Human action moved back and forth along an axis of tension between the individual and the collective or social. Self-awareness was an inescapably individualist phenomenon. Never after creation could the sense of the self be exterminated. Never thereafter, then, could the collectivity perpetually and wholly dominate the individual soul. Incessant, forcible, and imaginative attempts to do so over all of history were foredoomed to fail and still are. The split self, a source of the greatest terror, could not permit its unification by the collectivity, even though the collective achieved its great resilient strength from its guarantees to the individual that it would assuage, diminish and even cure the terror of the split. There was no returning to the mammal.

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