The group exists, after all, even as the most completely socialized political doctrines insist, for the realization of individual selves, for freedom of opportunity and initiative. It is when "individualism" runs rampant, when self-realization on the part of one individual interferes with self-realization on the part of all others that individualism becomes a menace. Individuality is itself valuable, in the first place, because as Mill pointed out in his essay on _Liberty_ earlier quoted:
What has made the European family an improving instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another; they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable; and although at every period those who traveled in different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest could have been compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have rarely had any permanent success, and each has endured in time to receive the good which the others have offered.[2]
[Footnote 2: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. III.]
Apart from the variations in group customs and traditions, and their progressive application to changing circumstances which individuality makes possible, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that society is the name for the process by which individuals live together. It is the individuals who are the realities and the happiness of individuals which is the aim of social organization. Such happiness is only attainable when individuals are allowed to make the most of their native capacities and individual interests. The social group as a group will be more interesting, colorful, and various when every experimentation and variety of life are encouraged and promoted. And the individuals in such a society will be personalities, not the mere mechanisms of a regimented routine.
THE MEANING OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES. The major part of this volume has been devoted to a consideration of those traits, interests, and capacities which all individuals share, and which may in general be described as the "original nature of man." These distinctive inborn tendencies were treated, for purposes of analysis, in the most general terms, and, on the whole, as if they appeared in the same strength and variety in all individuals. When we thus stand off and abstract those characteristics which appear universally in all individuals, human nature appears constant. But there are marked variations in the specific content of human nature with which each individual is at birth endowed. Put in another way, one might say that to be a human being means to be by nature pugnacious, curious, subject to fatigue, responsive to praise and blame, etc., and susceptible to training in all these respects. By virtue of the fact that we are all members of the human race, we have common characteristics; by virtue that we are _individuals_, we all display specific variations in specific human capacities. There is, save abstractly, no such thing as a standard human being. We may intellectually set up a norm or standard, but it will be a norm or standard from which every individual is bound to vary.