bonnes de leur nature et nous n'avons rien à éviter que leurs mauvais usages ou leur excès._[21] [Sidenote: _Virtues and Vices._] On the other hand, the erroneous form of the defence of the passions, consisting of making them the preparation or cause of the virtues, is already to be found in the English philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (More, Shaftesbury, etc.); and in the celebrated _Fable of the Bees_ of Mandeville, it assumes the aspect of a paradoxical theory, in which the vices are looked upon as promoters and factors of progress, morality as inefficacious and harmful for this purpose. And La Rochefoucauld had written: "_Les vices entrent dans la composition des vertus comme les poisons dans la composition des remèdes._"[22] [Sidenote: _The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher._] All these are false or crude forms, in which is involved the doctrine of the right to individuality, and they have always constituted and still constitute its danger. This doctrine received its most energetic expression in the romantic and preromantic period, thanks above all to Schleiermacher, after it had been referred to in a rather vague way by Jacobi.[23] "For some time" (writes Schleiermacher in the _Monologues_) "I too was satisfied that I had discovered Reason; and venerating equality with the _Unique Being_ as that which is most lofty, I believed that there was one single measure for every case, that action should be in all of them the same, and that each one is distinguished from the other only in so far as it occupies a place of its own in space. I believed that humanity manifested itself differently only in the variety of external facts; but that the internal man, the individual, was not a being peculiarly (_eigenthümlich_) constructed, and that each was everywhere equal to the other." "But afterwards was revealed to me that which instantly raised me to a high state of exaltation: it became clear that every man must represent humanity in his own way, in an altogether individual combination of its elements, in order that it may manifest itself in every mode, and that everything most different may issue from its bosom and become effectual in the fulness of time and space.... Owing to this thought, I felt myself to be a work individually willed and therefore elected by the Divinity and such that it must enjoy a particular form and culture; and the free act to which this thought belongs has collected and intimately joined together the elements of human nature in a peculiar existence." "While I now do whatever I do according to my spirit and sense, my fancy places before me as very clear proof of the internal determination, a thousand other modes, in which it would be possible to act otherwise without offending the laws of humanity: I rethink myself in a thousand different forms, in order to discover with the greater certainty that which is especially mine."[24] [Sidenote: _Romantic and very modern theories._]