Drang; abstract theorists like Fichte and poets of the imagination like Goethe; supporters of Prussian aristocracy like Hegel and revolutionary radicals like Ibsen; mystics like Carlyle and skeptics like Renan; dialecticians like Stirner and lyrists like Nietzsche. Hippolyte Taine, for all his talk of race and of tradition, is as strong for the individual as is the vagabond Gorky, dreaming in Russian solitudes fantastic dreams of gypsy anarchy. And the weighty evolutionary learning of Spencer joins with the elegant subtleties of Maurice Barrès to form part of the current conception of individualism.
Clearly, then, individualism cannot be a single and unchanging thing: too many spirits have exalted it. We must confess, as honest individualists, that there is no common and accepted type of individualism. And there could be perhaps no better proof of the profound and continual diversity of men than the fact that we give a single name and symbol to this many-colored flowering of forms and of ideals.
But perhaps the variety is not so great as it seems. Is it not possible that we are abusing terms when we class as individualistic certain theories which superficially proclaim the preëminence of the individual?
I can hardly repress this suspicion, for in-
