of thousands of wealthy people wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying
trivialities, hundreds of thousands meanly chaffering themselves, rich
or poor, in the wasteful byways of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes,
toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility,
fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order, to
develop understanding... All these people reflect and are part of the
waste and discontent of my life, and this co-ordination of the species
to a common general end, and the quest for my personal salvation, are
the social and the individual aspect of essentially the same desire...

And yet dispersed as all these people are, they are far more closely
drawn together to common ends and common effort than the filthy savages
who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of unpolished stone. They
live in the mere opening phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which
surpasses our imagination. Such intercourse and community as they have
is only a dawn. We look towards the day, the day of the organized
civilized world state. The first clear intimation of that conscious
synthesis of human thought to which I look, the first edge of the
dayspring, has arisen--as Socialism, as I conceive of Socialism.
Socialism is to me no more and no less than the awakening of a
collective consciousness in humanity, a collective will and a collective
mind out of which finer individualities may arise forever in a perpetual
series of fresh endeavours and fresh achievements for the race.


3.4. A CRITICISM OF CERTAIN FORMS OF SOCIALISM.

It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising in this way out of
the conception of a synthesis of the will and thought of the species
will necessarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived at in