THE
                              PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
                                  OF THE STATE
            
            
                                       BY
            
                               BERNARD BOSANQUET
            
            
            C'est le peuple qui compose le genre humain; ce qui
            n'est pas peuple est si peu de chose que ce n'est pas la
            peine de le compter. (?mile, livre 4.)
            
            
                                 Second Edition
            
                                      1910
            
            
                      Scanned and Edited by Robert Bamford
                          Golden Gale Electronic Books
                                      1995
            
            --------------------------------------------------------
            
                               PUBLISHING HISTORY
            
            First Edition: 1899
            Second Edition (here used): 1910
            
            --------------------------------------------------------
            
                      FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR
            
            FULL NAME: Bernard Bosanquet
            BORN: 14 June 1848, Alnwick
            DIED: 8 February 1923, Hampstead, aged 74
            AGE WHEN THIS BOOK WRITTEN: About 50
            
            --------------------------------------------------------
            
                          HOW TO CONTACT THE PUBLISHER
            
            By Internet email: rbamford@acslink.net.au
            By post: P.O. Box 894, Sandy Bay, TAS 7006, Australia
            
            --------------------------------------------------------
            
            The following notice applies to this computer program:
            Copyright 1995 Robert W. Bamford
            
            --------------------------------------------------------
            
            
                                       TO
                              CHARLES STEWART LOCH
            
            
            --------------------------------------------------------
            

PREFACE THE present work is an attempt to express what I take to be the
fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy. I have criticised and
interpreted the doctrines of certain well-known thinkers only with the
view of setting these ideas in the clearest light. This is the whole
purpose of the book; and I have intentionally abstained from practical
applications, except by way of illustration. It is my conviction,
indeed, that a better understanding of fundamental principles would very
greatly contribute to the more rational handling of practical problems.
But this better understanding is only to be attained, as it seems to me,
by a thorough examination of ideas, apart from the associations of
practical issues about which a fierce party spirit has been aroused.
And, moreover, it from the associations of practical issues about which
a fierce party spirit has been aroused. And, moreover, it is my belief
that the influence of the ideas here maintained upon practical
discussion, would be, in a certain sense, to detach it from
philosophical theory. The principles which I advocate would destroy so
many party prejudices, would put the mind in possession of so many clues
to fact, that practical "social" issues would in consequence be
considered as problems of life and mind, to be treated only with
intimate experience, and by methods adequate to their subtlety. The

result would be that such discussions would be regarded, if one may use
the expression, more respectfully, and would acquire an independence and
completeness worthy of their importance. The work of the social reformer
should no more be regarded as a mere appendix to social theory than that
of the doctor is regarded as a mere appendix to physiology. Such a
division of labour is, of course, no hindrance to the interchange of
facts and ideas between theory and practice. On the contrary, it tends
to promote such an interchange, by increasing the supply on either side,
and improving the intellectual communication between them. It will occur
to philosophical readers that the essence of the theory here presented
is to be found not merely in Plato and in Aristotle, but in very many
modern writers, more especially in Hegel, T. H. Green, Bradley, and
Wallace. And they may be inclined to doubt the justification for a
further work on the same lines by one who can hardly expect to improve
upon the writings of such predecessors. On this point I should like to
make a brief explanation. To begin with, it is a truism that every
generation needs to be addressed in its own language; and I might even
plead that the greatness of a tradition justifies some urgency in
calling attention to it. But further, as regards T. H. Green in
particular, whom in many points I follow very closely, I had two special
reasons for desiring

to express myself independently. One of these is to be found in my
attempt to apply the conceptions of recent psychology to the theory of
State coercion and of the Real or General Will, and to explain the
relation of Social Philosophy to Sociological Psychology. For a short
discussion of the Imitation Theory, which the purpose of the present
work would not permit me to include in it, I may refer to a paper which
will shortly appear in Mind. My other reason lay in the conviction that
the time has gone by for the scrupulous caution which Green displayed in
estimating the value of the State to its members. I have referred to
this subject in the body of my work (ch. x.); but I desire to emphasise
my belief that our growing experience of all social "classes" proves the
essentials of happiness and character to be the same throughout the
social whole. Scepticism on this point is the product, I am convinced,
of defective social experience. Indeed, it seems worth while to observe
that the attention which is now rightly paid to such disadvantages,
affecting the poorer classes of citizens, as it may be possible to
remedy, has given rise to a serious confusion. The zeal of the advocate
has led him to slander his client. In proving that under such and such
conditions it would be no wonder if "the poor" were bad, he forgets to
observe that in fact they are generally just as good as other people.
The all- important distinction between a poor home and a bad home is
neglected. And yet it seems probable that, omitting the definitely
criminal quarters, there is no larger proportion of bad homes among the
poor than among the rich. Such terms as "den" and "slum"

are too freely used, with an affectation of intimacy, for homes in which
thousands of respectable citizens reside. Our democratic age will be
remarkable to posterity for having dimmed the time-honoured belief in
the virtues of the poor. There was cant, no doubt, in the older
doctrine, but it was not so far from the fact as the opposite cant of
to-day; and it is time that the truth in it should be revived. I must
repeat that these remarks are not intended to be controversial. There is
nothing in them which serious men of all schools may not accept. They
are meant to defend my attitude in treating the Real Will, and Freedom
in the greater Self, as matters of universal concern, and not merely as
hopes and fancies cherished by "educated" persons. Indeed, although it
would be churlish for a student to disparage literary education, it must
never be forgotten that, as things are to-day, the citizens who live by
handicraft possess a valuable element of brain-culture, which is on the
whole denied to the literary class. Whatever, therefore, may be wanting
in the following pages, it is not, I think, the relation of their
subject-matter to the general life of peoples. The social student should
shun mere optimism; but he should not be afraid to make the most of that
which he studies. It is an unfortunate result of the semi- practical
aims which naturally influence social philosophers, that they are apt
throughout to take up an indifferent, if not a hostile, attitude to
their given object. They hardly believe in actual society as a botanist
believes in plants, or a biologist in vital processes. And hence, social
theory comes off badly. No student can really appreciate an object for
which he is always apologising. There is a

touch of this attitude in all the principal writers, except Hegel and
Bradley, and therefore, as I venture to think, they partly fail to seize
the greatness and ideality of life in its commonest actual phases. It is
in no spirit of obscurantism, and with no thought of resisting the march
of a true social logic, that some take up a different position. They are
convinced that an actual living society is an infinitely higher creature
than a steam- engine, a plant, or an animal; and that the best of their
ideas are not too good to be employed in analysing it. Those who cannot
be enthusiastic in the study of society as it is, would not be so in the
study of a better society if they had it. "Here or nowhere is your
America." BERNARD BOSANQUET. CATERHAM, March, 1899.
-------------------------------------------------------- PREFACE TO THE
SECOND EDITION THE present edition contains a new Introduction, defining
my attitude towards movements in European thought which have declared
their nature more distinctly in the interval since the first publication
of my work. A few alterations have also been made in the text and notes,
and the opening of ch. viii. has been rewritten. With regard to pressing
social questions, I have maintained, as before, an uncontroversial
position, though I have found it inevitably necessary to illustrate some
of my contentions by references to social experience. BERNARD BOSANQUET.
OXSHOTT, Nov. 12, 1909.
-------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION TO SECOND EDITION THE THREE LINES OF CRITICISM xxi-xl 1.
"Too narrow and too rigid" xxi (i.) "Too narrow" xxii (ii.) "Too rigid"
xxiv 2. "Too negative" xxv (i.) The Kantian principle xxv (ii.) Great
expectations from the modern State xxvi (iii.) Error in neglecting "the
social" as such xxvii *. By ranking it under the "individual" xxvii *.
By claiming the fascination of it for the State xxvii (iv.) Rectifying
this error, we can understand negative aspect of State xxviii *.
Religion and Morality non-enforceable; significance of this; injustice
of ethical "justice" xxix *. Nature of indirect promotion of good by
State xxxi *. Social Invention not on the whole the line of the State
xxxii *. Nature of the best State action xxxiv 3. "Too Intellectualist"
xxxiv (i.) A great movement plus a great fallacy. The European movement.
Earth and Olympus xxxv (ii.) The fallacy. That the principle of the
intelligence is tautology xxxvi (iii.) Life as the Thing-in-itself. A
new Agnosticism. Pessimism towards organised ideas xxxvii (iv.) True
nature of organised ideas and their place in the State xxxviii CHAPTER I
RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 1-16 1.
Meaning of "Philosophical Theory" 1 2. Philosophy and the "State" 3 *.
The Greek City-State 4 *. Type of mind implied in it 5 *. Type of
political philosophy suggested by it 5 3. Transition from City-State to
Nation-State. Law of Nature 9 4. Rise of Nation-States and of modern
political philosophy. Rousseau 11 CHAPTER II SOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH
PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 17-52 1. Problems of Social Physics and of Idealism
17 2. Social Theory as influenced by special sciences 19 (i.)
Mathematics 19 (ii.) Biology 21 (iii.) Economics 27 (iv.) Jurisprudence
and the theory of Right 34 (*) Law as "ideal fact" 34 (*) Sociological
analysis of Law 36 (v.) Idea of the "spirit of laws" or mind of peoples;
Anthropology in widest sense 39 (vi.) Psychology 42 (vii.) Connection of
points of view and kinds of fact 47 3. Comparison of Psychological
Sociology and Social Philosophy 48 CHAPTER III THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL
OBLIGATION; SELF-GOVERNMENT 53- 78 1. The conception of self-government
53 2. Law and Liberty in Bentham 56 3. Examination of Mill's "Liberty"
60 (i.) Mill's idea of Individuality 60 (ii.) His view of the authority
of Society over the Individual 61 (iii.) His applications of his
principle 65 4. Views of Herbert Spencer 69 (i.) Spencer and Bentham on
Natural Right 70 (ii.) Liberty and restraint in Spencer and Huxley 71 5.
Mill's criticism of Self-Government 73 CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEM OF
POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED 79-102 1. Nature of above
theories not expressed by term Individualism. "Theories of the first
look" 79 2. Rousseau's earlier Essays 84 3. Problem of the Contrat
Social 88 4. Conflict of ideas in Rousseau's statement 89 5. Nature of
his solution 91 6. Reality of the "Moral Person" and conception of Civil
Liberty 94 CHAPTER V THE CONCEPTION OF A "REAL" WILL 103-123 1. The
Supreme Will in Hobbes and Locke 103 2. Meaning of the General Will for
Rousseau 107 3. The General Will contrasted with the Will of All 111 4.
The General Will and the work of the Legislator 117 CHAPTER VI THE
CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING SUGGESTIONS
124-154 1. Liberty as the condition of our being ourselves 124 2.
Illustrated by the idea of Nature and Natural 128 3. Phases of idea of
Liberty 133 (a) juristic phase = "absence of restraint" 134 (b)
Political phase = "rights of citizenship" 135 (c) Positive connection of
(a) and (b) 136 (d) Philosophical phase--"being oneself in fullest
sense" 137 (e) Danger and justification of using same term for (a) and
(d) 142 4. Liberty as attribute of the will that wills itself 146 5.
This "real" will identified with State 149 (a) State in this sense is
social life as a whole 150 (b) How State is force as extension of
"individual" mind 152 CHAPTER VII PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDEA
OF A REAL OR GENERAL WILL 155-179 1. Object of the Chapter 155 2.
Connection between social and mental groupings 156 (1) Analogy between
them 156 (i.) Associations of persons and of ideas 156 (ii.)
Organisation of social groups and of ideas 159 (2) Identity of social
and mental groupings 170 (i.) Social groups as an aspect of mental
systems 170 (ii.) Individual minds as structures of appercipient systems
173 (iii.) Social whole as a system of mental systems 175 CHAPTER VIII
NATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF STATE ACTION 180
1. Distinction between Individual and Society irrelevant to question of
Social Means and End 180 2. True contrast: Automatism and Consciousness
182 3. End of State, and Means at its disposal qua State 185 4. State
can only secure "external" actions 187 5. Principle of the hindrance of
hindrances 191 6. State action as the maintenance of rights 202 (a)
System of rights from standpoint of community 203 (b) From standpoint of
individuals. "Position" 205 (i.) As Rights or recognised claims 207
(ii.) As Obligations or recognised debts 207 (c) Rights as implying
Duties 209 (i.) When Duty = Obligation 209 (ii.) When Duty = Purpose,
which is source of Right 210 (d) Rights, why recognised claims? 210 (i.)
A "Position" involves recognition 211 (ii.) No right based on individual
caprice 212 7. State action as punishment 217 (i.) Punishment as
reformatory 222 (ii.) Punishment as retributory 224 (iii.) Punishment as
deterrent 229 Conclusion. State Action as exercise of a General Will 233
CHAPTER IX ROUSSEAU'S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT,
FICHTE, HEGEL 235 1. Rousseau's literary influence in Germany 235 2.
Freedom and Social Contract in Kant 238 3. Freedom and Social Contract
in Fichte 244 4. Freedom in Hegel's Philosophy of Right 247 (a) Supposed
reactionary tendency in Hegel 248 (b) Relation of analysis and
idealisation 250 5. The Philosophy of Right as a chapter in the
Philosophy of Mind 252 CHAPTER X THE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL'S
"PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT" 256 1. Logic of Society as an ideal fact 256 2.
Sphere of Right or Law and its sub-divisions 258 3. The Letter of the
Law 260 4. The Morality of Conscience 262 5. Social Ethics 264 (i.)
Social Ethics as an actual world 266 (ii.) Social Ethics as the nature
of self- consciousness 267 6. Sub-divisions of Social Ethics. The Family
269 (a) Depends on natural fact 269 (b) Is factor in the State 270 (c)
Ethical and Monogamous Household 271 (d) Relation to Property 271 7.
Bourgeois Society. Justice, State Regulation, and Trade Societies 272 8.
The State proper, or Political Constitution 280 9. Public discussion and
public opinion 285 10. Criticism of such an analysis of the Modern State
287 CHAPTER XI INSTITUTIONS CONSIDERED AS ETHICAL IDEAS 296 1. The
individual soul and the social mind 296 2. Institutions as common
substance of minds 297 3. The Family and Property as elements of mind
299 4. The District or Neighbourhood as an element of mind 304 5. Class
as an element of mind. "The Poor" as an ethical idea 310 6. The
Nation-State as an element of mind 320 7. Morality of public and private
action 322 8. Humanity as an element of mind 328 (a) Humanity not
predicable of mankind as a whole 328 (b) Humanity does not = mankind as
a true community 329 (c) Dichotomous expressions for humanity and
mankind 330 (a) The self beyond any actual society; Art, Philosophy,
Religion 332 INDEX 335
--------------------------------------------------------

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION SINCE the present work was first
published, it has become apparent in many ways that the wealth of new
experiences which modern life brings with it is tending to obscure the
definite outlines of such a theory as is here advocated. There are three
directions in particular in which the classical theory of the State
might appear to be undermined; and it will be well to say a word on each
of them. The philosophy of political society, in view of modern
phenomena and modern investigations, is held to be too narrow and rigid,
too negative, and too intellectualist. 1. It is held to be too narrow
and too rigid. Too narrow, because the analysis which applies easily to
the City-state, and with some reinterpretation to the Nation-state, is
held to be inapplicable to the varied gradation of communities with
which modern life makes us acquainted--to a man's membership in the
Empire composed of free dominions, or in the European concert of
nations, or in the Parliament of man, the federation of the world; not
to speak of the hierarchy of societies in which we are involved within
the boundaries of the Nation-state itself. The idea of the Nation-state,
it may be thought,

might even come to lose its distinctiveness and supremacy through the
impossibility of determining in which of several concentric communities
its peculiar prerogatives lay. There might be a return, on other lines,
to mediaeval conditions, which scarcely admitted of a truly independent
sovereign State. Again, the theory may appear too rigid, because the
strict democratic account of self-government is most readily understood
as applied to the exercise of power, if not necessarily by primary
assemblies, at least through elected representative bodies, not merely
in the case of Parliament, but in local administration on the one hand
and Imperial organisation on the other. But tendencies and phenomena are
now visible which suggest that elected representative bodies may not be
in every case the preferable type of organs of the general will, whether
in the microcosm of municipal administration, or in the macrocosm of the
Empire or the Federation. (i) In dealing with the suggestion of
narrowness, I would begin by calling attention to that argument of the
present work which treats of the State as the ultimate and absolute
power of adjustment, and as necessarily, therefore, single in respect to
every individual, and also to the point of view which refers the
difficulty of recognising what we call the State in the large-scale
characteristics of modern phenomena, simply to the tendency not to see
the wood for the trees; so that our analysis is hard to verify just
because it is so true, and is really much more applicable, because there
is much more for it to apply to, in the case of modern experience, than
in that of the lesser and more clear- cut objects from

which it was originally drawn. We are thus led to see more plainly the
true character of the State as a source of pervading adjustments and an
idea-force holding together a complex hierarchy of groups, and not
itself a separable thing like the monarch or the "government," or the
local body with which we are tempted to identify it. And I would further
illustrate the problem by reference to the late Professor Maitland's
delightful Introduction to his translation of Gierke's Political
Theories of the Middle Age. The position there sketched by him,
according to which the real or general will is present in its degree in
every co-operating group of human beings, is one with which the theory
of the State is fully in accord. Where two or three are gathered
together with any degree of common experience and co-operation, there is
pro tanto a general will. The uniqueness of the general will of the
State, and the necessity that it should be unique, is an additional and
peculiar feature depending on the necessity referred to above, that an
absolute power should be single in reference to each individual. How far
even the absolute power of any one group in relation to individuals
within it may be interfered with by constitutional tradition or by a
conflict of authorities (as, e.g., the conflict between a State and the
Federal Government in the U.S.A.), or by International Courts or Leagues
is a question of degree and detail. It must be remembered that our
theory does not place Sovereignty in any determinate person or body of
persons, but only in the working of the system of institutions as a
whole. There is

therefore no technical difficulty in the modification of the
Nation-state towards larger forms of authoritative co-operation, so long
as it is made clear to what system of authorities every separate human
being is subject in respect of the ultimate adjustment of claims upon
him. And it would seem that there must always be at least a machinery
for making this clear (like the Court which interprets the constitution
of the U.S.A.), if civilised life is to be possible. The all-important
point is that the recognition of the Real or General Will should be
maintained. And this, as we have seen above, it is the tendency of
recent legal theory to sustain as the recognition of an actual fact.
(ii) The question of rigidity may be treated more briefly. It is plain
from what has been said above and from the whole trend of our theory,
that the administrative expression of the general will is not
necessarily confined to ad hoc elective bodies, but may take any
efficient and convenient shape without violation of the theory of
democratic self-government. It is impossible to lay down in detail any
indispensable form even for the supreme direction of affairs, the manner
of which varies very greatly between States which may be supposed to be
in principle equally free and democratic. As in all practical matters,
the first necessity is bona fides, which means in this case a genuine
intention throughout society to make the institutions express the best
will of the people. It is always through a complex of institutions, and
never through the

mere voices of a crowd, that a people's freedom finds utterance; and
every complex of institutions must be criticised on its own merits as an
expression of freedom. Parliamentary government, in one shape or
another, seems hardly likely to be superseded as the normal form for
civilised peoples. But the example of the English judiciary, which, I
imagine, is generally approved, suffices to show that for certain
functions a very high degree of independence is desirable in the social
interest, and that even responsibility--the indispensable guarantee of
freedom--may mean rather the inevitable effect of publicity than
immediate subordination to a popular body. These observations are made
simply in the interest of maintaining the concreteness and adaptability
of our theory. There is at present an enthusiasm for the study of
group-life at first-hand, and for practical amelioration of it, which,
partly under the influence of such criticisms as have just been noticed,
tends to submerge the interest of strict political theory, But for a
true comprehension of group-life it will always be necessary to refer
its inward and spiritual side to something like the general will, and
its outward and visible form to a complex of institutions, and thereby
to set its outward and inward aspect in their true relation to each
other and to the social unity. 2. The theory of the State is held to be
too negative. (i) This objection is directed against the principle,
drawn from Kant, and identical with that adopted by Green, which is
defended in the present work. The principle rests on the obvious truth
that the distinctive action of the state cannot be in pari

materia with the positive end of the social whole, but is, qua
distinctive, confined to dealing with external acts in the sense in
which all that can be dealt with by compulsion is external. From this
follows the doctrine that the distinctive province of the State is
rightly described as the hindrance to hindrances of good life. The use
of spiritual influences in a spiritual form is only open per accidens to
State agency, while the promotion of spiritual ends by external means,
and, pre- eminently, by external means in which compulsion is operative,
is only possible through very delicate and indirect methods. (ii) We
have here the same peculiarly modern difficulty, describable as not
being able to see the wood for the trees, which was referred to in the
previous section. State activity has bewilderingly increased and
multiplied its shapes and organs. Though there are some things that the
modern State, as compared with the ancient city, rules out of its
purview, such as religion and fine art, yet on the whole it probably
plays a greater part in life than the City-state in its prime; so much
more is known to-day about desirable outward conditions;

so many more claims for the regulation of outward life are publicly
recognised. But this big bulking of the modern State in our eyes makes
it all the more important to be clear as to its truly distinctive powers
and functions. The harder the distinction is to make, the more
disastrous it is to fail in making it. If nobody expected much from the
State, there would be no danger; but when all eyes are turned to it, it
is fatal not to understand precisely the conditions of its interference.
(iii) The error lies, on both sides, in an insufficient appreciation of
what is involved in man's social being. Between visible activities
backed by the force of the State, and the narrowest self-assertion,
equally visible, of the separate, or would-be separate, human person,
the whole social development--the development, that is, of man's
universal nature, of which these are merely extreme limiting
cases--fails to obtain due recognition. *. The one party credits the
individual--the supposed self-existent isolable being--with all that
does not emanate from the formal procedure of the political group as
such; and thus, setting down, for example, art and religion as
"individual" activities and concerns, has a certain justification for
alleging that the individual is the end to which society (at most, the
argument should run, the direct machinery of politics) is a means. *.
The other, rightly aware that the deepest and loftiest achievements of
man do not belong to the particular human being in his repellent
isolation, and, like its antagonist, recognising only two opposites--
society as the State, and the man at

his minimum as the individual, naturally claims for the State the
glamour which belongs to the highest self- expression by which man
transcends his isolation. I do not say that poetry and philosophy are
actually treated as a product of political activity; but I do say that
the fascination attaching to all that is "social"--all that springs from
the co-operation and the sympathies of human beings--is habitually
attached and restricted to that legal and political form of co-operation
which we call the State. Between the two parties, the profounder meaning
of the term "social" goes unrecognised. We thus lose a great and
important truth, that which Aristotle expressed in the position he gave
to Theoria as the quintessence and consecration of the social whole. We
then take as representative conceptions the State and the atomic
individual respectively, and thus forfeit all possibility of
understanding the nature of an activity which is neither semi-political
on the one hand, nor "individualistic" on the other; and any reference
to the negative conditions of legislative and administrative operations
we are therefore inclined to regard as blasphemy against man's social
possibilities as a whole. (iv) But if we take the point of view just
suggested, we can conceive how the working of the State proper, as
society armed with force, has in it a negative element, without being
driven by a false antithesis to ascribe all fertile and positive
achievement to "individualistic" factors. The true terminology would be
to take the ultimate achievements we have referred to as the fullest
examples of true social activity, understanding that they are

at once ultra- social as being above all compulsory group-arrangements,
and ultra-individual as being beyond the aspect of exclusiveness, which,
however falsely, clings to the current conception of individuality. It
is easy to grasp that in the profoundest sense it is this ultra-social
and also ultra-individual level of life which represents the highest
fulfilment at once of society and of the individual. And below it, but
belonging to the same general line of progress, is the whole enormous
complex of "social" co-operation, which is associated with the State in
very various degrees of indirectness. And both of these belong, strictly
speaking, neither to the State, nor yet to the private person who hugs
his privateness. If we apprehend the phenomena in this light, a degree
of negativity in State action follows at once from its being that form
of social self-expression which is inevitably mixed with compulsion. *.
To begin with the simplest point, which is really decisive of the whole
question. It is absolutely certain that morality and religion cannot be
enforced by the State. The thing is a contradiction in terms. This case
must not be disregarded because it is so familiar. It means that the
most powerful of all social and human motives cannot be directly
controlled or moulded by the public power as such. It may be urged that
they can be "promoted"; but that is another question, and falls within
what we shall say below. To illustrate the absurdities that spring from
disregarding this truth, we may notice the pessimistic complaint that
the basis of society as now arranged

is not ethical, in the sense that material success does not correspond
to moral merit and social service. Now to make this a complaint depends
upon ignoring the necessary opposition between the nature of the power
of the State and the nature of the good life which is its ultimate end.
To attempt to assign material success in proportion to true merit and
social service would be flatly self-contradictory. Material success
belongs to a certain sort of career which displays a certain definite
sort of capacity and utility. The distribution of it depends, on the
whole, upon the principle "the tools to him who can use them," which is
on the whole, under any and every possible economic system, a socially
useful principle. But no one will be blind enough to deny that if we are
to speak of the truest and greatest social service, the first rank
belongs to the great poets or the great religious teachers. And the
apportionment would have the effect that these men would be crushed with
colossal fortunes, or, under any system, with great material
responsibilities, which would at once be fatal to their special form of
life, and would also probably have disastrous effects on society. The
relation of external means to spiritual ends is much more subtle than
this; and even the rashest devotee of mere ethical justice must surely
be revolted by the idea that the best--the spiritually strongest--is to
have the easiest and pleasantest lot. If we look at the analogous case
of physical strength, we ourselves should scorn

to adopt the principle assumed in the complaint, supposing us to be
apportioning burdens for a mountain climb or a campaign. The fact that
the goodness of the best has a certain deep underlying relation to
external success, in as far as goodness is the nature of things, further
demonstrates the subtlety of the problem, but does not justify the
direct relation desiderated by the complaint. *. Further, then, every
negative, of course, has a positive side; and the fact that the action
of the State, being confined to externals, cannot directly promote its
spiritual end, does not mean what has been called administrative
nihilism. The problem is one familiar in various degrees throughout the
whole of life, especially to all who are or make themselves responsible
for the lives of others. It is that of the evocation of spiritual good
by dealing with external circumstance; and the solution of the problem
is in general terms that such evocation must be indirect. We are aware
of the dangers of parasitism, and of the subtle and easily disconcerted
nature of those external conditions--we may take as examples bodily
health, comfortable homes, effective income-- which are most akin to
spiritual goods, and are therefore the least capable of being maintained
by the agency of compulsion. All this experience gives rise, in the
minds of those who

most fully appreciate it, to the paradox of social reform, in which
practical necessity corroborates our theory of the State. Perhaps I may
quote from a writing in which I have dealt with the matter more in
detail. "Our common purpose is the excellence of human souls: the only
means to this purpose which as social reformers we can handle lies in
legal provisions and acts of public and private administration, which
cannot directly affect anything at all except external circumstances.
Our purpose, therefore, can only be promoted indirectly, and for that
reason, the greatest skill and the finest adjustment are needed in the
handling of projects of reform. Simply to do in every case what you
desire to see done is a policy that frustrates itself." *. Finally, this
position may be illustrated by the general de facto relation of the
content of State action in the way of social amelioration to what I have
here called social action in contrast to the action of the State. As I
have pointed out elsewhere in greater detail, and as the most extreme of
recent proposals for the increase of State action admit and maintain,
the content of legislation and

administration with a view to the public good, the inventive,
experimental, creative element, is almost entirely supplied by one or
other of the forms of social action which are not due to the initiative
of the State. The relation on the whole is like that by which a tree
makes its wood, or a living body deposits its skeleton. The work of the
State is de facto for the most part "endorsement" or "taking over"--
setting its imprimatur, the seal of its force, on what more flexible
activities or the mere progress of life have wrought out in long years
of adventurous experiment or silent growth. True social work,
independent of the public power, is the laboratory of social invention.
The taking over of social inventions by the State is something like the
taking over of a private business by a limited company, and there are
analogous results for good and evil. The introduction of State socialism
would be a gigantic taking over of this kind. We are not now discussing
the advantages or disadvantages on the whole of such taking over on the
large scale. We are only pointing out that in detail the normal course
of improvement starts from origination by pure social invention, and
passes subsequently, if at all, into adoption by the State. Of course it
is not meant that the representatives of the State are incapable of
invention and adaptation. But there is a mass of experience to
corroborate the plain theoretical inference that what is distinctive and
normal in State action, as it cannot be the direct enforcement of good
life, so is not primarily the power of invention, adaptation, fine
adjustment in the promotion of it.

*. It is not denied that the organs of State can learn and borrow the
methods of indirect self- subordination to spiritual ends. The gist of
our whole contention is that these methods are just what it has to
learn, and to rely upon, so far as it passes beyond the nature of the
"Rechtsstaat"--the mere maintenance of an order according to law. This
necessity is imposed upon it by the same characteristic which is its
raison d'?tre, the need for the expression of the end of life through
force as well as in spiritual form, and the harder it is to discern this
factor amid the wealth of the functions which it assumes to-day, the
more fatal it is to fail in discerning it. The end of the State, we
repeat, is assuredly good life or the excellence of souls; but for a
power which deals primarily with the compulsory arrangement of
externals, and for all of us so far as in our degree we have power over
externals affecting others, the only path to that end lies in very fine
adjustments directed to eliciting what ex hypothesi they cannot produce.
3. The theory of the State is held to be too intellectualist. The
philosophical crusade against "intellectualism" cannot be properly dealt
with as an annexe to another subject. But it is undoubtedly

affecting the theory of the State, and so far we must indicate an
attitude towards it. (i) A great movement, we may briefly suggest, seems
to have fused itself with a great fallacy. Europe is full to-day of the
ethical and democratic demand for real progress, guided by the actual
interests and emotions of mankind; for a future to be moulded by and for
humanity. With it there comes from many quarters, supported by strange
alliances, a distrust of the highly intellectual consciousness. We have
had it from Schopenhauer, imported from the east, in John Henry Newman,
and in Mr. Kidd, no less than in Professor William James and M. Bergson.
Now a movement like this, of course, is not founded on a mere illusion.
It is based, and feels itself to be based, on something essential, and
something which has, say, since Rousseau, been gaining ground, in the
self-recognition of humanity. There is in it something of an
insurrection of the powers of earth against an intellectual Olympus, of
the revolution portrayed by Victor Hugo, in which Jupiter was to kneel
before Pan. But its value for theory must depend on its interpreters.
And in one crucial point--a technical but fundamental point--the most
prominent of them have led it into an impasse, the great fallacy of
which I spoke.

(ii) In the first edition of this book I already called attention to the
extraordinary treatment of identity and difference by the "imitation"
theorists; a treatment having at least a pronounced tendency to split
identity from difference, repetition from novelty, imitation from
invention; with the result of setting up a barrier between the normal
intellectual process and such activities as progress and creativeness.
Since that time the tendency has become more emphatic, and wide
acceptance has been accorded to a philosophy which rests upon the
assumption that the intelligence has for its province only what is
covered by the principle of identity construed as tautology; that life,
novelty, creativeness, are incompatible with its nature, and,

that intelligence, consequently, is powerless to identify itself with
freedom or with creative progress. (iii) We are thus brought into the
presence of a curious form of agnosticism. Life, volition, immediate
experience become, as it were, a Kantian thing-in- itself. For in as far
as mind finds articulate utterance or expression it departs--so the
argument runs--from its self-complete and concrete being. And like all
Agnosticism, this readily turns to pessimism. For pessimism is at hand
whenever we are led to suppose that the determinate is the derivative
and the secondary, and that the best experience and the true inwardness
of life are unutterable. The effect of such an attitude on the theory of
the State is easy to see. We may contrast it, for example, with the tone
of Hegel's words. "It is just freedom that is the self of thought; one
who repudiates thought and talks of freedom knows not what he is
saying." This is because what thought means for him is just identity
realised in difference; the breaking down of barriers, the fusion of
inner and outer, old and new, oneself and the other. But if an immediate
experience, of which intelligence is a secondary phenomenon, is set up
as the thing in itself, then all explicit organisation is discredited
and degraded. The difficulty is not so much that

social analysis is enlarged by tracing back the social interests and
feelings to instincts which have a long biological history behind them.
Plato would not have objected to this, and in fact does a good deal of
it himself. It is rather that in this analysis, a great deal of the
actual content of social--still more of supersocial-- life, simply
disappears. We are left with a foundation which has no superstructure.
All this fatal alternative, not the analysis of instinct and emotion,
but the omission of organised ideas from the analysis of the social
mind, springs, technically speaking, from the postulate that identity is
the principle of the intelligence, together with the conception of
identity as tautology, or as one with the similarity presented in
repetition. Instead of believing that "ideas have hands and feet," we
are taught to conceive of them as static systems, which can only
represent what is alive by entering into a rapid succession like that of
the pictures in a cinematograph. Whatever is not tautological becomes ex
hypothesi irrational. (iv) If we abandon that indispensable postulate,
the alternative between reason and the true inner life falls to the
ground. An idea may be held, as the greatest thinkers have held it, to
be the intensest and the most concrete just because the most highly
organised phase of mental concentration, which maintains in its complex
the interest and emotion due to its content. And the realisation of an
idea is the essence of what we mean by volition; and

therefore we have in the State at once a conception which serves as an
adjustment of all adjustments, and also, in this conception, a standing
will. I believe that it could be shown that views of the type here
advocated not only give the truest interpretation of social forces and
processes, but have in the recent past proved the most fruitful guide
and inspiration of social improvement. I hope to establish this more
completely in a future work; but it seems desirable to take this
opportunity of drawing attention to such an expression as that of
Professor William James, "a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may
call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with
concrete facts and joys and sorrows." I do not think that the chapter
from which this sentence is taken could have been written by any man who
had at all reflected on the nature of social work and the influences
that have inspired it in the English-speaking world during the past half
century. I am convinced, then, that the ancient theory of the State can
only be strengthened and amplified by the wealth of modern experience.
And little as the present work can claim to deal with the whole

province of recent State development and activity, I believe that,
resting on a tradition derived from thinkers who have been the sanest
and profoundest students of civilised life, it affords a serviceable
clue to the interpretation of such developments.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER I RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE
1. FIRST, it will be well to indicate, in a very few words, what is
implied in a "philosophical theory," as distinguished from theories
which make no claim to be philosophical. The primary difference is, that
a philosophical treatment is the study of something as a whole and for
its own sake. In a certain sense it may be compared to the gaze of a
child or of an artist. It deals, that is, with the total and unbroken
effect of its object. It desires to ascertain what a thing is, what is
its full characteristic and being, its achievement in the general act of
the world. History, explanation, analysis into cause and conditions,
have value for it only in so far as they contribute to the intelligent
estimation of the fullest nature and capabilities of the real individual
whole which is under investigation. We all know that a flower is one
thing for the geometrician, another for the chemist, another for

the botanist, and another, again, for the artist. Now, philosophy can of
course make no pretension to cope with any one of the specialists on his
own ground. But the general nature of the task imposed upon it is this:
aiding itself, so far as possible, by the trained vision of all
specialists, to make some attempt to see the full significance of the
flower as a word or letter in the great book of the world. And this we
call studying it, as it is, and for its own sake, without reservation or
presupposition. It is assumed, then, for the purpose of a philosophical
treatment, that everything, and more particularly in this case the
political life of man, has a nature of its own, which is worthy of
investigation on its own merits and for its own sake. How its phases
come into being, or what causes or conditions have played a part in its
growth, are other questions well worthy of investigation. But the
philosophical problem is rather to see our object as it is and to learn
what it is, to estimate, so to speak, its kind and degree of
self-maintenance in the world, than to trace its history or to analyse
its causation. Yet such phrases as "what it is" and "for its own sake"
must not mislead us. They do not mean that the nature of any reality
which we experience can be appreciated in isolation from the general
world of life and knowledge. On the contrary, they imply that when fully
and fairly considered from the most thoroughly adequate point of view,
our subject matter will reveal its true position and relations with
reference to all else that man can do and can know. This position and
these relations constitute its rank or significance in the totality

of experience, and this value or significance--in the present case, what
the form of life in question enables man to do and to become--is just
what we mean by its nature "in itself," or its full and complete nature,
or its significance when thoroughly studied "for its own sake" from an
adequate point of view. Further illustrations of the distinction between
an adequate point of view and partial or limited modes of consideration,
and of the relations between the former and the latter, will be found in
the following chapter. 2. In a certain sense it would be true to say
that wherever men have lived there has always been a "State." That is to
say, there has been some association or corporation, larger than the
family, and acknowledging no power superior to itself. But it is obvious
that the experience of a State in this general sense of the word is not
co-extensive with true political experience, and that something much
more definite than this is necessary to awaken curiosity as to the
nature and value of the community in which man finds himself to be a
member. Such curiosity has been awakened and sustained principally if
not exclusively by two kindred types of associated life--the City-state
of ancient Greece, and the Nation-state of the modern world. It will
throw light on the nature of our subject if we glance rapidly at the
characteristics to which it is due that political philosophy began in
connection with the former, and revived in connection with the latter.
In considering the Greek city-states in connection with the birth of
political philosophy, there are three points which press upon our
attention:

