ignorance and give a vague appearance of understanding. Nevertheless, from its application to the life of nations, the doctrine of a collective consciousness mainly derives its importance. It is seriously used by a number of vigorous contemporary writers, of whom Schaeffle[25] is perhaps the most notable, to carry to its extreme the doctrine of Comte and Spencer that Society is an organism. Spencer specifically refused to complete his analogy between society and an animal organism by the acceptance of the hypothesis of a collective consciousness; and he insisted strongly on the importance, for legislation and social effort of every kind, of holding fast to the consciousness of individual men as the final court of appeal, by reference to which the value of every institution and every form of social activity must be judged, the importance of regarding the welfare and happiness of individual men as the supreme end, in relation to which the welfare of the State is but a means. But those who, like Schaeffle, complete the analogy by acceptance of this hypothesis, regard a nation as an organism in the fullest sense of the word, as an organism that has its own pleasure and pain and its own conscious ends and purposes and strivings; as in fact a great individual which is conscious and may be more or less perfectly self-conscious, conscious of itself, its past, its future, its purposes, its joys and its sorrows. And they do not scruple to draw the logical conclusion that the welfare of the individual should be completely subjected to that of the State; just as the welfare of an organ or cell of the human body is rightly held to be of infinitesimal value in comparison with that of the whole individual and to derive its importance only from its share in the constitution of the whole. This conception of the ‘collective consciousness’ has thus been used as one of the supports of ‘Prussianism’ and has played its part in bringing about the Great War with all its immense mass of individual anguish. We must, then, examine the arguments upon which the doctrine is based, and ask—Do they suffice to render it probable, or to compel our acceptance of it, and to justify the complete subjection of the individual to the State?