One’s class, then, in the sense in which it indicates the type of position and service involved in one’s occupation, approaches very near the centre of one’s individuality. In principle, as an ethical idea, it takes the man or woman beyond the family and the neighbourhood; and for the same reason takes him deeper into himself. He acquires in it a complex of qualities and capacities which put a special point upon the general need of making a livelihood for the support of his household. In principle, his individual service _is_ the social mind, as it takes, in his consciousness, the shape demanded by the logic of the social whole. He is “a public worker” [1] by doing the service which society demands of him. And just because the service is in principle something particular, unique, and distinctive, he feels himself in it to be a member of a unity held together by differences. And in this sense the bond of social union is not in similarity, but in the highest degree of individuality or specialisation, the ultimate point of which would be to feel that I am rendering {314} to society a service which is necessary, and which no one but me can render--the closest conceivable tie, and yet one, which in a sense, really exists in every case. Your special powers and functions supply my need, and my special powers and functions supply your need, and each of us recognises this and rejoices in it. This ethical idea of unique service, or the service of a unique class, involves of course a more or less conscious identity in difference. That is to say, the individual’s mind is not reduced to his special service, or he would be a machine. Rather, the whole social consciousness is present in him, but present in a modified form, according to the point of view from which it is looking. The problem is simply put by Plato’s diagrammatic scheme of classes. The statesman’s function is to be wise for the community; the carpenter’s to carpenter for the community. But plainly the community for which the statesman knows that he has to be wise, must include the carpenter’s life and the conditions of his work, and the community for which the carpenter knows that he has to work must include some of the order and organisation which belong to it in the statesman’s vision. The individual, in short, is unique, or belongs to a unique class, not as an atom, but as a case of a law, or term of a connection. This is what is meant by individuality in the true sense; the character of a unit which has a great deal that, being his very self, cannot be divided from him; not one which has so little that there is nothing by subtraction of which he can be imagined less. Such individuality is in a sense the whole ethical idea, but more particularly is embodied in {315} the idea of a vocation. Our vocation, like our neighbourhood, and usually of course in connection with it, stamps both mind and body; and what we consider most intimately ourself is really the structure of ethical ideas which