The progress of social reform must be slow and uncertain, so long as the nature of society is not understood; and society can not be understood till the methods of science are substituted for the empiricism which distinguishes the right way from the wrong only by trying both.

This was the subject of our first Article.

Even science must fail to interpret society unless it adopts as its regulative hypothesis the principle which has produced society. It must, therefore, cease to employ the mechanical metaphors derived from ‘Nature’, and seek in the conception of rational spirit its only clue.

This was the theme of our second Article.

But spirit itself has been mechanically understood, even by many Idealists; for they have opposed the activities by which spirit unites its objects with itself to those by which it asserts and establishes facts against itself. They have proved that the real world is ideal, but not that the ideal world is real. They have shown that spirit makes all things into elements in its own life, but not that in doing so it deepens and enriches their independent objective significance.

This was shown in our third Article.

In the present Article I shall first test the truth of this view of the concurrent realisation of the self and the not-self by reference to Private Property, and then illustrate the significance of it by applying it to the general relations of Individualism and Socialism.