How vastly it concerns us, then, to know whether character is made for us or by us. If the former, then not a line of what has been so freely written is true. If freedom be a delusion character becomes valueless, even if it were possible. Building only what circumstances allow, we can build nothing circumstances cannot destroy. This is blank despair. "Necessity is not the irrevocable behind us, but the inevitable before us. In necessity is no intelligence, because no plan; no will, for there is no choice; no hope, for there is no escape; no responsibility, for there is no freedom."*

If all men have liberty to form character, what of the stricter individuality in its formation? The pendulum swings now over a lesser arc. Out of things a man, out of characters a character. No science of character existed among the ancients, ethical as their thinkers were, but they studied the individual instances of it carefully. There was much “delineation and analysis of character," and one work bearing this subject expressly as its title is a treatise of Theophrastus, the pupil and literary executor of Aristotle. The treatise is a short one, and contains descriptions of thirty characters, all implying "petty vices or weaknesses."

When we ask of later writers what is individual character, Mr. Samuel Bailey answers,† giving five propositions, of which one concerns the body and two the intellect, leaving only two which properly belong to the definition. The first of these is the "predominance of certain feelings," and the second "the energy or feebleness of the volitions." Evidently these contain the substance of a correct definition. It is in the realms of the affections and the will that we are to find individual character. There are the springs of action, in the appetencies. and desires, and there first we encounter a moral tone, without which there can be no character.

But ought individuality in the narrower sense to be an object of desire or endeavor? Is there not more need of the common than of the peculiar? Attention has recently been called to Schleiermacher's emphasis upon the "importance of developing and manifesting those elements in our nature which make us peculiar. He wanted individuality, and thought it the mission of each Christian to manifest religion according to the Letters on the Human Mind.

* Dr. Platt.

4- -FIFTH SERIES, VOL. V.

*

peculiarity of his being." To become conscious of what was in them meant that they should know their "peculiar characteristics," as well as that which they had "in common with others." Schleiermacher's "freshness, originality, and inspiration" came from daring to "go his own way." To this agrees Goethe's idea of all education. It is a development of "what lies in human nature," and this, first, in an "all-sided and har monious culture," and second in considerations of "individuality, life-activity, and solidity."

The fact is, character can come no other way than by individuality. General influences only make very general people, flavorless and uninteresting. Shot in a shot-tower are all rounded alike by the gravitation, except as the individual sieves make the sizes and thus the uses. The law of habit enters here. If character is the sum of our moral habits it can be constructed only by the repetitions of the individual will. Then comes the law of association to make easier thinking, which makes still easier doing, and thus character arrives. The inner struggles which make a self in the peculiar and individual sense constitute the deepest fact in soul-history. "As a man thinketh so is he." Marcus Aurelius says: "Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind, for the soul is dyed by the thoughts." We cannot help but hew and carve ourselves out, however bunglingly, in these conflicts. We are intense in reaching this moral end and lax toward that one, drawn here and there, pulled hither and driven thither, but deciding always both as to what we do and as to what shall be done to us. These struggles can never have exactly the same elements in any two cases. And they can never produce exactly similar results.

There can be no danger of forgetting the claims of the average man in this matter. We desire neither the "hero" (in Carlyle's sense) nor the distorted and shrunken dandy. But for that reason we desire the average man's liberty to be himself. This is the blessing of freedom. Liberty makes men unlike. Compare Russians and the English. Nor can there be any danger of exhaustion of individual varieties under the great types. Fourier made a singular classification. Being a Pythagorean in his respect for numbers, he imitates also the classes, Stuckenberg.

orders, and genera of natural science down to "tenuities and minimities."

He doubles his four hundred and four varieties, after adding one to take in the main trunk, and thus makes eight hundred and ten characters, each provided with the twelve radical passions, but more or less subject to the ascendant influence of one or several.*

But what are eight hundred and ten characters to the wilderness-profusion of individuality to be found in any populous city? Only what the statue-population of Milan's cathedral is to the teeming millions of Italy. What a curious study the infinite variety of human character must be to the angels! All the zest and color and foliage of the moral universe depend upon individuality. Nature seeks it in material and form. Ripening leaves are less alike than green ones. Every integration is toward heterogeneity. The higher the product the more individuality. So it is in civilization-Greek, Roman, Chinese. So art goes. There are circles within circles, and lines which cross them all, and schools which are always breaking up into lesser groups. And all the surface freshness and variety depend upon the underlying and little-known distinctions in character. All comfort and security, given the varieties, depend upon the moral unities below, but these are the sometimes unnoticed harmonies which sustain and enrich the melodies which alone are heard and remembered. The general resemblances make up families, tribes, nations, and races, but within each circle how infinite the play of individuality! Spencer argues that national character is the outgrowth of national habits of life. Why do not the habits, then, extinguish the variety discernible every-where? Since it comes not from without but from within, it can and must arise everywhere and persist through all conformities.

