INDIVIDUAL
762
INDIVIDUAL
State's proper province. This theory has a much
smaller following now than it had a century or even
half a century ago; for experience has abundantly
shown that the assumptions upon which it rests are
purely artificial and thoroughly false. There exists
no general ])rcsunii)tion either for or against state
activities. If there is any presumption with regard
to particular matters, it is as apt to be favourable as
unfavourable. The one principle of guidance and
test of propriety in this fielil is the welfare of society
and of its component individuals, as determined by
experience. Whenever these ends can be better at-
tained by state intervention than by individual effort,
state intervention is justified.
It is against intervention in the affairs of industry that present-day individualism malies its strongest protest. According to the liiisxez-faire, or let alone, school of economists anil politicians, the State should permit and encourage the fullest freedom of con- tract and of competition throughout the field of in<histry. This theory, which was derived partly from the political philosophy of the eighteenth cen- tury, already mentioned, ])artly from the Kantian doctrine that the individual has a right to the fullest measure of freedom that is compatible with the equal freedom of other individuals, and partly from the teachings of Adam Smith, received its most system- atic expression in the tenets of the Manchester School. Its advocates opposed not only such public enter- prises as state railways and telegraphs, but such re- strictive measures as factory regulations, and laws governing the hours of labour for women and children. They also discouraged all associations of capitalists or of labourers. Very few individualists now adopt this extreme posit ion . Experience has too frequently shown that the individual can be as deeply injured through an extortionate contract, as at the hands of the thief, the highwayman, or the contract breaker. The individual needs the protection of the State quite as much and quite as often in the former case as in any of the latter contingencies. As to state regu- lation or state ownership of certain industries and utilities, this too is entirely a (luestion of expediency for the public welfare. There is no a priori principle, political, ethical, economic, or religious, by which it can be decided. Many individualists, and others like- wise, who oppose state intervention in this field are victims of a fallacy. In (heir anxiety to safeguard individual liljerty, they forget that reasonable labour legislation, for example, does not deprive the labourer of any liberty that is worth having, while it does en- sure him real opportunity, which is the vital content of all true liberty; they forget that, while state control and direction of certain industries undoubtedly dimin- ishes both the lilierty and the opportunity of some individuals, it may increa.se the opportunities and the welfare of the vast majority. Both individualists and non-indivitlualists aim, as a rule, at the greatest measure of real liberty for the individual; all their disagreement relates to the means by which this aim is to be realized.
As in the matter of the necessity and justification of the State, so with regard to its functions, the Catho- lic position is neither indivitlualistic nor anti-individ- ualistic. It accepts neither the "policeman" theory, which would reduce the activities of the State to the protection of life and property and the enforcement of contracts, nor the proposals of Socialism, which would make the State the owner and director of all the instruments of production. In both respects its attitude is determined not by any metaphysical theory of the appropriate functions of the State, but by its conception of the requisites of individual and social welfare.
DdNisTHoRPE, Indivifhuilism : A System of Politics fLondon, 1SS9); Spencer, Man Versus the Stole (London, I.SS4); KloD. Western Civilization (New York. 1902); Ritchie. Principles of State Interference (hondon, 1891); Rick/lBY, Political and Moral
Essays (New York, 1902); Jevon.s, The State in Relation to
Labour (London, 1SS2); J*o(>rK, Socialism and Individualism
(London, 1907): i^lucyvlcK, Methods of Ethics [hondoiu 1901);
Leo XIII, Encyclicals, Rerum Xovarum and Libertas; Meyer,
Institutioncs Juris Xaturalis, II (Fribourg, 1900); Wenzel,
Cemcinschaft und Persnnlichkeit (Berlin, 1899): Le (Iall, /.a
doctrine individualiste et Vanarchie (Touloxise, 1S94): Hadley,
in New Encyclopedia of Social Reform, s. v.
John A. Ryan.
Individual, Individuality (Lat. indiridmtm; Germ. Einzeln; Fr. individuel). An individual being is defined by St. Thomas as " quod est in se indivisum, ab aliis vero divisum" (a being undivided in itself but separated from other beings). It implies therefore unity and separateness or distinctness. Individuality in general may lie defined or descrilied as the property or collection of properties by which the individual possesses tliis unity and is separated off from other beings. What is it that constitutes an individual, or individuality? This is a problem which has exer- cised most of the great schools of philosophy. It may lie considered from the metaphysical or the psychological standpoint, though these are intimately coimected. .Again, there is a sense in which individ- uality presents interesting questions to ethics and pedagogics.
Mkt.vphvsr'S. — The surrounding universe mani- fests itself to us, at all events at first sight, as a plural- ittj, a collection of individual things. We recognize as individually distinct Ijeings a multiplicity of mate- rial objects — animals, men, and the like. We speak of the stacks of corn or the stones scattered over a field as so many individual things. Yet a little reflection reveals to us that the nature of the unify, and conse- quently of the individuality, possessed by many of these objects is of a very imperfect kind. A stack of corn is after all merely an aggregate of separate ears; and a stone is merely a group of smaller stones or
E articles of matter in accidental local contact, and ounded ofT by some other kind of matter. The unity of such an object is entirely extrinsic and accidental, whilst the separateness is due merely to the discon- tinuity beyond its surfaces of the kind of material of which file object is composed. Portions of lifeless matter have thus oidy an inferior or imperfect kind of individuality. Higher in the scale of beings come plants and animal organisms, though in the lower forms of life it is often a difficult problem for the scientist to decide whether a particular specimen is better described as a single living being or a colony of beings.
However, the broad fact remains that we look on the real world presented to our senses as made up of a vast number of separate individual beings. On the other hand, as soon as our mind begins to think, judge, or reason, or to make any sort of significant state- ments about these objects, it conceives them under universal aspects. It does not manipulate them as mere disconnected individuals, but groups them under certain common points of view. If the mind is to make any progress at all in knowledge, it is compelled to organize its .sensible experiences, to handle the indivitlual facts presented to it by means of universal ideas. The psychological genesis of these ideas, their precise character, and the nature of the reality outside of the mind which corresponds to them — in other words the great problem of universals — were keenly discussed by Plato and Aristotle, and became a still more burning question in the Christian and Arabic schools of philosophy from the tenth to the twelfth century (see Idea). " But a counterpart of the same problem is the question of the individual. And this latter topic in the form of the controversy respect- ing the princijntim indit'iduationis became almost as prominent in the schools during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
What constitutes an individual being? What gives it its own peculiar individuality? By what is it