*. the type of experience which they presented; *. the type of mind
which that experience implied; and *. the type of interpretation which
such a mind elicited from such an experience. *. A Greek city-state
presented a marked contrast to the modes of human association which
prevailed in the non-Greek world. It differed from them above all things
by its distinct individuality. No doubt there was a recognisable
character in the life and conduct of Egypt or of Assyria, of Phoenicia
or of Israel. But the community which has a youth, a maturity, and a
decadence, as distinct as those of a single human being, and very nearly
as self-conscious; which has a tone and spirit as recognisable in the
words and bearing of its members as those of a character in a play; and
which expresses its mind in the various regions of human action and
endurance much as an artist expresses his individuality in the creations
of his genius--such a community had existed, before the beginnings of
the modern world, in the Greek city-state, and in the Greek city-state
alone. A political consciousness in the strict sense was a necessary
factor in the experience of such a commonwealth. The demand for
"autonomy"-- government by one's own law,--and for "isonomy"--
government according to equal law--though far from being always
satisfied, was inherent in the Greek nature; and its strenuousness was
evinced by the throes of revolution and the labours of legislation which
were shaking the world of Greece at the dawn of history. The very
instrument of all political action was invented, so far as we can see,
by the Greeks. The simple device by which an orderly vote is

taken, and the minority acquiesce in the will of the majority as if it
had been their own--an invention no less definite than that of the lever
or the wheel--is found for the first time as an everyday method of
decision in Greek political life. *. Such a type of experience implies a
corresponding type of mind. It is not surprising that science and
philosophy should owe their birth to the genius from which politics
sprang. For politics is the expression of reason in the relations that
bind man to man, as science and philosophy are the expression of it in
the relations which link together man's whole experience. The mind which
can recognise itself practically in the order of the commonwealth, can
recognise itself theoretically in the order of nature. And ultimately,
though not at first (for curiosity is awakened by objects perceived in
space and time, before attention is turned to the very hinge and centre
of man's own being), science passes into philosophy; and mind, and
conduct, and the political consciousness, are themselves made objects of
speculation. It has become a commonplace that this transference of
curiosity from the outer to the inner-- really, that is, from the
partial to the total world-- took shape in the work of Socrates, who
invested with the greatness of his own intelligence and character a
movement which the needs of the age had rendered inevitable. And thus
there arose the ethical and political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,
the successors of Socrates, just at the time when the distinctive
political life of Greece was beginning to decay. *. This philosophy,
like all genuine philosophy,

was an interpretation of the experience presented to it; and in this
case the interpretation was due to minds which were themselves a part of
the phenomena on which they reflected. Such minds, hostile as they may
feel themselves to the spirit of the age, and however passionately they
may cry out for reform or for revolution, are none the less its
representatives; and their interpretation, though it may modify and even
mutilate the phenomena, will nevertheless be found to throw the central
forces and principles of the time into the clearest light. So Plato's
negative treatment of the family, and of other elements which seem
essential to Greek civilisation, was no bar to his grasping, and
representing with unequalled force, the central principle of the life
around him. The fundamental idea of Greek political philosophy, as we
find it in Plato and Aristotle, is that the human mind can only attain
its full and proper life in a community of minds, or more strictly in a
community pervaded by a single mind, uttering itself consistently though
differently in the life and action of every member of the community.
This conception is otherwise expressed by such phrases as "the State is
natural," i.e. is a growth or evolution, apart from which the end
implied in man's origin cannot be attained; "the State is prior to the
individual," i.e. there is a principle or condition underlying the life
of the human individual, which will not admit of that life becoming what
it has in it to be, unless the full sphere or arena which is constituted
by the life of the State is realised in fact. The whole is summed up in
the famous expression of Aristotle, "Man is a creature formed for the
life of the City-state." The

working out of this idea, as we find it in Plato's commonwealth, is
bizarre to our minds; but its difficulty really lies in its simplicity
and directness; and there is no sound political philosophy which is not
an embodiment of Plato's conception. The central idea is this: that
every class of persons in the community--the statesman, the soldier, the
workman--has a certain distinctive type of mind which fits its members
for their functions, and that the community essentially consists in the
working of these types of mind in their connection with one another,
which connection constitutes their subordination to the common good.
This working or adjustment obviously depends in the last resort on the
qualities present in the innermost souls of the members of the
community; and thus the outward organisation of society is really as it
were a body which at every point and in every movement expresses the
characteristics of a mind. We must not pause here to follow up the
consequences of such a conception; but it will be seen at once, by those
who reflect upon it, to imply that every individual mind must have its
qualities drawn out in various ways to answer to--in fact, to
constitute--the relations and functions which make up the community; and
that in this sense every mind is a mirror or impression of the whole
community from its own peculiar point of view. The ethical assumption or
principle of Plato's conception is, that a healthy organisation of the
commonwealth will involve, by a necessary connection, a healthy balance
and adjustment of qualities in the individual soul, and vice versa. An
attempt will be made to illustrate this principle further in the latter
portion

of the present work. The general nature of Plato's conception--the
characteristic conception of Greek political philosophy --is all that
concerns us here. It is important to observe that during the very
genesis of this philosophical conception of society, an antagonistic
view was powerfully represented. The individual could not freely find
himself in the community unless he was capable of repudiating it; the
possibility of negation, as a logician might express it, is necessary to
a really significant affirmation. Thus we find in the very age of Plato
and Aristotle the most startling anticipations of those modern ideas
which seem diametrically opposed to theirs. We find the idea of nature
identified not with the mature fullness, but with the empty starting
point of life; we meet with the phenomena of vegetarianism,
water-drinking, the reduction of dress to its minimum, in short, the
familiar symptoms of the longing for the "return to nature," with all
that it implies; we find law and political unity treated as a tissue of
artifice and convention, and the individual disdaining to identify
himself with the citizenship of a single state, but claiming to be a
stranger in the city and a citizen of the world. To prove that these
ideas were not without their justification, it is enough to point out
that in some instances they were accompanied by a polemic against
slavery, which, as a form of solidarity, was upheld in a qualified sense
at least by Aristotle. The existence of this negative criticism is
enough to show how distinctly the Greek intellect set before itself the
fundamental problem of the relation between the individual and society,
and of how high a quality was the bond of union which

maintained this relation in such intimacy among minds of a temper so
analytic. 3. Many writers have told the story of the change which came
over the mind of Greece when the independent sovereignty of its
City-states became a thing of the past. For our purpose it is enough to
draw attention to the fact that with this change the political or social
philosophy of the great Greek time not only lost its supremacy, but
almost ceased to be understood. From this period forward, till the rise
of the modern Nation- states, men's thoughts about life and conduct were
cast in the mould of moral theory, of religious mysticism and theology,
or of jurisprudence. The individual demanded in the sphere of ethics and
religion to be shown a life sufficing to himself apart from any
determinate human society--a problem which Plato and Aristotle had
assumed to be insoluble. Stoicism and Epicureanism, the earliest
non-national creeds of the western world, triumphantly developed the
ideas which at first, as we saw, were little more than a rebellion
against the central Socratic philosophy. Cosmopolitanism, the conception
of humanity, the idea of a "Society of Friends"--the Epicurean
league--from which women were not excluded, and the precept of "not
expecting from life more than it has to give," take the place of the
highly individualised commonwealth, with its strenuous masculine life of
war and politics, and its passionate temper which felt that nothing had
been accomplished so long as anything remained undone. With this change
of temper in the civilised world there is brought into prominence a
great deal of

human nature which had not found expression through the immediate
successors of Socrates. In the period between Aristotle and Cicero there
is more than a whisper of the sound which meets us like a trumpet blast
in the New Testament, "neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian,
bond nor free." But the unworldliness which took final shape in
Christianity was destined to undergo a long transmigration through
shapes of other- worldliness before it should return in modern thought
to the unity from which it started; and the history of ethics and
religion has little bearing upon true political theory between the death
of Aristotle and the awakening of the modern consciousness in the
Reformation. In so far as the political ideas of antiquity were
preserved to modern times otherwise than in the manuscripts of Plato and
Aristotle, the influence which served them was that of Roman
Jurisprudence. The Roman rule, though it stereotyped the state of things
in which genuine political function and the spur of freedom were
unknown, had one peculiar gift by which it handed to posterity the germs
of a great conception of human life. This is not the place to describe
at length the origin of that vast practical induction from the working
of the "foreigners' court" at Rome which obtained for itself the name of
the Law of Nations, and which, as tinged with ideal theory, was known as
the Law of Nature. Whatever fallacies may be near at hand when "natural
right" is named, the conception that there is in man, as such, something
which must be respected, a law of life which is his "nature," being
indeed another name

for his reason, and in some sense or other a "freedom" and an "equality"
which are his birthright--this conception was not merely a legacy from
Stoic ideas, which had almost a religious inspiration, but was solidly
founded on the judicial experience of the most practical race that the
world has ever seen. 4. In order that the forces which lay hidden in the
conception of Natural Right and Freedom, like the powers of vegetation
in a seed, might unfold themselves in the modern world, it was necessary
that conditions should recur analogous to those which had first elicited
them. And these earlier conditions were those of the Greek City-state;
for it was here, as we have seen, that the conception of man's nature
had flourished, as the idea of a purposive evolution into a full and
many-sided social life, while in Stoic philosophy and Roman juristic
theory it had become more and more a shibboleth and a formula which lost
in depth of meaning what it gained in range of application. To restore
their ancient significance, expanded in conformity with a larger order
of things, to the traditional formulae, demanded just the type of
experience which was furnished by the modern Nation- state. The growth
of Nation-states in modern Europe was in progress, we are told, from the
ninth to the fifteenth century. And it is towards and after the close of
this period, and especially in the seventeenth century when the national
consciousness of the English people, as of others, had become thoroughly
awakened, that political speculation in the strict sense begins again,

after an interval extending back to the Politics of Aristotle. To let
one example serve for many; when we read John of Gaunt's praises of
England in Shakespeare's Richard II., we feel ourselves at once in
contact with the mind of a social unity, such as necessarily to raise in
any inquiring intelligence all those problems which were raised for
Plato and Aristotle by the individuality of Athens and Sparta. And so we
see the earliest political speculation of the modern world groping, as
it were, for ideas by help of which to explain the experience of an
individual self-governing sovereign society. And for the most part the
ideas that offer themselves are those of Roman Jurisprudence, but
distorted by political applications and by the rhetoric of Protestant
fanaticism. As Mr. Ritchie points out, the conception of natural right
and a law of nature makes a strange but effective coalition with the
temper of the Wycliffite cry "When Adam dalf and Eve span, Who was then
the gentleman?" The notions of contract, of force, of representation in
a single legal "person," are now applied separately or together to the
phenomenon of the self-governing individual community. But the solution
remains imperfect, and the fundamental fact of self-government refuses
to be construed either as the association of individuals, originally
free and equal, for certain limited purposes, or as the absolute
absorption of their wills in the "person" of a despotic sovereign. The
revival of a true philosophical meaning

within the abstract terms of juristic tradition was the work of the
eighteenth century as a whole. For the sake of clearness, and with as
much historical justice as ever attaches to an attribution of the kind,
we may connect it with the name of a single man--Jean Jacques Rousseau.
For it is Rousseau who stands midway between Hobbes and Locke on the one
hand, and Kant and Hegel on the other, and in whose writings the actual
revival of the full idea of human nature may be watched from paragraph
to paragraph as it struggles to throw off the husk of an effete
tradition. Between Locke and Rousseau the genius of Vico and of
Montesquieu had given a new meaning to the dry formulae of law by
showing the sap of society circulating within them. Moreover the revived
experience of the Greeks came in the nick of time. It was influential
with Rousseau himself, and little as he grasped the political
possibilities of a modern society, in matters of sheer principle this
influence led him on the whole in the right direction. His insight was
just, when it showed him that every political whole presented the same
problem which had been presented by the Greek City-state, and involved
the same principles. And he bequeathed to his successors the task of
substituting for the mere words and fictions of contract, nature, and
original freedom, the idea of the common life of an essentially social
being, expressing and sustaining the human will at its best. According
to the view here indicated, the resurrection of true political
philosophy out of the dead body of juristic abstractions was inaugurated by

Vico and Montesquieu, and decisively declared itself in Jean Jacques
Rousseau. The idea which most of us have formed of "the new Evangel of a
Contrat Social" is not in harmony with this representation of the
matter. Was it, we may be asked, a genuine political philosophy which
inspired the leaders of the French Revolution? And the question cannot
be evaded by denying all connection between the theory and the practice
of that age. The phraseology of the revolutionary declarations--which
will strike the reader accustomed to nineteenth century socialism as
exceedingly moderate and even conservative in tone--is undoubtedly to a
great extent borrowed from Rousseau's writings. Perhaps the truth of the
matter may be approached as follows. The popular rendering of a great
man's views is singularly liable to run straight into the pit-falls
against which he more particularly warned the world. This could be
proved true in an extraordinary degree of such men as Plato and Spinoza,
and still more astonishingly, perhaps, of the founder of the Christian
religion. The reason is obvious. A great man works with the ideas of his
age, and regenerates them. But in as far as he regenerates them, he gets
beyond the ordinary mind; while in as far as he operates with them, he
remains accessible to it. And his own mind has its ordinary side; the
regeneration of ideas which he is able to effect is not complete, and
the notions of the day not only limit his entire range of achievement--
where the strongest runner will get to must depend on where he
starts--but float about unassimilated

within his living stream of thought. Now all this ordinary side of his
mind will partake of the strength and splendour of his whole nature. And
thus he will seem to have preached the very superstitions which he
combated. For in part be has done so, being himself infected; in part
the overwhelming bias of his interpreters has reversed the meaning of
his very warnings, by transferring the importance, due to his central
thought, to some detail or metaphor which belongs to the lower level of
his mind. It is an old story how Spinoza, "the God-intoxicated man," was
held to be an "atheist," when in truth he was rather an "acosmist"; and
in the same way, on a lower plane, the writer who struggled through to
the idea that true sovereignty lay in the dominion of a common social
good as expressed through law and institutions, is held to have ascribed
absolute supremacy to that chance combination of individual voices in a
majority, which he expressly pointed out to have, in itself, no
authority at all. But there is something more to be said of cases, like
that under discussion, where a great man's ideas touch the practical
world. If the complete and positive idea becomes narrow and negative as
it impinges upon every- day life, this may be not only a consequence of
its transmission through every-day minds, but a qualification for the
work it has to do. The narrower truth may be, so to speak, the cutting
edge of the more complete, as the negation is of the affirmation. And
the vulgar notion of popular sovereignty and of natural right may have
been necessary to do a work which a more organic social theory would
have been too delicate to achieve.

Like the faith in a speedy second coming of Christ among the early
Christians, the gospel according to Jean Jacques may have taken for the
minds of Revolutionary France a form which was serviceable as well as
inevitable at the moment. If, as we said above, the great man is always
misunderstood, it seems to follow that when his germinal ideas have been
sown they must assert themselves first in lower phases if they are ever
to bear fruit at all. And therefore, while not denying the influence of
Rousseau on the Revolution, we shall attempt to show that he had another
and a later influence, more adequate to the true reach of his genius.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER II SOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 1. THERE is
no doubt that Sociology and Social Philosophy have started, historically
speaking, from different points of view. The object of the present
chapter is to ascertain the nature and estimate the importance and
probable permanence of the difference between them. I propose first to
explain the difference in general; then to review the sources of social
experience, which in other words are facets or aspects of social life,
by which social theory has been influenced, and with which it has to
deal; and, finally, to form some idea of the distinctive services which
may be rendered by sociology and social philosophy respectively in view
of the range of experience which it is the function of social theory to
organise. Beginning with Vico's New Science, there has been more than
one attempt in modern Europe to inaugurate the Science of Society as a
new departure. But the distinctive and modern spirit of what is known as
Sociology, and under that

name has had a continuous growth of half a century at least, first found
unmistakable expression in Auguste Comte. The conception which he
impressed upon the science to which he first gave the name of sociology
or social physics, was a characteristically modern conception. Its
essence was the inclusion of human society among the objects of natural
science; its watchwords were law and cause--in the sense in which alone
Positivism allowed causes to be thought of--and scientific prediction.
It is true that the large conception of unity which Comte embodied in
his philosophy had very much in common with the principles insisted on
by the Greek social philosophers. The close interdependence of all
social phenomena among each other, the unity of man with nature, and the
consequent correlation of moral and political theory with the organised
hierarchy of mathematical and physical sciences, are ideas which Comte
might have borrowed directly from Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless the
modern starting-point is wholly different from that of antiquity. The
modern enquirer--the sociologist as such--was to ask himself, according
to Comte, in the language of physical science, what are the laws and
causes operative among aggregations of human beings, and what are their
predictable effects? The ancient philosopher--the ethical and
metaphysical theorist--had before him primarily the problem, "what is
the completest and most real life of the human soul?" The work of the
latter has been revived by modern idealist philosophy dating from
Rousseau and Hegel, and finding a second

home in Great Britain, as that of the former has developed itself within
the peculiar limits and traditions of sociological research, flourishing
more especially upon French and American soil. The continuance of these
two streams of thought in independent courses, though not without signs
of convergence, is a remarkable phenomenon of nineteenth century
culture; and it will be one of the problems which the present chapter,
and in a larger sense the whole of the present work, must deal with, to
consider how far it is necessary or desirable that they should blend. 2.
Every science, no doubt, is to some extent, the playground of analogies;
but the complexity and the unmateriality of human relations has forced
this character upon social theory in an extraordinary degree. It is
impossible to account for the tendencies of sociological as well as of
philosophical thought without making some attempt to pursue the line of
investigation suggested by Mr. Bagehot in his Physics and Politics.
Predominant modes and types of experience necessarily colour the whole
activity of the mind, and, as indicated above, this influence more
especially affects a province of research which is not prima facie
accessible to direct experiment or sensuous observation. I must,
therefore, endeavour to review, in a brief outline, the principal
branches of experience which have furnished ideas for application to
social theory, and to indicate the leanings in speculation upon society,
which have been due to preoccupation with one or another special
analogy. i. The Newtonian theory of gravitation is the entrance gate to
the modern world of science.

"When the Newton of this subject shall be seated in his place" is the
aspiration of the modern investigator in every matter capable of being
known. It is not surprising, therefore, that the inclusion of human
society within the range of matters capable of being definitely
understood, should have been symbolised by demanding for social science
a completeness of explanation and a power of prediction analogous to
those displayed by astronomy or by mathematical physics. Representative
of this conception is the title, Social Physics--for Comte the
alternative and the equivalent to the name Sociology. It is easy to see
both the merits and the dangers of such an ideal, which, as the
embodiment of perfection in a natural science, is presupposed by the
attitude of sociology down to the present day. Is a science necessarily
a natural science, and is a natural science necessarily an exact
science? --these are the fundamental questions involved in the adoption
of a mathematical ideal for the study of society. No fault can be found
with it on the ground of its implying the highest degree of harmony and
precision; the only question is whether an adequate type of comparison
is afforded for, let us say, the growth of an institution, by the law of
a curve. The general conception, indeed, of a continuity between human
relations and the laws of the cosmic order is thoroughly in the spirit
of Plato, and betokens a scientific enthusiasm worthy to be the parent
of great things. And especially in the sphere of economic science, where
certain relatively simple hypotheses have proved on the whole to be
effective instruments

of explanation, an analysis of intricate phenomena has been effected,
which in some degree justifies the aspiration after the ideal of an
exact science. ii. But it has been recognised from the earliest days of
political speculation that, within the general ideal of a perfect
natural science, the more special analogy of the living organism had a
peculiar bearing upon social phenomena. Beginning in the ancient world
with the comparison between individuals as "members" of a social whole,
and the parts or organs of a living body, or even the constituent
elements of a mind, this analogy has been extended and reinforced in
modern times by what amounts to the new creation of the biological and
anthropological sciences. The sense of continuity thus intensified and
implying all that is understood by the modern term evolution, has
brought an immense material of suggestions to sociological research, but
has imposed upon it at the same time a characteristic bias from which it
is just, perhaps, beginning to shake itself free. This characteristic
may be roughly stated as the explanation of the higher, by which I mean
the more distinctly human phenomena, by the lower, or those more readily
observed, or inferred, among savage nations, or in the animal world. Any
one familiar with logic will be aware that there is a subtle and natural
prejudice which tends to strengthen such a bias by claiming a higher
degree of reality for that which, as coming earlier in temporal
succession, presents itself in the light of what is called a "cause." So
strong has been this bias among sociologists, that the student,
primarily interested in the features and achievements of civilised society,

is tempted to say in his haste that the sociologist as such seldom deals
seriously with true social phenomena at all; but devotes his main
attention to primitive man and to the lower animals, occasionally
illustrating his studies in these regions by allusions, showing no great
insight or mastery, to the facts of civilised society. Such a complaint
becomes less and less justified as the years go by, and sociology
recovers its balance as against the overwhelming influence of the
sciences of lower life. How far the approach from this "lower" or more
purely natural side will remain in the end characteristic of
sociological science, is an integral part of the main problem concerning
its nature and destiny with which we have to deal in the present work.
But it remains true to say and very important to observe, that no such
serious successes have as yet been won in the name and by the special
methods of sociology as have been achieved by many investigators
approaching their problems directly and with an immediate interest;
whether in the sphere of political economy proper, or in dealing with
various questions of social and ethical importance, such as pauperism,
charity, sanitation, education, the condition of the people, the
comparative study of politics, or the analysis of material and
geographical conditions in their reaction upon social and artistic
development. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the

epoch and influence of which we speak has bequeathed a legacy of
imperishable value to the theory of society. In a word, it has made us
sensitive to the continuity of things, and therefore also to their
unity. It has shown us the crowning achievements of the human race,
their States, their Religion, their Fine Art, and their Science, as the
high-water mark of tendencies that have their beginnings far back in the
primitive organic world, and in their original sources have also a
connection with each other--as in the practical aspects of
religion,--which too easily escapes notice in their highest individual
development. The "return to nature" and the "noble savage" have been
invested with a significance which can never be forgotten, and which
criticism can never set aside. This is the sum and substance of the
general contribution which the latter half of the eighteenth century and
the greater part of the nineteenth have made to sociology through the
science of life and of man. More particularly, it is necessary to notice
the double operation of biological influence on sociology, according to
the unit from which the analogy is drawn. *. The idea which still bulks
most largely in the popular mind, as contributed by biology to social
theory, is unquestionably that of the struggle for life, or the survival
of the fittest. It should be noticed that the social application of this
analogy rests entirely on the comparison of a human society, not to the
individual animal organism, and still less to the individual mind; but
to a whole animal species, or even to the aggregate of all animal
species, so far as they or their members are in competition with one
another. One whole side of the sociological

doctrine, which Mr. Spencer has advocated with unwearied persistence, is
founded upon this application of the biological analogy, and the paradox
which he has made his principle professes to be borrowed directly from
the dealings of nature with the individuals of the animal species. This
paradox, that benefits should be assigned inversely as services in
infancy but directly as services among adults, is his ultimate
sociological basis; the modification of which, to suit human society, by
the introduction of benevolence or altruism, so to speak, on the top of
it, only serves to display its inadequacy. But we may take it that the
analogy of the struggle for life has made it clear that, in any given
position, life can be maintained only in virtue of definite qualities
adapted to that position. And formal as this principle is when taken by
itself, its application in human society can never be unnecessary. *. A
more recent school has insisted on the complementary analogy, which
might be taken as resting upon the comparison of a society with an
individual organism. Here, it must be remembered, lay the resemblance
which, in this region of ideas, first caught the eye of social
philosophers in antiquity. But it is alleged that the aspect of
co-operation can be traced as between individual members of the animal
world no less than between the parts of a single organism, and it is
affirmed that the view which sees nothing but internecine competition in
the animal kingdom has been too rough and too superficial in its reading
of the facts. And therefore it is suggested that the phenomena of social
fellowship, no less than those of individual competition, have their source

and root in the world of lower nature; and perhaps sociology is now not
far from the recognition that competition and co- operation are simply
the negative and positive aspect of the same general fact--the fact of
the division of labour, of essentiality of function, and of uniqueness
of true individual service. If it is suggested by the one organic
analogy that life depends upon qualities adequate to the position which
is to be filled, it is made obvious by the other that the qualities
which satisfy the claims of a certain position are those, in general and
in principle, by which a function is discharged in the service of the
whole. In Mr. Spencer's doctrine the two sides above indicated have been
brought into very marked relation by a suggestive criticism, which he
has taken special pains to answer. If human society corresponds to an
individual organism--as is, in many ways, Mr. Spencer's well-known
doctrine--how is it that the absolute central control in which the
perfection of an organism consists is, for Mr. Spencer, a note of
imperfection when it appears in a human society? And the answer is in
effect that human society corresponds in many of its features rather to
a local variety of a species than to an individual organism. It is
essentially discrete, not individual, and at this point, therefore, the
analogy of the individual organism gives way to that of the group or
species. But Mr. Spencer does not really mean that a human society has
no more intrinsic bond between its members than the local group of an
animal species. To indicate its true nature he

gives us a good word--but a word only--the word "super-organic." It is a
significant term, and brings us perhaps to the limit of what biological
sociology is able to suggest with regard to the unity of a human
commonwealth, and points us to something beyond. It is remarkable that
when the facts of true human society are more thoroughly realised than
by Mr. Spencer, but the clue of the individual organism and the
co-operative side of animal life is not followed up, there is a tendency
to sever the links which unite man to "lower" nature, and to represent
the ethical and cosmic processes as absolutely opposed. We see this
point of view decidedly adopted by Mr. Huxley, and its adoption perhaps
indicates the inception of an epoch in which sociology will cut itself
free from a good deal of pseudo-scientific lumber. Nevertheless, a
patient and careful study will continue to recognise the elements both
of competition and of co-operation as ineradicable and inseparable
moments in human society as in the animal world; the essential meaning
of competition in its higher forms being the rejection and suppression
of members who are unable to meet the ever advancing demand for co-
operative character and capacity; and the study of parasitism and of
regressive selection will continue to

be a warning against the attempt to emancipate mankind from the sterner
general conditions of the cosmic order. It will be recognised that there
is an adaptation to conditions which consists in degradation; but the
failure will be understood by comparison with the only true "survival of
the fittest," being that which reveals the full unity and significance
of organism and environment. It is important to observe that, at least
in the two eminent biologists just alluded to, the doctrine of the
individual self--of the relation between self-assertion and
self-restraint--is altogether of an uncivilised and anti-social type.
Biological categories do not, in their case at least, appear to have
afforded any suggestion for the treatment of the social self as more and
greater, in a positive sense, than the self which is less bound up with
social obligations. As for the denying spirits in Plato's Republic, so
for both Mr. Spencer and Mr. Huxley, "nature" is essentially self-
assertion, and "society" self-restraint. Here again we touch the same
limitation which met us in Mr. Spencer's term "super-organic," and we
feel that a different point of view must be brought to bear. iii.
Political Economy existed before modern Sociology was born, and is still
the only part of it which is obviously and indisputably successful as a
science of explanation. The triumphant development of this theory
reacted even upon Hegel's political philosophy, by suggesting to him the
distinction between "Bourgeois Society" and "The

State." A fortiori, it could not but have a serious influence on the
growing science of sociology itself, the ideal of which might not
unfairly be regarded as the extension to society as a whole of that type
of investigation which had proved so successful in economic matter. From
this influence has arisen the tendency in sociological research which
has been called by the name of the economic or materialist view of
history, and consequently of society. Primarily connected with the name
of Marx, it may also be illustrated by many contentions of Buckle and Le
Play, and has become, indeed, the formula of a school. In sum, the point
of view amounts to this: that the fundamental structure of civilisation,
the type of the family, for example, and the order relations and
development of classes in society, have been and must be determined by
the primary necessities of human existence, and the conditions of
climate and nutrition under which these necessities are met. Economic
facts alone, it is suggested, are real and causal; everything else is an
appearance and an effect. Before saying a word as to the true importance
of this point of view, we may profitably correct the commonplace idea of
its nature. Materialism, in a strict philosophical sense, means the
conviction that nothing is real but that which is solid, or, perhaps,
which gravitates. By a not very convincing analogy from this idea, all
those passions and necessities which we speak of in a quite loose and
popular way as connected with the body, may be and often are regarded as
"material" in opposition to energies which it seems pleasanter

to ascribe to incorporeal mind. But it should be noted that this
secondary usage, especially in a time when no one denies the physical
correlation of all psychical activity, has no important ethical
implication. Like the "flesh" or the "body" of St. Paul's religious
language, the "bodily" or "material" needs and appetites of man are an
element of mind, the rank and value of which must be determined on other
grounds than the notion that they are connected in some peculiar degree
with "physical" conditions. The economic view of history has been called
and has called itself materialist partly because of the commonplace
usage, which I have just described, by which certain passions and
necessities, which it takes to be fundamental, are apt to be called
material as opposed to ethical or ideal--a wholly unjustified
opposition--and partly from the notion, which I referred to at the
beginning of this chapter, that the success of political economy was in
some way analogous to that of the mathematical science of abstract
matter. Stripping off, then, the unjustified suggestion of philosophical
materialism, what we have in the economic view of history, amounts
pretty much to what is expressed in the saying that while statesmen are
arguing, love and hunger are governing mankind. Climate and natural
resources make a

difference to history; occupations determine the type of the family; an
agricultural and an industrial society will never exhibit the same
relations between classes, and very vast commercial operations cannot be
carried on by the same methods or by the same minds which sufficed for
the retail trade of a petty shop. But when it is clearly seen that
economic needs and devices are no detached, nor, so to speak, absolutely
antecedent department of human life--a fact which the epithet
"materialist" has done something to obscure, for, in truth, in economics
there is no question of genuine material causation--then it becomes
obvious that we have not here any prior determining framework of social
existence, but simply certain important aspects of the operations of the
human mind, rather narrowly regarded in their isolation from all others.
If we seriously consider the import of such an economic conception as
the "standard of life," it becomes plain that the contrast too commonly
accepted between the mechanical pressure of economic facts and the
influence of ideas stands in need of a completely fresh criticism and of
entire restatement. Discounting, however, the exaggerations which have
arisen from confused notions of materialism, and from the genuine
achievements of economic science, we have remaining, in the point of
view under consideration, a thoroughly just assertion of man's
continuity with

the world around him. Undoubtedly man lives the life of his planet, his
climate, and his locality, and is the utterance, so to speak, of the
conditions under which his race and his nation have evolved. The only
difficulty arises if, by some arbitrary line between man and his
environment, the conditions which are the very material of his life come
to be treated as alien influences upon it, with the result of
representing him as being the slave of his surroundings rather than
their concentrated idea and articulate expression. Do we think that
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would have been greater or more free in
their genius if one had not been the voice of Greece, another that of
Italy, and the third that of England? The world in which man lives is
himself, but is constituted, of course, by presentation to a mind and
not by strictly physical causation; and even where strictly physical
causation plays a part, as in the bodily effects of a hot climate or of
a certain kind of nutrition, still it cannot determine a type of human
life except by passing into the world which a human being presents to
himself. The exclusive importance which has been attached to
considerations of this kind in recent social theory is partly due to an
unfounded opinion of their novelty. It is somewhat striking, though
following naturally enough from the sort of schism in the world of
letters which modern sociology and ancient social philosophy represent,
that the firm and well balanced handling of these problems which we owe
to Plato and Aristotle is for the most part ignored by modern sociologists.

The entire social conception of those writers is a continued application
of the principle, fundamental in their whole philosophy, that "form" is
the inherent organising life of "matter," so that the better life of a
commonwealth can be nothing but the flower and crown of the
possibilities inherent in its material conditions and industrial and
economic organisation. The law which is ultimately to reveal itself as
the spring of all righteousness in the State, has its most obvious and
external symbol--so Plato tells us--in the economic exchange of
services; and every circumstance of site, and industry, and trade, and
the racial type of the citizen, helps to constitute, both for him and
for Aristotle, the living organic possibility from which, in some
appropriate individual form, the higher life is to spring. If we ask
ourselves what then is the difference between the ancient view of
economic causation, and that of the "materialist" historical school, we
shall find the answer in the absence, from the former, of that unreal
isolation upon which we observed above. The relation of "matter" or
"conditions" to "form" or "purpose" is not, for the Greek thinker, the
pressure of an alien necessity, of a hostile environment, but the
upspringing of a life, continuous in principle through all its phases.
The thought of the legislator fixes in the shape of distinct
consciousness and will, what the assemblage of conditions embodies as a
physical or instinctive tendency, as the artist, to use an ancient
simile, finds the statue in the marble. Working with this idea, the
connection is far more thoroughly, because more sympathetically, traced
than it can be when we think that our science is but laying bare the
fetters of humanity. And following

in the spirit of the Greek thinkers themselves, modern students of
antiquity have devoted themselves to eliciting the positive connection
of conditions with history, up to a point of success of which the common
run of modern sociologists appear to have no conception. When we reflect
how typical and, comparatively speaking, how readily isolated and
exhausted is the history of Ancient Greece in the greatest age, it seems
extraordinary that the considerable and minute researches which have
been bestowed upon its geographical, commercial, and economic conditions
should not be commonly drawn into account with a view to the
illustration of the relations between natural resources, commercial and
economic development, and historical greatness. However this may be,
here at any rate, in the analysis of economic and quasi-economic
conditions in their bearing upon the life of peoples, we get a real
subject-matter which is perhaps, so far as can yet be seen, the
territory least disputably belonging to the pure sociologist. It is not
really a sphere of natural causation, but it is a sphere of certain
simple and general conditions in psychical life,

corresponding to external facts which admit of more or less precise
statement, and, we may hope, of reduction to fairly trustworthy
uniformities. Such for instance are M. Durkheim's investigations on the
effect of density of population upon the division of labour, or
Professor Giddings' observations upon the causes and limiting conditions
of the aggregation of populations. We now proceed to a branch of
experience which seriously strains the working conceptions of the
sociologist. iv. A completely new vista reveals itself to the student of
social theory when he turns from biological analogies and economic
conditions to consider the wealth of experience and of ideas which is
furnished to him by Jurisprudence and the Science of Right. He knows,
indeed, by this time, that the obvious aspect of a province of fact will
not be the only one, and that a unity will certainly be traceable
between all the facets of social existence. But none the less, he will
be able to restrain the itch to explain things away, and he will fairly
and candidly give weight to the significance and suggestiveness of the
mass of history and of reflection which is now brought before him. *.
For here, as the plainest and most unmistakable data of experience, we
are confronted with ideal facts. The vast mass of documents which form
the basis of the Science of Right--a more complete and comprehensive set
of records,

perhaps, than any other branch of social science can boast--bears
witness in every case to one social phenomenon at least, to a formal act
of mind and will, aimed at maintaining some relative right or hindering
some relative wrong, and stamped with what in some sense and in some
degree amounts to a social recognition. Theorists have said too hastily,
though with a sound meaning, that right is independent of fact. It would
be as true to say that reason is independent of civilisation, or the
soul independent of culture. Right is not exhausted in the facts of past
history; but it is at every moment embodied in facts; and to comprehend
that the social phenomena which are among the most solid and unyielding
of our experiences, are nevertheless ideal in their nature, and consist
of conscious recognitions, by intelligent beings, of the relations in
which they stand, is to make a great step towards grasping the essential
task of science in dealing with society. From the beginning of social
theory the facts of law have been set in opposition to the idea of a
natural growth. It has been observed that, as a definite institution
maintained by formal acts of will, society is artificial, conventional,
contractual. We all know to-day that there is much more than this to be
said about the nature and principles of social growth. Nevertheless, it
remains true that the social whole has an artificial aspect, an aspect
of will and of design, of the agreement and mutual recognition of free
conscious beings. And in so far as the history of law has resulted in
the conception of natural right, this in no way derogates from the
artificial or ideal character of

society as above understood. For "natural" right belongs to a "nature"
which includes and does not exclude that action of intelligence in
virtue of which society may be termed artificial; and is merely the
revelation of the principle towards which the social will is working,
and which in some degree it has always embodied. Therefore the facts of
Jurisprudence and the Science of Right, or of "Natural Right," as the
issue and outcome of Jurisprudence, necessarily counterbalance the
extreme ideas of continuous growth and natural causation which social
science derives from other analogies. We are reminded that, after all,
we are dealing with a self-conscious purposive organism, which is aware
of a better and a worse, and has members bound together by conscious
intelligence, though, it may be, not by conscious intelligence alone. At
one time the ideas of Jurisprudence, such as Sovereignty or Contract,
were considered sufficient by themselves to equip a social theory. And
if they are now seen to need completion from both sides,--from the side
of lower nature, and from the side of the national spirit and
culture,--this should not make us neglectful of the important truths
which the facts of law and recognised obligation, more than any others,
establish on solid ground. *. It is of course the case that Law has been
treated from the standpoint of economic history in the same way as the
other phenomena of civilised life. It may be taken simply as the form
into which substantive relations crystallise, under the influence of
economic conditions or of other elementary social forces. And obviously
such a

view has its truth. The social will, like the will of any one of us from
day to day, is formed not in vacuo, but as the focus of all the
influences which penetrate our being. It is a fair object of research to
ascertain the economic or other social meaning of the statutes which we
find on the statute book; and it is because they have so much meaning
that they are excellent object-lessons in the play of the social
consciousness and sense of right. But this focussing of social
influences makes the laws not less acts of social will, but more. To
suppose the contrary would be like supposing that nothing is a true act
of will which embodies an individual's distinctive purposes in life. I
will explain by an illustration the relative value of sociological
analysis in dealing with the facts of positive law. I am indebted for it
to M. Durkheim, whose writings appear to me among the most original and
suggestive works of modern sociology. I regret that my immediate purpose
does not justify me in stating and appreciating the whole very
interesting theory of repressive and contractual law from which the
point in question is selected. An act is a crime, we are told, for the
pure sociologist, when it offends the strong and definite collective
sentiments of society. This is the strictly causal view of the matter.
The act is a crime because it offends; it does not offend because it is
a crime. And the corollaries are valuable. It is idle to distinguish, on
such a basis, between the reformatory, the retributive, and the
deterrent views of the reaction which is punishment. An

offensive act is in itself at once an exhibition of character, an
injury, and a menace. If a man assaults me in the street, and I knock
him down; how futile to ask if my action is meant to cure him of his
insolence, to punish him for having hit me, or to prevent him from
hitting me again! The real fact is that I am offended, and I react by
way of injury and negation against that which offends me. Now, this
view, I think, illuminates the subject. By going back to the simple
operative cause, as it may be supposed to exist especially in the minds
of a tribe in an early stage of development (M. Durkheim is chiefly
referring to religious offences), we have got a plain type of mental
reaction, easy to imagine and to understand. In this type we see at once
the unity of aspects which the forms of law, and legal or philosophical
theory, tend later to dissociate in a fictitious degree. And moreover we
are reminded that a law must have something behind it; some positive
sentiment or conviction, without which it would be unaccountable and
unmeaning. But when all this is said, it must not be supposed that penal
law has been reduced to the level of a strong and definite collective
sentiment, or a crime to the level of an annoyance. The simplest penal
law of a self- existent social group is different from the anger of a
crowd or mob. There is in it some sense of permanence, and permanence
means responsibility and generality--a distinction of right and wrong.
The fact of formally constituting a crime, i.e. of announcing a law,
implies that mere distaste is no ground of punishment. The law means
that there is something worth maintaining,

and that this is recognised, and that to violate this recognition is not
merely to be unpopular, but to sin against the common good, and to break
an obligation. With less than this there is no true crime. Thus, if I am
right, the relation of pure "sociological" causation to juristic facts
is the well- known relation of the more abstract to the more concrete
sciences, usually illustrated in logic by the relation of the physical
and the musical account of musical sound. For the pure physicist, a
harmony and a discord are only two different combinations of shakings.
For the musician they are not only opposite effects, but are causes of
divergent consequences. So with the relation between a strong collective
sentiment and a true law. A strong sentiment, as such, is a mere fact, a
mere force; and as such the sociologist regards it. A law involves the
pretension to will what is just, and is therefore a sentiment and
something more, viz., the point of view of social good. It aims at a
right and implies a wrong, and demands to be apprehended and judged on
this ground. A mere force cannot by its reaction constitute a crime; for
that a law is necessary. The ideal aspect of law as recognition of right
is no less actual, no less solid and verifiable, than the facts of
sentiment or necessity which may have suggested and sustained it. In
this way the relation of sociological causation to the facts of
Jurisprudence is typical of the whole relation of Sociology conceived as
a natural science, to the larger facts with which social theory has to
deal. v. But the ideas involved in mere legality, though they bear
emphatic testimony to the conscious and artificial aspect of the social
whole, have always

been regarded with some justice as the type of what is empty and formal.
To treat a law as a command with a penalty annexed, or to enunciate the
tendency of social progress as being from status to contract, may convey
important meanings, but is obviously very far short of the whole truth.
And, indeed, generalisations of this kind, though characteristic of a
certain class of reflective Jurisprudence, do not at all represent the
highest level which has been reached within the science of right itself.
But yet, as we pass beyond these everyday working conceptions, we are
beginning to leave the central ground of Jurisprudence, and to move
towards a point of view which deals more completely with life and
culture. The need and occasion for such a point of view may be measured
by that revival of national individuality which was referred to in the
last chapter as constituting the true ground and occasion for the
rebirth of genuine political philosophy in modern times. Montesquieu's
investigation into the "spirit of laws," and his treatment of a law as
something deeper than a command, following upon the similar endeavours
of Vico, was in fact a recognition of the fundamental unity of a
national civilisation, which, on its political side, even Hobbes and
Locke had already attempted to explain by help of the inadequate
instruments furnished to them by legal theory. Montesquieu's and Vico's
conceptions were only the forerunners of the many-sided study of
civilisation which characterised the latter part of the eighteenth
century, following up the problem which was enunciated in Rousseau's
paradox, that "law itself must be created by the social spirit which it
aims at creating." To recognise the social spirit

of a people, as the central unity behind its law and culture and
politics, was the principle of the various researches dealing with
formative art, poetry, language, religion, and the state, which marked
the close of the eighteenth century (compare Wolf's theory of Homer as
the utterance of a racial mind), and laid the foundation of nineteenth
century idealism. The true Greek renaissance, initiated in the age of
Winckelmann, forcing modern minds into contact with Hellenic ideas in
their original form, and no longer through Latin intermediaries,
furnished a type and focus for these researches by bringing before the
thoughts of students the brilliant individuality of the ancient
city-state; the crude traditions of which had already exercised the most
powerful influence on Rousseau, and through him on the Revolution. At
the same time the organic sciences were full of activity. The life-work
of Goethe marks the parallelism of the two movements. It is plain that
the doctrines of Comte were no more than a very one-sided attempt to
formulate the significance of the fermentation around him, and that
deeply as he felt the unity of the social being, his expression of it
ignored half the lesson of the times. Thus the generalities of
Jurisprudence are vitalised and completed by the work of the sciences of
culture; and the conception of a national mind and character takes its
unquestioned place in modern social theory. It may be well at this point
also to call attention to the researches which later historians have
directed to what may be called "Comparative Politics"; the relations,
that is, of communities under government with respect to the

mode in which they are governed. For this branch of inquiry once more,
though narrow and empty by itself, yet does aid in bringing to light the
purposive and conscious character of society, and in correcting the
tendency to treat it altogether as a "natural" phenomenon. vi. "And so
the whirligig of Time brings about his revenges." French Sociology
to-day is a psychological science, though its founder banished
psychology from his sociological method. Nothing is more instructive
than to watch the gradual pressure of the various points of view which
are emphasised by the various departments of social experience, as they
reveal, under criticism, their tendency to complete themselves and one
another by suggesting the only category which is adequate to them as a
whole. As every serious student of social matters knows by his own
experience, it is impossible to touch a physical fact, or a statistical
datum, or a legal enactment, in reference to its social bearing, without
its at once, so to speak, coming alive in his hands, and attaching
itself to an underlying relation of mind as the only unity which will
make it intelligible, and correlate it with other experiences, by
themselves no less fragmentary. In statistics, for example, you touch a
moving creature, as if through the holes in a wall, at this point and
the other, and write down where you have touched him. But to see the
creature as he is, and combine your information of all kinds in a just
and complete idea, you

must get him into the open. And that, when the question is of a life,
you can only do by reconstructing his mind, for even to see a social
unit with your eyes gives you a fragment only, and not a whole. On
Fridays, we are told, the passenger traffic returns of French railways,
omnibuses, and steamers show a decline. What dumb fact is this? People
do not like to travel on Fridays, or prefer to travel upon other days.
What is this preference? The only unity that can really afford an
explanation, that can correlate this irregular fragment of fact with the
whole to which it belongs, is the living mind and will of the society in
which the phenomenon occurs. Explanation aims at referring things to a
whole; and there is no true whole but mind. Necessarily, therefore, with
widening experience and deepening criticism, mind has become the centre
of the experiences focussed by sociology. We may note some significant
points in this development, although, indeed, the whole course of modern
sociology is one single illustration of what has just been said.
Discussions of the problem in what the differentia of society consists,
no longer deal with organic or economic conceptions, but with such ideas
as the "Consciousness of kind," the "Mind of a Crowd," "Imitation" and
"Invention," similarities and differences in the social consciousness,
"Social logic" and society considered as a syllogism, and the imitative and

inventive person. The work of M. Tarde in particular is typical of the
whole movement, and his phrases have largely been adopted whether in
agreement or in controversy. For him the one fact coextensive with the
social character is "Imitation"--the means by which ideas and practices
spread throughout groups and masses of intelligent beings. For the
characteristic of knowable phenomena, in his view, is Repetition, and
Imitation is the means and vehicle of Repetition in social matters.
Here, however, we have accounted only for generalisation, and
differentiation needs a separate origin. This will be supplied by the
idea of "Invention;" Invention and Imitation, therefore, are the general
form of all social process, the matter on the other hand being
analysable as Belief and Desire. Every institution is a belief, every
activity is a want or desire. In the Logique Sociale these conceptions
of the general medium and process of social life are pushed home into
the actual formative operation of the social mind and will. Society, we
are told, may be compared not indeed to an organism, but rather to a
brain; it is a co-operative mind, a syllogism, in which the principles
held by one part are modified and applied by another. M. Tarde's extreme
illustrative hypothesis corresponds strangely with one thrown out by Mr.
Sidgwick. Mr. Sidgwick has simplified an ethical question by supposing
only a single

sentient conscious being in the universe; for M. Tarde there is, we
might say, no single being at all; the typical social man is a
hypnotical creature, a somnambulist acting under suggestions from
others, though he does not know it, and is under the illusion that he is
himself. Nothing could be of higher interest than to see the necessities
of social science thus working themselves out, on slippery and
unfamiliar ground, by the sheer force of facts and experience. That a
science of man must be a science of mind seems no longer disputable. On
the substance of this development there is one observation which
inevitably suggests itself to any critic who approaches the problem from
the philosophical side. Necessarily, as the relation of the individual
to society is the root of every social problem, psychological sociology
consists to a great extent in exercises upon the theme of identity and
difference. These exercises have hitherto been for the most part
unconscious and involuntary. And the high degree of substantial truth
which is attained by inquirers who have not thought the logic of
identity worthy of a single glance, is the strongest possible
confirmation of the common experience that it is safer to neglect theory
than to be careless of facts. Nevertheless, it has now become apparent,
that a point has been attained at which logical criticism is absolutely
essential, or if not logical criticism, at least some reference to the
familiar and well-established results of ancient or modern social
philosophy.

