Kidd, B: Individualism and After -

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Résumé :
Excerpt from Individualism and After: The Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre on the 29th May, 1908

IT is a matter of peculiar satisfaction to me that the honour which has come to me of being asked to deliver the Herbert Spencer lecture before the University of Oxford shonld afford me the opportunity of speaking to you upon the subject which I have chosen for this address. It is not simply that it is a subject which lies very close to my mind and to my own work. One of the principal objects aimed at in this lecture will be to set out, within the brief limits allowed, reasons for conceiving the time in which we are living as the beginning of a period of development and reconstruction which must have unusual results in the future. To do this it is necessary to discuss the meaning of that profoundly infiuential,tendency which has its roots deep in our history, and which is known, particularly in this country and in the United States, as Individualism. There has been no more characteristic, consistent, and devoted ex ponent of individualism in its theoretical and scientific aspects than Herbert Spencer. It is with this tendency, and with its relations to the principles of evolution, that his name is most closely associated/ If it is necessary for the purpose I have in view to exhibit individualisma/ not as an end in itself, but as a preparation for what is to come after, it will be, I trust, in the true spirit of evolutionary knowledge,/and with'am ever-present sense of the essential greatness of the work which Spencer has accomplished.

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