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Similarly, one may say that this has not been an era for encouraging individualism, and yet know perfectly well that, powerless or not, individuals make up the world. Every mass unleashing in this century, for good or ill, may be traced to an individual choice. And even when the choice has overwhelmed the choosers, the solitary mind, like a bat in a cave, gropes about for its own directions. "History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience." (Churchill on Chamberlain.) That can be no less true of our time than of others. What may have mattered most about these years is not how close the world came to self-destruction, but that it did not happen, that the individual's claim on survival took precedence over all the wilder forces he let go. "Between the widening and the heightening," wrote Octavio Paz, "be tween the lips that say the Word and the Word itself, there is a pause, a sparkle that divides and claws: I. I'm not finished with myself yet." What is one to conclude then? That the self always prevails over the circumstances that oppose it? It hardly seems likely. One has no guarantees that the self will have prevailed in our time, and in any case no force in this century has so opposed the individual conscience as the individual conscience. The mind unleashed has as often run helter-skelter over its fellows as it has advanced their wellbeing. True, few periods of history have so concerned themselves with moral problems, but few have done so much to create them. It would be heartening to think that as a result of these 60 years the individual finally managed to come to terms with the social consequences of his liberations, seeing at last that the question he posed as the period began— How free can one be?—was not an exultation but a problem. The trouble all along may have rested with the word freedom, which represents an emotional idea, not a rational one, and thus offers a perilous guide for diverse human beings. In the realm of politics, had the world been inspired by the idea of justice rather than freedom, it might look a good deal healthier. At the onset of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke cautioned an enthusiast who sought Burke's approval of the events: "When I see the spirit of liberty in action," wrote Burke, "I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared and until we see something deeper than the agita tion of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one." Which is to say that when people or ideas are unfettered, they are freed but not yet free. To be free, in fact, seems to require an attitude opposite that which sets one free: a sense of reasonable limitations, of self-governing restraint, the acknowledgment that one is able to escape from anything except his skin. Nothing new in such a lesson, of course. But it will have mattered to learn it.