But there is also a new habit to be acquired in regard to the practical ethical consequences of the theory. The chief of these is the prizing of distinctive difference above uniformity or sameness. The ethical quality is that quality in which a man is intrinsically unique. The ethical act is the most completely individualized act (I ought perhaps to say personalized, but the completely individualized act _is_ that of a unique personality). In brief, the emphasis is here put on that in which a man differs from all others, and not on the common nature which he shares with the rest; or rather, since the common nature is not denied, the stress is put on the intrinsically different mode in which the common nature is expressed in him.[43] The accentuation in current ethical discussion of the common nature of man, and the fallacious assumption that the common interests are the pre-eminently moral interests, that uniformity is the test of ethical quality, is easy to understand. It is the reaction of the modern world against feudalism, a social system not yet entirely outgrown, in which the empirical differences of rank and birth were made the basis of intolerably oppressive discriminations, and in which it was an accepted axiom that some men are baked of better clay than others. It is also a reaction against the capitalistic system that has taken the place of the feudal, in which wealth is to a considerable extent made the standard of social appraisement. It is against these false discriminations that the voice of humanity is now indignantly raised, affirming the moral equality of all men. But equality is mistakenly taken to mean likeness in the sense of sameness, not in the sense of that fundamental likeness on the background of which the desirable unlikenesses stand forth. And this notion of equality as identical with sameness leads to great practical aberrations. Thus, for instance, women are not only to be recognized as the equals of men, but are to be the same as men,—their education patterned on that of men, their specific functions, as far as possible, ignored. For unlikeness is supposed to connote inferiority, and inferiority is justly repelled as morally intolerable. But aside from this one example, the stressing of the common nature, or of the basis of likeness at the expense of the outstanding unlikenesses, leads to other leveling tendencies of which modern democracies furnish many unpleasing illustrations. Thus uniform popular opinion, encompassing the individual on every side, penetrates into his inmost thinking, so that he hardly ventures to hold to his own judgment against the judgments of the majority. And the impulses of the mass tend also to threaten his independence in action. There is indeed a certain intoxication in the very sense of being submerged in a large whole, a certain glad loss of self in great impersonal movements, a