INDIVIDUALISM AND AFTER THE HERBERT SPENCER LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE BY BENJAMIN KIDD OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS MCMVIII INDIVIDUALISM AND AFTER Ir is a matter of peculiar satisfaction to me that the honour which has come to me of being asked to deliver the Herbert Spencer lecture before the University of Oxford should afford me the opportunity of speaking to you upon the subject which I have chosen for this address. It is not simply that it is a subject which lies very close to my mind and to my own work. One of the principal objects aimed at in this lecture will be to set out, within the brief limits allowed, reasons for conceiving the time in which we are living as the beginning of a period of development and reconstruction which must have unusual results in the future. To do this it is necessary to discuss the meaning of that profoundly influential tendency which has its roots deep in our history, and which is known, particularly in this country and in the United States, as Individualism. There has been no more characteristic, consistent, and devoted exponent of individualism in its theoretical and scientific aspects than Herbert Spencer. It is with this tendency, and with its relations to the principles of evolution, that his name is most closely associated. If it is necessary for the purpose I have in view to exhibit individualism_ not as an end in itself, but as a preparation for what is to come after, it will be, I trust, in the true spirit of evolutionary knowledge, and with an ever-present sense of the essential greatness of the work which Spencer has accomplished. It may be recalled that it is now some three-quarters A 2 183242 of a century since John Henry Newman set out on a memorable journey for rest and contemplation in the south of Europe. He was at the time full of the spirit of unrest which was then striving in this University; and he was to return later confirmed in the conviction which had been growing in his mind that there was something wrong in the conclusions which men were drawing from the prevalent tendencies of the time. This conviction, shared in by others and carrying different minds in different directions, was destined later to lead Newman, to the surprise of his generation, to turn his back finally on the principles of what up to that time had been one of the most successful developments in Western history. I refer to this period not because I wish to discuss in detail any of the controversies to which it gave rise, but because I desire to take it as a point of departure. The time which intervenes between that period and our own has been filled with a series of movements which have extended outwards, apparently from many independent centres. They have come, indeed, to embrace in their influence not only much of the purely intellectual life of our time, but many of its deeper practical activities. In literature, in politics, in art, in legislation, in our conception of the national life, in our theories of society, and even in the fundamental conceptions of philosophy, the more vital controversies of the time all appear to centre round movements which have a certain feature in common. They are all movements the leaders of which emphasize a direction of progress which seems to be away from the principles of what we have known in the past as individualism. It is of these movements, seen not in isolation, but as the details of a single development related to organic causes, that I wish to speak. Some of the phases of it are described as Reaction, others are spoken of with no less certainty as Revolution. But it is of this development, seen neither as reaction nor as revolution, but as a movement of Reconstruction, quite unusual as it appears to me in history, a movement carrying within itself not only the life of the future, but with equal certainty the meaning of the past, that I desire to discuss here./ Those who come after us will in all probability make allowance for the fact that it must be a very rare occurrence for any one of us to imagine this particular time in which we are now living as it will appear in the future, Any of us, for instance, may still to-day talk to men whose early years take them back to the days before the period of railways, telegraphs, and ocean steamships-to the days, that is to say, when all the activities of the world were still as distant from each other in time and space as they were in the days of Augustus Caesar. Those who are still our contemporaries have known the time when the white races of the world were scarcely more than a third of their present number, and when applied science had not yet begun those surprising transformations through which the face of this planet would appear changed, if it were possible for us to see it from the depths of space. Even those who are middle-aged can go back to the days before the doctrine of organic evolution, as we now know it, had yet been propounded, and to the time when, in all the sciences, the processes of thought were still striving to orient themselves to the |