For it is a universal characteristic of the sociological movement before
us, that identity and difference are referred to different spheres, and
the "one" and the "other" are regarded as reciprocally exclusive atoms.
The difficulties and fallacies which thus arise are innumerable. Thus we
have the contagious common feeling of a crowd taken as the true type of
a collective mind, obviously because it is not understood how an
identical structure can include the differences, the rational
distinctions and relations, which really constitute the working mind of
any society. So again we have one type of law marked off as
corresponding to social similitude, while a different type corresponds
to the social division of labour; simply because the category of
resemblance has been substituted for that of identity, and is treated as
exclusive of differentiation; with the result of a really terrible
distortion of facts in the attempt to separate the whole sphere of penal
enactment from that which deals with industrial organisation. So with
the entire set of notions of "Imitation," "Repetition" and "Invention."
The separation of Imitation and Invention is simply the popular
exclusion of Difference from Identity; while the treatment of Repetition
as the characteristic of knowable phenomena and the mode of utterance of
social Imitation means the restriction of rational

Identity to its barest form, and the exclusion from social theory of
absolutely every case of true co- operative structure. For true
co-operative structure is never characterised by repetition, but always
by identity in difference; it is the relation not of a screw to an
exactly similar screw, but of the screw to the nut into which it
fastens. In the discussions of Egoism and Altruism the difficulty comes
to a head. Some writers think Egoism prior to Altruism; others--the more
wary and enlightened--incline to treat Altruism as a phase earlier than
Egoism; M. Durkheim, whose eye for a fact is very keen, seeing the
absurdity of both these suppositions, is determined to include the two
characters in question from the very beginning in the human
consciousness, but, of course, as contents belonging to different
spheres and consisting of contrasted elements. The conception of a whole
held together by its differences, its identity consisting in and being
measured by their very profoundness and individuality, is not at the
command of any of these writers, although the greater part of M.
Durkheim's theory seems imperatively to demand such a conception. vii.
Before considering, in conclusion, the relation of Sociology as
influenced by the above-mentioned sources and points of view, to social
philosophy proper, it will be well to devote a few words to emphasising
the way in which these "sources" ought to be regarded. Every "source" of
sociological science is at once a category, or point of view, and also a
certain

group of actual social conditions. This relation is effectively
illustrated by the study of any social unity which is such as to invite
a thorough conspectus of its life from top to bottom of the social
growth and underlying conditions. I repeat that the history and life of
ancient Greece, a singularly complete working model of society on a very
small scale, analysed with remarkable thoroughness, and individual
throughout, is the prerogative example of such a treatment; but next to
this, or in addition to it, a thoroughly careful study of local history,
life, and conditions, in a limited region, with which we are familiar
from top to toe, is an essential propaedeutic to true social theory. To
focus a number of groups of fact, and co-ordinate the points of view
which they substantiate, into the conception of a living being, with its
individual character and spiritual utterance, needs more than a merely
literary or statistical study. But by making this effort we shall learn,
as no economic charts or general scientific works can teach us, what a
social life is, and in what sense it is true that all partial facts and
experiences within it demand ultimate co- ordination in the category of
mind. It is not meant that consciousness can make the weather hold up,
but it is meant that no fact has a true social bearing except in as far
as, sooner or later, it comes to form part of the world which a being
capable of sociality and therefore intelligent, presents to himself as
his theatre of action. 3. Thus it may seem that by mere force of facts a
necessary solution has been arrived at, and that

psychological sociology must be one and the same science with social
philosophy. But this is not quite the case. Up to the present time these
two sciences continue to approach their object-matter, as it were, from
different ends, and whether the two views will ultimately amalgamate is
perhaps mainly a problem of the personal division of labour. But a
question of principle, with reference to the true nature of psychology,
is indirectly involved. Only there seems no reason why two kinds of
psychology should not exist. Psychology, as at present conceived by its
best working representatives, is a positive, though not a physical
science. "For (the psychologist) the crude superstitions of Australian
aborigines have as much interest and value as the developed and accurate
knowledge of a Newton or a Faraday." Its aim is "the establishment of
continuity among observed facts, by interpolating among them
intermediate links which elude observation." If not a "physical"
science, then, it is, in a common sense of the term, a "natural"
science. It has the impartiality, and uses the watchwords--law, process,
genesis--which belong to a natural science. And like every impartial
science, to which process and genesis are watchwords, it tends to
explain the higher by the lower. This springs from no malice
aforethought, but from the conditions of the case. The lower is simpler,
and usually comes first in time. It is naturally dwelt upon, as that
into which it is hoped to resolve the more complex, and the explanation

which is more adequate for the simple, is less adequate for the complex.
No difference of higher and lower is recognised by the impartial
science, and its ideal, as a science, is inevitably the expression of
the complex in terms of the simple; while, as far as genesis in time is
insisted on, the bias towards temporal causation is pretty sure to
operate by attaching a quasi-causal significance to the earlier phases.
In all these characteristics psychology is at one with sociology. And,
therefore, though it is a gain that other points of view should be
resolved into the point of view of mind, yet the positive bias of
sociology is not transcended simply by this resolution. Philosophy
starts, we have said, as it were from the other end. It is critical
throughout; it desires to establish degrees of value, degrees of
reality, degrees of completeness and coherence. Its purpose might be
termed "Ethical," but for the extreme narrowness of the meaning of that
term. Society, for it, is an achievement or utterance of human
nature--of course not divorced from nature in general--having a certain
degree of solidity, so to speak; that is to say, being able, up to a
certain point, to endure the tests and answer the questionings which are
suggested by the scrutiny of human life from the point of view of value
and completeness. Is the social life the best, or the only life for a
human soul? In what way through society, and in what characteristics of
society, does the soul lay hold upon its truest self, or become, in
short, the most that it has in it to be? How does the social life at its
best compare with the life of art, of

knowledge, or of religion, and can the same principle be shown to be
active in all of them? And what have they in common, or peculiar to
each, which has an imperative claim on the mind of man? Now it was
hinted above that there might be two kinds of psychology, or two
tendencies within it. And if psychology were to be impelled, as it has
been more than once in the past, by the recognition that where there is
more of its object--of mind--its interest is greater and the rank of its
object-matter is higher, then there would not be much to choose between
the temper of psychology and that of philosophy. And as sociology has
found itself driven forward into the territory of social "logic," a name
which at once suggests a critical and philosophical science, it may well
be that sociological psychology will not remain wholly "positive" and
impartial, but will assume, as in the hands of Professor Giddings, for
example, it seems inclined to, at least a teleological attitude, testing
social phenomena by the quantity and quality of life which they display.
But, at any rate, the points of view of sociology, and of social
philosophy as above described, will continue to supplement each other.
Philosophy gives a significance to sociology; sociology vitalises
philosophy. The idea of mind is deepened and extended by the unity and
continuity which sociological analysis, throughout all its many-sided
sources, vindicates for the principle of growth and order down to the
roots and in all the fibres of the world. Every natural resource and
condition must be thought of as drawing forth or constituting some new
element in the mind which is the universal

focus; just as every shape and colour of the trees in the landscape or
every note of a melody finds its definite and individual response in the
contemplative consciousness. The error lies, not in identifying the mind
and the environment, but in first uncritically separating them, and then
substituting not merely the one for the other, but wretched fragments of
the one for the whole in which alone either can be complete. Philosophy,
on the other hand, in treating of society, has to deal with the problems
which arise out of the nature of a whole and its parts, the relation of
the individual to the universal, and the transformation by which the
particular self is lost, to be found again in a more individual, and yet
more universal form. In all these respects its view is what might be
called teleological; that is to say, it recognises a difference of level
or of degree in the completeness and reality of life, and endeavours to
point out when and how, and how far by social aid, the human soul
attains the most and best that it has in it to become. As long as these
two points of view are clearly recognised, it is a matter of the mere
personal division of labour whether they are brought to bear by the same
thinkers and within the same treatises.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER III THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION: SELF-GOVERNMENT 1. TO
every-day common sense there is something paradoxical in the phenomena
of political obligation; however it may acquiesce in what, although not
satisfactorily explicable, is plainly seen to be necessary. Where,
indeed, we meet with any form of absolutely despotic government, we have
not so much a paradox as a defect; for, although government may exist in
such a shape, it is open to question how far true political obligation
can be said to arise under such a system. In as far as it does so, we
shall find that the fact is due to unacknowledged conditions and
relations, which we shall more easily analyse as they appear in free or
constitutional states. It would then be easy to show, if we were
interested in doing so, that the principles which will have been
recognised as operative in the freest states known to history, are and
have been, in various degrees, at the root of the common life of every
state or community which has held together effectively enough to be
treated as in any sense a political whole. But this would be a
historical investigation, unnecessary for the purpose of pure

social theory. In this we may fairly start from the highest form of
political experience, in which, as we shall see, the mere defects of
political immaturity being outgrown, the paradox of political obligation
emerges with intensified emphasis. Let us take as our starting point,
then, the conception of "self-government," to which, it will be admitted
on all hands, the thought and feeling of mature communities has clung
both in ancient and modern times, as in some way containing the true
root and ground of political obligation. We shall find in it a striking
illustration of the strength and weakness of wide-spread popular
notions. A universal popular notion cannot but have a hold of some
essential truth, otherwise it could not survive and spread, and form a
working theory for an immense area of experience. On the other hand, a
popular notion, as such, cannot be critical of itself and aware of its
own foundations; and so in defending and applying itself it is pretty
sure to plunge deep into fallacy. "Self-government" is an idea which
will be found, as has been said, to contain the true ground and nature
of political obligation. But the rough and ready application of it
which, for example, represents the individual as simply one with the
community, and the community therefore as infallible in its action
affecting him, is a pure example of fallacy, and may be justly
characterised as a confusion pretending to be a synthesis. Of this idea
as of so many we must say that those who have pronounced it to be
self-contradictory have understood it much better than most of those who
accept it as self-evident. In the conception of self-government then we

have the paradox of obligation in its purest form. As applied to the
individual himself, it gives the paradox of Ethical Obligation. As
applied to the individuals who compose a society, it gives the paradox
of Political Obligation. This must be the preliminary distinction by
which we approach the subject; but we shall find that the two problems
and the two cases cannot be ultimately separated, although they are to
be distinguished in a certain respect. The paradox of Ethical Obligation
starts from what is accepted as a "self," and asks how it can exercise
authority or coercion over itself; how, in short, a metaphor drawn from
the relations of some persons to others can find application within what
we take to be the limits of an individual mind. The paradox of Political
Obligation starts from what is accepted as authority or social coercion,
and asks in what way the term "self," derived from the "individual"
mind, can be applicable at once to the agent and patient in such
coercion, exercised prima facie by some persons over others. Both
relations and their connection have been pointed out by Plato. Our
object in the present chapter is to enforce the reality of the
difficulties which attach to the idea of political self-government, so
long as current assumptions as to the union of individuals in society
are maintained. And for this purpose we are to examine the views of some
very distinguished philosophers to whom the paradox has appeared
irreconcilable, and law or government has seemed

essentially antagonistic to the self or true individuality of man; while
the term self, if applied to the collective group by or within which
government is undoubtedly exercised, appears to them an empty and
misleading expression. The curious and significant point, to which we
shall call attention, is, in brief, that while maintaining law and
government to be in their nature antagonistic to the self of man--
whether as pain to pleasure or as fetters to individuality--they
nevertheless admit with one voice that a certain minimum of this
antagonistic element is necessary to the development of the sentient or
rational self. We have here a dualism which challenges examination. 2.
The attitude towards law and government which Bentham (1748-1832)
adopted was in a great degree that of the philanthropic reformer. His
principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is said to
have been derived from Beccaria, whose work on "Crimes and Penalties"
had great influence throughout Europe. And Howard, "the philanthropist,"
who was just twenty- two years Bentham's senior (1726-1790), represented
a revolt against the abuses of the treatment of criminals at that time,
by which Bentham, who eulogised him as "a martyr and apostle," was
strongly affected. The movement which Bentham led was, in short,
markedly hostile to the existing system of law, and to the reasonings of
its advocates. And substantial as his knowledge and constructive genius
proved to be, it never lost the character which the direction of his
approach to the subject had marked upon it, a character of suspicion and
antagonism, which is

expressed in his description of law as a necessary evil, and government
as a choice of evils. Pain being the ultimate evil, it is clear why, on
Bentham's principles, every law is an evil. For every law, for him, is
contrary to liberty; and every infraction of liberty is followed by a
natural sentiment of pain. Against those who would deny the proposition
that every law is contrary to liberty he brings a charge of perversion
of language, in that they restrict liberty to the right of doing what is
not injurious to others. They give the term, that is to say, a partly
positive implication. For him then liberty has the simplest and
apparently widest meaning, which includes liberty to do evil, and is
defined, we must suppose, purely as the absence of restraint. And he
therefore has no doubt whatever that the citizen can acquire rights only
by sacrificing part of his liberty. And in this there is an appearance
of truth, if we forget that in saying that a part of one's liberty is
sacrificed it is implied that one had, to begin with, a certain area of
liberty, of which a portion is abandoned to save the rest. But the idea
of any such antecedent liberty is just such a fiction as Bentham himself
delighted to expose. It is true, however, that some degree of restraint
on what we can now easily imagine ourselves free to do, is involved in
political society. The point on which we have to fix our attention, for
the purposes of social theory, is the remarkable representation of this
state of things under the figure, as it were, of an amount of general
liberty,

which is increased by subtraction, or which can only attain its maximum
by the conversion of a certain edge or border of it, so to speak, into
constraint. This border of constraint is implied to be capable of a
minimum, such as to condition a maximum of liberty, or possible
individual initiative; a relation which, being at first sight
contradictory, demands further analysis. For it would appear that if the
sacrifice of some liberty is to be instrumental to the increase of the
whole amount, that whole can hardly be a homogeneous given quantity,
like, for instance, a piece of land; for such a one must surely be
diminished by the subtraction of any part of it. It must, one would
infer, be something which has a complex nature like that of a living
plant, such that certain restrictions or negations which are essential
to its prosperity are dictated by its individual characteristics (which
must be positive), and express the same principle with them; and
therefore are wholly relative to the positive type and phase of the
plant to be cultivated. Only in some such sense can it be intelligible
how constraint is instrumental to effective self-assertion. But if this
is so, the restrictive influences of law and government, which are the
measure of the constraint imposed, cannot be alien to the human nature
which they restrict, and ought not to be set down as in their own nature
antagonistic to liberty or to the making the most of the human self. The
root of the difficulty obviously lies in assuming that the pressure of
the claims of "others" in society is a mere general curtailment of the
liberty of the "one," while acknowledging, not

contrary to fact, but contrary to the hypothesis of that curtailment,
that the one, so far from surrendering some of his capacity for life
through his fellowship with others, acquires and extends that capacity
wholly in and through such fellowship. On the above assumption the terms
of the paradox of self-government become irreconcilable, and government
is made an evil of which it is impossible to explain how it ministers to
the self which stands for the good. So long as to every individual,
taken as the true self, the restraint enforced by the impact of others
is alien and a diminution of the self, this result is inevitable. It is
instructive, therefore, to note Bentham's uncompromising hostility to
all the theories of philosophical jurists. The common point of all their
theories, from Hobbes and Grotius to Montesquieu and Rousseau, not to
mention Kant and his successors, has lain in the fact that their authors
divined under the forms of power and command, exercised by some over
others, a substantive and general element of positive human nature,
which they attempted to drag to light by one analogy after another. But
neither Montesquieu's "eternal relations," nor the "Social Contract,"
nor "General Will," nor "Natural Rights" of other thinkers find favour
in Bentham's eyes. One and all they are to him fiction and fallacy. He
can understand nothing in law but the character of a command; he can see
no positive relation of it to human nature beyond the degree in which it
dispenses with the pain of restraint while increasing the pleasure of
liberty. To describe the magnificent success which

attended the use of this rule of thumb in the practical work of reform
does not fall within our immediate subject. Our purpose was merely to
illustrate the paradox implied in the conception of self-government, by
pointing out how fundamentally hostile to one another Bentham took its
constituent elements to be. 3. The same point may be further insisted on
by examining the main ideas of Mill's "Liberty," without by any means
professing to give a full account of Mill's opinions on the relation of
individuals to society. What indeed is instructive in his position, for
our immediate purpose, is that, having so deep a sense, as he has, of
social solidarity, he nevertheless treats the central life of the
individual as something to be carefully fenced round against the impact
of social forces. i. Mill's idea of Individuality is plainly biassed by
the Benthamite tradition that law is an evil. It is to be remembered
that Anarchism of a speculative kind, the inevitable complement of a
hide-bound Conservatism, was current in the beginning of this century,
as in Godwin and Shelley. Thus we find concentrated in a few pages of
the "Liberty" all those ideas on the nature of Individuality,
Originality, and Eccentricity, which are most opposed to the teaching
derived by later generations in England from the revival of philosophy
and criticism. It is worth while, after reading Mill's observations upon
the relation of individuality to the Calvinistic theory of life, to turn
to the estimate expressed by Mark Pattison of the force of individual
character generated by

the rule of Calvin at Geneva. That the individuality, or genius, the
fullness of life and completeness of development which Mill so justly
appreciates, is not nourished and evoked by the varied play of relations
and obligations in society, but lies in a sort of inner self, to be
cherished by enclosing it, as it were, in an impervious globe, is a
notion which neither modern logic nor modern art criticism will admit.
In the same way, the connection of originality and eccentricity, on
which Mill insists, appears to us to-day to be a fallacious track of
thought; and in general, in all these matters, we tend to accept the
principle that, in order to go beyond a point of progress, it is
necessary to have reached it; and in order to destroy a law, it is
necessary to have fulfilled it. Here, however, is the heart of the point
on which we are insisting. If individuality and originality mean or
depend upon the absence of law and of obligation; if eccentricity is the
type of the fully developed self, and if the community, penetrated by a
sense of universal relations, is therefore a prey to monotony and
uniformity, then it needs no further words to show that law is a
curtailment of human nature, the necessity of which remains
inexplicable, so that self-government is a contradiction in terms. ii.
How then does Mill bring the two terms into relation? How does he
represent the phenomenon that, in the life of every society, the factors
of self and of government have to be reconciled, or at any rate to co-
exist? To find the answer to this question, the whole

of the chapter, "Of the limits of the authority of society over the
individual," should be carefully studied. A few characteristic sentences
may be quoted here. "What, then, is the rightful limit to the
sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of
society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to
individuality, and how much to society? "Each will receive its proper
share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it. To
individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the
individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly
interests society." Every one who lives in society, he continues in
effect, is bound not to interfere with certain interests of others
(explicitly or implicitly constituted as "rights"), and is bound to take
his fair share of the sacrifices incurred for the defence of society and
its members. These conditions society may enforce, at all costs to
recalcitrants. Further, it may punish by opinion, though not by law,
acts hurtful to others, but not going so far as to violate their rights.
But acts which affect only the agent, or need not affect others unless
they like, may be punished, we are given to understand, neither by law
nor by opinion. Mill expects his conclusions to be disputed, and the
following is the conclusion of the passage in which he explains and re-
affirms it: ". . . when a person disables himself, by conduct purely
self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on
him to the public, he is guilty of a social

offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a
soldier or policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.
Wherever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of
damage either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out
of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law." It
will probably occur at once to the reader that, considered as a
practical rule, the view here maintained would by no means curtail
unduly the province of social interference. We should rather anticipate
that it would leave an easy opening for a transition from administrative
nihilism to administrative absolutism; and some such transition seems to
have taken place in Mill's later views. This tendency to a complete
bouleversement is the characteristic of all conceptions which proceed by
assigning different areas to the several factors of an inseparable
whole, which then reasserts itself in its wholeness within the area of
either factor to which we may happen to attend. Indeed, even in the
passage before us, the defence of individuality has already well-nigh
turned round into its annihilation. Every act that carries a definite
damage to any other person belongs to the sphere of law, and every act
that can be supposed likely to cause such a damage, to that of morality;
and individuality has what is left. The extraordinary demarcation
between the sphere of morality and that of liberty is to be accounted
for, no doubt, by the Benthamite tradition which identified the moral
and social sanctions; so that in this usage the sphere of morality means
much the same as what,

in the first passage referred to, was indicated as the sphere of
opinion. Now, it is obvious that the distinction which Mill is
attempting to describe and explain is one practically recognised by
every society. The question is whether it can be rightly described and
explained by a demarcation which, if strictly pressed, excludes
individuality from every act of life that has an important social
bearing; while, owing to the two-sided nature of all action, it becomes
perfectly arbitrary in its practical working as a criterion. For every
act of mine affects both myself and others; and it is a matter of mood
and momentary urgency which aspect may be pronounced characteristic and
essential. It may safely be said that no demarcation between
self-regarding and other-regarding action can possibly hold good. What
may hold good, and what Mill's examples show to be present to his mind,
is a distinction between the moral and the "external" aspects of action,
on the ground of their respective accessibility to the means of coercion
which are at the disposal of society. The peculiar sense in which the
term "external" is here employed will explain itself below. For our
present purpose, however, what we have to observe is merely that the
demarcation between individuality and society, contrived in defence of
the former, has pretty nearly annihilated it. And thus we see once more
how overwhelming is the prima facie appearance that, in the idea of
self-government, the factors of self and government are alien and
opposed; and yet how hopeless it remains

to explain the part played by these factors in actual society, so long
as we aim at a demarcation between them as opposites, rather than at a
relative distinction between them as manifestations of the same
principle in different media. iii. A few words may here be said on the
applications by which Mill illustrates his doctrine, in order to point
out what confusion results from relying on a demarcation which cannot
strictly be made. It will be noted in the first place that he objects
altogether to the attempt to prevent by punishment either immorality or
irreligion as such. This objection a sound social theory must uphold.
But if we look at Mill's reason for it, we find it simply to be that
such an attempt infringes liberty, by interfering with action which is
purely self- regarding. Without entering further upon the endless
argument whether this or any action is indeed purely self-regarding, we
may observe that by taking such ground, Mill causes the above objection,
which is substantially sound, to appear as on all fours with others
which are at any rate very much more doubtful. Such is the objection on
principle to all restrictions imposed upon trade with a distinct view to
protecting the consumer, not from fraud, but from opportunities of
consumption injurious to himself. The regulation or prohibition of the
traffic in alcoholic liquors is of course the main question here at
issue; and it may be admitted that Mill's discussion, with the many
distinctions which he lays down, is full of shrewdness and
suggestiveness. But the ultimate ground which he takes, as above stated,
is quite different from the genuine reasons which

exist against attempting to enforce morality by law and penalty, and
introduces confusion into the whole question of State interference by
ranking the two objections together. Closely analogous are his
objections to the statutes respecting unlawful games, which, whether
wise or unwise, are quite a different thing from an attempt to punish
personal immorality as such. And lastly, the same principle is
illustrated by his whole attitude to the strong feeling and the various
legal obligations which determine and support the monogamous family. In
maintaining the general indissolubility of marriage, and supporting the
parental power, the State is interfering, for him, with the freedom of
parties to a contract, and conferring power over individuals, the
children, who have a right to be separately considered. Such
interference is for him ipso facto of a suspected nature. It is an
interference hostile to liberty; and whether it is or is not an external
condition of good life, which the State is able effectively to maintain,
is a question which he does not discuss. Throughout all these objections
to authoritative interference we trace the peculiar prejudice that the
criterion of its justifiability lies in the boundary line between self
and others, rather than in the nature of what coercive authority is and
is not able to do towards the promotion of good life. On many points
indeed, when the simple protection of "others" is concerned, Mill's
doctrine leads to sound conclusions. Such, for example, is the problem
of legislation after the pattern of the Factory Acts. But yet a strange
nemesis attaches to grounds

alleged with insufficient discrimination. just as, by ranking inner
morality and outer action alike under the name of freedom, Mill is led
to object to interference which may be perfectly justified and
effectual; so by the same confusion he is led to advocate coercive
treatment in impossibly stringent forms, and in cases where it runs
extreme risk of thwarting a true moral development. We are amazed when
he strongly implies, in respect to the education of children and the
prospect of supporting a family, that the existence of a moral
obligation to an act is a sufficient ground for enforcing the act by
law. The proposal of universal State-enacted examinations by way of
enforcing the parental duty of educating children, to the exclusion of
the task of providing education by public authority, in which Mill sees
danger to individuality, opens a prospect of a Chinese type of society,
from which, happily, the good sense of Englishmen has recoiled. And just
the reverse of his proposal has come to pass under the influence of the
logic of experience. The State has taken care that the external
conditions of an elementary education are provided, and, while doing
this, has no doubt exercised compulsion in order that these conditions
may be a reality. But the individual inquisition by examination is
tending to drop out of the system; and the practical working of the
public education is more and more coming to be that the State sees to it
that certain conditions are maintained, of which the parents' interest
and public spirit leads them to take advantage. Sheer compulsion is not
the way to enforce a moral obligation.

Still more startling is the suggestion that it might be just to
interdict marriage to those unable to show the means of supporting a
family, on the ground of possible evil both to the children themselves
through poverty, and to others through over-population. This is a case
in which authoritative interference (except on account of very definite
physical or mental defects) must inevitably defeat its object. No
foresight of others can gauge the latent powers to meet and deal with a
future indefinite responsibility; and the result of scrupulous timidity,
in view of such responsibilities, is seen in the tendency to
depopulation which affects that very country from which Mill probably
drew his argument. To leave the responsibility as fully as possible
where it has been assumed is the best that law can do, and appeals to a
spring of energy deeper than compulsion can reach. Thus we have seen
that by discriminating the spheres of non-interference and interference,
according to a supposed demarcation between the sphere of "self" and of
"others," a hopelessly confused classification has been introduced.
Sometimes the maintenance of external conditions of good life, well
within the power of the State, is forbidden on the same grounds as the
direct promotion of morality, which is impossible to it. In other cases
the enforcement of moral obligations is taken to lie within the
functions of the State, although not only is the enforcement of moral
obligations per se a contradiction in terms, but almost always, as in
the cases in question, the attempt to effect it is sure to frustrate
itself, by destroying the springs on which moral action depends.

It is worth noticing, in conclusion, that in two examples, the one
trivial, the other, that of slavery, both theoretically and practically
very important, Mill recognises a principle wholly at variance with his
own. Here he is aware that it may be right, according to the principle
of liberty, to restrain a man, for reasons affecting himself alone, from
doing what at the moment he proposes to do. For we are entitled to argue
from the essential nature of freedom to what freedom really demands, as
opposed to what the man momentarily seems to wish. "It is not freedom to
be allowed to alienate his freedom," as it is not freedom to be allowed
to walk over a bridge which is certain to break down and cause his
death. Here we have in germ the doctrine of the "real" will, and a
conception analogous to that of Rousseau when he speaks of a man "being
forced to be free." 4. Before referring to Mill's explicit utterances on
the problem of self-government, which are of the same general character
as those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, it will be well to note some
instructive points in the views of the latter thinker. The study of Mr.
Spencer's writings, and more especially of those which appear most
directly opposed to the popular conceptions of the day, cannot be too
strongly urged upon the sociological student. And this for two reasons.
In the first place, no other writer has exhibited with equal vividness
the fatal possibilities of a collective governmental stupidity. That in
practice these possibilities are continually tending to become facts,
just as in theory they are

represented by recurrent fallacies, is a proof of the extreme
arduousness of the demands made by the task of self-government upon the
people which undertakes it. And no theorist is fitted to discuss the
problem of social unity who has not realised the arduousness of these
demands in all its intensity. And, in the second place, the student will
observe an instructive meeting of extremes between elements of Mr.
Spencer's ideas and popular social theories of an opposite cast. The
revival of doctrines of the natural rights of man on a biological
foundation is a case in point. An uncriticised individualism is always
in danger of transformation into an uncritical collectivism. The basis
of the two is in fact the same. i. A comparison of the conception of
"right" as entertained by Bentham and by Herbert Spencer forms a
striking commentary on ideas in which "government" is antagonistic to
"self." Bentham, seeing clearly that the claims of the actual
individual, taken as he happens to be, are casual and unregulated,
fulminates against the idea of natural right as representing those
claims. Right is for him a creation of the State, and there can be no
right which is not constituted by law. And the truth of the contention
seems obvious. How, in fact, could individual claims or wishes
constitute a right, except as in some way ratified by a more general
recognition? But to Mr. Herbert Spencer the contrary proposition is
absolutely convincing, and, indeed, on

their common premises, with equal reason. It is ridiculous, he points
out, to think of a people as creating rights, which it had not before,
by the process of creating a government in order to create them. It is
absurd to treat an individual as having a share of rights qua member of
the people, while in his private capacity he has no rights at all. We
need not labour this point further. It is obvious that Mr. Herbert
Spencer is simply preferring the opposite extreme, in the antithesis of
"self" and "government," to that which commended itself to Bentham. If
it is a plain fact that "a right" can only be recognised by a society,
it is no less plain that it can only be real in an individual. If
individual claims, apart from social adjustment, are arbitrary, yet
social recognitions, apart from individual qualities and relations, are
meaningless. As long as the self and the law are alien and hostile, it
is hopeless to do more than choose at random in which of the two we are
to locate the essence of right. ii. And how alien and hostile the self
and the law may seem we see even more crudely enunciated in Herbert
Spencer than in Bentham or Mill, as the fundamental principle of the
tradition has worked itself more definitely to the front. "The liberty
which a citizen enjoys is to be

measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives
under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of
the restraints it imposes on him." And so we are astounded to find it
maintained that the positive and active element in the right to carry on
self-sustaining activities is of a non-social character, depending only
on the laws of life, and if the matter were pushed home, would have to
be identified, one must suppose, with the more strictly animal element
of the mind; while only the negative element arises from social
aggregation, and it is this negative element alone which gives ethical
character to the right to live. Though these distinctions apply
primarily to the ground of the right to live, yet it appears inevitable
that they represent the point of view from which the active self or
individuality must be regarded on the principle we are pursuing. The
ground of the right to live, as here stated, is simply the recognition
that life is a good; and if the positive element of this good is
non-social and only the negative is of social origin, and this alone is
ethical, it seems clearly to follow that the making the most of
life--its positive expansion and intensification--is excluded from the
ethical aspects of individuality, and, indeed, that individuality has no
ethical aspect at all. Here is the ultimate result of accepting as
irreducible the distinction between the self and government, or the
negative relation of individuality and law. Liberty and self are
divorced from the moral end, a tendency which we noted even in Mill.
Selves in society are regarded as if they

were bees building their cells, and their ethical character becomes
comparable to the absence of encroachment by which the workers maintain
the hexagonal outline due to their equal impact on each other as they
progress evenly from equidistant centres. The self, which has ranked
throughout these views as the end, to whose liberty all is to be
sacrificed, turns out to be the non-ethical element of life. Thus, when
Professor Huxley speaks of "self-restraint as the essence of the ethical
process," while "natural liberty" consists in "the free play of
self-assertion," we see how the whole method of approaching social and
ethical phenomena is turned upside down unless the paradox of
self-government is conquered once for all. The idea that assertion and
maximisation of the self and of the individuality first become possible
and real in and through society, and that affirmation and not negation
is its main characteristic; these fundamental conceptions of genuine
social philosophy can only be reached through a destructive criticism of
the assumptions which erect that paradox into an insoluble
contradiction. 5. We may now restate the essence of the problem of
self-government as it presents itself to the thinkers whom we have been
reviewing. On the assumptions which they accept, the annihilating
criticism of self- government in the first chapter of Mill's Liberty is
indeed irresistible. He begins by pointing out that in times of
political immaturity,

the conception of political liberty consisted in setting limits to the
power which the ruler, considered as an independent force opposed in
interest to his subjects, should be suffered to exercise over the
community. But as it was found possible, in a greater and greater
degree, to make the ruling power emanate from the periodical choice of
the ruled, "some persons began to think that too much importance had
been attached to the limitation of the power itself. That, it might
seem, was a resource against rulers whose interests were habitually
opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers
should be identified with the people; that their interest and will
should be the interest and will of the nation. The nation did not need
to be protected against its own will. There was no fear of its
tyrannising over itself." Rousseau in some moods is the victim of this
fallacy, and it is widely triumphant to-day. But with the success of the
democratic principle, "elective and responsible government became
subject to the observations and criticisms which wait upon a great
existing fact. It was now observed that such phrases as
`self-government,' and `the power of the people over themselves,' do not
express the true state of the case. The `people' who exercise the power
are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and
the `self-government' spoken of is not the government of each by
himself, but of each by all the rest. The

will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most
numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those
who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority . . . and
precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse
of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government loses
none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly
accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. .
. . In political speculations, `the tyranny of the majority' is now
generally included among the evils against which society requires to be
on its guard." The paradox of self-government then, so far from being
theoretically solved by the development of political institutions to
their highest known maturity, is simply intensified by this development.
When the arbitrary and irrational powers of classes or of individuals
have been swept away, we are left face to face, it would seem, with the
coercion of some by others as a necessity in the nature of things. And,
indeed, however perfectly "self-government" has been substituted for
despotism, it is flying in the face of experience to suggest that the
average individual self, as he exists in you or me, is ipso facto
satisfied, and at home, in all the acts of the public power which is
supposed to represent him. If he were so, the paradox of self-
government would be resolved by the annihilation of one of its factors.
The self would remain but "government" would be superfluous; or else
"government" would be everything, and the self annihilated. If, on the
other hand, we understand the "self" in "self-government" to stand for
the whole sovereign group or

community, which is usually called a "self-governing," as opposed to a
subject, state, then we have before us the task of showing that this
self is a reality in any sense which justifies the acceptance of what is
done by the public power as an act of the whole community. But on the
ground where we stand in the theories reviewed in the present chapter,
no such self can be shown. Government, in fact and in principle, reveals
itself as coercion exercised by "the others" over "the one." And so long
as this is the case, and as the government is alien to the self, not
only do the rights of majorities remain without explanation, but no less
is it impossible to say on what rational ground an entire community can
apply coercion to a single recalcitrant member. We have seen that Mill
would solve the problem by a demarcation, according to which the aim and
ground of government is to protect the self from the impact of others,
and leave it in its isolated purity. Herbert Spencer, it may be noted,
has recourse to one of those hypotheses of tacit consent which would
reduce a community to the level of a joint-stock company, minus a
written instrument of association; which in the case of the State has to
be replaced by Mr. Spencer's estimate of purposes, which would probably
be accepted with unanimity if the question were asked! Bentham alone,
founding

himself on the actual nature of social life, genially overrides the
whole question of individual right, and while maintaining law to be a
necessary evil, and pouring scorn on all attempts to exhibit a positive
unity throughout the selves which compose a society, makes the promotion
of a free and happy life the sole criterion of governmental
interference. On the basis of every-day reflection, then, we are brought
to an absolute deadlock in the theory of political obligation. If, as
popular instinct maintains, and as common sense seems somehow to insist,
there is a theory and a justification of social coercion latent in the
term "self-government," we cannot find a clue to it in the reasoning of
our most recent and popular political thinkers. Nor should we find a
comprehensive theory, though we might find suggestions towards one, if
we recurred to our more philosophical teachers, such as Hobbes and
Locke, who are further from popular modes of thought. If there is
anything satisfactory in the conception of self-government, every
interpretation of it is at once condemned which does not give the
fullest force to both terms of the paradox, at the same time that it
exhibits their reconciliation. What this fullest force is, and the
antagonism which it involves, we have seen in the present chapter. We
must start from an actual self, which is capable of rebelling against
law and government; and from an actual "government," which is capable of
tyrannising over the individual self. We must not treat the self as ipso
facto annihilated by government; nor must we treat government as a pale
reflection, pliable to all the vagaries of the actual self. Nor, again,
must we divide the inseparable

content of life, and endeavour to assign part to the assertion of the
individual as belonging to self, and part to his impact on others, as
belonging to government. We must take the two factors of the working
idea of self-government in their full antagonism, and exhibit, through
and because of this, the fundamental unity at their root, and the
necessity and conditions of their coherence. We must show, in short, how
man, the actual man of flesh and blood, demands to be governed; and how
a government, which puts real force upon him, is essential, as he is
aware, to his becoming what he has it in him to be. And if we fail to
destroy the assumptions which hinder us from doing this, we shall have
to admit that the maturity of democratic institutions has only liberated
us from arbitrary despotism to subject us to necessary tyranny; and
though, in spite of such a failure, we might still acquiesce in
"counting heads to save breaking them," we should have to agree that
this may indeed be the shrewdest device of political expediency, but
that the difference between the two processes corresponds to no real
capacity of the human individual for partaking, by the exercise of will
and intelligence, in a peacefully organised and yet effectually governed
whole. We shall then, in short, be compelled to agree with Bentham and
Mill and Spencer that "self-government" and "the general will" are
meaningless phantoms, combinations of hostile factors, incapable of
being united in a real experience.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IV THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED 1.
THE reader will no doubt have observed that the theory dealt with in the
last chapter belongs to the general type of what is currently known as
Individualism. For several reasons I have preferred not to make use of
this hackneyed word. In the first place, it is very hackneyed; and the
employment of such terms takes all life and expressiveness out of
philosophy. And, in the next place, Individualism may mean many things,
and in its fullest, which is surely, for the student of philosophy, its
truest meaning, it is far too good for the theories under discussion. An
"Individual" may be "individual" or indivisible because he has so little
in him, that you cannot imagine it possible to break him up into lesser
parts; or because, however full and great his nature, it is so
thoroughly one, so vital and so true to itself, that, like a work of
art, the whole of his being cannot be separated into parts without
ceasing to be what it essentially is. In the former case the
"individual" is an "atom"; in the latter he is "a great individuality."
The sense in which we shall make

use of the notion of the individual, so far as we use it at all, will be
the latter and not the former. And, therefore, we shall as far as
possible discard the hackneyed term "Individualism," which embodies the
former meaning only. If then we are to coin an expression which will
indicate the common features of the theories outlined in the previous
chapter, we may venture upon some such phrase as "prima facie theories,"
or "theories of the first look." By this I do not mean that they stand
in the same rank with the views of the Greek thinkers, who, undisturbed
by previous speculation, saw the great facts of social experience with a
freshness and wholeness of vision with which they can never be seen
again. The "first look" of our own day is of a different kind. It is the
first look of the man in the street or of the traveller, struggling at a
railway station, to whom the compact self-containedness and
self-direction of the swarming human beings before him seems an obvious
fact, while the social logic and spiritual history which lie behind the
scene fail to impress themselves on his perceptive imagination. We see
then that these theories of the first appearance are mainly guided by
this impression of the natural separateness of the human unit. For this
reason, as we noted, the experience of self-government is to them an
enigma, with which they have to compromise in various ways. And because
their explanations of it are not true explanations but only compromises,
they rest on no principle, and dictate no consistent attitude. For
Bentham all solid right is actually in the State, though conceived by
himself as a means to

individual ends; for Mill, it is divided between the State and the
individual, by a boundary which cannot be traced and therefore cannot be
respected; for Herbert Spencer all right is in the individual, and the
State has become little more than a record office of his contracts and
consents. The assumption common to the theories in question is dictated
by their very nature. It is not precisely, as is often supposed to be
the case, that the individual is the end to which Society is a means.
Such a definition fails to assign a character which is distinctive for
any social theories whatever. For since Society is, at the lowest rate,
a plurality of individuals, whatever we say of "the individual" may be
construed as true of Society and vice versa, so long as all individuals
are understood as differing only in number from one. Thus the "means"
and the "ends" are liable to change places, as, for practical purposes,
we saw that they did in Bentham. The ethical term "altruism" illustrates
this principle. It shows that by taking "the individual" as the "end,"
nothing is determined as to the relation between each individual and
all, and it remains a matter of chance how far it is required of "each"
individual, in the name of the welfare of "the individual," to sacrifice
himself to "all." The fact is that the decisive issue is not whether we
call the "individual" or "society" the "end"; but what we take to be the
nature at once of

individuals and of society. This is the question of principle; and views
which are at one in this have nothing which can in principle keep them
apart, although they may diverge to the seemingly opposite poles of the
liberty of each and the welfare of all. We have observed this sliding
from one narrowness to its opposite, as between Bentham, Mill, and
Herbert Spencer. The root idea then, of the views which we have been
discussing, is simply that the individual or society--it makes no
difference which we take--is what it prima facie appears to be. This is
why we have called them "prima facie" theories or "theories of the first
look." It would be a long story to explain how a first look can be
possible in the eighteenth or nineteenth century A.D. But in brief, the
history of thought shows certain leaps or breaks in culture; when the
human mind seems to open its eyes afresh, or to emerge on a new
platform, from which new point of view all its adjustments have to be
re-made and its perceptions re-analysed. In these new stages a great
advance is involved; but the advance is potential, and the possible
insight has to be paid for by an initial blindness. Such an occasion it
was on which the legislator or economist or natural philosopher of the
modern world turned his gaze upon man in society. He saw him as "one of
millions enjoying the protection of the law," and society as the
millions of which he is one. Such an onlooker inevitably proceeds to
treat the social whole as composed of units A, B, C, etc., who, as they
stand, and just

as they seem to us when we rub against them in daily intercourse, are
taken to be the organs and centres of human life. From this assumption
all the rest follows. Each of us, A, B, C, and all the others, seems to
be, and to a great extent in the routine of life actually is,
self-complete, self-satisfied, and self- willed. To each of us, A, B, or
C, all the rest are "others." They are "like" him; they are
"repetitions" of him, but they are not himself. He knows that they are
something to himself; but this "something" is still "something else,"
and even in ethical reflection he is apt to call his recognition of it
"altruism"--an indefinite claim and feeling, touching his being at its
margin of contact with neighbouring circles, the centres of which are
isolated. To the individual and society thus conceived--A, B, C, and the
rest--it is plain that government can be nothing but self-protection. It
is. in fact, a form of the impact of "others," scientifically minimised,
and accepted because it is minimised. For this reason it is, as we saw
throughout, alien to the self, and incapable of being recognised as
springing from a common root with the spontaneous life which we pretend
to be aware of only within our private magic circle. Then the forcible
impact of B and C upon the circle of A is a necessary evil, a
diminution, pro tanto, of A. And the more altruistic A is, the more he
will recognise this, as affecting not himself only, but B and C also. It
is for this reason that, on the views in question, all law and
government necessarily remain formal and negative as compared with the
substantive and positive ends of the self. The maintenance of

