finds it impossible to disregard the group, and the student of the group finds it impossible to disregard the elements common to the individuals who compose the group. He is thus led to fix attention on elements of likeness, and to remove attention from elements of difference—to be, in short, a seeker of contacts and affinities rather than of chasms and aversions.
The very first interests of Spencer, then, indicate that fundamental characteristic which makes him in reality an opponent of individualism: his love for unity and for likeness.
This affirmation will seem strange to those who are wont to consider Spencer as the prophet of individualism à outrance. But your true individualist doesn't write sociology. If he writes at all, he writes "confessions," recording the adventures of his egotism. Shall we say that he disregards men? Not that, for an individualism which simply carried off a little slice of the world would be the individualism of a mole. The individualist considers men as servitors, as instruments to grasp, as animals to drive in leash, and not as objects of knowledge. In a word, your true individualist does not write history: he makes it. He lives the life of society, and does not stop to theorize. He is a Pandolfo Petrucci or a Napoleon, not a Comte or a Spencer.
Spencer, however, chose the other course: he turned to the study of men in their actions and
