His was the unconscious and constructive heresy which looked in the direction of national intellectual independence and national moral union and good faith.
IV MEANS OF INDIVIDUAL EMANCIPATION We are now in a position to define more clearly just how the American individual can assert his independence, and how in asserting his independence he can contribute to American national fulfillment.

He cannot make any effective advance towards national fulfillment merely by educating himself and his fellow-countrymen as individuals to a higher intellectual and moral level, because an essential condition of really edifying individual education is the gradual process of collective education by means of collective action and formative collective discipline.

On the other hand, this task of collective education is far from being complete in itself.

It necessarily makes far greater demands upon the individual than does a system of comparative collective irresponsibility.

It implies the selection of peculiarly competent, energetic, and responsible individuals to perform the peculiarly difficult and exacting parts in a socially constructive drama; and it implies, as a necessary condition of such leadership, a progressively higher standard of individual training and achievement, unofficial as well as official, throughout the whole community.