"liberty," of the circular or hexagonal fences round A, B, C, and the
rest, is conceived as involving no determinate type of life, no relation
to the ends which the units pursue within their hexagons. If in any way
the self went beyond itself, and A recognised a positive end and nature
which peremptorily bound him to B and the others, it would be impossible
to keep this nature and end from reflecting themselves in the
determinate content of the conditions of association between them. The
assumption would be destroyed which keeps "government" alien to "self,"
and it would be possible to consider in what sense and for what reason
the nature of a spiritual animal turns against itself with the dualism
which the paradox of self-government embodies, and that in pursuit of
its true unity. 2. We will now discuss Rousseau's treatment of the
paradox of "self-government." And we discuss it, not because it is
complete or self-consistent, but rather because, while breaking through
to the root of the whole matter, it is as incomplete and as inconsistent
as are the efforts of our own minds to lay hold of any profound truth.
It displays, in fact, on the great stage of the history of philosophy,
precisely the struggle which each of us has to go through if he tries to
pierce the surface of commonplace fiction and tradition which
persistently weaves itself about social facts. On almost every page
there is relapse and vacillation. The fictions which are being cast
aside continually reassert themselves; the embodiment of the principle
which the author's genius has discerned is sought for in

expedients essentially opposite to its nature, while the instruments
which it has developed for itself are contemptuously rejected. We are
going to examine the main thesis of Rousseau's Contrat Social. The
reader who is surprised to find in our account little or nothing of the
"return to nature," "natural equality," and the "natural rights of the
individual," may refer for these to Rousseau's earlier essays on theses
propounded by the Academy of Dijon. The first of the theses (1750) ran,
"Whether the re- establishment of the sciences and the arts contributed
to purify morals"; and Rousseau's discourse, which won the prize,
following the lead of the thesis, started from the later Renaissance,
and dealt in general with the phenomena of decadence--a very real
problem. The notable feature of this brief essay is its constant
vacillation between the attack on science, art, and education as such,
and the criticism, by no means all undiscerning criticism, of their
abuses. Rousseau's head is full, not of primitive man, but of Socrates
and Cato, of Sparta and republican Rome. A writer who speaks of Newton
and Verulam as preceptors of the human race can hardly be hostile to
true intellectual achievement. It is noteworthy that his zeal for

educational reform is already apparent in this first published work. The
second essay (1754), a much longer and more serious piece, is on the
thesis, "What is the origin of Inequality among mankind, and is it
justified by natural law?" It was dedicated, with expressions of
extravagant laudation, to Rousseau's native state, the Republic of
Geneva. His enthusiasm for this community, as for the ancient
city-states, is a far truer guide to his genuine social ideas than any
of his paradoxes about the state of nature and the bondage of social
man. His genius, in fact, is very much under-rated by those who suppose
him at any time to have believed the primitive state of nature, or
earliest imaginable condition of the human race, to be capable of
furnishing an ideal of life. He is perfectly aware that a state of
nature, which is to furnish an ideal, must be selected at least from
among the higher phases of man's evolution, after morality and the
family have begun to form themselves, and language and property have
made some advance. Here, again, his vacillation is strikingly
observable, and we can see that it arises from his profound insight. The
vices of civilisation tend to force the desirable state of man down the
scale of evolution, but the value of morality and respect for human
nature tend to force it up, and Rousseau's argument embodies the
struggle. For Rousseau is far too critical and clear-sighted to ascribe
true morality or strictly human nature to a state of animal innocence,
and he knows that virtue involves potential vice; and therefore it is
with hesitation

and regret that he selects a middle state as representing his ideal,
fully aware that it has forfeited animal innocence, without having
attained human morality. Even the famous declamation against the first
founder of property in land seems to pass away in an admission that this
was an inevitable stage in the growth of human capacities, which the
author would not seriously desire to remain undeveloped. Two further
points may be noted; first, the fundamental contention that men are by
nature not equal but unequal, the evil of civilisation lying just in the
replacement of natural by political inequality. If this political
inequality were considered as modifiable, it is plain that the view
would point to an advantage in the way of equality possessed by society
over nature. Secondly, the view here taken of natural liberty in
relation to the social pact should be compared with that of the Contrat
Social. In the essay, "natural liberty" is on the whole preferred; in
the Contrat, another kind of liberty is held a truer good, although much
of the tone and language associated with the preference of natural
liberty continues by the side of the later view. It is plain that we are
dealing, not with an unconsidering fanatical enthusiasm for one or
another state of man, but with a struggling insight, which sees evil but
also good in all, and, with hesitation and reluctance, depresses the scale

first in favour of the one, and then in favour of the other condition of
human beings. 3. The famous opening words of chap. i. of the Contrat
Social (published 1762) sound like the beginning of a tirade against
civilisation and the State. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains. One thinks himself the master of others, who does not fail to be
more of a slave than they." Here we might well suppose ourselves to be
reading the preface to a demonstration that all social constraint is
slavery, and that man, in a state of nature, possessed a liberty which
he has now lost. We expect such an opening to be followed by a
denunciation of the fetters of society, and a panegyric on the
pre-social life. And there can hardly be a doubt that these sentences,
along with a few similar phrases which stick in the memory, are the
ground of the popular idea of Rousseau, shared by too many scholars. But
how does Rousseau go on? Here are the succeeding sentences. "How did
this change take place? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I
think I can tell." Here, as previously in the discourse on "Equality,"
he (1) cuts himself loose in principle from the historical fiction of a
social pact succeeding a state of nature; and (2) he promises to furnish
a justification for the change (or, striking out the quasi-historical
term "change," for the condition of man), which is expressed by the
words, "is everywhere in chains." This then is the task which he has set
himself. The sentences last cited show that his answer will,

in some degree, turn its back on his question, and that really man had
little natural freedom to lose, and is not everywhere in chains. But the
fact that the problem first struck Rousseau's mind through a feeling of
rebellion against social slavery, and a loathing for the civilisation of
his day, sets him at the very beginning of the path which social theory
has to traverse, and ensures that the difficulties which we all feel at
times will be met in their sharpest form. He knows, in short, that
something, which can look like utter bondage, is a fact; and he knows
that this fact has to be justified. After some chapters devoted to
clearing away inadequate solutions of the problem, he re-states it as
follows, in terms of that form of the supposed social contract in which
it was regarded as a compact of all with all for the constitution of a
community: "To find a form of association which shall defend and
protect, with the entire common force, the person and the goods of each
associate, and by which, each, uniting himself to all, may nevertheless
obey only himself, and remain as free as before." 4. Before proceeding
to examine the true meaning of this formula and its answer, we will
briefly notice the conflict of ideas suggested by it. Man's freedom, it
is implied, remains at the same level. Even his power is not increased;
it is only that individuals combine their forces, previously isolated.
These implications suit neither the view he starts from, nor the view he
arrives at. If man had a natural freedom, and then submitted to society,

though merely to increase his force of action, some of his freedom must
be lost, and he cannot remain as free as he was before. But if man in
society has a nature, which he could not have out of society, such that
his individuality is maximised by the organisation of a social whole,
then it is plain that he is not merely as free "as he was before," but
very much more free; free, indeed, strictly speaking, under social
conditions alone. The notion which Rousseau started from, that man has
surrendered some part of a previous freedom in order to make the most of
the remainder, appears, as here, in the language of compromise,
frequently through the Contrat Social. But it is not effectively relied
on, for Rousseau is too acute to attempt a demarcation theory, and while
he assumes, for example, according to the literal notion of a compact,
that man only surrenders as much of his liberty as is necessary to the
community, he sees that the sovereign is sole judge of this proportion
and consequently is absolute. In the same way he first deduces the
sovereign's right of inflicting capital punishment from the individual's
pre- existing right to risk his life in order to save it, in virtue of
which he has transferred to the sovereign a right to demand his life
when necessary to the public safety, which includes his own. And then,
feeling this to be a fiction, he ekes it out by the precisely contrary
suggestion that a criminal has broken the social treaty, has ceased to
be a member of the community, and is dealt with as an enemy on terms of
war. This supplementation shows that Rousseau is aware of the weakness
of his other account

of the matter, based on non-social individual right. His constant
failure, entire or partial, to free himself from the language of "first
appearance theories," as we have ventured to call them, is just what
makes him so instructive, in view of the similar inclination which
besets us all. 5. We will now examine the real nature of his solution.
For the historical fiction of a social contract, he substitutes, in
answer to the problem formulated above (see section 3, end), the
conditions which constitute a "people" or commonwealth. He speaks,
indeed, of the "act" or "contract" which constitutes it --a survival of
the language which belongs to the fiction. But it is plain, even if he
had not said so distinctly in the first chapter, that he is dealing not
with an act in historical time, but with the essential nature of a
social body. The "clauses of the contract," he explains, are dependent
on "the nature of the act"; they are implicit and universal--that is to
say, not capable of being affected by any actual or supposed agreement
in contravention of what the essence of a body politic requires. He is,
as he has clearly said in the previous chapter, analysing the "act" "by
which a people is a people," i.e. the conditions of political unity. The
"clauses of the contract" then reduce themselves to a single one, "the
total alienation of each associated member, with all his rights, (the
language is moulded by the fiction of an actual contract and pre- social
rights,) to the community as a whole." The community as a whole is
therefore absolute. The subsequent passage, referred to above, in

which he speaks as if individual rights were retained, is a case of the
vacillation on which we have remarked. The essence of this "social pact"
is further reducible to the following formula: "Each of us puts into the
common stock his person and his entire powers under the supreme
direction of the general will: and we further receive each individual as
an indivisible member of the whole." "Instantaneously, in place of the
particular person of each contracting party, this act of association
produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the
assembly has voices, which receives from this same act its unity, its
common self (son moi commun), its life, and its will. This public person
which thus forms itself, by the union of all the others, used to take
the name of city, and now takes that of republic or body politic, which
is called by its members State when it is passive, Sovereign when it is
active, Power when comparing it with others." In this passage the
formula of association, and much of the commentary upon it, imply the
"contract" to have been an event in history. Such is the bearing of the
words "act of association," "produces," "receives," "forms itself." It
is admitted that Rousseau's thoughts are always more or less struggling
with this conception, which, it must however be remembered, he
explicitly refuses to rely on; and henceforward, having sufficiently called

attention to it, we shall not encumber ourselves with observing upon it
in every instance. Putting aside then the defective terminology, and
bearing in mind that Rousseau considers himself to be analysing the
essence of that act or character "by which a people is a people," we
find in this passage very far- reaching ideas. We find that the essence
of human society consists in a common self, a life and a will, which
belong to and are exercised by the society as such, or by the
individuals in society as such; it makes no difference which expression
we choose. The reality of this common self, in the action of the
political whole, receives the name of the "general will," and we shall
examine its nature and attributes in the following chapter. The primary
point which it is necessary to make clear, however, is whether the whole
set of ideas is to be seriously pressed, or whether the unity which they
indicate is merely formal and superficial. For phrases of the kind here
employed may be found in many earlier writers. The term "person," for
example, comes through Hobbes from the Roman law. "Persona," in Roman
law, we are told, means either a complex of rights or the possessor of
those rights, whether an individual or a corporate body. "Unus homo
sustinet plures personas." Thus a man may devolve his "persona" on
another man. A corporation has a single "persona." It is in this sense
that for Hobbes, the State is a "real unity in one person," which person
has been devolved by all the individuals of a multitude upon one man or
a definite

assembly of men, whose acts therefore are, politically speaking, the
acts of the whole multitude so united in one "person." This use of the
term "person" is one of the cases alluded to in ch. I., where an
abstraction of law has preserved the seed of a philosophical idea of
unity. How far the unity thus indicated is an empty fiction, or how far
it is grasped as something vital, into which the individual mind goes
out and in which it finds what its nature demands, is what we now have
to consider further. 6. Chapters vii. and viii. of book I. of the
Contrat Social show the outcome of Rousseau's conflicting ideas in a
very few remarkable propositions. The question is whether the unity of a
body politic is an arbitrary abstraction or a fundamental force and
reality. Rousseau is discussing in chapter vii. the guarantees which
exist for a fulfilment of obligations by the sovereign (or whole) to its
members and by the members to the sovereign respectively. As regards the
obligation of the sovereign to its members, he runs straight into the
fallacy referred to in ch. I. He contends, that is to say, that the
whole is necessarily, by its constitution, that which it ought to be,
and being composed of all the individuals can have no interest opposite
to theirs as a whole, while, qua sovereign, it is debarred from any such
special action as might be hurtful to any single individual. This
presupposes that the whole always acts according to its idea as a whole,
and neither is "captured" by individual

interests nor transgresses the limits set to its action by restriction
to true public concerns. But if this were so, the State would be
perfectly wise and good; and we do not need to be told that a State, qua
wise and good, could do no injustice to its members. The whole is of
course liable to vices correlative to those which Rousseau is about to
guard against when they arise in the individual. And his view of
individual disloyalty is decisive as to the vitality of his conception
of political unity. "Indeed," he says, "each individual may, as a man,
have a particular will contrary to or unlike the general will which he
has as citizen; his particular interest may speak to him quite
differently from the common interest; his absolute and naturally
independent existence may make him regard what he owes to the common
cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would be less
injurious to others than its payment is burdensome to himself; and
considering the moral person which constitutes the State as an
abstraction (?tre de raison), because it is not a man, he would enjoy
the rights of the citizen without consenting to fulfil the duties of the
subject--an injustice the progress of which would cause the ruin of the
body politic." "In order, then, that the social pact may not be a vain
formula, it tacitly includes the covenant, which alone can confer
binding force on the others, that whoever shall refuse to obey the
general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which
means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free."

In this passage Rousseau lays bare the very heart of what some would
call political faith, and others political superstition. This lies in
the conviction that the "moral person which constitutes the state" is a
reality, as opposed to the natural idea that it is an abstraction or
fiction of the reflective mind (an "ens rationis," ?tre de raison),
because it is not an actual individual human being. The theories of the
first appearance, as we have called them, are characterised by accepting
as ultimate "the absolute and naturally independent existence" of the
physical individual, and therefore regarding government as an
encroachment on the self, and force as oppression. Whereas, if the
social person is taken as the reality, it follows, as Rousseau points
out, that force against the physical individual may become a condition
of freedom. We saw even in Mill how extreme cases bring out the
necessity for assuming a "real" will at variance with the individual's
immediate desire. There is more to be said, of course, as to the limits
within which force can be so applied.

It is worth while to cite here the whole of the short chapter viii.,
which draws out the consequences of the above conception of a social
pact and of sovereignty. "Of the Civil Condition.--This passage from the
state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable
change by replacing, in his conduct, instinct by justice, and giving to
his actions the morality which they lacked before. It is then alone
that, the voice of duty succeeding to physical impulse, and right to
appetite, man, who till then had only considered himself, sees himself
compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before
listening to his inclinations. Although he deprives himself in this
state of several advantages which he holds from nature, he gains such
great ones in their place, his faculties exercise and develop
themselves, his ideas expand, his sentiments are ennobled, his whole
soul is exalted to such a degree, that, if the abuses of his new
condition did not often degrade him below that from which he has
emerged, it would be his duty to bless without ceasing the happy instant
which tore him from it for ever, and, from a stupid and narrow animal,
made him an intelligent being and human. "Let us reduce these pros and
cons to terms easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is
his natural liberty and an unlimited right to all which attracts him and
which he can

obtain; what he gains is civil liberty and the property of what he
possesses. To avoid error in these reckonings we must carefully
distinguish natural liberty, which has no bounds but the powers of the
individual, from the civil liberty which is limited by the general will;
and possession, which is only the effect of force or the right of the
first occupant, from property, which can only be founded on a positive
title. "We might, in view of the preceding, add to the gains of the
civil state the moral freedom which alone makes man master of himself;
for the impulsion of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law
which we have prescribed to ourselves is liberty. But I have already
said too much on this head, and the philosophical sense of the word
liberty is not my subject here." Besides the terminology of the
historical fiction this curious passage shows in the strongest light the
struggle by which Rousseau passed from the position of the "Discourse on
the Origin of Inequality" to that of the "Contrat Social." The "hedging"
of the sentence, "Although he deprives himself," etc., represents a
loathing of the decadent society of his day, which was deep-seated in
Rousseau's mind, and which his life enables us thoroughly to understand.
The son of a Genevese artisan, with a touch of vagabond impulses, and
more than a touch of Wordsworthian genius, he was the first, perhaps, of
great modern writers to feel the true democratic passion, and

to see his artificial age as Plato or as Ruskin might have seen it. It
was no small feat of insight to subdue his just repugnance so far as to
estimate, in the language of the chapter before us, the use, as distinct
from the abuse, of law and society. As a feature of this conflict of
ideas, we may observe more especially the notion of original individual
right, ascribed to a condition of man in which, according to the
previous paragraph, right could not exist. The phrase is merely taken up
from previous writers, as is also the so-called "right of the first
occupant." And the antithesis with true right and property, recognised
by the social mind, in which this chapter presents them, has the effect
of a destructive analysis of these uncritical conceptions. True right,
then, begins with that social unity "by which a people is a people,"
figured by Rousseau under the image of the social compact. This unity is
one aspect of the rule of reason, the sense of duty, and the essence of
humanity. The quality of man is liberty, and we here see that this
fundamental principle which Rousseau has above laid down in an
undetermined sense, must, in the course of his reasoning, take on the
higher meaning demanded by the conceptions of this chapter. And the
import of the term "liberty" in this chapter is a measure of the
modification of ideas which has been brought about in the process of

"justifying" the "bondage" of man. The famous sentence, "Man is born
free, and everywhere he is in chains," now turns out to mean, "Man is
born in natural liberty (which, if it refers to any actual condition at
all, implies, `in animal isolation'), and by subservience to social law,
he attains the civil liberty through which alone he becomes truly man."
Of course, however, the phrase "born free" has the under current of
meaning, "is born for the truest freedom," but in order that this import
may be elicited the rhetorical antithesis, "and everywhere is in
chains," must be abandoned. The final paragraph of chapter viii. makes
it clear that Rousseau considers the civil state as an embodiment of
moral liberty, while he is rightly anxious not to seem to cut the knot
of his problem by appealing to the merely ethical or philosophical sense
of the term freedom. For this latter conception, taken by itself, is apt
to be understood as the establishment of unity in the self by the path
of renunciation. Now, the freedom of the true civil state is, on the one
hand, only a stage in the ascent towards perfect ethical freedom or
unity, for it involves rather the recognition of such freedom as the
imperative end of social law, than the actual attainment of it; and, on
the other hand, it is something broader and more substantial than
ethical freedom is apt to be conceived as implying, because of that
outgrowth of the self into an organised social content which the civil
condition involves. The distinction between the civil state and ethical
freedom is

therefore a sound one, but yet does not prevent their juxta-position in
this passage from throwing important light on Rousseau's conception of
the former. The expansion of old conceptions in Rousseau's hands, and
the direction in which his views are advancing, are well illustrated by
the paragraph before us in comparison with Locke's idea of consent. A
recent editor of the Contrat cites in illustration of the words,
"Obedience to the law which we have prescribed to ourselves is liberty,"
Locke's sentence, "The liberty of man in society is to be under no other
legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth."
But Locke is speaking, according to his theory, of the actual or tacit
consent of individuals to the establishment of a governing power; a
consent which, for him, is conditional and revocable, and therefore
fails to meet the full difficulty of self-government. Rousseau,
borrowing very likely his actual phrases from Locke, is speaking of
something quite different, viz., the recognition of a law and a will,
with which one's everyday self may be at odds, as nevertheless one's
truer and fuller self, and imperative as against the commonplace trivial
moods which constitute one's inferior existence. Thus far, then, we have
seen how the problem of self- government is transformed by a deeper
insight. (a) The negative relation of the self to other selves begins to
dissolve away before the conception of the common self; and (b) the
negative relation of the self to law and government begins to disappear
in the idea of a law which expresses

our real will, as opposed to our trivial and rebellious moods. The whole
notion of man as one among others tends to break down; and we begin to
see something in the one which actually identifies him with the others,
and at the same time tends to make him what he admits that he ought to
be. We have now to follow these ideas to their application.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER V THE CONCEPTION OF A "REAL" WILL 1. WE saw in the course of the
last chapter that for Rousseau's political theory everything turns on
the reality of the "moral person" which constitutes the State. When
active, this "moral" or "public person," or common self, is called
sovereign; and sovereignty for Rousseau consists in the exercise of the
General Will; and it is in this characteristic of political society that
he finds that justification for the use of force upon individuals which
he set out to seek. At the close of the last chapter we noted the
transformation in the problem of "self-government" which such a
conception tends to produce. In face of it, the opposition between self
and others, and between self and law or government, will have to be
interpreted altogether afresh. The present chapter will be devoted to
explaining the idea of a General Will with reference to Rousseau's
presentation of it, and the rest of the work will develop and apply it
more freely. A few words may be said upon Rousseau's relation to Hobbes
and Locke, simply to illustrate

the process by which deepening political experience awakened the ancient
meaning within abstractions which had preserved it in a latent form.
Both Hobbes and Locke use expressions, in treating of the government and
unity of a commonwealth, which closely resemble Rousseau's phrases
respecting the General Will, the moral person, and the real unity.
Hobbes, for example, insisted that sovereignty must be in a will, and
that this will must be real and must be taken as representing or
standing for the will of the community. "This is more than consent, or
concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person."
Only, interpreting "real" as implying inherence in tangible determinate
individuals, he in fact substituted the will (taking the word in its
ordinary sense) of a certain individual or certain individuals for the
will of the community or moral person as such. His temperament was
emphatically one of those described by Rousseau as treating the "moral
person" as a fiction. But so far from abandoning for that reason all
idea of actual effective unity, he replaces the fictitious or abstract
unity of the "person" by the "real unity" of an actual human being or a
determinate group of human beings, to be taken as the unity of the
Commonwealth as such. Thus, for instance, with a logic which is
irresistible on the basis which he adopts, he denies all possibility of
other representation of the people where there is already a sovereign
power. For the one and only representative of the people is for him the
sovereign, on whom the "person" of the

community is, by the very fact of his sovereignty, assumed to be
conferred. We may say then, in short, that Hobbes places the unity of
political society in a will, and that, in his sense, a real or actual
will, but emphatically not in a general will. He inherits the language
which enables him to predicate unity and personality of the state, but
in his mouth the terms have not recovered a true political meaning, and
the social right, which they are intended to account for, remains a mere
name. Locke brings to bear a truer political experience, but a far less
coherent logic. He feels that actual government is a trust, and that the
ultimate supreme power remains in the community as a whole. The
difficulty in his case is to understand how the will or interest of the
community as such obtains determinate expression. Generally, and apart
from particular causes of dissent, it is to be taken as one with the
will of the governing body to which, according to the constitution, the
work of government is given in trust. But the trust is conditional, and
theoretically revocable; the ultimate supreme power is in the community
at large, which may withdraw the trust if its conditions are violated.
Of course, no determinate means of doing this in a lawful manner is, or
can be, suggested, and therefore the will of the people is not expressed
by Locke as a real or actual will. And so the right, which was to be
displayed as social, remains

a latent right in individuals to assent or to dissent, and society is
not represented as a genuine unity. For Hobbes, then, we might venture
to say, political unity lies in a will which is actual, but not general;
while for Locke it lies in a will which is general, but not actual. If
the two are pressed to extremes, the former theory annihilates "self,"
and the latter annihilates "government." For the former there is no true
right, because the will of the state is related as mere force to the
actual individual will; for the latter there is no true right, because
the individual's will remains a mere natural claim, which is never
thoroughly transformed by social recognition and adjustment. But if it
were possible to inspire a logic as coherent as that of Hobbes, with a
political content as large as that which animates Locke, a new ground
would be won. And this is what Rousseau has attempted in his conception
of a will at once actual and general; on the one hand, an absolute and
determinate adjustment and recognition of rights; on the other hand,
embodying in its recognitions all individual claims which represent a
true individuality. Here, if such a theory were workable, we should have
a genuine account of self- government, political obligation, and social
right. It may be admitted that the theory is not workable in the form
which Rousseau gave it. As Bentham contemptuously said, his doctrine
would make all laws invalid, excepting, perhaps, those of the Republic
of San Marino. But we shall see that these difficulties arise just where
Rousseau failed to be true to his own best insight; and we shall find
indications in his writings which suggest a different conclusion.

2. What Rousseau means to indicate by his expression, "the General
Will," may seem to many persons, as he clearly saw, to have no actual
existence. It is of the nature of a principle operating among and
underneath a great variety of confusing and disguising factors, and can
only be defined by the help of an "as such" or "in so far as." It is, we
might say, the will of the whole society "as such" or the wills of all
individuals "in so far as" they aim at the common good. It is expressed
in law, "in so far as" law is what it ought to be; and sovereignty, "as
such," i.e. when truly itself because rightly acting for the common
interest, is the exercise of the General Will. In its idea, as the key
to the whole problem of self-government and freedom under law, it is
that identity between my particular will and the wills of all my
associates in the body politic which makes it possible to say that in
all social co-operation, and in submitting even to forcible constraint,
when imposed by society in the true common interest, I am obeying only
myself, and am actually attaining my freedom. It embodies indeed the
same factors as the conception of self-government, but in a shape which
is a stage nearer to reconciliation. It postulates a will which in some
sense transcends the individual whose will it is, and is directed upon
an object of wider concern. And in one way or other, we know that this
may be, and indeed always is the case, for our will is always directed
to something which we are not. We may, perhaps, approach Rousseau's
thought more successfully by starting from the idea of what is implied
in the nature of will, as a characteristic

of an intelligent being. We may then find ground for conceiving that my
will or yours, as we exercise it in the trivial routine of daily life,
does not fulfil all that it implies or suggests. It is narrow,
arbitrary, self-contradictory. It implies a "true" or "real" or
"rational" will, which would be completely, or more completely, what
ours attempts to be, and fails. Thus, it has been said that what
Rousseau really aimed at, with his conception of the General Will, was
the will "in itself," or the will as it would be if it carried out what
its nature implies and demands. We can see that some notion of this kind
floats before Rousseau's mind from the predicates which he assigns to
Sovereignty and the General Will, which are for him nearly convertible
terms. Sovereignty, for example, is inalienable and indivisible; that is
to say, it is a simple consequence of the nature of a body politic,
"that by which a people is a people." You can no more alienate or break
it into parts than you can alienate or break into parts the use of your
own judgment. To be capable of sovereignty means to be a people "as
such" or "as a whole," that is a living and choosing people. The people
may of course give general orders to subordinates to hold good till
revoked, as I may give a power of attorney for more or less specified
purposes to another man. But that is the delegation "of power, not of
will." We see the author's intention still more clearly when he
maintains that the General Will is always

right, and is indestructible. Though it is always right, as Will, yet
the people may be misled in their knowledge and judgment of details;
though it is indestructible in the human breast, yet a man may vote at
the polling booth on another issue than that which he would have before
him if he consulted the General Will. He may answer by his vote not the
question, "Is this for the public good?" but the question, "Is this for
my private good?" If so, he does not indeed extinguish the General Will
in himself, but he evades it. Or, as we might say, the man does not
altogether cease, however ignorant or interested, to possess a man's
leaning towards making the real best of himself, though his private
interest may at times so master his mind as to throw the higher or
common good into the second place. Thus, the relation of the general
will to a community is plainly apprehended by Rousseau much in the
spirit of the doctrine that man always aims at something which he takes
to be good. And so the General Will is as much implied in the life of a
society as some sort of will for good in the life of an individual. The
two, in fact, are not merely analogous but to a great extent identical.
The General Will seems to be, in the last resort, the ineradicable
impulse of an intelligent being to a good extending beyond itself, in as
far as that good takes the form of a common good. Though this impulse
may be mastered or cheated in a degree, yet, if it were extinct, human
life would have ceased. We need not enter at length upon the question
whether the good which extends beyond oneself

is adequately described as the good which is general or common to
oneself and others. It is plain that the unity of myself with others in
a common good is the same in principle as the unity of myself with
myself which I aim at in aiming at my own good. Thought and language, we
should bear in mind, unite me to myself just as they unite me to others,
and they expand my being by binding my own life into a whole no less
than by making intercourse possible between my fellow men and myself.
Just so, the good at which I aim extends beyond my trivial or momentary
self--that is to say, is universal as against myself as particular--in
ways which are not prima facie exhausted by saying that they include the
good of others. But again, just like thought and language, the good
which enables me to enter deeper into communion with myself or with the
world must always have an aspect of extending that communion to others;
and therefore, for the purposes of social philosophy, we may treat the
universal good or self as also in its nature a general or common good or
self. It is that at least, though it may be more, in accordance with the
logical relation between the rational universal, and the numerical
generality. This indestructible impulse towards the Good, which is
necessarily a common good, the substantial unity and filling of life by
the interests through which man is human, is what Rousseau plainly has
before him in his account of the General Will. But it has rightly been
observed that he did not really distinguish this conception, analogous
as it is to what Plato or Aristotle might have said

of the "divine reason which is the source of the laws and discipline of
the ideal polity," from the legal idea of the sovereign "in the sense of
some power of which it could reasonably be asked how it was established
in the part where it resides, when and by whom and in what way it is
exercised." We will point out, however, the negative and positive
indications which he furnishes as to where it is not and where it is to
be looked for. That he fails to emancipate himself from the fallacies
which he acutely indicates is a phenomenon for which the reader is, I
trust, sufficiently prepared. 3. Rousseau develops his idea of a General
Will by the contrast which he draws between the General Will and the
Will of All. The General Will aims at a common interest, and it is this
community of interest, and not the number of votes in which it may find
expression, which in truth "generalises the will." The Will of All aims
at private interest as such ("l'int?r?t priv?"), and is only a sum of
particular wills. Only, Rousseau fancies, if you let the particular
wills fight it out freely, their differences are likely to cancel each
other, and the General Will to make itself felt, like any pervading
factor through a chaos of indefinite variations. The important point in
the idea of the "Will of All" lies in its being "a sum" of
"particulars," as opposed to something common or general in its nature.
Thus, in the limiting case, you may have a unanimous vote in favour of a
certain course of action, and yet the voters may severally have been
determined by aims and considerations which

Rousseau would not admit to be capable of entering at all into a
determination of the General Will. For a private affair as such is
incapable in Rousseau's view of being made the subject of law, that is
of an act of the General Will. Such an act must be general, not only in
the number of votes (which, as we have seen, is the less important
factor), but in the nature of its subject-matter, which must be, as we
should say, a question of genuine public interest. Now, when men's minds
leave out of sight the public or truly general aspect of a question, and
are determined, each of them severally, by the expected consequences to
himself as a private individual; then, though all may practically agree
in the decision which is arrived at, yet such a decision is founded on
no view of truly public interest, but is what Rousseau calls "a sum of
particular wills." The distinction between such a sum of wills, and a
will that aims at a truly common interest or good, rests upon that
fundamental contrast between a mere aggregate and an organic unity,
which is embodied in the opposing views of society which we have been
discussing. Pushed to extremes, it might raise a difficulty for those
who are not familiar with the logical distinction between a Judgment of
Allness and a true Universal Judgment. What harm can there be, it may be
asked, in my voting according to the effect a measure will have upon my
affairs, if everyone else is allowed to vote according to the effect it
will have upon his affairs, especially as in the extreme case suggested,
the result is that we are all agreed? What can be more for the general

interest than a decision in which every particular interest is
satisfied? On the mere basis of comparative generality, as estimated by
number, there is plainly no answer to this objection. We meet here with
another instance of the difficulties which arise from working with the
notion of society as "self and others," and of the good as an altruistic
aim. For in the case supposed, the others are all satisfied as much as
myself; and so I should give weight to no higher aim by considering
their interest than by considering my own, unless I considered it on
different grounds from those which I admitted in judging of my own
advantage. But any different, higher, or deeper grounds might just as
well present themselves to me with reference to my own advantage as with
reference to theirs; and would differ from motives of private interest,
not by bringing about a more unanimous adhesion, but by belonging to a
deeper appreciation of the common good, and therefore producing a less
superficial unity of resolve. The real difference between Allness and
true Universality is that a "universal" characteristic goes more deeply
into the nature of that which it characterises than does a mark or
attribute which, like the owner's name in the books of a library, simply
happens to be attached ab extra to all the objects in question. So here,
the supposed accordant decisions of all the voters, as guided each by
his strictly private interest, are not really or completely accordant.
They happen to come together in one point which has to be settled at the
moment; but beyond that they express no oneness of life or principle;
still less can they give voice to any demand of the greater or rational

self in which the real common good resides. This is what Rousseau means
by saving that it is the community of the interest or the nature of the
object, and not the number of voices, which distinguishes the General
Will from the Will of All. It follows, therefore, that the private
interest as such, which in the case supposed determines the individual
voter, is not ultimately his true interest; and it may be said, "But if
each followed his own true interest the Will of All would be right." But
a true interest, as opposed to an apparent interest, necessarily has
just the characters which the true Universal has as against the
collection of particulars, or the General Will against the Will of All.
So that to say, "If everyone pursued his own true private interest the
Will of All would be right," is merely to say, "If everyone pursued his
true private interest he would pursue the common interest"; or, "The
Will of All, if directed to the common good, would be one with the
General Will." The reason why it is necessary to insist upon the
distinction between true and apparent interest, universal and aggregate
of particulars, General Will and Will of All, is just that a true
interest generally requires some degree of energy or effort, perhaps of
self-sacrifice; while the purely private or apparent interest, the
interest of each of us in his routine frame of mind, is that by which
many are always determined, and a whole community is only too likely to
be guided. That is why it is worth while to distinguish the Will of All
from the General Will. Let us suppose that Themistocles had been beaten
in the Athenian Assembly when he proposed that, instead of dividing the
revenue

from the silver mines among all the citizens, they should devote this
revenue annually to building a fleet--the fleet which fought at Salamis.
It is easy to see that in such a case a relatively ideal end, demanding
a certain self-denial, might appear less attractive to all the
individuals--each keeping before himself his own separate share of
profit--than the accustomed distribution of money. And if such a view
had gained the day, history would never have told, and no free Europe
would have existed to understand, by what decision the true general will
and common interest of Athens might have transcended the aggregate
private interests of all her citizens. No doubt, it may be added, a true
universal end is usually more powerful than a limited interest even in
the mere area of its operation; and we may ultimately find, in the
benefits conferred by Athens on the world, a justification of her
courage and self-denial, even by the rough and unreliable standard of
the number of individuals beneficially affected. If such a theory as
that just stated were to be literally pressed, it would lead to the
conclusion that a law which was not really for the general interest was
not binding on the subjects of a state. For, by the definition, such a
law could not be a true act of sovereignty. No political theorist,
however visionary, could accept such a conclusion as this, and Rousseau,
seeing that the decision of the recognised sovereign must be final,
attempts to show how and when it comes nearest to a true General Will.
The decisive point of his doctrine on this subject is his hostility to
representative government,

and his consequent demand of a primary assembly and a small community as
the only guarantees for the genuine expression of a will for the common
good. "The English people," according to his well-known saying, "is only
free during a general election." Further, it is a sign that the Will of
All is, on the whole, coinciding with the General Will, when unanimity
prevails in the assembly. But long discussions and the organisation of
minor "interests" and associations within the state, in short, all the
phenomena of mature political life, are signs and conditions of failure
to express the General Will, which is most likely to make itself felt
when particular wills neutralise one another in the way explained above.
Now all this makes it clear that in endeavouring to point out the signs
of the General Will, Rousseau is really enthroning the Will of All. He
aims at eliciting a direct opinion, uncontaminated by external influence
or interest, from each and every member of the citizen body. In this
aim, what is present to his mind is of course the popular idea of the
ancient City-State. But the actual working even of Athenian or of Roman
institutions was far more subtle and complex than this. And more
especially, the very core of the common good represented by the life of
a modern Nation-State is its profound and complex organisation, which
makes it greater than the conscious momentary will of any individual. By
reducing the machinery for the expression of the common good to the
isolated and unassisted judgment of the members of the whole body of
citizens, Rousseau is ensuring the

exact reverse of what he professes to aim at. He is appealing from the
organised life, institutions, and selected capacity of a nation to that
nation regarded as an aggregate of isolated individuals. And therefore,
he is enthroning as sovereign, not the national mind, but that aggregate
of private interests and ideas which he has himself described as the
Will of All. He is so far aware of this that, as we have seen, he
refuses to contemplate a great modern nation as a political whole,
because he fails to conceive how, for such a community, the General Will
can satisfactorily find expression. But in as far as he commits himself
to the view that the sovereign, constituted as he would have it,
"necessarily is what it ought to be," or "is incapable of injustice to
any of its members," so far he has forgotten the dangers of the Will of
All, and has affirmed the absolute supremacy of the popular will in the
very sense against which his conception of the Will of All is a protest.
The notion of primary assemblies and of direct participation in citizen
life has no doubt a real lesson for the political theorist; but it does
not point to reducing the whole political system of a great state to a
model which never, perhaps, thoroughly fulfilled its idea except under
very special conditions. 4. The other and more fruitful direction of
Rousseau's speculations upon the General Will is to be found in his
remarks on the function of the Legislator. We will approach them by help
of a short restatement of the problem as it now stands. It was observed
above that what Rousseau had before him in his notion of the General
Will might be described as the "Will in itself," or the Real

