But with the advent of the doubter's view of life absolutism and its appropriate other-worldism melted away like snow beneath a noonday sun, and upon their going self-denial ceased to be the cardinal virtue and the chief ground of an approving self-consciousness. Authority came to be placed not in a visible form, but in an abstract principle. Law became superior to laws; monarchy to monarchs; divinity to Gods; truth to truths, and righteousness to rites and habits. The abstract principle, too, instead of being, as many might imagine, a wholly shadowy thing, real only to the logician, stood for something vital and substantial, for something wholly real, for an inner spirit or life or power in the very things of experience. Authority, henceforth refused to any specific thing, whether person or manner of life, institution or formal belief, became a prerogative of all things together, of all persons or all manners of life or all creeds; and, residing in the working together of them all, it made personal worth consist no longer in the denial of individual characters and relations, but in honest assertion and open use of them. As some have liked to describe the change, the "universal individual," the individual as an authoritative and heaven-made type, that dictated a life and a belief to others generally, passed away, and in its stead, instead of unity as itself an individual, instead of an incarnate type, came unity as in the relation, or the activity maintaining the relation, of all individuals. Instead of a single planet, for [p.227] example, as the controlling centre of the heavenly bodies, came the unity of the solar system through the force or the law of gravity. Instead of a monarch or a book or a city the self-sufficient ruler of human life and human thought, came unity through the ballot; through freedom of thought--always loyal only to a real unity and in being thus loyal also always tolerant; and through all sorts of like means to individuality. The "universal individual" died, and there arose, as it were, out of his grave the living unity of manifold individuals, each one different, yet each quite essential.