Now, it is plain that this best life can only be realised in consciousness, that being the medium of all satisfaction and the only true type of a whole in experience. And all consciousness, as experienced by man, is on one side particular, attached to bodies, and exclusive of consciousnesses attached to other bodies. In a sense, it is true that no one consciousness can partake of or actually enter into another. Thus, it is apt to be held, as we have amply seen, that the essential danger of State interference lies in the intrusion of something originated by “others” upon a distinct particular consciousness, whose distinction and particularity--its freedom--are thus impaired. It is all-important to our point of view that this prejudice should be dispelled. Force or automatic custom or authoritative tradition or “suggestion” are not hostile to one individuality because they come from “others,” but because their nature is contradictory to the nature of the highest self-assertion of mind, because they are, so to speak, in a medium incompatible with its medium. They {183} are just as hostile to this self-assertion, just as alien, if they emanate, as they constantly do, from conflicting elements in our complex private experience, as if they come to us, as we say, “from without.” The question is of their “nature” and tendency, not of their centre of origin. Individuals are limited and isolated in many ways. But their true individuality does not lie in their isolation, but in that distinctive act or service by which they pass into unique contributions to the universal. True individuality, as we have said, is not in the minimisation which forbids further subdivision, but in the maximisation which includes the greatest possible being in an inviolable unity. It is not, therefore, the intrusion upon isolation, as such, that interferes with individuality; it is the intrusion, upon a growing unity of consciousness, of a medium hostile to its growth.