even than the French Decadents and the Russian Nihilists, had given expression to a similar doctrine. A number of citations are given to establish the point, among them Emerson's familiar sayings that "it is an esoteric doctrine of society that a little wickedness is good to make muscle," and that "there is no man who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed on manures." "Irreligion," the author says, "strives to transcend religion for no other reason than that religion fails to assert the independence of the human self. That for which irreligion contends is the ideal which religion itself has not the courage to advance, the independence of the inner life" (p. 181). Religion has suffered, first because it has clung to an antiquated cosmology, holding "its picture of the phenomenal world dearer than its sense of inner life," and secondly, because it "has surrendered the spiritual to the social."
The argument of Book Two, which deals with the Socialization of Life and the Repudiation of Society, follows the same general lines as that of the first book. Individualism finds that human worth can not be construed in the spirit of "sociality." The social thinker has made the conception of society "commonplace and obnoxious." "According to naturalism," we are told, "the self does not exist; according to sociality the self has no right to think of existing." The protest of individualism against "sociality" has been made by decadence, pessimism, and scepticism.
One of the most vigorous sections of the book is devoted to the Socialization of Work. Mechanized industry is its typical expression. The life content of the individual is here "nothing but labor"; the higher spiritual goods have long since disappeared. It is the condemnation of industrialism that it has made man "an automaton who must wait upon his machine." The protest of socialism against the industrial order is not against "social production but non-social distribution"; and although socialism, at least with its more intelligent representatives, is not avowedly antagonistic to culture, it accepts the scientific socialization of life with a readiness that individualism is compelled to oppose. "When, therefore, socialism protests that the worker has no property, no tools, the individualist protests that the worker has no culture, no character" (p. 228). It may be added, I think, that capitalism has not put forward a higher standard of culture for the worker than has socialism. In these days, to be sure, capitalism has been insisting that the workers must at least have religion even though it has to be bought at a great price. But it needs no special acuteness to discover that religion in this connection does