The law of individual development, as the law of life, is doing its work in the judging and test times of this world. The heroic spirit is incarnate in some individuals. The men that have been built alone can stand alone. They are the Noahs and Abrahains and Daniels of the world. They are like Moses and Elijah, Nehemiah and John the Baptist, Luther and Savonarola. "Athanasius contra mundum" was a most profound compliment to individuality in character. This it is

* Bain.

which is fitted for pioneer work. It crosses all social tendencies which demand subserviency to wrong, and does not understand to give "flattering titles." This makes Christians possible, who, sent into the world, are not of it but for it. This makes reformers, and makes reforms possible. The hoary wrong finds its opponent. He leads the timid and victory has begun. The personality of the martyr remains. "After martyrdom he is the same strange, intrusive, pertinacious, resistless force-active as ever-pervading the community by degrees with his peculiar life." * Our very eagerness to know details in the lives of great men bears witness to the strength of their personality. It may be said that no man can succeed without being rightly related to the life of the community-as Luther in Germany, and Zwingli in Switzerland. But let him be the truth incarnated and he shall be a "reformer before the Reformation," like Huss and Jerome of Prague. "Woe to the revolutionist who is not himself a creature of the revolution." Thus Hamilton; but we cry, "Woe to the revolution which has not first of all become incarnate in some revolutionist." Without believing in the König-mann we may believe in the incalculable power of individual character at the crises of affairs. What would history have been (modern) without the individuality of Napoleon and Wellington, Washington, Lincoln, and Grant? Who shall penetrate that secret of the Lord, the subtle correspondence between men's characters and their times? Bacon thought great success awaited the man able to divest himself of "theories and notions vulgarly received." Dugald Stewart says of such men that they are those "marked out by nature to be the lights of the world, to fix the wavering opinions of the multitude, and to impress their own characters on that of their age." Bain shows that

Bentham's revulsion at the system of legal procedure of his early days, by which fees were charged several times over for the same thing, and the impulse to become a social reformer that came over Fourier when he was made to throw wheat into the sea at Marseilles for the sake of raising the prices, are examples of the higher agencies of our conscientious feelings by means of which better:tandards are gradually forced upon mankind.

A glance at the broader relations of individuality may serve finally to fix our estimate of its place and power. It is but an

* Whipple.

easy corollary from the true doctrine of manhood, that institutions and laws and customs are meant to foster and promote it, and must be judged by their final effect upon it. They are but the chestnut-burr skillfully to inclose and faithfully to protect the close-lying and carefully nourished individuals they contain. That these things are for the man, and not the man for them, is plain from the fact that they are temporary and he is immortal. They are the scaffolding, he is the building. Individual liberty, that thing about which the world has quarreled the most and has yet an immense amount of fighting to do, in its extension and its limitation alike, is only, after all, the liberty of the individual; and if there be no individual (as there will be none except by character) there will be no liberty.

But in religion must it not be true that individuality shall cease to be at once the underlying fact and the objective point. as we have seen it to be elsewhere? Are not the considerations that make a man here so massive that the man shall disappear under them? No! just the reverse. Here more than any where is the objective point, for therein lies the glory of God, as thereunder lies his image. There is nothing in the universe about which God cares so much, or by which he can be so adequately revealed, as individual character. The law of the highest type, being most individual, obtains here fully. All the elements which form character are consolidated now. Introversion is deepened in the most effective way when a man is set upon the search for his sins by an awakened conscience acting under the powers of the world to come and the vision of the cross. Higher elements are imported than men know elsewhere. Regulating power is restored. The soul is led out at the top of its faculties, as a candle's chemistry is set in operation by the burning wick. A personal result is sought infinitely beyond the all-confusing notions of pantheism and the race-immortality of positivism. Here, indeed, we are surest. Every thing in religion is meant to emphasize the dignity and value of individual character.

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