Organicism also reacted to a widely held political idea of the time: that individualism had been taken to extremes in modern society and that it was necessary to bring balance through an opposite emphasis. Against the self-sufficient individual of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the organicists claimed to bring the support of science to the primacy of the social bond. For these authors, the natural human state was that of association. As Worms put it in a critique of the contract theory: "Men did not need to associate themselves, they were born associated, and they remained so." Psychological and moral capacities developed "through" this association; in other words, humans owed their consciousness and their capacity for relative autonomy to society. Individuality as it was known and prized in modern society was a product of society. Lilienfeld stated this as a simple fact: "The intellectual and moral faculties of man are exclusively the product of social life." The organicists believed this should settle the conflict between individual liberty and social solidarity; humans would come to realize their strict dependence on the collective (Barberis 2003: 62).