consideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified,
it is raised instantly into an axiom of life. The community, in that
case, becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence.
Socialism, then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable
sequence. That even the Far Oriental, with all his numbing
impersonality, has not touched this goal may at least suggest that
individuality is a fact.

But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?

Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event
takes place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other
events sink into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized
and chronicled by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with
action. No one but the child is aware of its occurrence, and he
never speaks of it to others. Yet to that child it marks an epoch.
So intensely individual does it seem that the boy is afraid to avow
it, while in reality so universal is it that probably no human being
has escaped its influence. Though subjective purely, it has more
vividness than any external event; and though strictly intrinsic to
life, it is more startling than any accident of fate or fortune.
This experience of the boy's, at once so singular and yet so general,
is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
fact of his own personality.

Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to
sensitiveness as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained
by the five bodily senses is being fused into the wisdom of that
mental one we call common sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to
the act of waking up. All at once he becomes conscious of himself;