Will. Any such conception involves a contrast between the Real Will and
the Actual Will, which may seem to be meaningless. How can there be a
Will which is no one's Will? and how can anything be my Will which I am
not fully aware of, or which I am even averse to? This question will be
treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter. For the
present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact that often
when people do not know what they mean, they yet mean something of very
great importance; or that, as has commonly been said, "what people
demand is seldom what would satisfy them if they got it." We may recall
the instances in which even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to
infer, from the inherent nature of will, that people do not really
"will" something which they desire to do at a given moment. The example
of slavery is a striking one. A man may contract to become a slave, but
no civilised government will enforce his contract at law, and the
ultimate reason for the refusal is, as Mill in effect points out, that
man's nature is to exercise will--to have liberty--and a resolution to
divest himself of this capacity must be taken as ipso facto void, by
contradicting the very essence of humanity. Now the contradiction, which
here appears in an ultimate form, pervades the "actual" will, which we
exert from moment to moment as conscious individuals, through and
through. A comparison of our acts of will through a month or a year is

enough to show that no one object of action, as we conceive it when
acting, exhausts all that our will demands. Even the life which we wish
to live, and which on the average we do live, is never before us as a
whole in the motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a
full statement of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least
be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments; and this
cannot be done without also correcting and amending it so as to
harmonise it with what others want, which involves an application of the
same process to them. But when any considerable degree of such
correction and amendment had been gone through, our own will would
return to us in a shape in which we should not know it again, although
every detail would be a necessary inference from the whole of wishes and
resolutions which we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented
and readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole
we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction, it
would appear to us quite remote from anything which we know. Such a
process of harmonising and readjusting a mass of data to bring them into
a rational shape is what is meant by criticism. And criticism, when
applied to our actual will, shows that it is not our real will; or, in
the plainest language, that what we really want is something more and
other than at any given moment we are aware that we will, although the
wants which we are aware of lead up to it at every point. To obtain
something which approximates to a real will, then, involves a process of
criticism and

interpretation, which may be either natural or intellectual; that is to
say, it may proceed by "natural selection," through the method of trial
and error, or it may be rapidly advanced at favourable moments by the
insight of a great mind. But some forwardness in this criticism and
interpretation, bringing with it some deposit, so to speak, of objects
of volition in which the private will, so far as it is distinguished at
all, finds harmony and expansion, must be coeval with social life, and,
in short, with humanity. It is such a process of interpretation that
Rousseau ascribes to the legislator. He fathers on him the whole labour
of history and social logic in moulding the customs and institutions of
mankind. And in agreement with our general attitude to Rousseau's
historical imagination, we may take what he says of legislation and the
legislator as an expression of his views on the function of customs and
ordinances in the constitution of will. It is very remarkable,
considering the other aspects of his views, that he should have
conceived so distinctly, as the following passage shows that he did, the
immense contrast between a real will and anything which could be
presented as a whole in the momentary consciousness of human beings.
Here is his statement of the problem. "Laws are, strictly speaking, only
the conditions of civil association. The people which submits to the
laws ought to be their author. Only the associates can have the right to
regulate the conditions of the society. But how are they to regulate
them? Can

it be done by a common agreement, by a sudden inspiration? Has the body
politic an organ for pronouncing its acts of will? Who will give it the
necessary foresight to form such acts and to publish them before they
are needed? Or how is it to pronounce them at the moment when they are
required? How is a blind multitude, which often does not know what it
wills, because it rarely knows what is good for it, to execute for
itself so great and difficult an enterprise as a system of legislation?
Of itself, the people always wills the good, but it does not always see
it. The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it
is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects such as they
are, and, sometimes, such as they ought to appear to it; it must be
shown the right road which it seeks, must be protected from the
allurements of private will; places and times must be brought close to
its eyes, and the attractions of present and visible advantages
counterbalanced by the danger of remote and latent evils. Private
persons see the good which they reject; the public wills the good which
it does not see. All alike need guidance. The former must be obliged to
conform their will to their reason; the latter must be taught to know
what it wills. Then, from the public enlightenment there results the
union of understanding and of

will in the social body; and hence the precise co-operation of the parts
and the greatest power of the whole. Hence springs the necessity of a
legislator." In the following chapter Rousseau touches the essence of
laws and institutions in a few words, which only embody a contradiction
or a miracle because he is thinking of the legislator's work as a
creation accomplished at one blow. "In order that a people at its birth
should have the capacity to appreciate the sound maxims of policy and
follow the fundamental rules of political reason, it would be necessary
for the effect to become the cause; for the social spirit, which is
meant to be the work of the legislation, to preside over the legislation
itself, and for men to be, before laws are made, what they are meant to
become by their means." The legislator then, in face of this
contradiction, must have recourse to supernatural sanctions. But the
paradox precisely expresses the fact. Laws and institutions are only
possible because man is already, what they gradually make more and more
explicit; because he has a general will, that is, because the good which
he presents to himself as his own is necessarily in some degree a good
which extends beyond himself, or a common good. The criticism or
interpretation which elicits the general will or actual social spirit,
by removal of contradictions, and embodiment in permanent form, is
essentially one with the work which Rousseau ascribes to the legislator.
And his paradox is removed when we understand that the legislator is
merely one of the organs of the

social spirit itself, as it carries out its self- criticism and
self-interpretation, in part by trial and error and in part by conscious
insight and adjustment. The habits and institutions of any community
are, so to speak, the standing interpretation of all the private wills
which compose it, and it is thus possible to assign to the General Will
an actual and concrete meaning as something different at once from every
private will, and from the vote of any given assembly, and yet as
standing, on the whole, for what both the one and the other necessarily
aim at sustaining as the framework of their life. It is needless to
observe that such a representation of the Real Will is imperfect, since
every set of institutions is an incomplete embodiment of life; and any
given system of life is itself also incomplete. It is more important to
remember that, though always incomplete, just as the system of sciences
is an incomplete expression of truth, the complex of social institutions
is, as we have seen, very much more complete than the explicit ideas
which at any given instant move any individual mind in volition.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VI THE CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING
SUGGESTIONS 1. WE have now seen that the problem of Self- Government may
be regarded from a point of view other than that which presented it as a
contradiction in terms. The contradiction depended on the absolute
opposition between self and others which was embodied in the prima facie
idea of society; the result of which was that all increase of
individuality and all assertion of self were at the first view hostile
as regarded others, and liberty, the condition of individuality, became
a negative idea, prescribing as it were a maximum of empty space, to be
preserved against all trespassers, round every unit of the social whole.
We saw that notions of this kind were pushed so far as to endanger the
fundamental principle, according to which self- affirmation is the root
of morality, and it was maintained that the ethical attitude essentially
lay in the negation and limitation imposed by social life upon the
natural tendency to self-assertion. According to these ideas, the self
in society is something less than, if it could so exist, it would

be out of society, and liberty is the arrangement by which, at a
sacrifice of some of its activities, it is enabled to disport itself in
vacuo with the remainder. But if we may give weight to the suggestions
of the two previous chapters, the assumptions which we work with are
transformed. The difference of principle is that the average individual,
such as each of us takes himself to be in his ordinary trivial moods,
when he sees, or thinks he sees, nothing in life but his own private
interest and amusement,--this average individual is no longer accepted
as the real self or individuality. The centre of gravity of existence is
thrown outside him. Even his personality, his unique and personal being,
the innermost shrine of what he is and likes to be, is not admitted to
lie where a careless scrutiny, backed by theoretical prejudice, is apt
to locate it. It is not in the nooks and recesses of the sensitive self,
when the man is most withdrawn from things and persons and wrapped up in
the intimacies of his feeling, that he enjoys and asserts his individual
self to the full. This idea is a caricature of the genuine experience of
individuality. It is true that to feel your individuality is to feel
something distinctive, which gives you a hold and substance in yourself
and a definite position among others, and, it may be, against them. But
on a careful consideration, it will be found that this substance and
position are always sustained by some kind

of determinate achievement or expansion on the part of the self. It
always comes from taking hold of the world in some definite way; which,
just because it is definite and affirmative, is at once a distinct
assertion of the self, and a transition from the private self into the
great communion of reality. The simplest machine will show us that it is
the differences of the parts which enable them to make a whole. And so,
we are now suggesting, it is in the difference which contributes to the
whole that the self feels itself at home and possesses its
individuality. Following up such thoughts as these, we see that there is
a meaning in the suggestion that our real self or individuality may be
something which in one sense we are not, but which we recognise as
imperative upon us. As Rousseau has said of the social self, we say more
generally of the self or life which extends beyond our average private
existence, that it is more real than we are, and we only feel ourselves
real in proportion as we identify ourselves with it. With such
suggestions in our minds, we see the problem of liberty in a new light.
Liberty, no doubt, is as Rousseau has told us, so far agreeing with
Mill, the essential quality of human life. It is so, we understood,
because it is the condition of our being ourselves. But now that it has
occurred to us that in order to be ourselves we must be always becoming
something which we are not, or in other words, we must always recognise
that we are something more than we have become, liberty, as the
condition of our being ourselves, cannot simply be something which

we have, still less something which we have always had--a status quo to
be maintained. It must be a condition relevant to our continued struggle
to assert the control of something in us, which we recognise as
imperative upon us or as our real self, but which we only obey in a very
imperfect degree. Thus it is that we can speak, without a contradiction,
of being forced to be free. It is possible for us to acquiesce, as
rational beings, in a law and order which on the whole makes for the
possibility of asserting our true or universal selves, at the very
moment when this law and order is constraining our particular private
wills in a way which we resent, or even condemn. Such a law and order,
maintained by force, which we recognise as on the whole the instrument
of our greatest self-affirmation, is a system of rights; and our
liberty, or to use a good old expression, our liberties, may be
identified with such a system considered as the condition and guarantee
of our becoming the best that we have it in us to be, that is, of
becoming ourselves. And because such an order is the embodiment up to a
certain point of a self or system of will which we recognise as what
ought to be, as against the indolence, ignorance, or rebellion of our
casual private selves, we may rightly call it a system of self-
government or free government; a system, that is to say, in which
ourselves, in one sense, govern ourselves in another sense; not as Mill
has said, by each one of us being subject to all the "others" (taking
"others" in the same sense in which each of us is "one"),

but by all of us, as casual private units, being subject to an order
which expresses, up to a certain point, the rational self or will which,
as rational beings, we may be assumed to recognise as imperative. 2.
Before proceeding to develop the idea of liberty, we may consider for a
moment the closely analogous idea of "nature" and what is "natural."
Like the notion of "liberty," which is that of "being able to be
yourself," the notion of nature, which is that of "coming to be of
yourself, or of itself," has always, however imperfectly apprehended,
exercised immense power over the mind. It is felt that you have touch
with reality when you have found something which can grow of itself. But
again, like the notion of liberty, the notion of nature is apt to be
apprehended in a form so partial as to be practically negative, and in
this form, to be given a hostile bearing against what are, in fact,
completer phases of the same idea. That which is natural, or by nature,
in the most obvious sense--what most plainly appears to have "come of
itself"--is what comes first in time, and what comes with the least
putting together--the primitive and the simple as against the late and
the complex. And so in the theoretical inquiry after what is solid and
can be relied upon, there constantly recurs in all ages the tendency to
story-telling; to the narration of what is supposed to have come first,
as the simple

spontaneous beginning out of which the world as we know it has emerged
with greatly altered attributes. The note of story-telling is
unmistakable in this na?ve theory, whether we find it in poets who
portray the Golden Age, from Hesiod downwards, or represented as a
fallacy of social compact by Plato in the second book of the Republic,
or adopted as a juristic theory by Tacitus and the writers who relied on
the idea of a "state of nature," down to Rousseau. It may be observed at
this point that the conception of a "law of nature" made a very valuable
middle term between the conception of a purely primitive condition of
the world and the ideal of a complete society. The logical reason is
plain. The instinct of getting at something solid and permanent, which
first reveals itself by going back to the supposed original or simple,
soon attaches itself also to what is generally found to exist,
understanding generality as a mark of that tendency to come of itself
which it feels to attach to what is real and able to stand in its own
right. But generality is a clue which leads a long way; and the mind
passes from saying "Fire burns by nature,

for it burns everywhere; but law is variable" to observing that there
are features of law which have their own generality, and there thus
appears to be a "natural" element in law, which may mean the right of
the strongest, but may again amount to a tendency to come out of the
"state of nature." Just in the same way, the conception of Liberty has
always drawn from experience a certain positive tendency to progress,
and has never perhaps, even in the most fanatical theory, maintained the
full demand for isolation which its negative bearing might seem to
imply. But again, the instinct which, in looking for what has power to
grow or come of itself, lays hold of what is merely primitive or merely
general, has in all great epochs of thought been met by a deeper
insight. It is not merely what we are born as, or what the world begins
with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth
involves maturity, and the term nature in Greek and Latin, as in
English, can indicate not only what we are born as, but what we are born
for, our true, or real, or complete nature. Thus the great thinkers of
every age have been led to something like Aristotle's conception, "what
a thing is when its growth is completed, that is what we call its nature
(growth or evolution)"; and so, if we are to think of "nature" as a
whole, it will not be,

as when we speak of "natural" science, an outward world, whether of
atoms or of organisms, contrasted both with God and with Man, "for
nature in Aristotle is not the outward world of created things; it is
the creative force, the productive principle of the universe." To us,
inclined to contrast the natural at once with the human and the divine,
there is something startling in the vivid reality with which the Greek
thinkers hold the three ideas together. The creative activity of the
divine principle seems for Plato to be actually one with growth, or
nature, or evolution. It may be of interest to cite the great passage in
which Plato lays his finger on the common fallacy. "Many learned men say
that the elements and inorganic and organic world below man came by
nature and chance, but that law and justice and man's works and social
institutions and religion are merely conventional, variable, and untrue.
But we must maintain that law and religion and man's works exist by
nature, or are not lower than nature, being the products of mind
according to right reason." . . . "For they give the name of nature to
the origin of the earliest things; but if really mind is earliest of all
things, then it may rightly be said to be superlatively natural." And
so, as the universe is for the great thinkers

at once natural and divine, the same applies to human society. Not only
in Aristotle's trenchant expressions to the effect that the City State
is a natural growth, but in the whole of Plato's careful analysis of
moral and social life, we find society depicted as a living and growing
creature, in which man's nature expands itself from more to more, having
its own essence progressively communicated to it. And so we find that
the peculiar naturalness of the primitive and the simple is only an
illusion, caused by the greater difficulty of recognising the larger
individuality which comes both of and to itself in the later and more
complex phases of life. But whatever it was that was real and that came
of itself in the primitive and simple is there to a greater degree--with
more reality and as the same self, only more complete-- in the later and
complex. The idea of a diminution of being as we pass from the simpler
to the more developed self is a fallacy of non-recognition. Rousseau, as
we saw, maintains in words the traditional opposition between the
natural and the civil or moral condition of man. From the tendency of
his views, however, we might have expected that in his philosophy the
wheel would come full circle, and the term "nature" would revert to its
Greek meaning. But this is not the case, though in ?mile there is a
compromise which points in some such direction. Yet a remarkable passage
from Burlamaqui, a Genevese jurist, the earlier contemporary of
Rousseau, shows the reversion to the Greek view of social nature
completed in principle. "La libert? civile l'emporte de

beaucoup sur la libert? naturelle, et, par cons?quent, l'?tat civil qui
l'a produit est de tous les ?tats de l'homme le plus parfait, et, ?
parler exactement, le v?ritable ?tat naturel de l'homme. L'?tablissement
d'un gouvernement et d'une puissance souveraine, ramenant les hommes ?
l'observation des lois naturelles, et par cons?quent dans la route de
bonheur, les fait rentrer dans leur ?tat naturel, duquel ils ?taient
sortis par le mauvais usage qu'ils faisaient de leur libert?." Upon this
reversion to ancient usage there followed the movement of the age of
romantic genius and of organic science, and with Goethe's Erdgeist and
Wordsworth's religion of Nature the restriction of the natural to the
primitive and simple was destroyed. Nature still remains a point of view
under which we regard what relatively speaking "comes of itself," but it
has ceased to exist as a question-begging predicate, attached to
pre-social or extra-social conditions of man. 3. Liberty, as understood
by the writers who were discussed in ch. iii. of the present work, is
related to the State much as Nature, in the mouth of story-telling
theory, is related to civilised society. We saw that Seeley in his
Introduction to Political Science lays it down that "perfect liberty is
equivalent to total absence of government." And this no doubt fairly
represents our first notion of the matter, when cleared of the
limitations imposed upon it by practical life, which

limitations--really a first hint of the truth--we are apt to mistake for
mere sophistications and imperfections. We noted in Rousseau the
surviving contrast between natural liberty on the one hand and civil or
moral liberty on the other, and we observed that the expanding idea of
what was natural could not be prevented from covering the ground of the
civil or moral life. The thread of connection, or rather the ferment of
expansion, we found to be, in the case of nature, the idea of
self-origination. That was natural which came of itself. (a) In the
simple ideal of liberty, as equivalent to the absence of all
government--for we must not forget that it is an ideal, obtained by
neglecting the facts of life which run counter to it--there is clearly
embodied a claim which commands our respect. The claim is so
self-evident and so convincing to average human feeling --Mr. Spencer
would indeed say, with some truth, to animal feeling in general--that
its precise nature is seldom stated in distinct language. We have
assumed above that the root of it lies in the claim to be ourselves. But
it is safer to take it in the shape which it actually has for the
average consciousness, and this is the negative shape, as a claim to be
free from constraint. If we ask, "What is constraint?" the answer is
founded on the current distinction between myself and others as
different minds attached to different bodies. It is constraint when my
mind is interfered with in its control of my body either by actual or by
threatening physical

violence under the direction of another mind. A permanent and settled
condition of such constraint, by which I become in effect the instrument
of another mind, is slavery. And it will not lead us far wrong if we
assume that the value put upon liberty and its erection into something
like an ideal comes from the contrast with slavery. The ideal of
positive political freedom presupposes more complex experiences. But
Homer already knows that "Zeus deprives a man of half his manhood when
he becomes a slave." This, then, we may take as the practical starting
point in the notion of freedom. It is what, with reference to a formed
society, we may call a status; the position of a freeman as opposed to a
slave; that is, of one who, whatever oppression he may meet with de
facto from time to time, or whatever specified services he may be bound
to render, normally regards himself and is regarded by others as, on the
whole, at his own disposal, and not the mere instrument of another mind.
Thus the juristic meaning of the term liberty, based on the normal
distinction between one self-determining person and another, we may set
down as its literal meaning, and so far the English writers, of whom
Seeley is the latest type, are on solid ground when they define liberty
as the absence of restraint, or perfect liberty as the absence of all
government (in the sense of habitual constraint by others). (b) It is
obvious that the above definition would be wholly inadequate to the
simplest facts respecting the demands which have through all history
been asserted and achieved under the name of political

liberty. A man may be a long way more than a slave and yet a long way
less than a citizen. If, as Seeley says, the English writer of the
verses, "Ah, Freedom is a noble thing," only meant by Freedom, being out
of prison, it is certain that he meant much less than the Greek
historian who two thousand years before used almost the same words. "The
right of equal speech," he wrote, "demonstrates itself in every way as a
noble thing." By this, as his words and their occasion make plain, he
meant a certain determinate security for the positive exercise of
activities affecting the welfare of the social whole, and some such
security is always understood to be involved in the notion of political
liberty. But we will content ourselves at this point with noting the
distinction and connection between the negative or juristic, and the
varyingly positive or political conception of liberty. For the latter
is, in its degree, a case of that fuller freedom which we are about to
trace to its embodiment in the state; and the phenomena of political
liberty are covered, of course, by the point of view which we shall take
in indicating the state as the main organ and condition of the fuller
liberty. (c) The connection, we said, between juristic and political
liberty should be observed at this point. It is merely an example of
what we shall find throughout, that the apparently negative has its
roots and its meaning in the positive, and, in proportion as its true
nature becomes evident, its positive aspects become explicit. There is
no true security for juristic liberty apart from political

liberty; and it has constantly been the infraction of juristic liberty
that has been the origin of the demand for a share in highly positive
political duties and functions. Mere protection for person and property
may seem an easy thing to define and maintain with just a little
goodwill; but the questions when, how, and in what sense it is to be
maintained involve the positive character of the political system, and
there is no ultimate security unless that system is moulded by the whole
compass of individuality which society contains. (d) Recurring then to
the literal or elementary sense of liberty, as the absence of constraint
exercised by one upon others, we may admit that, in going beyond it, we
are more or less making use of a metaphor. We are passing from the idea
of non-constraint pure and simple to the idea of more or less moulding
and selection within the powers and activities of the self. It is true,
indeed, and must be maintained as a fundamental principle, that the
"higher" liberty is also in fact the "larger" liberty, presenting the
greater area to activity and the more extensive choice to
self-determination. But this larger development remains within a
positive general character, and if more alternatives are open, there are
also, by that very fact, more which are closed. We cannot wholly exhaust
the new meaning of liberty as applied to the law-abiding and moral life
of a

conscientious citizen even by changing the negative into the positive,
and saying that, whereas mere juristic freedom was only freedom from
constraint, political freedom means freedom to act. The higher sense of
liberty, like the lower, involves freedom from some things as well as
freedom to others. And that which we are freed from is, in this case,
not the constraint of those whom we commonly regard as others, but the
constraint of what we commonly regard as a part of ourself. Here is the
reason for saying that, when we speak of liberty in the higher sense, we
must be admitted to be speaking metaphorically. In the straightforward
sense of the word, we saw, I am free when I am not made the instrument
of another person's will through physical violence or the threat of it.
The subtle questions which may arise with regard to due or undue degrees
of influence, by which I may become the instrument of another's mind,
with more or less willingness on the part of my own, are here
disregarded. I am assumed to be acting freely so long as I follow the
inclination of my mind, apart from any painful conflict forced upon it
by the prospect of physical interference with its belongings. But from
the earliest ages of ethical reflection, a further sense has been
ascribed to the term liberty. It has been pointed out by moralists and
philosophers-- first, perhaps, by Socrates and Plato--that the condition
of man as to being himself is fundamentally affected not only by the
power to do what he likes without constraint, but by the nature of that
which he likes to do. The human

mind, it is explained, is never wholly at one with itself, and the
common phrases "self-mastery" or "self-control" are adduced by way of
presenting what we spoke of above as the ethical paradox of
self-government. The mind, then, is treated by a metaphor as if it were
two or more persons; and the term liberty, which applies prima facie to
the non-constraint of one person by another, is applied to the
non-constraint of something within an individual mind by something else
within it. Now, apart from further scrutiny, it does not appear why the
term liberty, when thus applied, should mean anything of ethical value.
As Plato observed, in a passage from which the current use of all these
phrases is probably derived, it seems absurd at first sight to speak of
self-control as a distinctive predicate of certain states of mind. For
surely, within the mind, that which is controlled must be of the nature
of self no less than that which controls it, so that, in saying that I
have self-control, I am saying that I am self-indulgent; in saying that
my mind is free, I am at the same time saying that it is a slave. Within
certain limits this paradox represents a truth, and the ethical rank of
the elements which coerce and are coerced may be quite oppositely
estimated. We may think fit to call ourselves free either when love
conquers reason or when reason triumphs over love. Still, as Plato
proceeds to point out, the general adoption of the metaphor, the fact
that we think and call ourselves "free" or "self- controlled" or "fully
ourselves" in some cases and not in others; and that we do not in each of

these cases regard the opposite attribution "slave," "self- indulgent,"
"not ourselves" as equally true with the former, indicates that some
substantial fact is forcing itself upon us through the metaphor in
question. It is the same problem as that which Professor James has
wittily stated when he points out that "the sluggard, the drunkard, the
coward never talk of their conduct in that way (i.e. as `conquering'
their impulses and temptations) or say they resist their energy,
overcome their sobriety, conquer their courage, and so forth." It is
most important, we may venture to observe in passing, not to understand
the substantive fact, or Plato's presentation of it, as if it lay in an
alternative between two psychological factors, say intelligence and
desire, the one of which was to be preferred and the other to be
repudiated, through some quasi-ethical conception of rank, such as the
supposed affinity of the one factor with divine or of the other with
animal life. We are speaking of the sense in which it can be asserted
that the human self is, comparatively speaking, free in one kind of life
and unfree in another, both being assumed to be chosen, in the absence
of constraint by an external will. It is plain that the only ground on
which such an assertion can really be sustained is that the one life
more than the other gives effect to the self as a whole, or removes its
contradictions and so makes it most fully what it is able to be, or
what, by the implied nature of each and all of its wants, it may be said
really to want to be. The claims of intelligence and desire in their
various phases must be

criticised according to this principle, and not advocated upon
presuppositions drawn from external comparisons. But our question at the
present moment is not as to the deeper nature of that which we call the
self par excellence, but as to the bearing of the metaphor by which the
assertion of such a self is identified with liberty or absence of
constraint. And the point is plainly this; that in the conflict between
that which stands for the self par excellence and that which, at any
time, stands opposed to it, we have the clear experience that we are
capable of being determined by a will within our minds which
nevertheless we repudiate and disown, and therefore we feel ourselves to
be like a slave as compared with a freeman if we yield, but like a
freeman compared with a slave if we conquer. We may be determined by
something which not only is not ourself-- for in the greatest moments of
life, when our being touches its maximum, we, in a sense, feel an
impulse which is not ourself--but it is not ourself as something which
has got hold of us by force, and operates upon us by conflict and
violence, without having the kind of power needed to carry us away and
sweep our whole self harmoniously into its current. That we can be
determined by a will in us which neither is ourself nor represents it at
a higher level, and which we loathe and disown, is the experience on
which the metaphor of freedom and slavery is

based. when applied to the life of man considered apart from external
constraint. (e) The metaphorical application of the term Liberty to a
state of the individual mind has both its danger and its justification.
The state of mind in question, we repeat, is that in which the impulse
towards self- satisfaction sets itself upon an object which represents
the nature of the self as a whole, as free from contradiction or as at
its maximum of being, and triumphs over the alien and partial will, the
tendency to narrower tracks of indulgence, when entangled in which it
feels itself oppressed and constrained by a foreign influence. When the
mind does what, as a whole, it wills, as Plato implies, it feels free.
When it cannot be said to will anything as a whole, but is distracted
among aims which cannot satisfy it, then there is no sense in which it
can be said to do what it wills, and it feels itself under constraint
and a slave. The metaphor has this danger. The contrast between whole
and part is too readily transformed, in popular theory, into the
contrast between an empty generality and everything in particular. The
claim to be free then involves the separation between mind as a general
faculty of volition, and every particular object. Mind is then said to
be free as an undetermined faculty, but as filled and

moulded by any object or idea, (the passive participles "filled" and
"moulded" imply a relation which is not real, but, as assumed, is the
ground of the fallacy in question) it has lost its freedom and become a
slave. But if we retain the conception that mind has reality only as a
whole of determinate character, self-determined through its power of
being a self, but not through any power of creating particulars out of
nothing, we shall avoid this caricature of the higher freedom. But it is
far more important to note the justification of the metaphor. We saw
that, from Homer downwards, the conviction has been ineradicable that
liberty is the true nature of man. And we now observe that the metaphor,
through which the deepest sense of this quality has expressed itself,
depends upon the same principle as the literal usage from which it is
drawn. In the case of Liberty, conceived as a condition of the mind,
just as in the case of Liberty, conceived as the absence of physical
menace or coercion on the part of other persons, the root of the matter
is the claim to be determined only by ourself. But, in the literal case,
what we mean by ourself is the given self, the group of will and wishes,
of feelings and ideas, associated from time to time with my particular
body; in short, the actual uncriticised "mind," as we experience it all
day and every day. In the metaphorical case, we have made so much
progress in self-criticism as to know at least that our "self" is
something of a problem. We know that the given self, the mind from day
to day, is not satisfactory; and

we throw the centre of gravity outside it, and place the true self in
something which we rather want to be than actually are; although, at the
same time, it is clear that to some extent we are this something or we
should not want to be it. We realise, indeed, that to be ourselves is a
principle at once of distinction or position among others, and of
thorough transition into and unity with the life which is at the root of
theirs. And it is for this reason that we feel so confident, in
proportion as we at all lay hold upon a life which can thus distinguish
and identify us, that we have here the grasp of what is in its nature
our true self. Here then, as in the literal case of liberty from
personal constraint, we are putting in act the principle of "being
determined only by ourself." And thus Liberty as understood by
"theorists of the first look," or by those who in all ages have resisted
arbitrary tyranny, belongs after all to the same principle with the
civil or moral liberty of the philosopher. The claim to obey only
yourself is a claim essential to humanity; and the further significance
of it rests upon what you mean by "yourself." Now if it is true that
resistance to arbitrary aggression is a condition of obeying only
ourselves, it is more deeply true, when man is in any degree civilised,
that, in order to obey yourself as you want to be, you must obey
something very different from yourself as you are. And it has been well
pointed out that the consciousness of civilised peoples is deeply alive
to this significance of liberty, so that any work of self-improvement
may be most effectively

presented to a popular audience as an effort to attain freedom by
breaking the bondage of drink, for example, or of ignorance, or of
pauperism. In spite of the objection that Freedom as thus represented is
a mere metaphor, "the feeling of oppression, which always goes with the
consciousness of unfulfilled possibilities, will always give meaning to
the representation of the effort after any kind of self- improvement as
a demand for `freedom.'" We have followed the usual course of English
thought, and the example of a writer whose caution equalled his
enthusiasm, in admitting that the lower sense of the term Liberty is the
literal sense, and that the deeper meaning may be treated as
metaphorical. It is worth while to observe that the justice of this way
of looking at the matter is very doubtful. It is because we know,
however indefinitely, that our self has a reach beyond its daily needs,
that arbitrary oppression becomes a thing to be resisted at the price of
life itself. Herbert Spencer draws attention to the struggles of an
animal which we try to confine, as a proof of the innate feeling of
liberty. But the domesticated animal is the highest animal, or at any
rate not the lowest; while the man domesticated on similar terms is what
we call a slave, because he has sold his liberty for his life. It is
therefore in truth the sense of the higher liberty-- the greatness and
unity of life--that has communicated uncontrollable force to the claim
for the lower; and if the fuller meaning is the reality and the lesser
the symbol, it would be nearer the truth to say that the reality is the
liberty of

a moral being whose will finds adequate expression in its life, of which
liberty the absence of external constraint is only an elementary type or
symbol. The claim of the dictionary- maker that the earliest or the
average meaning is also the truest or the "proper" meaning of words has
no foundation. 4. Liberty, then, throughout, is the being ourselves, and
the fullest condition of liberty is that in which we are ourselves most
completely. The ideal thus implied may be further explained by help of
the philosophical expression, "The free will is the will that wills
itself." We have already seen, by implication, the meaning of this. If
we are asked, "But does not our will always will itself?" we have the
answer ready, that in one sense it does, but in another it does not. We
always want what we will, but what we will is not always what would
satisfy our want. A will that willed itself would be a will that in
willing had before it an object that would satisfy its whole want, and
nothing but its want. Its desires would not be narrow and partial
desires, in the fulfilment of which a man feels choked and oppressed
like one lost in a blind alley which grows narrower and narrower. They
would not be artificial desires stimulated and elaborated into a tyranny
of the machinery of life by the self which gropes for more and cannot
find the "more" which it needs. That is to say, the volitions of the
self would have undergone a process just such as is undergone by a
casual sensuous observation as it passes into a great scientific theory.
As the observation stands it is inadequate to itself; for it poses as a
truth, and is manifestly a false

connection. So it is supplemented on the one hand and purged away on the
other; conditions and qualifications are inserted into it to harmonise
it with other knowledge, until it makes some approach to being an
expression of experience fit to occupy a permanent place in man's
conception of the world. This, the adjustment of a partial element to
unity with the whole, is the essence of criticism. And it is just such
another process by which the experience of life fills up and purifies
the objects presented to the casual volition. That is to say, the nature
of the process may be represented by considering it as having an effect
of this kind on an unharmonised will; and relatively at any given moment
such a process is in some degree going on. But we must bear in mind that
we are not to think of the sensuous individual as totally prior in time
to the social consciousness, and as a pre-existing matter, upon which
such an effect is to be thought of as super- induced. That would be
precisely the fallacy with which Rousseau struggles so hard, and the
escape from which we are attempting to illustrate; none the worse,
perhaps, if our own language betrays how very difficult it is to throw
it off altogether. We really know the sensuous individual as such, the
will in its impure and uncriticised form, only in our experience,
constant as that is, of failure, error, and forgetfulness, in adhering
to the rational life, which, on the whole, is inherent in the very
nature of our rational being, and which we only desert in the same way
and to the same extent as we make mistakes in intellectual matters. We
go wrong by narrowness and confusion, by erroneous abstractions out of
the whole, in a way only possible

for a social and intellectual being, and not prior to our entire social
and intellectual character. Understanding then that we are dealing with
narrowness and confusion and their opposites within a social
intelligence already existing and predominant on the whole, we may note
the sort of relation in which the more adequate will is analogous to the
more adequate piece of knowledge. Take, as we said above, the actual
casual will of any individual at any given moment, especially if it is
of a nature which, within the context of civilised life, we commonly
pronounce to be wrong. Let it be, for example, an impulse of sensual
passion. It is a commonplace that in such impulses the self can find no
abiding satisfaction. They pass and leave him empty. They bring with
them no opening out of fresh possibilities, no greater stability to the
mind. Yet they have their meaning, and belong to human nature. They
imply a need for union, and an attraction outside the immediate self. If
we compare them with the objects and affections of a happy and devoted
family, we see the difference between a less adequate and a more
adequate will. The impulse, in passing into family affection, has become
both less and more. It is both disciplined and expanded. The object
presented to the will is transformed in character. Lawlessness is
excluded; but, in place of a passing pleasure, a whole world of
affections and interests, extending beyond the individual life, is
offered as a purpose and a stimulus to the self. In short--for it is
idle to expatiate upon what everybody recognises at once--you can make a
life out of the one, and you cannot out of the other. In the family at
its best the will has an

object which is real and stable, and which corresponds to a great part
of its own possibilities and capacities. In willing this object, it is,
relatively speaking, willing itself. We might compare in the same way
the mere will to earn our daily bread, with the horizon of a great
intellectual profession; or the routine of an industry or profession
vacantly and formally pursued with the very same routine conscientiously
followed in a spirit of enlightenment. In every case we are led up to
the contrast of the actual indolent or selfish will, and the will, in as
far as it comes to be what its nature implies, namely, that which we
have spoken of as the real or rational will, embodied in objects which
have power to make a life worth living for the self that wills them.
Now, our nature as rational beings implies the imperative claim upon us
of a will which is thus real or rational. Recognised or unrecognised, it
is rooted in our own wills, as the claim to be true is rooted in our
assertions. Any system of institutions which represents to us, on the
whole, the conditions essential to affirming such a will, in objects of
action such as to constitute a tolerably complete life, has an
imperative claim upon our loyalty and obedience as the embodiment of our
liberty. The only question that can arise is whether the system is that
which it pretends to be. But even if rebellion is a duty, it can only be
so because the imperative obligation, as we recognise it, is
irreconcilable with the particular system which claims our obedience in
its name. The imperative claim of the will that wills itself is our own
inmost nature, and we cannot throw it off. This is the ultimate root of
political obligation. 5. It is such a "real" or rational will that

thinkers after Rousseau have identified with the State. In this theory
they are following the principles of Plato and Aristotle, no less than
the indications which Rousseau furnished by his theory of the general
will in connection with the work of the legislator. The State, when thus
regarded, is to the general life of the individual much as we saw the
family to be with regard to certain of his impulses. The idea is that in
it, or by its help, we find at once discipline and expansion, the
transfiguration of partial impulses, and something to do and to care
for, such as the nature of a human self demands. If, that is to say, you
start with a human being as he is in fact, and try to devise what will
furnish him with an outlet and a stable purpose capable of doing justice
to his capacities--a satisfying object of life--you will be driven on by
the necessity of the facts at least as far as the State, and perhaps
further. Two points may be insisted on to make this conception less
paradoxical to the English mind. (a) The State, as thus conceived, is
not merely the political fabric. The term State accents indeed the
political aspect of the whole, and is opposed to the notion of an
anarchical society. But it includes the entire hierarchy of institutions
by which life is determined, from the family to the trade, and from the
trade to the Church and the University. It includes all of them, not as
the mere collection of the growths of the country, but as the structure
which gives life and meaning to the political whole, while receiving
from it mutual adjustment, and therefore expansion and a more liberal
air. The State, it might be said, is thus conceived as the operative
criticism of all

institutions--the modification and adjustment by which they are capable
of playing a rational part in the object of human will. And criticism,
in this sense, is the life of institutions. As exclusive objects, they
are a prey to stagnation and disease--think of the temper which lives
solely for the family or solely for the Church; it is only as taken up
into the movement and circulation of the State that they are living
spiritual beings. It follows that the State, in this sense, is, above
all things, not a number of persons, but a working conception of life.
It is, as Plato has taught us, the conception by the guidance of which
every living member of the commonwealth is enabled to perform his
function. If we ask whether this means that a complete conception of the
aims and possibilities of the common life exists even in the minds of
statesmen, not to speak of ordinary citizens, the question answers
itself in the negative. And yet the State can only live and work in as
far as such a conception, in however fragmentary, one-sided shapes,
pervades the general mind. It is not there mostly in reflective shape;
and in so far as it is in reflective shape it is according to ultimate
standards contradictory and incomplete. But everyone who has a fair
judgment of what his own place demands from him, has, at his own angle,
so to speak, a working insight into the end of the State; and, of
course, practical contradictions would be fewer if such conceptions were
completer and more covered by each other. But a complete reflective
conception of the end of the State, comprehensive and free from
contradiction, would mean a complete idea of the realisation of all human

capacity, without waste or failure. Such a conception is impossible
owing to the gradual character of the process by which the end of life,
the nature of the good, is determined for man. The Real Will, as
represented by the State, is only a partial embodiment of it. (b) The
State, as the operative criticism of all institutions, is necessarily
force; and in the last resort, it is the only recognised and justified
force. It seems important to observe that force is inherent in the
State, and no true ideal points in the direction of destroying it. For
the force of the State proceeds essentially from its character of being
our own mind extended, so to speak, beyond our immediate consciousness.
Not only is the conduct of life as a whole beyond the powers of the
average individual at his average level, but it is beyond the powers of
all the average individuals in a society taken together at their average
level. We make a great mistake in thinking of the force exercised by the
State as limited to the restraint of disorderly persons by the police
and the punishment of intentional law-breakers. The State is the
fly-wheel of our life. Its system is constantly reminding us of duties,
from sanitation to the incidents of trusteeship, which we have not the
least desire to neglect, but which we are either too ignorant or too
indolent to carry out apart from instruction and authoritative
suggestion. We profit at every turn by institutions, rules, traditions,
researches, made by minds at their best, which, through State action,
are now in a form to operate as extensions of our own minds. It is not
merely the contrast

between the limited activity of one individual and the greater
achievement of millions put together. It is the contrast between
individuals working in the order and armed with the laws, customs,
writings, and institutions devised by ages, and the same individuals
considered as their daily average selves, with a varying but always
limited range of immediate consciousness. For at any given moment, no
judge knows all the law; no author knows all his own books, not to
mention those of others; no official of an institution has the whole
logic and meaning of the institution before his mind. All individuals
are continually reinforced and carried on, beyond their average
immediate consciousness, by the knowledge, resources, and energy which
surround them in the social order, with its inheritance, of which the
order itself is the greatest part. And the return of this greater self,
forming a system adjusted to unity, upon their isolated minds, as an
expansion and stimulus to them, necessarily takes the shape of force, in
as far as their minds are inert. And this must always be the case, not
merely so long as wills are straightforwardly rebellious against the
common good, but so long as the knowledge and energy of the average mind
are unequal to dealing, on its own initiative and out of its own
resources, with all possible conjunctions in which necessary conditions
of the common good are to be maintained. In other words, there must be
inertia to overcome, as long as the limitations of our animal nature
exist at all. The State is, as

Plato told us, the individual mind writ large, or, as we have said, our
mind reinforced by capacities which are of its own nature, but which
supplement its defects. And this being so, the less complete must
clearly submit to find itself in the more complete, and be carried along
with it so far as the latter is able to advance. It is very important to
note, however, that our mind at its best is very different from our mind
at its average; and it has understood and approved, when at its best, a
great deal which in its average moments comes upon it as force or custom
from the outside. Thus, there is no abrupt division between our
conscious mind and the social system of suggestion, custom, and force,
which supports and extends and amends it. The two are related much as
the focus of consciousness is related to the sub- conscious and
automatic habits by which daily life is rendered possible. It is no more
conceivable that social life should go on without force and
authoritative custom, because the end of social life is reflected in the
varying intelligence of individuals, than that individual life should go
on without sub-consciousness and automatism, because it is ultimately
relative to the ends which appear as ideas in the shifting focus of the
mind. The inherent limitations of State action will be dealt with in a
later chapter. We have thus far been attempting to make clear what is
meant by the identification of the State with the Real Will of the
Individual in which he wills his own nature as a rational being; in
which identification we find the only true account of political
obligation. --------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VII PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDEA OF A REAL OR GENERAL
WILL 1. THE object of the present chapter is to assist the reader in
bringing together the conception of the State or the Community on the
one hand, and that of an actual personal will, existing in an individual
mind, on the other. We have seen that Self-Government can only be
explained if the centre of gravity of the self is thrown outside what we
are continually tempted to reckon as our individuality, and if we
recognise as our real being, and therefore as imperative upon us, a self
and a good which are but slightly represented in our explicit
consciousness, at its ordinary level. We have seen that all sound theory
and all good practice are founded on the insight or on the faith that
the common self or moral person of society is more real than the
apparent individual; and we have followed Rousseau's clue in criticising
as defective and contradictory the actual will of

given persons, and in looking for its interpretation and completion in
law and institutions as the embodiment of the social spirit. But Society
and the State present themselves at first sight as indefinite multitudes
of persons. Institutions are many-sided facts; and an unreflective
citizen could hardly say of what he takes them to be composed. And
though law and custom approach more nearly to what we commonly
understand by a "will," yet they again are apt to be regarded as a sort
of dead external weight with which the living volition of the ordinary
man has little or nothing to do. Our purpose, therefore, is to explain
what is meant by saying that "a will" can be embodied in the State, in
society, in law and institutions; and how it is possible for the
individual, as we know him, to be in an identity with this will, such as
continually to vary, but never wholly to disappear. How can a man's real
self lie in a great degree outside his normal self, and be something
which he only now and then gets hold of distinctly, and never
completely? 2. We will begin (1) by pointing out the analogy between the
groups or systems of which our intelligence is composed, and the groups
or systems which make up the fabric of society, and we will then go on
(2) to exhibit them as up to a certain point aspects of the same fact.
(1) We may note two degrees of connection between the members of a
whole, which we may call "Association" and "Organisation." (i.) When two
individuals are so connected that where you find the one you expect to
find the

other, they may be called associates. And any kind of habitual grouping,
from a gang of thieves to a scientific or philanthropic institution, may
be called an Association. Owing probably to the verbal force which it
borrows from the verb "to associate," the term "association" implies the
intentional coming together of units which have been separate, and which
may become separate again. The word "Society," on the other hand, has
not this verbal force, and although an "association" may call itself "a
society," yet "Society" as such is not spoken of as an "Association."
When we speak of "Society" we do not emphasise the aspect of being put
together out of elements which exist apart, and therefore we habitually
apply the word to that natural grouping, which, at any rate, we do not
normally think of as purposely put together and liable to be dissolved
again. When the State is treated as an Association, a definite theory of
its nature is implied, such as is involved in Herbert Spencer's
comparison between it and a joint stock company. Now this same term
"Association" is the most familiar expression for a connection between
elements of mind, analogous to that between persons who are called
associates. If two elements of mind are so connected that, where we find
the one we expect to find the other, they are said to be "associated."
If the engine's whistle makes me think the train is going to start, then
it would be said that the idea "train starting" is associated in my mind
with the idea "engine whistling." They have before entered into the same
mental group or whole, and so, where we find the one,

we expect to find the other, just as, where my friend X is, his comrade
Y is probably not far off. We may here note the analogy between these
two modes of association--that of persons and that of mental elements.
In both cases, according to the plain man's view of the matter, we are
dealing with wholly casual conjunctions of units naturally independent.
The associates in either case need no better reason for now being
together than that they had been together before. Their connection
expresses nothing intimate or essential in their natures, and, if they
fall apart again, they will not be seriously affected by the separation.
Now, of course, this idea of mere conjunction is not strictly true even
of the connections between the most casual associates. Every
association, whether of comrades or of ideas, is a connection qualities,
and therefore a general connection between the natures of the related
terms. People are not really companions for no reason at all; and ideas
are not really units or atoms which stick together by mere
juxtaposition, so that when one is pulled up out of the Hades of
oblivion it drags the other with it. Both the association of companions
and the association of ideas are tendencies in which some general
connection of qualities is at work, and expresses itself through the
detail of the actual surroundings, so far as an opening is left to it.
When the association is made explicit by both members being present
together, there is an outlet or utterance of the nature of the
associates which there is not when they are separated.

