else the attributes of an organism, e.g., self-regulation, reparative power, assimilation, secretion and excretion, metabolic power, regeneration, i.e., the equivalents of these physiological processes; but it is a mistake, he adds, to suppose that they belonged to him at the start—he was at first a part of a whole, an organ, and only as such did the first stirrings of the general organic qualities come to him. That is, individuals are not born free and sovereign, they become so [to whatever extent they do become so] as the result of a social process. Hence the state did not originally oppress individuals—they as yet failed to exist.[1] "The amœba-like unity of the individual comes at the end! and the philosophers started with it, as if it was already there!"[2] All the same individuals—organic unities in themselves—do come at last. Society by its own processes breeds those more or less independent of society, and morality itself helps train the future super-moral or autonomous individual—this last we shall see more clearly later on.[3]
IV
The conception of morality as entirely a social thing is perhaps still the dominant one. Nietzsche remarks that the early ages of mankind have done more to fix its character than the later historical epochs[4]—and this appears to hold of its intellectual conceptions as well. Hegel speaks entirely in the spirit of the antique conception of morality, when he says that "the individual has his truth, real existence, and ethical status only in being a member of the state," that "the striving for a morality of one's own is futile and by its very nature impossible of attainment"; and again when he says, "In respect to morality, the saying of one of the wisest men of antiquity is the true one—to be moral is to live in accordance with the moral tradition of one's country."[5] The latest, or, at least, best book which America has produced on ethics—Dewey and Tufts Ethics—has, if not the same, a similar conception. We read there of "moral, i.e., socialized interests"; we hear that in
