and an army on its
present composition, where the very inferiority of the soldier as an
individual--his inferiority in compass and versatility of power and
knowledge--is the very ground from which the army derives its superiority
as a whole, viz. because it is the condition of the possibility of a total
surrender of the individual to one exclusive pursuit. In science
therefore, and (to speak more generally) in the whole evolution of the
human faculties, no less than in Political Economy, the progress of
society brings with it a necessity of sacrificing the ideal of what is
excellent for the individual, to the ideal of what is excellent for the
whole. We need therefore not trouble ourselves (except as a speculative
question) with the comparison of the two states; because, as a practical
question, it is precluded by the overruling tendencies of the age--which
no man could counteract except in his own single case, _i.e._ by refusing
to adapt himself as a part to the whole, and thus foregoing the advantages
of either one state or the other. [1]
FOOTNOTE
[1] The latter part of what is here said coincides, in a way which is
rather remarkable, with a passage in an interesting work of Schiller's
which I have since read, (_on the Aesthetic Education of Men_, in a
series of letters: vid. letter the 6th.) 'With us in order to obtain the
representative _word_ (as it were) of the total species, we must
spell it out by the help of a series of individuals.
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