But though all this is true, and can be detected in cases of association
by careful analysis, it is, relatively speaking, the fact that
commonplace association depends upon qualities which are so superficial
that they may set up a tendency to connection between any units which
are members of the same world. And, therefore, as compared with any more
thorough-going kind of connection, such association may be set down as
casual, and as determined by the mere chance of juxtaposition. (ii.) Let
us compare the kind of connection just described as association with
that which we have agreed to call organisation. Associates, we saw, were
together, as might roughly be said, simply because they found themselves
together. That is to say, they were, after their association, what they
were before it, and would not be seriously affected if they were to be
separated. Connections of this kind are essentially between unit and
unit. They fall short of the nature of a plan which determines a great
range of elements, variously but with reference to an identical
operation. Beginning, as before, with the connection between

persons, we may illustrate the difference by the comparison between a
crowd and an army. The mind of a crowd has indeed been taken as the type
of a true social mind. But it is really something quite different. It is
merely the superficial connection between unit and unit on an extended
and intensified scale. As unit joins unit in the street, each determines
his immediate neighbours, and is determined by them through the
contagion of excitement, and with reference to the most passing ideas
and emotions. What acts upon them in common is necessarily what there is
in common between persons meeting, as it were, for no reason, and not
knowing what they share beyond what they immediately see and feel. The
crowd may indeed "act as one man"; but if it does so, its level of
intelligence and responsibility will, as a rule, be extraordinarily low.
It has nothing in common beyond what unit can infect unit with in a
moment. Concerted action, much more reasoning and criticism, are out of
the question. The doing or thinking of a different thing by each unit
with reference to a single end is impossible. The crowd moves as a mere
mass, because its parts are connected merely as unit with unit. Any form
of connection which could effect an organisation in the whole would make
a demand on the nature of every unit, which, where their conjunction is
merely casual, could not possibly be met. An army, no less than a crowd,
consists of a multitude of men, who are associated, unit to unit.
Influences must pass and repass between every one

of the men and those men with whom he is standing in the ranks, or with
whom he passes his leisure time. We may note, by the way, that these
influences are themselves of a more permanent nature than those which
pass between members of a crowd, and that they must necessarily be
modified by that other connection of which we are about to speak. For
the links of "association" between man and man are not the determining
force in the operations of the army as such. The army is a machine or an
organisation, which is bound together by operative ideas embodied on the
one hand in the officers, and on the other hand in the habit of
obedience and the trained capacity which make every unit willing and
able to be determined not by the impulse of his neighbours, but by the
orders of his officers. What the army does is determined by the
general's plan, and not by influences communicating themselves from man
to man, as in a crowd. In other words, every unit moves with reference
to the movements of a great whole, with most parts of which he is not in
direct touch at all. He is not determined by simple reference to the
movements of his immediate neighbours. The army, that is, is a system or
organised group, the nature of which, or the predominant idea embodied
in its structure, determines the movements and relations of its parts or
members. The difference of the two modes of determination is plainly
visible on a review day, if we first watch the compact regiments
marching off the ground, and then the crowd streaming away irregularly
in search of rest or refreshment. By organisation then, as opposed to
association, we mean determination of particulars by the scheme or
general nature of a systematic group to which they belong, as opposed to
their determination by immediate links uniting them with what,
relatively speaking, are other

particulars in casual juxtaposition with them. In the working and
composition of mind the same difference is observable between
association and organisation. Mere association means that any perception
or idea may suggest absolutely any mental element whatever with which it
has developed a connection by entering into the same mental whole. A
study of the purely associative mind is sometimes said to be found in
the character of Miss Bates in "Emma." Perhaps, as really uncontrolled
association can hardly be found in a sane intellect, we may say that the
character in question is something more subtle and more true to nature;
and that is, a study of the tendency to pure association continually
breaking out, and as continually repressed, or "herded back" to the main
subject, to use the expression which Walter Scott applies to the way in
which just such an associative talker is brought back to his point by
his hearer. In mind, as in the external world, the higher stage of
association is organisation. The characteristic of organisation is
control by a general scheme as opposed to influence by juxtaposition

of units. The zigzag course of thought which is represented in such a
character as Miss Bates is due to the absence of control by any general
scheme. Every idea--every significant word--has practically innumerable
connections in the mind. If the course of thought has no general
direction impressed upon it, no selective control operative within it,
it may change its line altogether at every principal word. The
possibilities of the ideas at our command make them like a complex of
railways, wholly consisting of turn-tables, so that, on any one of these
component parts, the train may swing round and go off in a wholly new
direction. This is notably illustrated by the sense of context in
interpretation. For anyone who has no such sense, possible errors are
endless, beyond the hope of correction. The opposite of such a zigzag
course is a train of thought such as an argument. In a train of thought,
one general idea prescribes the direction, or forms the "subject," or
limits what has been called the universe of discourse. Attention is
wholly guided by the general idea, and refuses to be distracted by any
interest or suggestion which does not bear upon it. Let the general idea
be, for example, the relation of wealth to the best life. Experience
shows that it is most difficult to resist the varied interests and
distractions which present themselves in the attempt to keep this
relation in view. Easy and attractive modes of acquisition, easy and
attractive modes of expenditure, force themselves upon the mind as isolated

suggestions, and divert it from the question: "Shall I, or will any one
else, be the better for it, as I understand `better'?" The effort of
control, needed to keep in view the general nature of our conception of
what is best in life, and to attend to suggestions which offer
themselves as to acquisition and expenditure, only in so far as they
seem likely to promote that conception, means the predominance of a
scheme or general idea through all the varied circumstances of economic
possibility. It makes no difference whether we are speaking of reasoning
or of practice. The nature of the control which insists on relevancy,
and of the intellectual system in which it exhibits itself, is the same
in both cases. Every mind, in fact, is more or less organised under the
control of dominant ideas, which belong to its habitual preoccupations
and determine the constant bias of its thoughts. There is a well-known
story how a traveller in a railway carriage undertook to detect the
vocation of each of his fellow travellers from their respective answers
to a single question. The question was: "What is that which destroys
what it has itself produced?" and a naturalist, so the story runs,
revealed himself by the answer, "vital force," a soldier replied "war,"
a scholar "Kronos," a journalist "revolution," and a farmer "a boar."
Each answer was determined by the dominant bias or idea which selected
out of the possible answers to the riddle that which would harmonise
with the general mental system under its control. Selection, it must be
remembered, is at the same time creation. In every situation,

theoretical or practical, the surroundings as a whole are new, and the
rule or scheme has to assert itself in conditions which are not
precisely repeated from any former case. In so asserting itself it does
not simply reproduce something old, any more than a batsman recalls a
former movement when he plays a ball, but it produces that thought or
deed which expresses its nature with reference to the new surroundings
in which it has to act. For it is a universal tendency, a scheme partly
defined, and in process of further defining itself by moulding the
material presented to it. There is one more essential point. A mind has
its dominant nature, but is no single system equally organised
throughout. It is rather a construction of such systems, which may be in
all degrees of alliance, indifference, and opposition to one another.
Each of such systems, or groups of ideas and experiences, has its own
dominant scheme, and its own tendency in controlling thought or action.
And, as a general rule, in proportion as one system is active, all.the
others are quiescent; in proportion as we are intent or engaged upon one
train of thought or one pursuit, we are not alive to suggestions
belonging to any other. Every system, or group of this kind, is called
in psychology an "Appercipient mass," because it is a set of ideas,
bound together by a common rule or scheme, which dictates the point of
view from which perception will take place, so far as the system in
question is active. And without some "apperception," some point of view
in the mind which enables the

newcomer to be classed, there cannot be perception at all. The eye only
sees what it brings with it the power of seeing. Hence some of the most
striking instances of apperception are drawn from elementary cases in
which a really remote system is active in default of a better, just
because the action of some system is necessary and the nearest responds.
A child calls an orange "a ball"; a Polynesian calls a horse "a pig."
These are the nearest "heads" or rules of apperception under which the
new perception can be brought. Every scientific idea we apply, every set
of relations in which we stand, and every pursuit with which the mind is
familiar, is a case of such an appercipient mass, or rule or scheme of
attention. And we know by common experience how entirely quiescent is
one such factor of the mind while we are absorbed in the activity of
another; how utterly, for example, we disregard the botanical character
of wild flowers when we are clearing them out of the garden as weeds,
and how wholly we neglect the question whether they are "flowers" or
"weeds" when we are occupied in studying their botanical character. And
in the action of every appercipient mass, in as far as it determines
thought by the general nature of a systematic whole, rather than through
the isolated attraction exercised by unit upon unit, we have an example
of organisation as opposed to association; or, if we like, of systematic
connection or association between whole and part, as opposed to the same
principle operating casually and superficially between unit and unit.
The scheme or systematic connection, it must be added, may work
unconsciously. Not all ideas

which control our thought and action are explicit ideas in abstract
form; and perhaps the general nature and limits of a man's mind are
something of which he can never be reflectively conscious, though he is
aware of what he takes to be his leading ideas. It is well known that
principles which are not presented to reflection may be intellectually
operative, and embodied in a train of results. Thus our appercipient
masses may have very different degrees of explicit system. But their
action is always systematic--the nature of the whole modifying what it
comes in contact with, and being modified by it. With this conception of
psychical systems before us, let us cast one more glance at the
organisation of society and the State. We refused to take a crowd as a
true type of society, and we looked to the example of an army for the
leading features of organisation as opposed to casual "association." The
characteristic of an army on which we insisted was the determination of
every unit in it, not by the movements and impulses of his immediate
neighbours, but by the scheme or idea of the whole. Now, on looking
closer, we see that society as such is a vast tissue of systems of this
type, each of them a relatively, though not absolutely, closed and
self-complete organisation. There are wheels within wheels, systems
within systems, groups within groups. But, speaking generally, the
business and pleasure of society is carried on by persons arranged in
groups, which exhibit the characteristic of organisation that the
capacity of every person is determined by the general nature and
principle of the group considered as a whole, and not by his relations
to the units who happen to be next him.

Such groups, for example, are the trades and professions. Their
structure may be very different. In some the workshop is again a
subordinate self-organised group. In others the professional man works
alone, and to all appearances goes his own way. It is common to all of
them, however, that they form groupings of members, within each of which
groupings all members are determined in a certain way by the common
nature of the group. Within his trade or profession, a man acts, as it
is said, in a definite "capacity." He regards himself and is regarded
from a definite point of view, and all other points of view tend to be
neglected while and in so far as he is acting in the capacity
corresponding to his membership of a certain group. Prima facie, there
may be, as with systems which compose the mind, all degrees of alliance,
indifference, or opposition between these groupings of persons; and the
same person, belonging to many different groups, may find his diverse
"capacities" apparently at variance with one another. A conscientious
Trade Unionist may find his capacity as a member of the Union,
interpreted as binding him to do his utmost for the amelioration of
working class conditions in general, apparently at variance with his
capacity as the head of a family bound to provide immediately for those
whom he has brought into the world. Or a judge or magistrate, obliged to

enforce what he conceives to be a bad law, may find his official
capacity apparently at variance with his duty as a conscientious
citizen. It is plain that unless, on the whole, a working harmony were
maintained between the different groups which form society, life could
not go on. And it is for this reason that the State, as the widest
grouping whose members are effectively united by a common experience, is
necessarily the one community which has absolute power to ensure, by
force, if need be, at least sufficient adjustment of the claims of all
other groupings to make life possible. Assuming, indeed, that all the
groupings are organs of a single pervading life, we find it incredible
that there should ultimately be irreconcilable opposition between them.
That they should contradict one another is not more nor less possible
than that human nature should be at variance with itself. Thus, we have
seen that the mind, and society or the State, are identical in the
characteristic of being organisations, each composed of a system of
organisations, every superior and subordinate grouping having its own
nature and principle which determines its members as such, and every
one, consequently, tending to impose upon its members a peculiar
capacity or point of view, which, in so far as a given system is active,
tends to put all other systems out of sight. The connection between
these systems is of very different kinds, and very unequal in degree;
but in as far as the mind and the community are actual working wholes,
it is to be presumed that in each there is an ultimate or pervading
adjustment which hinders contradiction

from proceeding to destructive extremes. And neither the mind nor the
community, as working organisations, can be accounted for on the
principle of mere association. (2) After pointing out the analogy
between the organised structure of minds and the organised structure of
society, we now go on to show that minds and society are really the same
fabric regarded from different points of view. The explanation may be
divided into three parts. (i.) Every social group is the external aspect
of a set of corresponding mental systems in individual minds. (ii.)
Every individual mind is a system of such systems corresponding to the
totality of social groups as seen from a particular position. (iii.) The
social whole, though implied in every mind, only has reality in the
totality of minds in a given community considered as an identical
working system. (i.) Society and the State and every institution present
themselves to us at first sight as a number of persons, together,
perhaps, with certain buildings and other external apparatus, and
certain kinds of work carried on and tangible results produced--so many
children "educated," so many workmen "employed," so many ships built or
fields tilled. But if we could bring before ourselves the complete
reality of any social group or institution, we should find ourselves
considering a very different order of facts. Let us think for a moment
of a rate-supported elementary school. We imagine it as a heap of
buildings and a mass of children with a percentage of teachers scattered
among

them. But in what does its actual working really consist, and on what
does it depend? The actual reality of the school lies in the fact that
certain living minds are connected in a certain way. Teachers, pupils,
managers, parents, and the public must all of them have certain
operative ideas, and must be guided according to these ideas in certain
portions of their lives, if the school is to be a school. Now, the being
guided by certain operative ideas is, in other words, the activity of
certain appercipient masses dictating a certain point of view, in so far
as those particular masses are awake. And it must be noted that the
connection or identity in which the school exists presupposes a
different activity, that is, a different appercipient system, in every
mind, and more especially in every class of mind concerned. It is the
same as in our old example of the screw and the nut. No school could be
made of teachers alone or of pupils alone; nor, again, could a school be
made with teachers who were all the same, or with pupils who were all
the same. So, if we could visualise the reality of the school-- the
institution--what we should see would be an identical connection running
through a number of minds, various and variously conditioned. But within
each mind the connection would take a particular shape, such as to play
into the connections with all other minds, as a cogwheel plays into the
other cogwheels of a machine. The pupil must be prepared to learn in his
particular way and the teacher to teach in his particular way. The
parents and the public also have their

own relations to the work of teaching, and whether for good or for evil
they take up some attitude to it, and their attitude modifies it. Thus
the connection, as it is within any one mind, is useless and meaningless
if you take it wholly apart from what corresponds to it in the others.
It is like a wheel without an axle or a pump handle without a pump. And
it is because of this nature of the elements which make up the
institution that it is possible for the institution itself to be an
identity, or connection, or meeting point, by which many minds are bound
together in a single system. It may seem as if this way of analysing an
institution was reducing a solid fact into mere thoughts. But it is not
really so. Taking the ideas of all concerned as they really are, we have
the facts in space and time--buildings, appliances, hours of work and
attendance, and so on--included in them. It is impossible to state the
idea fully and correctly without including the environment on which it
rests, and the activities in which it is realised. We are not to omit
the facts in space and time from what we mean by an institution; the
only thing is that we have not known them as they really are till we
have known them as bound into unity by the mental systems of which they
are the context or the expression. The child and the teacher alike must
think of their work with reference to particular times and places, or
they would not do it at those times and places; and it is only in
actually doing it at those times and places that the idea, or point of
view, which stands for the school in each of their minds, is able to
assert itself without frustration.

Thus we may fairly say that every social group, or institution, is the
aspect in space and time of a set of corresponding mental systems in
individual minds. We may draw corollaries from this conception, both as
to the nature of the individual will, or active mind, and as to the
nature of the social and political whole. (ii.) Every individual mind,
in so far as it thinks and acts in definite schemes or contexts, is a
structure of appercipient systems or organised dispositions. Now, we do
not suggest at present that all appercipient systems can be represented
as social groups, though there are few, if any, such systems which do
not involve some relations with persons connected in time and space. But
it is clear, from the explanations of the last section, that every
social group or institution involves a system of appercipient systems,
by which the minds that take part in it are kept in correspondence.
Every individual mind, then, so far as it takes part in social groupings
or institutions, is a structure of appercipient systems, answering, each
to each, to the different capacities in which it enters into each
grouping respectively. We have already remarked on the way in which the
distinction between different "capacities" answers to the psychological
tendency for the activity of one appercipient system to obstruct the
activity of all others. It is hardly necessary to point out that, partly
for this reason, though the mind must be an actual structure of systems,
it is very far from being a rational system of systems. The fact that,
when one system is active, all others, as a rule, are inert, conceals
the contradictions which underlie the

entire fabric, and protects them from criticism and correction. But
though the mind is thus implicitly self- contradictory in various
degrees, this does not alter the fact that its general nature is to be a
unity of organised ideas answering to the actual set of parts which the
individual plays in the world of space and time. Thus each individual
mind, if we consider it as a whole, is an expression or reflection of
society as a whole from a point of view which is distinctive and unique.
Every social factor or relation, to which it in any way corresponds, or
in which it in any way plays its part, is represented in some feature of
its appercipient organism. And probably, just as, in any man's idea of
London, there is hardly any factor of London life which does not at
least colour the background, so, in every individual impression of the
social whole, there is no social feature that does not, in one way or
another, contribute to the total effect. In the dispositions of every
mind the entire social structure is reflected in a unique form, and it
is on this reflection in every mind, and on the uniqueness of the form
in which it is reflected, that the working of the social whole, by means
of differences which play into one another, depends. If, so to speak, we
lay a mind on the dissecting table, we find it to consist for the most
part of a fabric of organised dispositions, each disposition
corresponding to a unique point of view or special angle from which it
plays a part in some human function. About the precise relation of a
human function to the fact that, as a

rule, it connects together a plurality of human beings, we shall have
more to say in the following chapter. It is enough for the present that
whatever does connect a plurality of human beings depends on the
operation of appercipient systems in their minds, and therefore every
individual mind is, as Plato has told us, so far as it goes, for good or
evil, the true effective reality of the social whole. And it is easy to
see when we consider the working of organised apperception, how it is
possible actually to will more or less of our own volitional system.
There is first the contrast between appercipient systems which are at
any time active and those which are not active, and then there is the
contrast between our actual volitional nature at its actual fullest, and
the demands implied by the nature of the whole, from which it is
inseparable. These demands are always appearing more or less in every
act of willing our own will. (iii.) The social whole, regarded from a
corresponding point of view, would be a whole consisting of psychical
dispositions and their activities, answering to one another in
determinate ways. It would therefore be of the nature of a continuous or
self- identical being, pervading a system of differences and realised
only in them. It differs from a machine, or from what is called an
"organism" pure and simple, by the presence of the whole in every part,
not merely for the inference of the observer, but, in some degree, for
the part itself, through the action of consciousness. But it would be a
mistake, we should observe at this point, to identify the presence of
the whole for

the part by means of consciousness, with the consciousness of the part
that the whole is present to it. The latter is a speculative idea, the
former is a fact which embodies this idea for the observing theorist,
but not necessarily or usually for the working consciousness itself. In
the shape of our minds and their adjustment to our work, of which we are
unconscious, there is an irreducible analogy between human society and
the lower organisms. The consciousness which guides our lives is a
consciousness of something, but not as a rule a consciousness of the
place of that something in the whole of life. We live in our objects,
but we do not know how or how far our objects identify us with the whole
to which we ultimately belong. It is plain that the social whole can, in
practice, only be complete in a plurality of individuals. We know that
in the development of human nature, which we take as the ultimate
standard of life, no one individual can cover the whole ground. As in
the natural world in space and time, so, in the world of human beings
which on one side belongs to it, differentiation implies dispersion into
a plurality of centres. The same man, according to what seems to be the
limit of physical and psychical possibility, could not be both Plato and
Aristotle, nor both Greek and Jew, not even both Spartan and Athenian,
not to say both man and woman. We are on less secure ground when we say
that he could not, effectively and as a rule, be both statesman and
shoemaker, or soldier and clergyman. It is plain that in some cases
capacities may be united which in other cases are found apart.

The same man may be a good architect and a good workman, or again, the
architect and the workman may be different persons, though suited to
work together. We may reply, of course, that whatever abilities lie
within one personality, effective work demands the division of labour.
This is true, but is obviously a matter of degree. The man who does only
one thing does not always do it best, and it is not easy to say what
"one thing" means. The point of these suggestions is to make it clear
that, while plurality of human beings is necessary to enable society to
cover the ground, as it were, which human nature is capable of covering,
yet actual individuals are not ultimate or equal embodiments of the true
particulars of the social universal. We thus see once more that the
given individual is only in making, and that his reality may lie largely
outside him. His will is not a whole, but implies and rests upon a
whole, which is therefore the true nature of his will. We also gain some
light on the unity of the social mind. For it seems plain that one
actual human being may cover the ground, which, in other instances, it
takes many men to occupy. And in some such examples--not, or not
obviously, in those where a high intensity of genius is the essential
quality--there seems little reason to distinguish the correlation of
dispositions within the one person from the correlation of the same
dispositions if dispersed among different persons. If I am my own
gardener, or my own critic, or my own doctor, does the relation of the
answering dispositions within my being differ absolutely and altogether
from what

takes place when gardener and master, critic and author, patient and
doctor, are different persons? My instructions to my gardener are
conveyed in language, it will be said, while I know my own wishes
directly. And this is not the place to press the problem home either
psychologically or metaphysically. But, just to induce reflection, it
may be asked whether my instructions to myself are not as a rule
conveyed and remembered in language. If we consider my unity with myself
at different times as the limiting case, we shall find it very hard to
establish a difference of principle between the unity of what we call
one mind and that of all the "minds" which enter into a single social
experience. In any case, we have said enough to suggest that Society
prima facie exists in the correlated dispositions by which a plurality
of individual minds meets the need for covering the ground open to human
nature, by division of labour in the fullest sense. But we have further
pointed out that the true particularisation of the human universal does
not necessarily coincide with the distinction between different persons,
and that the correlation of differences and the identity which they
constitute remain much the same whether they chance to fall within a
single human being, or to be dispersed over several. The stress seems,
therefore, to lie on the attainment of the true particularisation which
does justice to the maximum of human capacity, rather than on the mere
relations which arise between the members of a de facto plurality. Not
that the presence of human nature in any

individual does not constitute a claim that it shall be perfected in
him, but that its perfecting must be judged by a criticism addressed to
determining real capacities, and not by the accidental standard of a
given plurality. We shall pursue these ideas further in the following
chapter. --------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VIII NATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF
STATE ACTION. 1. ACCORDING to the course of thought which we have been
pursuing, the distinction between the individual on the one hand, and
the social or political whole on the other, is not relevant to the
question where the "end" of man in Society is to be sought. For the
conceptions of Society and the Individual are correlative conceptions
through and through; at whatever level, therefore, we take the one, we
are bound to construe the other as at the same level; so that, to
distinguish the one element from the other as superior from inferior, or
as means from end, becomes a contradiction in terms. If we begin by
drawing boundaries round the individual, the boundaries which we draw
reproduce themselves in society conceived as a total of such
individuals, and the question of means and end, as we saw in Bentham's
case, takes the form whether "each" is the means to the welfare of
"all," or "all" to the welfare of "each"; the distinction thus becoming
purely verbal. While, if we set no limit to individuality, accepting it
as an end which

may involve any degree of self-completeness and therefore of
comprehensiveness, we find it to be actually one with, to consist in, a
realisation of the stuff and content of which social unity is made. Such
apparent exceptions as art or religion, which may be taken to be
independent of the social medium, are really, as we shall see, its
quintessence, though at a stage where plurality of persons becomes
unimportant. They are therefore not truly to be considered as ends
pertaining to the individual, in any sense in which the individual is
held to have an essence separable from that of society. This antithesis
is really, however, absurd. There are not two opposable sets of contents
concerned in the matter at all; but a single web of content which in its
totality is society and in its differentiations the individuals. To make
the totality the means to the differentiations or vice versa is like
making a drama the means to the characters, or the characters to the
drama. But the poet or the religious genius may be like a character that
concentrates in itself the significance of the entire drama, and so in
some degree transcends the dramatic form. Only, this is done by
including the essence of the whole plurality, not by being independent
of it. The only way, then, in which the idea of means and end can be
applied to the social whole and its parts, is to take Society when at
its lower level, being dealt with under the aspect of mere plurality, as
a means to what it is at its higher level, when

realised as a communion of individualities at their best. But from this
point of view we get no distinction of means and end as between
Individuals and Society. What we get is Individuals and Society alike,
as understood and partly existing at one level (that of commonplace
Individualism and Collectivism), taken as a means to both Individuals
and Society at a higher level. As we have seen, the only true
explanation of self-government is to throw the reality of the self
outside what passes for its average nature, and in this sense the
average nature may be treated as a means to the truer or fuller self--as
something, that is to say, which is instrumental to the latter, and has
no rights against it. 2. For us, then, the ultimate end of Society and
the State as of the individual is the realisation of the best life. The
difficulty of defining the best life does not trouble us, because we
rely throughout on the fundamental logic of human nature qua rational.
We think ourselves no more called upon to specify in advance what will
be the details of the life which satisfies an intelligent being as such,
than we are called upon to specify in advance what will be the details
of the knowledge which satisfies an intelligent being as such. Wherever
a human being touches practice, as wherever he touches theory, we find
him driven on by his intolerance of contradictions towards shaping his
life as a whole. What we mean by "good" and "truth" is practical and
theoretical experience in so far as the logic which underlies man's
whole nature permits him to repose in it. And the best life is the life
which has most of this general character--

the character which, so far as realised, satisfies the fundamental logic
of man's capacities. Now, it is plain that this best life can only be
realised in consciousness, that being the medium of all satisfaction and
the only true type of a whole in experience. And all consciousness, as
experienced by man, is on one side particular, attached to bodies, and
exclusive of consciousnesses attached to other bodies. In a sense, it is
true that no one consciousness can partake of or actually enter into
another. Thus, it is apt to be held, as we have amply seen, that the
essential danger of State interference lies in the intrusion of
something originated by "others" upon a distinct particular
consciousness, whose distinction and particularity--its freedom--are
thus impaired. It is all-important to our point of view that this
prejudice should be dispelled. Force or automatic custom or
authoritative tradition or "suggestion" are not hostile to one
individuality because they come from "others," but because their nature
is contradictory to the nature of the highest self-assertion of mind,
because they are, so to speak, in a medium incompatible with its medium.
They are just as hostile to this self-assertion, just as alien, if they
emanate, as they constantly do, from conflicting elements in our complex
private experience, as if they come to us, as we say, "from without."
The question is of their "nature" and tendency, not of their centre of
origin. Individuals are limited and isolated in many ways. But their
true individuality does not lie in their isolation, but in that
distinctive act or service by which they pass into unique contributions
to the universal.

True individuality, as we have said, is not in the minimisation which
forbids further subdivision, but in the maximisation which includes the
greatest possible being in an inviolable unity. It is not, therefore,
the intrusion upon isolation, as such, that interferes with
individuality; it is the intrusion, upon a growing unity of
consciousness, of a medium hostile to its growth. But we have seen that
force, automatism, and suggestion, are in some ways necessary to the
support and maintenance of the human consciousness, owing to its animal
limitations. They are, indeed, as is well known, the condition of its
progress. Therefore, in promoting the best life, these aids must be
employed by society as exercising absolute power--viz., by the State.
And the problem presented by their employment is not a question of the
"interference of the State with the Individual"-- an antithesis which is
meaningless so far as it implies that society can be interfering with
the individual, and not interfering with itself; but it is a question
how far and in what way the use of force and the like by the State is a
hindrance to the end for which the State, the social power, itself
exists. In other words, it is to be ascertained how far the fullest
self-assertion of the social universal in its differences--the best
life--can be promoted or is likely to be endangered by means which are
of a different order, and so in some circumstances opposed to it. The
point is not that I and some thousands more break in by force upon you
in particular and violate your isolation; but that such breaking in by
force, whoever does it and whoever suffers by it, and even if

through passion or obsession you do it to yourself and I to myself, is
hostile prima facie to the living logic of the will, which alone can
create a unity and realise a best. How then, and under what
reservations, in the complicated conflict of the fuller and narrower
self, can this dangerous drug of violence be administered, so to speak,
as a counter-poison to tendencies which would otherwise give no chance
to the logical will? With this difficulty in our minds, we will
endeavour to determine the general principle on which force and menace
should be used by the State, and a routine be mechanically maintained by
it. 3. We have hitherto spoken of the State and Society as almost
convertible terms. And in fact it is part of our argument that the
influences of Society differ only in degree from the powers of the
State, and that the explanation of both is ultimately the same. But on
the other hand, it is also part of our argument that the State as such
is a necessary factor in civilised life; and that no true ideal lies in
the direction of minimising its individuality or restricting its
absolute power. By the State, then, we mean Society as a unit,
recognised as rightly exercising control over its members through
absolute physical power. The limits of the unit are, of course,
determined by what looks like historical accident; but there is logic
underneath the apparent accident, and the most tremendous political
questions turn upon the delimitation of political units. A principle, so
to speak, of political parsimony--entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter
necessitatem, "two organisations will not survive when

one can do the work"--is always tending to expand the political unit.
The limits of the common experience necessary for effective
self-government are always operating to control this expansion. We might
therefore suggest, as a principle determining the area of states, "the
widest territorial area compatible with the unity of experience which is
demanded by effective self-government." But the State de facto (which is
also de jure) is the Society which is recognised as exercising
compulsory power over its members, and as presenting itself qua a single
independent corporation among other independent corporations. Without
such power, or where, if anywhere, it does not exist, there can be no
ultimate and effective adjustment of the claims of individuals, and of
the various social groups in which individuals are involved. It is the
need for this ultimate effective adjustment which constitutes the need
that every individual in civilised life should belong to one state, and
to one only. Otherwise conflicting adjustments might be imposed upon him
by diverse authorities having equal power and right to enforce his
obedience. That Society, then, is a State, which is habitually
recognised as a unit lawfully exercising force. We saw that the
characteristics of Society pass gradually into those of the State. It
would not be true that Society is a State only as actually exercising
force; but it would perhaps be true to say that State action as such,
though far from being limited to the downright exercise of force, yet
consists of all that side of social action which depends on the
character of ultimate arbiter and regulator, maintainer of mechanical
routine, and source of authoritative suggestion, a character

which is one with the right to exercise force in the last resort. The
end of the State, then, is the end of Society and of the Individual--the
best life, as determined by the fundamental logic of the will. The means
at its disposal, qua State, always partake of the nature of force,
though this does not exclude their having other aspects as well.
Taxation may have the most reasonable and even the most popular purpose,
yet the generality and justice of its incidence, and the certainty of
its productiveness, can only be secured by compulsion. No State could
undertake its work on the basis of voluntary contributions. A universal
end, we might say, is indeed not a mere general rule; but you cannot
carry out a universal end in a plurality of units--and a set of human
individuals is always in one aspect a plurality of units--without
enforcing general rules. 4. Here, then, we have our problem more closely
determined than in the previous chapters. There we saw, in general, that
self-government can have no meaning unless we can "really" will
something which we do not always "actually" will. And we were led to
look for a clue to our real or implied will in the social spirit as
incorporated in laws and institutions, that is to say in Society as a
working whole reflected in the full system of the consciousnesses which
composed it. We supposed ourselves prepared, then, it would seem, to do
and suffer anything which would promote the best life of the whole--that
maximisation of our being which, from the nature of our real will, we
saw to be imperative upon us--a demand

implied in every volition and from which we could never escape. But now
we are face to face with the question what we are called upon to do or
to suffer, as members of a State, in promotion of the best life. We have
here to renew, from another standpoint, the discussions of chapter iii.
The governing fact of the situation is that the means of action at our
disposal as members of a State are not, on their distinctive side, in
pari materia with the end. It is true that the State, as an intelligent
system, can appeal by reasoning and persuasion to the logical will as
such. It constantly does so in various forms, and a State which did
nothing of the kind either directly or indirectly would not possess the
recognition which is necessary to its very existence. So far its work is
in pari materia with the end, being a direct element in the expansion of
mind and character in their own spiritual medium of thought and will.
But this side of its work is not distinctive of the State, and,
therefore, is not that for which more particularly it exists. Its
distinctive attribute is to be ultimate arbiter and regulator of claims,
the guarantor of life as at least a workable system in the bodily world.
It is in its ultimateness de facto that the differentia lies which
separates it from the innumerable other groupings and associations which
go to make up our complex life. This is shown in the fact that each of
us, as we have said, must belong to a State, and can belong to one only.
It is because the authority is ultimate that it must be single. Now,
authority which is to be ultimate in a sphere including the world of
bodily action,

must be an authority which can use force. And it is for this reason
that, as we said, force is involved in the distinctive attributes of the
State. But force is not in pari materia with the expansion of mind and
character in their spiritual medium. And, thus, there at once appears an
inadequacy of means to end as between the distinctive modus operandi of
the State and the end in virtue of which it claims to represent the
"real" will. What is the bearing of this inadequacy? What is the most
that the State, in its distinctive capacity, can do towards promoting a
form of life which it recognises as desirable? Its direct power is
limited to securing the performance of external actions. This does not
mean merely the performance of outward bodily movements, such as might
be brought to pass by actual physical force. It is remarkable that
actual physical force plays a very small part in the work of any
decently ordered State. When we say that the State can do no more than
secure the performance of external actions, we do not exclude from the
action the intention to act in a certain way. Without such an intention
there is no action in the sense of human action at all, but merely a
muscular movement. It is necessary for the State to attach importance to
intention, which is involved in the idea of human action, and is the
only medium through which the muscular movements of human beings can be
determined with any degree of certainty. The State, then, through its
authority, backed ultimately by physical force, can produce, with a fair
degree of certainty, the intention to

act in a certain way, and therefore the actions themselves. Why do we
call intentional actions, so produced, external actions only? It is
because the State is unable to determine that the action shall be done
from the ground or motive which alone would give it immediate value or
durable certainty as an element in the best life. On the contrary, in so
far as the doing of the action is due to the distinctive mode of
operation which belongs to the State, due, that is to say, to the hope
of reward or the fear of punishment, its value as an element in the best
life is ipso facto destroyed, except in so far as its ulterior effects
are concerned. An action performed in this sense under compulsion is not
a true part of the will. It is an intention adopted from submissiveness
or selfishness, and lacks not only the moral value, but what is partly
the same thing, the reliable constancy of principle, displayed in an
action which arises out of the permanent purposes of a life. The State,
then, as such, can only secure the performance of external actions. That
is to say, it can only enforce as much intention as is necessary

to ensure, on the whole, compliance with requirements stated in terms of
movements affecting the outer world. So far from promoting the
performance of actions which enter into the best life, its operations,
where effective, must directly narrow the area of such actions by
stimulating lower motives as regards some portion of it. 5. The State,
then, in its distinctive capacity, has no agency at its command for
influencing conduct, but such as may be used to produce an external
course of behaviour by the injunction or prohibition of external acts,
in enforcing which acts the State will take note of intentions, so far
as it can infer them, because it is only through them that its influence
can be exerted. The relation of such a means to the imperative end, on
which we have seen that political obligation depends, must be in a
certain sense negative. The means is one which cannot directly promote
the end, and which even tends to narrow its sphere. What it can effect
is to remove obstacles, to destroy conditions hostile to the realisation
of the end. This brings us back to a principle laid down by Kant, and in
its bare statement strongly resembling Mill's contention. When force is
opposed to freedom, a force that repels that force is right. Here, of
course, all depends upon what we mean by freedom, and in what sense we
think that force can hinder hindrances to it. If freedom meant for us
the empty hexagon round each individual, the principle would take us
back to Mill's Liberty. If,

