it. The truth is diversified by its relation to these per sonalities. Values do indeed alter with the point of view. The world as interpreted by me is a fact different from the world as inter preted by you; and these different interpreta tions have all of them their basis in the truth of things. So far as moral values are con cerned, it is therefore indeed certain that no 78 INDIVIDUALISM 78 INDIVIDUALISM ethical doctrine can be right which neglects individuals, and which disregards, I will not say their right, but their duty to centralize their lives, and so their moral universe, about their own purposes. As we seem to be at the centre of the starry heavens, so each of us is indeed at the centre of his own realm of duty. No impersonal moral theory can be successful. Individualism in ethics has therefore its permanent and, as I believe, its absolute jus tification in the nature of things. And the first principle of a true individualism in ethics is indeed that moral autonomy of any rational person which I mentioned at the last time, and which Kant so beautifully defended. Only your own will, brought to a true knowl edge of itself, can ever determine for you what your duty is. And so far, then, I myself, in defending loyalty as a good thing for the loyal, am speaking as an ethical individualist. My whole case depends upon this fact. And so, in following my argument, you need not fear that I want to set some impersonal sort of life as an ideal over against the individualism of 79 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY the opponents of loyalty whose various cases I have just been stating. I contend only that their opposition to loyalty, their view that one's individual purposes can be won otherwise than by and through loyalty, is due merely to their failure to comprehend what it is that the ethical individual needs, and what it is that in all, even of his blindest strivings, he is still seeking. What I hold is, that he inevitably seeks his own form of loyalty, his own cause, and his opportunity to serve that cause, and that he can actually and rationally find spiritual rest and peace in nothing else. Let me indicate to you my reasons for this view; and then, as I hope, you will see that my opponents do not at heart mean to oppose me. As the matter stands, they merely oppose themselves, and this through a mere misapprehension.
To my opponent, wherever he is, I therefore say: Be an individual; seek your own indi vidual good; seek that good thoroughly, un swervingly, unsparingly, with all your heart and soul. But I persist in asking: Where, in heaven above and in earth beneath, have you 80 INDIVIDUALISM to look for this your highest good? Where can you find it?
The first answer to this question might very naturally take the form of saying: "I seek, as my highest individual good, my own happi ness." But, as I pointed out to you in my opening discussion, this answer only gives you your problem back again, unsolved. Happi ness involves the satisfaction of desires. Your natural desires are countless and conflicting. What satisfies one desire defeats another. Until your desires are harmonized by means of some definite plan of life, happiness is therefore a mere accident. Now it comes and now it flies, you know not why. And the mere plan to be happy if you can is by itself no plan. You therefore cannot adopt the pursuit of happiness as your profession. The calling that you adopt will in any case be some thing that the social order in which you live teaches you; and all plans will in your mind be practically secondary to your general plan to THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY live in some sort of tolerable relation to your social order. For you are indeed a social being.
If, next, you simply say: "Well, then, I will live as my social order requires me to live," again, as we have seen, you find yourself with out any determinate way of expressing your own individuality. For if the social order is indeed not as chaotic in its activities as by nature you yourself are, it is quite unable of itself to do more than to make of you, in one way or another, a link in its mechanism, or a member of one of its numerous herds, in any case a mere vehicle for carrying its various in fluences. Against this fate, as an ethical indi vidual, you justly revolt. If this chance social existence furnishes to you your only plan of life, you therefore live in a sad but altogether too common wavering between blind submis sion and incoherent rebellion. As Kant says of the natural human being, your state so far remains this, that you can neither endure your fellow-man nor do without him. You do your daily work perhaps, but you complain of your 82 INDIVIDUALISM 82 INDIVIDUALISM employer. You earn your bread, but you are bitter because of hard times, and because of the social oppressions that beset you. You are insufferably dreary when alone, but are bored when in company. Your neighbors determine your customs; but in return for the art of life thus acquired, you persistently criticise your neighbors for their offences against custom. Imitation and jeal ousy, slavish conventionality, on the one hand, secret or open disorder, on the other, bicker ings that inflame, and gayeties that do not cheer — these, along with many joys and sor rows that come by accident, constitute upon this level the chronicle of your life. It is such a chronicle that the daily newspapers, in the most of their less violently criminal re ports, constantly rehearse to us, so far as they are not taken up with reporting the really greater social activities of mankind. Thus the merely social animal escapes from the chaos of his natural desires, only to sink to the pettiness of a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his lord, the social order. He may 83 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY become fairly happy for a longer or shorter time; but that is so far mere chance. He may even think himself fairly contented, but that is, upon this level, mere callousness.
But if, indeed, you are a genuine individual ist, you cannot accept this fate. If you are an effective individualist, you do not remain a prey to that fate. You demand your libera tion. You require your birthright of the social order which has brought your individuality into being. You seek the salvation of yourself from this intolerable bondage. Now, I have already counselled you to seek such liberty in the form of loyalty; that is, of a willing and whole-souled devotion to a fascinating social cause. But perhaps this does not yet seem to you the solution. And therefore you may next turn to a very familiar form of individual ism. You may say, "Well, then, my ideal shall be Power. I seek to be master of my fate."
That the highest good for the individual is to be defined in terms of Power, — this, I say, is a well-known doctrine. It is very old. It is in each generation renewed, for the young men 84 INDIVIDUALISM define it ever afresh. In our time it has been emphasized by Nietzsche's view that the central principle of ethical individuality is Der Wille zur Macht — the will to be mighty.
If this is now your doctrine, the power that you seek will, of course, not be mere brute force. Those have ill interpreted Nietzsche, — that heavily burdened invalid, doomed to solitude by his sensitiveness, and yet longing amidst his sufferings for an influence over his fellow-men of which he never became conscious before the end came to him, — those have ill interpreted him who have found in his passion ate aphorisms only a glorification of elemental selfishness. No, --power for Nietzsche, as for all ethical individualists of serious signifi cance, is power idealized through its social efficacy, and conceived in terms of some more or less vague dream of a completely perfected and ideal, but certainly social, individual man. And Nietzsche's particular dream of power has all the pathos of the hopeless invalid's longing for escape from his disease. The tragedy of his personal life was one only of the 85 85 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY countless tragedies to which the seekers after power have fallen victims.
Well, if it is power that you seek, your ideal may not be expressed as Nietzsche expressed his, but in any case you will be seeking some socially idealized type of power. Warriors, statesmen, artists, will be before your mind as examples of what power, if attained, would be. In your sphere you will be seeking to control social conditions, and to centre them about your individual interests. Our present question is: Can you hope to attain the highest individual good by such a quest for power as this?
When we remember that the principal theme of heroic tragedy in all ages has been the fate of the seekers after individual power, and that one of the favorite topics of comedy, from the beginning of comedy until to-day, has been the absurdity of the quest of these very lovers of power, our question begins to suggest its own answer. Regarding few topics have the sages, the poets, and the cynical critics of mankind more agreed than regarding the sig- 86 INDIVIDUALISM