observer telling us that the only note of idealism he finds in contemporary intellectual life is a growing, but half-hearted, belief in Socialism, which is more noticeable "in the educated and professional classes."
There is another note of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the poetry of Browning and Walt Whitman.
But this form of idealism cannot be said to differentiate our time from the Early Victorian era, for it found its classic expression back in the middle of the last century in Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, a book which has been forgotten amid the growing consciousness of the organic solidarity of society. But Mr. Street is possibly justified in ignoring this tendency, for as a school of thought it has committed suicide in the person of Nietzsche's Overman attempting to construct out of materials drawn from his inner consciousness a pair of stilts on which to tower above "the herd."