on the other hand, we failed to grasp the discrepancy between force of
any kind and the positive nature of the common good which we take to be
freedom, the principle would lead us straight to a machine-made Utopia.
For its negative character cannot restrain it from some degree of
positive action. It is only through positive operation that a negation
or opposition can find reality in the world. And the limits of its
positive action must depend on the precise bearings of the negation
which it puts in force. Now, for us, after the explanations which have
been given, the negative nature of our principle is to be seriously
pressed, although its action has to take positive form. The State is in
its right when it forcibly hinders hindrance to the best life or common
good. In hindering such hindrances it will indeed do positive acts. It
may try to hinder illiteracy and intemperance by compelling education
and by municipalising the liquor traffic. Why not, it will be asked,
hinder also unemployment by universal employment, over-crowding by
universal house-building, and immorality by punishing immoral and
rewarding moral actions? Here comes the value of remembering that,
according to our principle, State action is negative in its immediate
bearing, though positive both in its actual doings and its ultimate
purpose. On every problem the question must recur, "Is the proposed
measure bona fide confined to hindering a hindrance, or is it attempting
direct promotion of the common good by force?" For it is to be borne in
mind throughout that whatever acts are enforced are, so far as the force
operates, withdrawn from the

higher life. The promotion of morality by force, for instance, is an
absolute self-contradiction. No general principle will tell us how in
particular to solve this subtle question, apart from common sense and
special experience. But there is perhaps more to be learned from this
principle, if approached with bona fides, than from most generalities of
philosophy on social or ethical topics. It is well, I think, constantly
to apply the idea of removing hindrances, in criticism of our efforts to
promote the best life by means involving compulsion. We ought, as a
rule, when we propose action involving compulsion, to be able to show a
definite tendency to growth, or a definite reserve of capacity, which is
frustrated by a known impediment, the removal of which is a small matter
compared to the capacities to be set free. For it should be remarked
that every act done by the public power has one aspect of encroachment,
however slight, on the sphere of character and intelligence, if only by

using funds raised by taxation, or by introducing an automatic
arrangement into life. It can, therefore, only be justified if it
liberates resources of character and intelligence greater beyond all
question than the encroachment which it involves. This relation is
altogether perversely presented, as we saw above, if it is treated as an
encroachment of society upon individuals. All this is beside the mark.
The serious point is, that it is an interference, so far as compulsion
operates in it, of one type of action with another and higher type of
action; of automatism, so to speak, with intelligent volition. The
higher type of action, the embodiment of the common good in logical
growth, is so far from being merely individual as opposed to social,
that it is the whole end and purpose in the name of which allegiance to
society can be demanded from any individual. As in the private so in the
general life, every encroachment of automatism must be justified by
opening new possibilities to self-conscious development, if it is not to
mean degeneration and senility. It is the same principle in other words
which Green lays down when he says in effect that only such acts (or
omissions) should be enforced by the public power as it is better should
take place from any motive whatever than not take place at all. When,
that is, we enforce an act (or omission) by law, we should be prepared
to say, "granting that this act, which might conceivably have come to be
done from a sense of duty, now may come to be done for the most part
from a fear of punishment, or from a mechanical tendency

to submit to external rules (attended by the practical inconveniences of
insensibility, half-heartedness, and evasion which attach to acts so
enforced), still so much depends, for the higher life of the people,
upon the external conditions at stake, that we think it worth while to
enforce the act (or omission) though our eyes are fully open to the risk
of extended automatism." Here we may have to meet our own arguments
against Mill. "You said it was a contradiction," we shall be told, "to
admit coercion as a means to liberty. But here you are advocating
coercion as a means to something as incompatible with it, in so far as
it is operative, as our `liberty,' viz., a certain state of mind and
will. If the area of coercion is necessarily subtracted from the area of
liberty, as you argued above, is not the area of coercion necessarily
subtracted from that to be occupied by the desired growth of will and
character?" The answer depends, as we indicated in ch. iii., on the
difference between bare liberty and a determinate growth. If your
liberty is wholly indeterminate, then every restraint is a reduction of
it. You cannot increase a quantity which is all of one kind by taking
away a part of it. And, in fact, the idea that there was or could have
been a previous general liberty, of which a part was given up in
exchange for more, is a mere illusion. Liberty has grown up within the
positive determinations of life, as they have expanded and come to fit
mankind better. But if the quantity to be increased is a determinate
growth, of a type whose general character

is known, the problem is transformed. It is the commonest of experiences
that hindrances can be removed and favourable conditions maintained, if
this has to be done not with a view to every conceivable and
inconceivable development, but for a growth the general line of which is
known. In this case, as the whole expands, the restraints and the
liberty, the room for action, may even increase together. This is not
only true in universal theory, but much more important than is always
remembered in special theory or practice. The possibility of promoting
freedom or well-being by compulsion depends very greatly indeed on the
unity of habit and experience which binds together a single community.
The more the life has in common, the more definite and automatic
arrangements you may safely make in promotion of it. The rules of my
household, which inconvenience its members no more than their clothes
do, would produce a rebellion if they were enforced by law even
throughout our village. Thus, then, we may maintain our principle of the
limits of distinctive State action. The peculiarity of it is that it
allows of positive acts and interferences, motived by an ultimate
positive purpose, but with a bearing on that purpose which is primarily
negative or indirect. However positive, as actual facts, are the
conditions which it may become advisable to maintain, they may always,
on the side which is distinctively due to State compulsion, be regarded
as the hindrance of hindrances. And the bona-fide application of this

principle will really be, when aided by special experience, in some
degree a valuable clue to what ought to be done. It is only putting in
other words the rule of action followed by all practical men in matters
of which they have genuine experience. We may think, for instance, of
the problem involved in State maintenance of universities. It is easy to
vote money, to build buildings, and to pass statutes. But none of these
things will secure the objects of a university. Money and buildings and
statutes may throw open an arena, so to speak, for the work of willing
minds in learning and education. But the work itself is in a different
medium from anything which can be produced by compulsion, and is so far
less vital as it is conditioned by the operation of force upon minds
which demand no work of the kind. But here we meet a difficulty of
principle. Do we say that no external conditions are more than
hindrances of hindrances to the best life? Do we deny that the best life
can be positively promoted by external conditions; or if we admit this,
do we still deny that it can be positively promoted by the work of the
State? The answer has already been implied, but may be explicitly
restated. We refused to separate mind from its embodiment in material
things, and so to be drawn into a purely inward theory of morality. It
would be exaggeration to call such external conditions as, e.g.,
first-rate educational apparatus, mere negative

conditions of the best life. But then, we are now asked, cannot the
State supply such external conditions by expenditure compulsorily
provided for, and if so, is not our principle destroyed, viz., the
limitation of State action to the hindrance of hindrances? The
difficulty springs from the fact, that the State, as using compulsion,
is only one side of Society, and its action is only one side of social
action. If first- rate educational apparatus is called into existence by
a State endowment, the first-rateness of the apparatus is not due to the
compulsion applied to taxpayers, which rather, so far, negatives the
action of intelligent will as such. But it must be due, in one way or
another, to the fact that first-rate ability in the way of devising
apparatus was somewhere pressing for an outlet, which, by a stroke of
the pickaxe, so to speak, the public power was able to provide for it.
We must not confuse the element of compulsion, which is the side of
social action distinctly belonging to State interference, with the whole
of the material results which liberated intelligence produces. When we
say, then, that the State as such can do nothing for the best life but
hinder hindrances to it, the principle applies in the strictest sense
only to the compulsory or automatic side of State action, which must, so
to speak, be reckoned against it in comparing its products with those
which are spontaneous social growths throughout. But it is further true
that material conditions which come close to life, such as houses, wages,

educational apparatus, do not wholly escape our principle. They occupy a
very interesting middle region between mere hindrances of hindrances and
the actual stimulation of mind and will. On the one side they are
charged with mind and character, and so far are actual elements in the
best life. On the other side they depend on external actions, and
therefore seem accessible to State compulsion, which extends to all
external doings and omissions. But what we have to observe is, and it is
in practice most important, that, as charged with mind and will, these
material facts may not be accessible to State compulsion, while, as
accessible to State compulsion pure and simple, they may forfeit their
character of being charged with mind and will. This shows itself in two
ways. First, just because they are facts of a kind which come so close
to life (in other words depend so greatly upon being charged with mind
and will), State compulsion cannot with certainty secure even their
apparent existence. They fail bodily, like human beings, if there is no
spirit to keep them alive. The relation of wages to the standard of life
illustrates this point. Secondly, supposing that for a time, by
herculean efforts of compulsion, which must call active intelligence to
its aid, such facts are made to present a satisfactory appearance of
existence, none the less, so far as they are characterised by
compulsion, they may lose their character as elements in the best life.
That is to say, they may fail to benefit those whom they are meant to
benefit. The fact may fail to be absorbed in the life. The principle of
the hindrance of hindrances is most valuable and luminous when rightly

grasped, just in these middle cases. A pretty and healthy house, which
its inhabitant is fond of, is an element in the best life. Who could
doubt it who knows what home-life is? But in order that putting a family
out of a bad house into a good one should give rise to such an element
of the best life, it is strictly and precisely necessary that the case
or policy should come under our principle. That is to say, unless there
was a better life struggling to utter itself, and the deadlift of
interference just removed an obstacle which bound it down, the good
house will not be an element in a better life, and the encroachment on
the ground of volition will have been made without compensation--a fact
which may show itself in many fatal ways. If, on the other hand, the
struggling tendency to a better life has power to effect the change
without the deadlift from outside, then the result is certain and wholly
to the good. Thus we may say that every law and institution, every
external fact maintained by the public power, must be judged by the
degree in which it sets at liberty a growth of mind and spirit. It is a
problem partly of removing obstacles to growth, and partly of the
division of labour between consciousness and automatism. It ought to
occur to the reader that the ground here assigned for the limitation of
State action--that is, of social action through the public power--is not
prima facie in harmony with the

account of political obligation, according to which laws and
institutions represented a real self or general will, recognised by
individuals as implied in the common good which was imperative upon
them. We spoke, for example, of being forced to be free, and of the
system of law and order as representing the higher self. And yet we are
now saying that, in as far as force is operative through compulsion and
authoritative suggestion, it is a means which can only reach its end
through a negation. But this prima-facie contradiction is really a proof
of the vitality of our principle. It follows from the fact that we
accept self-government in the full strength of both its factors, and can
deal with it on this basis. The social system under which we live,
taking it as one which does not demand immediate revolution, represents
the general will and higher self as a whole to the community as a whole,
and can only stand by virtue of that representation being recognised.
Our loyalty to it makes us men and citizens, and is the main
spiritualising force of our lives. But something in all of us, and much
in some of us, is recalcitrant through rebellion, indolence,
incompetence, or ignorance. And it is only on these elements that the
public power operates as power, through compulsion or authoritative
suggestion. Thus, the general will when it meets us as force, and
authority resting on force, and not as a social suggestion which we
spontaneously rise to accept, comes to us ex hypothesi as something
which claims to be ourself, but which, for the moment, we more or less
fail to recognise. And, according to the adjustment

between it and our complex and largely unintelligent self, it may
abandon us to automatism, or stir in us rebellion or recognition, and so
may hinder the fuller life in us or remove hindrances to it. It seems
worth while to distinguish two main cases of the relation between the
ordinary self and the general will. One of these cases covers the whole
of our every-day law- abiding life, in its grades of active loyalty,
acceptance of suggestion, and automatic acquiescence; and consists of
the relation of our ordinary self to the general system of rights
maintained by the State as ultimate regulator and arbiter. The other is
confined to more exceptional situations, and has to do with collision
between the particular and the general will, as treated in the theory of
punishment. The subject of reward may be mentioned at the same time, if
only to show why it is almost an empty heading in political theory. We
will end this chapter, therefore, with a general account of the system
of rights and of reward and punishment. 6. The idea of individual rights
comes down to us from the doctrine of natural right, and has generally
been discussed with reference to it. We need not now go back upon the
illusions connected with the notion of natural right. It is enough if we
bear in mind that we inherit from it the important idea of a positive
law which is what it ought to be. A right, then, has both a legal and a
moral reference. It is a claim which can be enforced at law, which no
moral imperative can be; but it is also recognised to be a claim which
ought to be

capable of enforcement at law, and thus it has a moral aspect. The case
in which positive enactment and the moral "ought" appear to diverge will
be considered below. But a typical "right" unites the two sides. It both
is, and ought to be, capable of being enforced at law. Its peculiar
position follows from what we have seen to be the end of the State, and
the means at its disposal. The end of the State is a moral purpose,
imperative on its members. But its distinctive action is restricted to
removing hindrances to the end, that is, to lending its force to
overcome--both in mind and in externals essential to mind--obstacles
which otherwise would obstruct the realisation of the end. The whole of
the conditions thus enforced is the whole of "rights" attaching to the
selves, who, standing in definite relations, constitute the community.
For it is in these selves that the end of the State is real, and it is
by maintaining and regulating their claims to the removal of
obstructions that the State is able to promote the end for which it
exists. Rights then are claims recognised by the State, i.e. by Society
acting as ultimate authority, to the maintenance of conditions
favourable to the best life. And if we ask in general for a definition
and limitation of State action as such, the answer is, in a simple
phrase, that State action is coincident with the maintenance of rights.
The system of rights which the State maintains may be regarded from
different points of view. First, (a) from the point of view of the whole
community, that is, as the general result in the promotion of good life
obtained by the working

of a free Society, as a statesman or outside critic might regard it.
Thus looked at, the system of rights may be described as "the organic
whole of the outward conditions necessary to the rational life," or
"that which is really necessary to the maintenance of material
conditions essential to the existence and perfection of human
personality." This point of view is essential as a full contradiction of
that uncritical conception by which rights are regarded as something
with which the individual is invested in his aspect of isolation, and
independently of his relation to the end. It forces us away from this
false particularisation, and compels us to consider the whole
State-maintained order in its connectedness as a single expression of a
common good or will, in so far as such a good can find utterance in a
system of external acts and habits. And it enables us to weigh the value
which belongs to the maintenance of any tolerable social order, simply
because it is an order, and so far enables life to be lived, and a
determinate, if limited, common good to be realised. From other points
of view we are apt to neglect this characteristic, and to forget how
great is the effect, for the possibilities of life throughout, of the
mere fact that a social order exists. Hegel observes that a man thinks
it a matter of course that he goes back to his house after night-fall in
security. He does not reflect to what he owes it. Yet this very
naturalness, so to speak, of living in a social order is perhaps the

most important foundation which the State can furnish to the better
life. "Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice." If we ask how it affects our
will, the answer is that it forms our world. Speaking broadly, the
members of a civilised community have seen nothing but order in their
lives, and could not accommodate their action to anything else. It
should be mentioned as a danger of this point of view that, fascinated
by the spectacle of the social fabric as a whole, we may fail to
distinguish what in it is the mere maintenance of rights, and what is
the growth which such maintenance can promote but cannot constitute.
Thus we may lose all idea of the true limits of State action. (b) We may
regard this complex of rights from the standpoint of the selves or
persons who compose the community. It is in these selves, as we have
seen, that the social good is actual, and it is to their differentiated
functions, which constitute their life and the end of the community,
that the sub-groupings of rights, or conditions of good life, have to be
adjusted each to each like suits of clothes. The rights are, from this
point of view, primarily the external incidents, so far as maintained by
law--the authoritative vesture as it were--of a person's position in the
world of his community. And we shall do well to regard the nature of
rights, as attaching to selves or persons, from this point of view of a
place or position in the order determined by law. It has been argued, I
do not know with what justice, that, in considering the relations of
particles in space, the proper course would be to

regard their positions or distances from each other as the primary fact,
and to treat attributions of attractive and repulsive forces as modes of
expressing the maintenance of the necessary positions rather than as
descriptive of real causes which bring it about. At least, it appears to
me, such a conception may well be applied to the relative ideas of right
and obligation. What comes first, we may say, is the position, the place
or places, function or functions, determined by the nature of the best
life as displayed in a certain community, and the capacity of the
individual self for a unique contribution to that best life. Such places
and functions are imperative; they are the fuller self in the particular
person, and make up the particular person as he passes into the fuller
self. His hold on this is his true will, in other words, his
apprehension of the general will. Such a way of speaking may seem
unreally simplified when we look at the myriad relations of modern life
and the sort of abstraction by which the individual is apt to become a
rolling stone with no assignable place--indeed "gathering no moss"--and
to pass through his positions and relations as if they were stations on
a railway journey. But in truth it is only simplified and not falsified.
If we look with care we shall see that it, or nothing, is true of all
lives. The Position, then, is the real fact--the vocation, place or
function, which is simply one reading of the person's actual self and
relations in the world in which he lives. Having thoroughly grasped this
primary fact, we can readily deal with the points of view which present
the position or its incidents in the partial aspects of rights or
obligations.

(i.) A right, we said, is a claim recognised by society and enforced by
the State. My place or position, then, and its incidents, so far as
sanctioned by the State, constitute my rights, when thought of as
something which I claim, or regard as powers instrumental to my
purposes. A right thus regarded is not anything primary. It is a way of
looking at certain conditions, which, by reason of their relation to the
end of the whole as manifested in me, are imperative alike for me and
for others. It is, further, the particular way of looking at these
conditions which is in question when I claim them or am presumed to
claim them, as powers secured to me with a view to an end which I accept
as mine. I have the rights no less in virtue of my presumed capacity for
the end, if I am in fact indifferent to the end. But, in this case,
though attributed ab extra as rights, they tend to pass into
obligations. (ii.) If rights are an imperative "position" or function,
when looked at as a group of State-secured powers claimed by a person
for a certain end, obligations are the opposite aspect of such a
position or group of powers. That is to say, the conditions of a
"position" are regarded as obligations in as far as they are thought of
as requiring enforcement, and therefore primarily, from the point of
view of persons not directly identified with the "position" or end to
which they are instrumental. Rights are claimed, obligations are owed.
And prima-facie rights are claimed by a person, and obligations are owed
to a person, being his rights as regarded by those against whom they are
enforceable.

Thus, the distinction of self and others, which we refused to take as
the basis of society, makes itself prominent in the region of
compulsion. The reason is that compulsion is confined to hindering or
producing external acts, and is excluded from producing an act in its
relation to a moral end, that is, the exercise of a right in its true
sense; though it can enforce an act which in fact favours the
possibility of acting towards a moral end--that is, an obligation. This
is the same thing as saying that normally a right is what I claim, and
the obligation relative to it is what you owe; as an obligation is that
which can be enforced, and that is an act or omission apart from the
willing of an end; and a right involves what cannot be enforced, viz.,
the relation of an act to an end in a person's will. But even here the
distinction of self and others is hardly ultimate. The obligation on me
to maintain my parents becomes almost a right if I claim the task as a
privilege. And many rights of my position may actually be erected into,
or more commonly may give rise to, obligations incumbent on me for the
sake of my position or function. If the exercise of the franchise were
made compulsory that would

be a right treated also as an obligation; but it might be urged that qua
obligation it was held due to the position of others, and only qua right
to my own "position." But if the law interferes with my poisoning myself
either by drains or with alcohol, that, I presume, is the enforcement of
an obligation arising out of my own position and function as a man and a
citizen, which makes reasonable care for my life imperative upon me. (c)
It is commonly said that every right implies a duty. This has two
meanings, which should be distinguished. In the one case, (i.) for
"duty" should be read "obligation," i.e. a demand enforceable by law.
This simply means that every "position" may be regarded as involving
either powers secured or conditions enforced, which are one and the same
thing differently looked at. Roughly speaking, they are the same thing
as differently looked at by one person, and by other persons. My right
to walk along the high road involves an obligation upon all other
persons not to obstruct me, and in the last resort the State will send
horse, foot and artillery rather than let me be causelessly obstructed
in walking along the high road. It is also true that every position
which can be the source of obligations enforceable in favour of my
rights is likewise a link with obligations enforceable

on me in favour of the rights of others. By claiming a right in virtue
of my position I recognise and testify to the general system of law
according to which I am reciprocally under obligation to respect the
rights, or rather the function and position of others. My rights then
imply obligations both in others, and perhaps in myself, correlative to
these rights, and in me correlative to the rights of others. But it
cannot strictly be said that the obligations are the source of the
rights, or the rights of the obligations. Both are the varied external
conditions of "positions" as regarded from different points of view. But
(ii.) there is a different sense in which every right implies a duty.
And this, the true meaning of the phrase, is involved in what we have
said of the nature of a "position." All rights, as claims which both are
and ought to be enforceable by law, derive their imperative authority
from their relation to an end which enters into the better life. All
rights, then, are powers instrumental to making the best of human
capacities, and can only be recognised or exercised upon this ground. In
this sense, the duty is the purpose with a view to which the right is
secured, and not merely a corresponding obligation equally derived from
a common ground; and the right and duty are not distinguished as
something claimed by self and something owed to others, but the duty as
an imperative purpose, and the right as a power secured because
instrumental to it. (d) We have treated rights throughout as claims, the
enforcement of which by the State is merely

the climax of their recognition by society. Why do we thus demand
recognition for rights? If we deny that there can be unrecognised
rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular
caprice? (i.) In dealing with the general question why recognition is
demanded as an essential of rights, we must remember what we took to be
the nature of society and the source of obligation. We conceived a
society to be a structure of intelligences so related as to co- operate
with and to imply one another. We took the source of obligation to lie
in the fact that the logic of the whole is operative in every part, and
consequently that every part has a reality which goes beyond its average
self, and identifies it with the whole, making demands upon it in doing
so. Now, we are said to "recognise" anything when it comes to us with a
consciousness of familiarity, as something in which we feel at home. And
this is our general attitude to the demands which the logic of the
whole, implied in our every act, is continuously making upon us. It is
involved in the interdependence of minds, which has been explained to
constitute the mind of which the visible community is the body. A
teacher's behaviour towards his pupils, for example, implies a certain
special kind of interdependence between their minds. What he can do for
them is conditioned by what they expect of him and are ready to do for
him, and vice versa. The relation of each to the other is a special form
of "recognition." That is to say, the mind of each has a definite and
positive attitude towards that of

the other, which is based on, or rather, so far as it goes, simply is,
the relation of their "positions" to each other. Thus, social positions
or vocations actually have their being in the medium of recognition.
They are the attitudes of minds towards one another, through which their
several distinct characteristics are instrumental to a common good.
Thus, then, a right, being a power secured in order to fill a position,
is simply a part of the fact that such a position is recognised as
instrumental to the common good. It is impossible to argue that the
position may exist, and not be recognised. For we are speaking of a
relation of minds, and, in so far as minds are united into a single
system by their attitudes towards each other, their "positions" and the
recognition of them are one and the same thing. Their attitude,
receptive, co- operative, tolerant, and the like, is so far a
recognition, though not necessarily a reflective recognition. Probably
this is what is intended by those who speak of imitation or other
analogous principles as the ultimate social fact. They do not mean the
repetition of another person's conduct, though that may enter in part
into the relation of interdependence. They mean the conscious adoption
of an attitude towards others, embodying the relations between the
"positions" which social logic assigns to each. (ii.) But then the
question of page 211 presses upon us--"If we deny that there can be

unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or
to popular caprice?" The sting of this suggestion is taken out when we
thoroughly grasp the idea that recognition is a matter of logic, working
on and through experience, and not of choice or fancy. If my mind has no
attitude to yours, there is no interdependence and I cannot be a party
to securing you rights. You are not, for me, a sharer in a capacity for
a common good, which each of us inevitably respects. A dog or a tree may
be an instrument to the good life, and it may therefore be right to
treat it in a certain way, but it cannot be a subject of rights. If my
mind has an attitude to yours, then there is certainly a recognition
between us, and the nature of that recognition and what it involves are
matters for reasoning and for the appeal to experience. It is idle for
me, for instance, to communicate with you by language or to buy and sell
with you, perhaps even idle to go to war with you, and still to say that
I recognise no capacity in you for a common good. My behaviour is then
inconsistent with itself, and the question takes the form what rights
are involved in the recognition of you which experience demonstrates. No
person and no society is consistent with itself, and the proof and
amendment of their inconsistency is always possible. And, one
inconsistency being amended, the path is opened to progress by the
emergence of another. If slaves come to be recognised as free but not as
citizens, this of itself opens a road by which the new freeman

may make good his claim that it is an inconsistency not to recognise him
as a citizen. But no right can be founded on my mere desire to do what I
like. The wish for this is the sting of the claim to unrecognised
rights, and this wish is to be met, as the fear that our view might lead
to despotism was met. The matter is one of fact and logic, not of
fancies and wishes. If I desire to assert an unrecognised right, I must
show what "position" involves it, and how that position asserts itself
in the system of recognitions which is the social mind, and my point can
only be established universally with regard to a certain type of
position, and not merely for myself as a particular A or B. In other
words, I must show that the alleged right is a requirement of the
realisation of capacities for good, and, further, that it does not
demand a sacrifice of capacities now being realised, out of proportion
to the capacities which it would enable to assert themselves. I must
show, in short, that in so far as the claim in question is not secured
by the State, Society is inconsistent with itself, and falls short of
being what it professes to be, an organ of good life. And all my showing
gives no right, till it has modified the law. To maintain a right
against the State by force or disobedience is rebellion, and, in
considering the duty of rebellion, we have to set the whole value of the
existence of social order against the importance of the matter in which
we think Society defective. There can hardly be a duty to rebellion in a
State in which law can be altered by constitutional process.

The State-maintained system of rights, then, in its relation to the
normal self and will of ordinary citizens with their varying moods of
enthusiasm and indolence, may be compared to the automatic action of a
human body. Automatic actions are such as we perform in walking, eating,
dressing, playing the piano or riding the bicycle. They have been formed
by consciousness, and are of a character subservient to its purposes,
and obedient to its signals. As a rule, they demand no effort of
attention, and in this way attention is economised and enabled to devote
itself to problems which demand its intenser efforts. They are relegated
to automatism because they are uniform, necessary, and
external--"external" in the sense explained above, that the way in which
they are required makes it enough if they are done, whatever their
motives, or with no motives at all. By far the greater bulk of the
system of rights is related in this way to normal consciousness. We may
pay taxes, abstain from fraud and assault, use the roads and the
post-office, and enjoy our general security, without knowing that we are
doing or enjoying anything that demands special attention. Partly, of
course, attention is being given by other consciousnesses to maintaining
the securities and facilities of our life. Even so, the arrangement is
automatic in so far as there is no reason for arousing the general
attention in respect to it; but to a varying extent it is automatic
throughout, and engrained in the system and habits of the whole people.
We are all supposed to know the whole law. Not even a judge has it all
in his knowledge at any one time; but the meaning is

that it roughly expresses our habits, and we live according to it
without great difficulty, and expect each other to do so. This
automatism is not harmful, but absolutely right and necessary, so long
as we relegate to it only "external" matters; i.e. such as are necessary
to be done, motive or no motive, in some way which can be generally laid
down. Thus used, it is an indispensable condition of progress. It
represents the ground won and settled by our civilisation, and leaves us
free to think and will such matters as have their value in and through
being thought and willed rightly. If we try to relegate these to
automatism, then moral and intellectual death has set in. But if the
system of rights is automatic, how can it rest on recognition? Automatic
actions, we must remember, are still of a texture, so to speak,
continuous with consciousness. "Recognition" expresses very fairly our
habitual attitude towards them in ourselves and others. We might think,
for example, of the system of habits and expectations which forms our
household routine. We go through it for the most part automatically,
while "recognising" the "position" of those who share it with us, and
respecting the life which is its end. At points here and there in which
it affects the deeper possibilities of our being, our attention becomes
active, and we assert our position with enthusiasm and
conscientiousness. Our attitude to the social system of rights is
something like this. The whole order has our habitual recognition; we
are aware of and respect more or less the imperative end on which it
rests--the claim of a common good upon us all. Within the

framework of this order there is room for all degrees of laxity and
conscientiousness; but, in any case, it is only at certain points, which
either concern our special capacity or demand readjustment in the
general interest, that intense active attention is possible or
desirable. The view here taken of automatism and attention in the social
whole impairs neither the unity of intelligence throughout society nor
the individual's recognition of this unity as a self liable to be
opposed to his usual self. As to the former point, every individual mind
shows exactly the same phenomena, of a continuum largely automatic, and
thoroughly alive only in certain regions, connected, but not thoroughly
coherent. As to the latter point, permeation of the individual by the
habits of social automatism does not prevent, but rather gives material
for, his tendency to abstract himself from the whole, and to frame an
attitude for himself inconsistent with his true "position," against
which tendency the imperative recognition of his true self has
constantly to be exerted. 7. We have finally to deal with the actual
application by the State of its ultimate resource for the maintenance of
rights, viz., force. Superior force may be exercised upon human nature
both by rewards and by punishments. In both respects its exercise by the
State would fall generally within the lines of automatism; that is to
say, it would be a case of the promotion of an end by means other than
the influence of an idea of that end upon the will. But, owing to the
subtle continuity of human nature throughout all its phases, we shall
find that there is something

more than this to be said, and that the idea of the end is operative in
a peculiar way just where the agencies that promote it appear to be most
alien and mechanical. In so far as this is the case, the general theory
of the negative character of State action has to be modified, as we
foresaw, by the theory of punishment. Prima facie, however, it is true
that reward and punishment belong to the automatic element of social
life. They arise in no direct relation of the will to the end. They are
a reaction of the automatic system, instrumental to the end, against a
friction or obstacle which intrudes upon it, or (in the case of rewards)
upon the opposite of a friction or obstacle. There is no object in
pressing a comparison into every detail; but perhaps, as social and
individual automatism do really bear the same kind of relation to
consciousness, it may be pointed out that reward and punishment
correspond in some degree to the pleasures and pains of a high-class
secondary automatism, say of riding or of reading, i.e. of something
specially conducive to enhanced life. Such activities bring pleasure
when unimpeded, and pain when sharply interrupted by a start or blunder
which jars upon us. Putting this latter case in language which carries
out the analogy to punishment, we might say that the formed habit of
action, unconsciously or semi- consciously relevant to the end or fuller
life, is obstructed by some partial start of mind, and their conflict is
accompanied with recognition, pain, and vexation. "What a fool I was,"
we exclaim, "to ride carelessly at that corner," or "to

let that plan for a holiday interrupt me in my morning's reading." It
may seem remarkable that reward plays a small and apparently decreasing
part in the self-management of society by the public power. To the naive
Athenian, it seemed a natural instrument for the encouragement of public
spirit, probably rather by a want of discrimination between motives than
by a real belief in political selfishness. In European countries honours
still appear to play a considerable part, but on analysis it would be
found less than it seems. Partly they are recognitions of important
functions, and thus conditions rather than rewards. To a great extent,
again, they recognise existing facts, and are rather consequences of the
respect which society feels for certain types of life (with very curious
results in regions where the general mind is inexperienced, e.g. in fine
art) than means employed to regulate the conduct of citizens. We should
think a soldier mean whose aim was a peerage, still more a poet or an
artist. I hardly know that rewards adjudged by the State, as distinct
from compensations, exist in the United States of America. Rewards then
fill no place correlative to that of punishments, and the reason seems
plain. Punishment corresponds much better to the negative method which
alone

is open to the State for the maintenance of rights. For Punishment
proclaims its negative character, and no one can suppose it laudable
simply to be deterred from wrong-doing by fear of punishment. But though
precisely the same principle applies to meritorious actions done with a
view to reward, an illusion is almost certain to arise which will hide
the principle in this case. For, if reward is largely used as an
inducement to actions conducive to the best life, it is almost certain
that it will be used as an inducement to actions, the value and
certainty of which depend on the state of will to which they are due.
And then the distinction between getting them done, motive or no motive,
which is the true region of State action, and their being done with a
certain motive, which is necessary to give them either the highest
practical or any moral value, is pretty sure to be obliterated, and the
range of the moral will trenched upon in its higher portion and with a
constant tendency to self-deception. It is the same truth in other words
when we point out that, taking reward and punishment, as interferences,
only to deal with exceptional cases, reward would deal with the
exceptionally good. Therefore, again, reward must either make an
impossible attempt to deal with all the normal as good, which involves
the danger of de-moralising

the whole of normal life, or must take the line of specially promoting
what is exceptionally conducive to good life; in which case confusion is
certain to arise from interference with the delicate middle class of
external actions analysed above. And thus it is only what we should
expect when we find that States having no damnosa hereditas of a craving
for personal honours are hardly acquainted with the bestowal of rewards
by the public power. It will be sufficient, then, to complete the
account of State action in maintenance of rights by some account of the
nature and principles of punishment. And we may profitably begin by
recalling M. Durkheim's suggestion, which was mentioned in a former
chapter. Punishment, he observes, from the simplest and most actual
point of view, includes in itself all those sides which theory has
tended to regard as incompatible. It is, in essence, simply the reaction
of a strong and determinate collective sentiment against an act which
offends it. It is idle to include such a reaction entirely under the
head either of reformation, or of retaliation, or of prevention. An
aggression is ipso facto a sign of character, an injury, and a menace;
and the reaction against it is equally ipso facto an attempt to affect
character, a retaliation against an injury, and a deterrent or
preventive against a menace. When we fire up at aggression it is pretty
much a chance whether we say "I am going to teach him better manners,"
or "I am going to serve him out," or "I am going to see that he doesn't
do that again." A consideration of each of these

aspects is necessary to do justice both to the theories and to the
facts. i. An obvious point of view, and the first perhaps to appear in
philosophy, though strongly opposed to early law, is that the aim of
punishment is to make the offender good. As test of the adequacy of this
doctrine by itself, the question may be put, "If pleasures would cure
the offender, ought he to be given pleasures?" The doctrine, however,
does not, by any means, altogether incline to leniency. For it carries
as a corollary the extirpation of the incurable, which Plato proposes in
a passage of singularly modern quality, when he suggests the
co-operation of judges and physicians in maintaining the moral and
physical health of society. The first comment that occurs to us is, that
by a mere medical treatment of the offender, including or consisting of
pleasant conditions, if helpful to his cure, the interest of society
seems to be disregarded. What is to become of the maintenance of rights,
if aggressors have to anticipate a pleasant or lenient "cure"? It may be
true that brutal punishments stimulate a criminal temper in the people
rather than check it; but it is a long way from this to laying down that
there is no need for terror to be associated with crime. To suppose that
pleasures may simply act throughout as pains, is playing with words and
throws no light on the question. If we leave words their meaning, we
must say that punishment must be deterrent for others as well as
reformatory for the offender, and therefore in some degree painful. It
is true, however, that the offender, as a human being, and

presumably capable of a common good, has, as Green puts it,
"reversionary rights" of humanity, and these, punishment must so far as
possible respect. But there is a deeper difficulty. If the reformation
theory is to be seriously distinguished from the other theories of
punishment, it has a meaning which is unjust to the offender himself. It
implies that his offence is a merely natural evil, like disease, and can
be cured by therapeutic treatment directed to removing its causes. But
this is to treat him not as a human being; to treat him as a "patient,"
not as an agent; to exclude him from the general recognition that makes
us men. (If the therapeutic treatment includes a recognition and
chastisement of the offender's bad will--the form of which chastisement
may, of course, be very variously modified--then there is no longer
anything to distinguish the reformatory theory from other theories of
punishment.) It has been lately pointed out what a confusion is involved
in the claim that beings, who are irresponsible and so incapable of
guilt, are therefore in the strict sense innocent. Here are the true
objects for a pure reformatory theory. Here that may freely be done, as
to creatures incapable of rights, which is kindest for them and safest
for society, from quasi-medical treatment to extirpation. There is no
guilt in them to demand punishment, but

there is no human will in them to have the rights of innocence. But,
applied to responsible human beings, such a theory, if really kept to
its distinctive contention, is an insult. It leads to the notion that
the State may take hold of any man, whose life or ideas are thought
capable of improvement, and set to work to ameliorate them by forcible
treatment. There is no true punishment except where one is an offender
against a system of rights which he shares, and therefore against
himself. And such an offender has a right to the recognition of his
hostile will; it is inhuman to treat him as a wild animal or a child,
whom we simply mould to our aims. Without such a recognition, to be
punished is not, according to the old Scotch phrase, to be "justified."
ii. The idea of retaliation or retribution, though in history the oldest
conception of punishment, may be taken in theory as a protest against
the conception that punishment is only a means for making a man better.
Its strong point is its definite idea of the offender. The offender is a
responsible person, belonging to a certain order which he recognises as
entering into him and as entered into by him, and he has made actual an
intention hostile to this order. He has, as Plato's Socrates insists in
the Crito, destroyed the order so far as in him lies. In other words, he
has violated the system of rights which the State exists to maintain,
and by which alone he and others are secured in the exercise of any

capacity for good, this security consisting in their reciprocal respect
for the system. His hostile will stands up and defies the right, in so
far as his personality is asserted through a tangible deed which
embodies the wrong. It is necessary, then, that the power which
maintains the system of rights should not merely, if possible, undo the
external harm which has been done, but should strike down the hostile
will which has defied the right by doing that harm. The end or true self
is in the medium of mind and will, and is contradicted and nullified so
far as a hostile will is permitted to triumph. It is obvious, however,
that the means by which the hostile will can be negatived fall prima
facie within the region of automatism. The recalcitrant element of
consciousness is not susceptible to the end as an idea, or it would not
be recalcitrant. The end can here assert itself, agreeably to the
general principle of State action, only through external action the
mental effects of which cannot be precisely estimated. It might,
therefore, seem that the pain produced by the reaction of the automatic
system on the aberrant consciousness-- the punishment--was simply a
natural pain, which might act as a deterrent from aberration, but had no
visible connection with the true whole or end for the mind of the
offender. We shall speak below of the sense in which punishment is
deterrent or preventive. But it is to be noted at this point that a
high-class secondary automatism, with which all along we have compared
the system of rights as engrained in the habits of a people, retains a
very close connection with

consciousness. We do not indeed will every step that we walk, but we
only walk while we will to walk, and so with the whole system of routine
automatism which is the method and organ of our daily life. At any
interruption, any hindrance or failure, consciousness starts up, and the
end of the whole routine comes sharply back upon us through our
aberration. So it is with punishment. Primarily, no doubt, chastisement
by pain, and the appeal to fear and to submissiveness, is effective
through our lower nature, and, in as far as operative, substitutes
selfish motives for the will that wills the good, and so narrows its
sphere. But there is more behind. The automatic system is pulsing with
the vitality of the end to which it is instrumental; and when we kick
against the pricks, and it reacts upon us in pain, this pain has subtle
connections throughout the whole of our being. It brings us to our
senses, as we say; that is, it suggests, more or less, a consciousness
of what the habitual system means, and of what we have committed in
offending against it. When one stumbles and hurts his foot, he may look
up and see that he is off the path. If a man is told that the way he
works his factory or keeps his tenement houses is rendering him liable
to fine or imprisonment, then, if he is an ordinary, careless, but
respectable citizen, he will feel something of a shock, and recognise
that he was getting too neglectful of the rights of others, and that, in
being pulled up, he is brought back to himself. His citizen honour will
be touched. He will not like to be below the average which the common
conscience had embodied in law.

When we come to the actual criminal consciousness, the form which the
recognition may take in fact may vary greatly; and as an extreme there
may be a furious hostility against the whole recognised system of law,
either involving self-outlawry through a despair of reconciliation, or
arising through some sort of habitual conspiracy in which the man finds
his chosen law and order as against that recognised by the State. But
after all, we are dealing with a question of social logic and not of
empirical psychology. And it must be laid down that, in as far as any
sane man fails altogether to recognise in any form the assertion of
something which he normally respects in the law which punishes him
(putting aside what he takes to be miscarriage of justice), he is
outlawed by himself and the essentials of citizenship are not in him.
Doubtless, if an uneducated man were told, in theoretical language, that
in being punished for an assault he was realising his own will, he would
think it cruel nonsense. But this is a mere question of language, and
has really nothing to do with the essential state of his consciousness.
He would understand perfectly well that he was being served as he would
say anyone should be served, whom he saw acting as he had done, in a
case where his own passions were not engaged. And this recognition, in
whatever form it is admitted, carries the consequence which we affirm.
In short, then, compulsion through punishment and the fear of it, though
primarily acting on the

lower self, does tend, when the conditions of true punishment exist
(i.e. the reaction of a system of rights violated by one who shares in
it), to a recognition of the end by the person punished, and may so far
be regarded as his own will, implied in the maintenance of a system to
which he is a party, returning upon himself in the form of pain. And
this is the theory of punishment as retributive. The test doctrine of
the theory may be found in Kant's saying that, even though a society
were about to be dissolved by agreement, the last murderer in prison
must be executed before it breaks up. The punishment is, so to speak,
his right, of which he must not be defrauded. There are two natural
perversions of this theory. The first is to confuse the necessary
retribution or reaction of the general self, through the State, with
personal vengeance. Even in the vulgar form, when a brutal murder evokes
a general desire to have the offender served out, the general or social
indignation is not the same as the selfish desire for revenge. It is the
offspring of a rough notion of law and humanity, and of the feeling that
a striking aggression upon them demands to be strikingly put down. Such
a sentiment is a part of the consciousness which maintains the system of
rights, and can hardly be absent where that consciousness is strong. The
second perversion consists in the superstition that punishment should be
"equivalent" to

offence. In a sense, we have seen, it is identical; i.e. it is a return
of the offender's act upon himself by a connection inevitable in a moral
organism. But as for equivalence of pain inflicted, either with the pain
caused by the offence or with its guilt, the State knows nothing of it
and has no means of securing it. It cannot estimate either pain or moral
guilt. Punishment cannot be adapted to factors which cannot be known.
And further, the attempt to punish for immorality has evils of its own.
The graduation of punishments must depend on wholly different
principles, which we will consider in speaking of punishment as
preventive or deterrent. iii. The graduation of punishments must be
almost entirely determined by experience of their operation as
deterrents. It is to be borne in mind, indeed, (i.) that the
"reversionary rights" of humanity in the offender are not to be
needlessly sacrificed, and (ii.) that the true essence of punishment, as
punishment, the negation of the offender's anti-social will, is in some
way to be secured. But these conditions are included in the preventive
or deterrent theory of punishment, if completely understood; if, that is
to say, it is made clear precisely what it is that is to be prevented.
if we speak of punishment, then, as having for its aim to be deterrent
or preventive, we must not understand this to mean that a majority, or
any persons in power, may rightly prevent, by the threat of penalties,
any acts that seem to them to be inconvenient.

That which is to be prevented by punishment is a violation of the
State-maintained system of rights by a person who is a party to that
system, and therefore the above-mentioned conditions, implied in a true
understanding of the reformatory and retributive aspects of punishment,
are also involved in it as deterrent. But, this being admitted, we may
add to them the distinctive principle on which a deterrent theory
insists. If a lighter punishment deter as effectively as a heavier, it
is wrong to impose the heavier. For the precise aim of State action is
the maintenance of rights; and if rights are effectively maintained
without the heavier punishment, the aim of the State does not justify
its imposition. It is well known that success in the maintenance of
rights depends not only on the severity of punishments, but also on the
true adjustment of the rights themselves to human ends, and on that
certainty of detecting crime which is a result of efficient government.
And it must always be considered, in dealing with a relative failure of
the deterrent power of punishment in regard to certain offences, whether
a better adjustment of rights or a greater certainty of detection will
not meet the end more effectively than increased severity of punishment.
We have seen that the equivalence of punishment and offence is really a
meaningless superstition. And there is no principle on which punishment
can be rationally graduated, except its deterrent power as learned by
experience. This view corresponds to the true limits of State action as
determined by the means at its disposal compared with the end which is
its justification, and

is therefore, when grasped in its full meaning as not denying the nature
of punishment, the true theory of it. We saw, in speaking of punishment
as retributive, in what sense it can and cannot rest upon a judgment
imputing moral guilt. Of degrees of moral guilt as manifested in the
particular acts of individuals, the State, like all of us, is
necessarily ignorant. But this is not to say that punishment is wholly
divorced from a just moral sentiment. Undoubtedly it implies and rests
upon a disapproval of that hostile attitude to the system of rights
which is implied in the realised intention constituting the violation of
right. Though in practice the distinction between civil and criminal law
in England carries out no thoroughly logical demarcation, yet it is true
on the whole to say with Hegel that, in the matter of a civil action,
there is no violation of right as such, but only a question in whom a
certain right resides; while in a matter of criminal law there is
involved an infraction of right as such, which by implication is a
denial of the whole sphere of law and order. This infraction the general
conscience disapproves, and its disapproval is embodied in a forcible
dealing with the offender, however that dealing may be graduated by
other considerations. I may touch here on an interesting point of
detail, following Green. If punishment is essentially graduated
according to its deterrent power, and not according to moral guilt, how
does it come to pass that "extenuating circumstances" are allowed to
influence sentences? That they do so really, if not nominally, even in
England, there can be no

doubt. Is it not that they indicate a less degree of wickedness in the
offender than the offence in question would normally presuppose? It
would seem that judges themselves are sometimes under this impression.
But it may well be that they act under a right instinct and assign a
wrong reason. For it is impossible to get over the fact that moral
iniquity is something which cannot be really estimated. The true reason
for allowing circumstances which change the character of the act to
influence the sentence is that, in changing its character, they may take
it out of the class of offences to which it prima facie belongs, and
from which men need to be deterred by a recognised amount of severity.
If a man is starving and steals a turnip, his offence, being so
exceptionally conditioned, does not threaten the general right of
property, and does not need to be associated with any high degree of
terror in order to protect that right. A man who steals under no
extraordinary pressure of need does what might become a common practice
if not associated with as much terror as is found by experience to deter
men from theft. It may be said, in some exceptional emergency, "but many
men are now starving; ought not the theft of food, on the principle of
prevention, to be now punished with extreme severity, as otherwise it is
likely to become common?" Or in general, ought not severity to increase
with temptation or provocation, as a greater deterrent is needed to
counterbalance this? The case in which the temptation or provocation is
exceptional has just been dealt with. But if abnormal temptation or
provocation becomes common, as in a famine,

or in some excited condition of public feeling, then it must be
remembered that not one right only, but the system of rights as such, is
what the State has to maintain. If starvation is common, some
readjustment of rights, or at least some temporary protection of the
right to live, is the remedy indicated, and not, or not solely,
increased severity in dealing with theft. If provocation becomes common,
then the rights of those provoked must be remembered, and the
provocation itself perhaps made punishable, like the singing of faction
songs in Ireland. Punishment is to protect rights, not to encourage
wrongs. Thus, we have seen the true nature and aims of punishment as
following from the aim of the State in maintaining the system of rights
instrumental to the fullest life. The three main aspects of punishment
which we have considered are really inseparable, and each, if properly
explained, expands so as to include the others. We may, in conclusion,
sum up the whole theory of State action in the formula which we inherit
from Rousseau--that Sovereignty is the exercise of the General Will.
First. All State action is General in its bearing and justification,
even if particular, or rather concrete, in its details. It is embodied
in a system of rights, and there is no element of it which is not
determined by a bearing upon a public interest. The verification of this
truth, throughout, for example, our English system of public and private

Acts of Parliament, would run parallel to the logical theory of the
Universal Judgment as it passes into Judgments whose subjects are proper
names. But the immediate point is that no rights are absolute, or
detached from the whole, but all have their warrant in the aim of the
whole, which at the same time implies their adjustment and regulation
according to general principles. This generality of law is practically
an immense protection to individuals against arbitrary interference. It
makes every regulation strike a class and not a single person. And,
secondly. All State action is at bottom the exercise of a Will; the real
Will, or the Will as logically implied in intelligences as such, and
more or less recognised as imperative upon them. And, therefore, though
in the form of force it acts through automatism, that is, not directly
as conscious Will, but through a system which gives rise to acts by
influences apparently alien, yet the root and source of the whole
structure is of the nature of Will, and its end, like that of organic
automatism, is to clear the road for true volition; it is "forcing men
to be free." And in so far as by misdirection of the automatic process
it encroaches on the region of living Will--the region where the good
realises itself directly by its own force as a motive--it is "sawing off
the branch on which it sits," and superseding the aim by the instrument.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IX ROUSSEAU'S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT,
FICHTE, HEGEL 1. PROBABLY no other philosophical movement has ever
focussed in itself so much human nature as the post- Kantian Idealism.
It has fallen to the present writer to show elsewhere how the "finding
of Greek art," which it owed to Winckelmann, gave it unrivalled insight
into mind as embodied in objects of sense. Here we have to deal with
another source of its ideas. As we pointed out in the first chapter, the
ethical and political theory of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel springs from the
same Evangel of Jean Jacques from which the French Revolution drew its
formulae. It would not be true to say that it springs from this alone.
Great philosophers know how to fuse the materials they work in; and
particularly the modern abstraction of "freedom" was blended, for Hegel,
with the idea of concrete life through the tradition of the Greek city,
with its affinity for autonomy on the one hand and for beauty on the
other. Nevertheless, few lines of affiliation are better established in
the history of philosophy than that between Rousseau's

declaration that liberty is the quality of man and the philosophy of
Right as it developed from Kant to Hegel. It has been suggested that the
literary intercourse of France, England, and Germany was far closer in
the eighteenth century than it is to-day, in spite of the immense
mechanical development of communication in the interval. National
self-consciousness and the divergent growth of national minds have, it
is urged, raised a barrier between peoples, which existed in the last
century to a far smaller degree. This question of literary history lies
beyond my subject; but at least it seems probable that Rousseau had a
power in Germany which no French writer of to-day could possibly
exercise outside his own country. His educational influence alone forms
a considerable chapter in the history of P?dagogik, and touches closely
on philosophy. Our psychologists of childhood are his spiritual
descendants, and indeed the question of the development of the human
being is closely akin to the question of liberty. His literary
influence, as the prophet of nature and feeling, and the champion of
sentimental

religion against the Philosophes, carried everything before it. He
struck into the path which had been opened in Germany by the translation
of Thomson's Seasons before 1750, and followed by the Swiss critics and
the idyllic poets, who were opponents of the dominant pseudo-classicism.
Jacobi, who passed some years of his youth at Geneva, owed his doctrine
of feeling as the faculty of religious truth in part at least to
Rousseau. Klinger, whose drama, Sturm und Drang, gave its name to the
romantic and naturalist revolution, marked by Goethe's G?tz von
Berlichingen (1773) and Schiller's R?uber (1781), was responsible, we
are told, in later years, for the surprising judgment that Rousseau
(in ?mile) is the young man's best guide through life. Even Schiller and
Herder passed through a period of enthusiastic admiration for Rousseau.
It is exceedingly significant that Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Humanity are addressed expressly to the problem of
reconciling the claims of Nature and of the State upon individual man.
For, when Schiller suggests that the clue to the required reconciliation
between Nature and the State lies in the union of feeling and
intelligence which is found in Beauty, we have before us in a single
focus three main types of experience, from the fusion of which a new
idealism was to emerge.

2. Returning to our immediate subject, the Philosophy of Right, we will
consider for a moment the specific relation of Rousseau's idea of
Freedom to Kantian or post-Kantian thought. It is permissible, perhaps,
to embody the chief part of what has to be said in extracts from works
of great original value and not very generally accessible. Not only the
poets and sentimentalists of Germany, but also the great philosophers,
distinctly recognised the debt of the German genius to the ideas of
Rousseau. The conception of the "Social Contract" has an importance
which surprises the modern reader in the political philosophy of Kant
and more especially of Fichte, and it is not till we come to Hegel that
the literal interpretation of the "Social Contract" is completely
discriminated from the truth conveyed by the doctrine of the General
Will. Apart from all questions about the literal meaning of the "Social
Contract," it is simple fact that the whole political philosophy of
Kant, Hegel, and Fichte is founded on the idea of freedom as the essence
of man, first announced--such was Hegel's distinct judgment--by
Rousseau. I begin by citing the crucial passage from Hegel's History of
Philosophy, which gives in a few lines the basis of his own theory of
Right, as well as his view of Rousseau's position. After explaining that
Rousseau treated the right of Government as on one side, in its
historical aspect, resting on force and compulsion, Hegel

continues, "But the principle of this justification (the `absolute
justification of the State') Rousseau makes the free will, and,
disregarding the positive right (or `law') of States, he answers to the
above question (as to the justification or basis of the State) that man
has free will, seeing that `Freedom is the distinctive quality of man.
To renounce one's freedom, means to renounce one's humanity. Not to be
free is therefore a renunciation of one's human rights, and even of
one's duties.' The slave has neither rights nor duties. Rousseau says,
therefore, `The fundamental problem is to find a form of association
which shall protect and defend at once the person and the property of
every member with the whole common force, and in which each individual,
inasmuch as he attaches himself to this association, obeys only himself,
and remains as free as before. The solution is given by the Social
Contract; it (Rousseau says) is this combination, to which each belongs
through his will. "These principles, thus set up in the abstract, we
cannot but take as correct; yet ambiguity begins at once. Man is free;
this is no doubt the substantive nature of man; and in the State it is
not only not abandoned, but in fact it is therein first established. The
freedom of nature, the capacity of freedom, is not the actual freedom;

for nothing short of the State is the actualisation of freedom. "But the
misunderstanding about the `General Will' begins at the following point.
The notion of Freedom must not be taken in the sense of the casual
free-will of each individual, but in the sense of the reasonable will,
the will in and for itself. The general will is not to be regarded as
compounded of the expressed individual wills, so that these remain
absolute; else the proposition would be true, `where the minority has to
obey the majority, there is no freedom.' Rather the general will must be
the rational will, even though people are not aware of it; the State,
therefore, is no such association as is determined upon by individuals.
"The false apprehension of these principles does not matter to us. What
matters to us is that by their means it comes as a content into
consciousness, that man has in his mind Freedom as the downright
absolute, that the free will is the notion of man. It is just freedom
that is the self of thought; one who repudiates thought and talks of
freedom knows not what he is saying. The oneness of thought with itself
is freedom, the free will. Thought, only taken in the form of will, is
the impulse to break through one's mere subjectivity, is relation to
definite being, realisation of one's

self, inasmuch as I will to make myself as an existent adequate to
myself as thinking. The will is free only as that which thinks. "The
principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite
strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite. This
furnishes the transition to the Kantian philosophy, which, from a
theoretical point of view, took this principle as its basis. Knowledge
was thus directed upon its own freedom, and upon a concrete content,
which it possesses in its consciousness." Everyone is familiar, in
general terms, with the part played by the idea of freedom in Kant's
philosophy. It may, however, be of interest to point out how definitely
it comes to him in the form given it by Rousseau. Omitting the whole
subject of Kant's educational interest, I will refer to two passages
from Kant's early notes in connection with the tract on the Feelings of
the Sublime and the Beautiful, and two from the Philosophy of Right,
which first appeared in the autumn of 1796. First, then, to establish
the definite impulse communicated to Kant in his earlier years by
Rousseau in particular. "I am myself," he writes, "a student by
inclination. I feel the whole thirst for knowledge, and the covetous
restlessness that demands to advance in it, and again the satisfaction
of every

step of progress. There was a time when I believed that all this might
constitute the honour of humanity, and I despised the crowd that knows
nothing. It was Rousseau who set me right. That dazzling privilege
disappeared; and I should think myself far less useful than common
artisans if I did not believe that my line of study might impart value
to all others in the way of establishing the rights of humanity." Kant
seems, from the context, to be foreshadowing the idea of his critical
philosophy, as putting man in his place in the order of creation. "If
there is any science," he says just below, "which man really needs, it
is that which I teach, to fill properly that place which is assigned to
man in creation; a science from which he can learn what one must be in
order to be human." This throws light on the curious passage in the same
set of notes, where, in a discussion of the idea of Providence, Kant
first refers to Newton's discovery of order in the multiplicity of the
planetary motions, and then proceeds, "Rousseau first discovered,
beneath the multiplicity of the forms assumed by man, the deeply latent
nature of humanity, and the hidden law, according to which Providence is
justified by his observations. Before that the objection of Alphonsus
and of Manes held the field. After Newton and Rousseau, God is
justified, and henceforwards Pope's doctrine is true." "Pope's doctrine"
is no doubt his Leibnitzian optimism, founded on a supposed insight into
man's true place in creation. Rousseau's

"discovery," which Kant here connects with this doctrine, must be his
assertion of man's natural goodness and freedom, which he tends to
forfeit by departing in civilisation from the place assigned him by
nature. It is clear that Rousseau's impeachment of literature and
civilisation had at this time made a considerable impression upon Kant.
It is all the more interesting to see Kant retracing, on a very
different scale, the development which Rousseau had initiated, from
natural to social and ethical freedom. I subjoin two passages from the
Philosophy of Right (1796), which exhibit this later development, still
in its connection with Rousseau's phraseology. "The innate Right is one
only.--Freedom (independence of the constraining will of another), in as
far as it can co-exist with the freedom of every other according to a
universal law, is this unique original right, belonging to every human
being by reason of his humanity." An indication of the embodiment of
this freedom in the State may be given as follows: "All those three
powers in the State (Sovereignty or the Legislative, the Executive, and
the Judicial), are offices; and, as essential, and necessarily
proceeding from the idea of a State in general with reference to the
establishment (Constitution) of one, are offices of State. They contain
the relation of a universal supreme Power (which, considered according
to laws of freedom, can be no other than the united people), to the
crowd of individuals which compose it qua the governed; that is, of the
ruler (imperans) to the

subject (subditus). The act whereby the people constitutes itself into a
State, or strictly speaking only the idea of that Act, according to
which idea alone the justice of the Act can be conceived, is the
original contract, according to which all (omnes et singuli) of the
people surrender their external freedom, in order at once to receive it
back again as members of a commonwealth, that is, of the people regarded
as a State (universi). And one cannot say, The State, or man in the
State, has sacrificed a part of its innate outward freedom for a certain
end; but rather, he has totally abandoned his wild lawless freedom in
order to find his entire freedom again undiminished in a lawful
dependence, that is, in a condition of right or law; (undiminished),
because this dependence springs from his own legislative will." It is
remarkable, in face of these general views, that both Kant and Fichte
follow Rousseau, for reasons which Kant explains from the political
conditions of the time, in distrusting representative government. The
passage just cited is of course a reproduction of Rousseau's view
modified by interpretation very much in the sense in which we
interpreted it above. 3. When we pass to Fichte (whose earlier work upon
Natural Right was published actually before that of Kant), we observe
the idea of

contract in the act of transmuting itself, though by an imperfect
transition, into the idea of an organic whole. For Fichte, the State is
a necessary implication of the human self; for a self involves a society
of selves, and law or right is the relation between selves in a bodily
world. And the "contract" on which citizenship rests, by the fact that
it is general, forges an indiscernible unity of the social whole. In
this connection, Fichte makes the remarkable claim to be first to apply
the simile of an organism to the whole civic relation. I cite an
important passage: "As far as I know, the idea of the whole of the State
has so far only been established through the ideal combination of
individuals, and thereby the true insight into the nature of this
relation has been cut off." You must, he urges, not merely have an idea
of combination; you must show a bond of union beyond the idea, or making
the idea necessary. "In our account this has been achieved. In the
notion of that which is to be protected, in accordance with the
necessary uncertainty which individual will need the visible protection,
and still further, which it will have advantaged invisibly in the case
of a wrongful will suppressed by the law before its outbreak, all
individuals are forced into unity.

"The most fitting simile to elucidate this notion is that of an
organised natural product, which has often been employed in modern times
to describe the different branches of the public power as a unity, but
not, so far as I know, to throw light on the whole civic relation. Just
as, in the natural product, every part can be what it is only in this
combination, and out of this combination simply would not be this
(indeed outside all organic combination there would simply be nothing .
. . ): just so it is only in the combination of the State that man
attains a definite position in the series of things, a point of rest in
nature; and each attains this determinate position towards others, and
towards Nature, only through the fact that he is in this determinate
combination. . . . In the organic body every part continually maintains
the whole, and while it maintains it, is itself maintained thereby; just
such is the citizen's relation to the State." Here we seem to be back
with Plato and Aristotle. We are in fact too near to Plato; for the
distinction between maintenance of the citizen's determinate activity,
and maintenance of the general conditions of such activity, being
destroyed by Fichte in his desire to make State action positive and not
negative, the conclusion necessarily arises that the citizen must be
secured and maintained in his definite activity or occupation, and from
this springs the notion of the closed commercial State; "closed" against
foreign trade in order that the government may be able to determine
prices and assign occupations. In other words, the basis of the State is
still the Ego conceived as the individual self; it is not the social
good operating by its own

power on intelligent will. And, arising from this individualism, the
precautions which seem necessary to protect and sustain the individual
in his fixed relation to the whole, make Fichte's "Closed Commercial
State" perhaps the earliest document of a rigorous State Socialism.
Freedom, as he himself recognises to be prima facie the case, is
annihilated by the provisions for its protection. It is curious to see
Rousseau's phrase "forced to be free," which refers in him to the
supremacy of law, reappearing as a defence of the enforcement of leisure
time, as though freedom were not realised in labour and in loyalty. Here
is Hegel's judgment of the transition we have just been considering.
"Kant began to found right on freedom, and Fichte too in his Natural
Right made freedom his principle; but it is, as in Rousseau, the freedom
of the particular individual. This is a great beginning; but in order to
get to particular results they were obliged to accept presuppositions.
The universal (for them) is not the spirit, the substance of the whole,
but the external mechanical negative power against individuals. . . .
The individuals remain always hard and negative against one another; the
prison-house, the bonds, become ever more oppressive, instead of the
State being apprehended as the realisation of freedom." 4. To apprehend
the State as the realisation of freedom was the aim of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right, which has perhaps been more grossly

misrepresented than any work of a great political philosopher, excepting
Plato's Republic. Popular criticism will tell us that Hegel found his
ideal in the Prussian bureaucracy, and will further hint that his doing
so was to his advantage. Such suggestions imply two misapprehensions,
for one of which Hegel's tactlessness was responsible, while the other
depends on a genuine difficulty attending any philosophical analysis of
society. I will try to throw light on each of these misapprehensions.
(a) If Hegel had wished to have a partisan tendency attributed to his
book, he could not have timed it better nor written a preface more
certain to mislead. In 1820, when the book was published, the minds both
of governments and of peoples were full of irritation. The
anti-constitutional reaction had recently declared itself. The
demonstration at the Wartburg, celebrating the anniversary of the
Reformation, and of the Battle of Leipzig, took place in October, 1817.
The unaccountable change in the ideas of the Czar from Liberalism to
reaction took place, we are assured, in June, 1818. The murder of
Kotzebue, a Russian agent, reactionary journalist, and decayed
dramatist, took place in March, 1819. Kotzebue seems to have been
popularly credited with perverting the views of the Czar. His
assassination had an effect in no way related to his real importance.
Hardenberg, the Prussian minister, exclaimed on hearing of it that a
Prussian constitution had now become impossible. Innocent persons

were arrested in Prussia at Metternich's instigation, and private papers
were seized and published in a garbled form. The publication of Hegel's
book with a preface attacking Fries for some expressions used by him at
the Wartburg festival, took place, as we said, in 1820, and Hegel had
moved from Heidelberg to Berlin, having obtained the honour of a Berlin
professorship, in 1818. Small wonder that "it was pointed out that the
new professor was a favourite of the leading minister, that his
influence was dominant in scholastic appointments, and that occasional
gratuities from the Crown proved his acceptability," or that Fries
remarked that Hegel's theory of the State had grown, "not in the garden
of science, but on the dunghill of servility." Hegel himself "was aware
that he had planted a blow in the face of a shallow and pretentious
sect, and that his book had given great offence to the demagogic folk."
And yet, so far as the essence of Hegel's political philosophy is
concerned, there is nothing in all this. The first sketch of the
Philosophy of Right was published in the Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences in 1817, before Hegel left Heidelberg. His
political interest, in its gradual development, can be traced back in
unpublished writings to 1802. He started from the conception of the
Greek State, on which his early sketch of the ethical system (1802,
unpublished in his lifetime) was founded. And his subsequent development
consisted in enlarging this conception by drawing out its framework to
include the more

accented freedom of modern life, as he divined it from the attentive
study both of English and of German politics. His substantive political
theory never changed, except by development, in accordance with his
general attitude towards the differences between Greek and modern life.
(b) "But," popular criticism will rejoin, "here we have Hegel's ideal
State, depicted by his own hand, and it is pretty much the Prussian
State of his time, tempered by a few references to English politics. Is
not this a narrow horizon and a low ideal?" This criticism is of value,
because it leads up to an important feature of true political theory. To
depict what most people call "an ideal State" is no more the object of
political philosophy than it is the object, say, of Carpenter's Human
Physiology to depict an "ideal" man or an angel. The object of political
philosophy is to understand what a State is, and it is not necessary for
this purpose that the State which is analysed should be "ideal," but
only that it should be a State; just as the nature of life is
represented pretty nearly as well by one living man as by another.
"Every State," Hegel says, "even if your principles lead you to
pronounce it bad, even if you detect this or that deficiency in it,
always has (especially if it belongs to the more developed States of our
time) the essential moments of its existence in it. But because it is
easier to discover defects than to grasp the affirmative, people easily
fall into the error of allowing particular aspects to lead them to
forget the inner organism

of the State. The State is no work of art, it stands in the world, that
is, in the sphere of caprice, accident, and error; evil behaviour is
able to mar it in many respects. But the ugliest human being, a
criminal, a sick man, or a cripple, is all the same a living human
being; the affirmative, his life, persists in spite of the defect, and
this affirmative is what we are concerned with here." Of course, no
comparison is quite precise, and it may be urged that the State is more
artificial than a human body. However this may be, we shall at least
understand Hegel's attitude better, and, as I venture to think, adopt by
far the most fruitful standpoint for ourselves, if we look at political
philosophy like one who is trying to ascertain what is the nature of
human life as he observes it in any or every human body. If the life is
there, its essentials are there, and his aim is to understand them. No
doubt a door is here opened to argument with regard to what logicians
call a "pure case." In understanding life "as such," you must, it would
seem, purge out its mere defects, in regard to which it is not "life,"
and the remainder, what you pledge yourself to as essential, must be ex
hypothesi your "ideal" of life. And perhaps there is no reason to reject
this responsibility if confined to the emphasis of elements and
interconnection of facts. It cannot apply to more. We cannot construct
an ideal body by reducing life, nor an ideal polity by reducing mind, to
its pure case or essentials, since we cannot construct

organisms or history at all. And it is because this is always being
forgotten that the duty of understanding rather than constructing has to
be insisted upon. It is true that in understanding, as in constructing,
we imply essential relations, and so incur responsibility, and are
liable to betray a bias; but still, life can be understood by help of
any creature that is alive, and therefore it is not the example with
which the student works, but the insight which he shows, that is the
decisive point. 5. We have to begin by realising what is involved in the
fact that we are about to treat the analysis of a Modern State as a
chapter in the Philosophy of Mind. For Hegel's Philosophy of Right (or
of Law), though published by him as an independent work, is essentially
an expansion of paragraphs which form one sub-division of his Philosophy
of Mind, itself the third and concluding portion of the Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy, of which the two earlier portions are the Logic and the
Philosophy of Nature. We saw in the second chapter of the present work
that the mere force of facts has driven modern sociologists to handle
their science in a more or less intimate connection with Psychology. The
differentia of society, we saw, has been stated in various formulae of a
psychological character. But it seemed to us that, owing to a neglect of
the logic of identity, the nature of mind was broken up by such unreal
distinctions as that between invention and imitation, varied by the unreal

reduction of the one to the other, and also that an unexplained
separation and parallelism survived as between the individual and the
social mind, bearing witness to the vitality of the superstition which
Rousseau's insight picked out for condemnation. We do not deny that mind
may be more than social; but in as far as it is social it is still real
mind, and that means that it is not something other than what we know as
individual lives, a pale and unreal reflection of them, but it is a
characteristic which belongs to their most intimate constitution. This
was Plato's analysis of moral autonomy, and his work remains classically
valid, needing only expansion and interpretation in applying it to
modern free intelligence and social self-government. The position of the
analysis of a State in the Philosophy of Mind may be briefly indicated
as follows. When we embark on the study of ordinary Psychology, we take
the individual human being as we find him to-day. We accept him as a
formed individual, distinguishing himself from external things, and
possessing what we call a will--a capacity of seeking his own
satisfaction, which he represents to himself in general ideas by the
help of language. We analyse the self and will with their aspects of
memory, attention, association, impulse, and emotion. But all modern
psychologists are aware that this formed self and will has much history
behind it, and presupposes a long genesis connecting it with simpler
forms of

soul-life. Hegel, indeed, was among the first in modern times to see how
far back the story of mind must be taken. The human intelligence, as the
psychologist assumes it, is for him a middle phase in the romance of
which mind is the hero. Before it come the chapters of Anthropology,
which treat of the fixation of a soul in the disciplined powers and
habits of a human body, and then the account of a consciousness which
gradually rises from a struggling perception of objects around it to a
moral and scientific certainty of being at home in the world. The story
of mind, then, begins long before the free mind, the object of
Psychology to-day, has appeared on the scene. And as to this there would
be no great difference of opinion. The peculiarity of Hegel's treatment
is that his romance of the intelligence not only begins long before the
phase of free mind is reached, but continues long after. Investigation
can no more stop at the individual of to-day than it can begin with him.
His "mind" is not a separable entity, and throughout the story no such
entity has appeared. It has been convenient for Hegel to treat the
earlier division of the Philosophy of Mind, comprising the Anthropology,
Phenomenology, and Psychology, as dealing par excellence with Mind
Subjective. This is because its main purpose was to trace the growth of
"subjectivity," the emergence of the man of full mental

stature, aware of himself, of his ideas and purposes, and confident in
his "subjectivity"--his self- hood--against all comers. But the
following division of the work, under the title of Mind Objective, deals
with a necessary implication which might have been noted at any point of
the entire history of consciousness, though at any earlier point it
could have been treated as referring to mind only by anticipation. Here,
however, the problem can no longer be deferred. The "free mind" does not
explain itself and cannot stand alone. Its impulses cannot be ordered,
or, in other words, its purposes cannot be made determinate, except in
an actual system of selves. Except by expressing itself in relation to
an ordered life, which implies others, it cannot exist. And, therefore,
not something additional and parallel to it, which might or might not
exist, but a necessary form of its own action as real and determinate,
is the actual fabric in which it utters itself as Society and the State.
This is what Hegel treats in the second division of the Philosophy of
Mind under the name of Mind Objective. It is not for him ultimate. A
particular society stands in time, and is open to criticism and to
destruction. Beyond it lies the reality, continuous with mind as known
in the State, but eternal as the former is perishable, which as Absolute
Mind is open to human experience in Art, Religion, and Philosophy. We
will pursue in the following chapter Hegel's analysis of the modern
State as Mind Objective, a magnified edition, so to speak, of Plato's
Republic, bringing before the eye in full detail distinctions and
articulations which were there invisible.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER X THE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL'S "PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT."
1. WE are about to analyse a modern State into groups of facts which are
also ways of thinking. And a question may arise in what sense the
connection is to be understood which will be alleged to bind together
these groups of facts or points of view. When it is urged that group b
or view b is suggested and made necessary by the shortcomings of group a
or view a, does this imply that group a or its idea came into existence
first, and group b or the notion of it sprang up subsequently or as an
effect of the former? And could such a relation be reasonably maintained
as between the component parts of a unity like the State? An answer may
be indicated as follows. We are dealing, in society and in the State,
with an ideal fact. As a fact, a form of life, society has always been a
many-sided creature, meeting the varied needs of human nature by
functions no less varied. As an ideal fact, however, its advance has
partaken of the nature of theoretical progress. In the continuous
attempt to deal satisfactorily with the needs of intelligent beings, the
mind, the

intelligent will, has thrown itself with predominant interest now into
one of its functions and now into another. And this has not been a
chance order of march. Obviously, what it has emphasised and modified in
the second place has depended both positively and negatively on what it
had emphasised and modified in the first place. Positively, because when
one step is thoroughly secured the next may be definitely attempted.
Negatively, because the definite attainment of one step exposes the
limitations of what has been achieved, and the need for another. At
every stage the will is dissatisfied with the expression of itself which
it has created. Till some public order has been established, morality
can hardly find expression; but when a legal system is thoroughly in
force it becomes apparent how far the letter may fall short of the
spirit. We see the same action of intelligence in pure theory. Every
conquest of science leads to a new departure. It suggests it by its
success, and demands it by its failure. Now, in science it may or may
not be the case that the connection which has led to a discovery enters
permanently as a discernible factor into the structure of knowledge. The
re-organisation of experience may sweep away the steps which led to it.
But in the living fact of society this is not so. Its many sides are
actual and persist, and the emphasis laid from time to time on the
principle of each--e.g. on positive law, on family ties, on economic
bonds--merely serves to accent an element which has its permanent place
in the whole. Thus, there must always be family ties and economic bonds.
But at one time everything tends to be construed in terms of kinship, at
another time in terms of

exchange. And the tendency means a difference of actual balance between
the functions as well as a different theory. The positive and negative
connection of elements like these, the true place and limit of each, is
permanently rooted in human nature, but may be elucidated by the
explicit logic of their attempt and failure to give the tone to the
whole social fabric. It follows that the social whole grows, like a
great theory, in adequacy to the needs which are its facts; and the
dissatisfaction of the will with its own expression, in other words, the
contradictions which practical intelligence is continually attempting to
remove, becomes more like suggestion than flat contradiction--or change,
as we say, becomes less revolutionary. It may seem to be a difference
between the social whole and a scientific theory that the former, as it
grows, creates new difficulties, by creating new and freshly
contradictory matter, as in the social problems of civilisation; while
the latter, as we imagine, deals with an unchanging experience. But this
distinction is less true than it appears, and the comparison with the
growth of a theory will always throw light on the true nature of the
will and its continuous effort to satisfy itself. 2. Right or Law may be
taken in the widest sense as including the whole manifestation of Will
in an actual world--"the actual body of all the conditions of freedom,"
"the realm of realised freedom, the world of mind produced out of
itself, as a second nature." It is a merit of the German

term "Recht" that it maintains the connection between the law and the
spirit of law, and almost of itself prohibits the separation between
positive law, and will, custom or sentiment, which underlies such a
theory as Austin's. This whole sphere of Right or Law, the mind as
actualised in Society and the State, naturally divides itself on the
principle which has just been explained, into three connected groups of
ideal facts or points of view. The first, or simplest and most
inevitable, of these, may be called the "letter of the law" as we come
upon it most especially in the law of property-- Shylock's law--the
sheer fact, as it seems, that the world is appropriated by legal
"persons". The second, obviously conditioned by the first both
positively and negatively, may be described as the morality of
conscience; the revolt of the will against the letter of the law, though
this was its own direct expression of itself (e.g. in taking things as
property); and its demand to recognise as right nothing but what springs
from itself as the good will. And thirdly, there is the reality or
concrete experience in which the two former sets of facts, or ideas,
find their true place and justification--the completed theory, so to
speak, which adjusts and explains the narrower views founded on
one-sided contact with life. This is indicated to consist in "social
observance," or "ethical use and wont"; the system of working mind where
the true will appears as incarnate in a way of living. This,

like the others, it must be remembered, is a fact, though akin to a
theory. Not only does it explain and justify the other factors, but its
existence has enabled them to exist, as theirs has also been essential
to it. And yet each of the three, as one aspect of society which under
certain influences may catch the eye, has at times claimed--is, indeed,
constantly claiming--predominance, and has thus brought into relief its
own defects and the need of the complementary ideas. We will speak of
these moods of mind or kinds of experience in their order, expecting a
further sub-division when we come to treat of the third. 3. "Law," then,
in the directest possible sense--the minimum sense, so to speak--is the
hard literal fact that it is a rule of the world we live in for things
to be appropriated by persons. This is the first or minimum change of
the world from mere matter into the instruments of mind, and it is a
necessary change. Things have no will of their own, and it is by having
a will asserted upon them that they become organs of life. In the same
way, it is by assertion in external things that the will first becomes a
fact in the material world. Property is "the first reality of freedom."
It is not the mere provision for wants, but the material counterpart of
will. Contract belongs to this sphere, the sphere of property. It is an
agreement of persons about an external thing--a "common will," but not
one "general" or "universal" in its own nature like that involved in the
State.

Thus, it is a confusion of spheres to apply the idea of contract to the
State, for the State is an imperative necessity of man's nature as
rational, while contract is a mere agreement of certain free persons
about certain external things. The idea of the social contract is a
confusion of the same type as that by which public rights and functions
were treated as private property in the middle age. The attributes of
private property are nothing more than the conditions of "personal"
existence, and absurdity results if they are transferred to functions of
the State. This phase or view of law as, in its letter, an ultimate and
absolute rule, may be illustrated, Hegel says, by the Stoic notion that
there is only one virtue and one vice; by the Draconic conception that
every offence demands the extreme penalty; and by "the barbarity of the
formal code of honour, which found in every injury an unpardonable
insult." It might also be illustrated by Austin's theory of law as a
command enforced by a penalty; or by the theories which account for
property simply by the fact of occupancy or of labour mixed with the
thing. The common point of all these views is that they treat the law,
not as a part of a living system, ultimately resting on the will to
maintain a certain type of life, but as something absolute in its
separateness, and equally sacred in all its accidents and inequalities.
Now, this emphasis and idea of law, being the exaggeration of a single
and direct necessity, the

necessity of order and property, may be called "primitive" or barbarous,
but it cannot of course be identified with the earliest state of social
authority known to history or to anthropology. There we should probably
find law undifferentiated from custom and from religious sentiment, and
consequently, though rigid enough, not in any such one-sided
absoluteness as we have been describing. All we can say is that this is
the way in which law must come to be regarded whenever its living spirit
is forgotten, and an unreal absoluteness is assigned to it; and this
connection of principle verifies itself as a fact in recurrent
historical phenomena, and in fallacies which perpetually reappear. 4.
Within the whole fabric of right or realised will, the element which
naturally asserts itself by antagonism to the letter of the law is the
morality of conscience, conscientiousness, or the idea of the Good Will.
It is connected with the letter of the law, as Hegel puts it, by the
various degrees of wrong. The will, that is to say, finds itself at
variance in or with the order of law and property which it has created
as its direct and necessary step to freedom. Its realised theory, so to
speak, is found to break down at a certain point, by being in
contradiction with the needs which it was created to meet. "Summum jus,
summa injuria." We may object that the anti-legal will is simply wrong.
This may be so, and again it may not be so. What the will has awakened
to, whether right or wrong, is

that it can acquiesce in nothing which does not come home to it as
fulfilling its own principle. What so comes home to it is what it calls
"good," and it cannot accept any order or necessity which it cannot will
as good, i.e. as satisfying its own idea. When this phase of reaction is
pushed to its logical extreme, we have the modern doctrine of my
conscience and my pure will. It is the conflict of the inner self with
the outer world, expressed in history through the Stoic and through some
forms of the Christian consciousness (especially the Protestant
consciousness), and in philosophy through the Kantian doctrine of the
good will, uttered in the famous sentence, "Nothing can possibly be
conceived in the world or out of it which can be called good without
qualification except a good will." Nothing is worth doing but what one
ought, and because one ought. The criticism to which this principle has
been subjected is familiar to students of ethics. Its point is, in
brief, that there is no way of connecting any particular action with the
mere idea of a pure will. The forms assumed by evasions of this
difficulty, which we fall into when we desire wholly to separate the
inner from the outer, or the "ought" from the "is," are treated by Hegel
with unsurpassable vigour and subtlety, as indeed the annihilating
criticism of this conception is primarily due to him. The essence of the
matter is that the pure will directed towards good for the sake of good
having no real connection with any detailed conduct, may be alleged by
self-deception in support of any behaviour whatever, and out of this may
spring the

whole sophistry and hypocrisy of "pure intention." He makes the shrewd
observation, which is still of interest, that the extreme Protestant
doctrine of conscience may take the form of ethical vacuity or
instability, and that this had in his time been the cause of many
Protestants going over to Rome, to secure some sort of moorings, if not
precisely the stability of thought. Still, out of all this
one-sidedness, there survives the permanent necessity that an
intelligent being can acquiesce only in what enters into the object of
his will. It is his will which affirms the aim to which his nature draws
him, and he is absolutely debarred from reposing in anything which does
not appeal to his will. The subjective will is the only soil on which
freedom can be a reality. So, within the general organism of Right or
realised Free-will, we have found two opposite groups of facts-- for the
aspirations of intelligent beings are facts--or tendencies or theories,
which are connected by opposition, and yet are necessary to the
expression of the same underlying need--the letter of the law, and the
freedom of conscience. 5. Hegel's name for the third term, which, as he
puts it, expresses the "truth" of these extremes, may be rendered "the
Ethical System," or "the Moral Life," or "Social Ethics." It expresses
"the truth" of the extremes, as a good theory may express the truth of
two one-sided views. Only, as we have said, it is a fact as well as a
theory, and therefore is something which actually contains what these
two views demand, and does the work which they, and the facts they rely on,

exhibit as necessary to be done. This relation is not obscure or
unprecedented. Every institution, every life, works as a theory, and
either masters its facts or fails to master them; though not every
theory is a life or an institution. The German word which the
above-mentioned phrases attempt to render is "Sittlichkeit." The word
takes its meaning from "Sitte," which in common usage is equivalent to
"custom." Hegel's use of the term, in his later writings, as opposed to
"Moralit?t," and as indicating, in comparison with it, a fuller and
truer phase of life, is an intentional declaration of war against the
Kantian principle of the pure good will, and is the gist of Hegel's
ethico-political view in a nutshell. The word would most naturally apply
to the life of a community in which law, custom, and sentiment were not
yet very sharply distinguished. According to accepted views, the
communities of ancient Greece, before they were stirred by the
reflective movement which is associated with the names of Socrates and
the Sophists, would be examples of a disposition and order of life which
the word "Sittlichkeit" might denote. And it was in the Greek
communities, as is shown by the work which he sketched as early as 1802,
that Hegel found this suggestion of a whole in which law and custom,
duty and disposition, were absolutely at one. He subsequently modified
the conception in accordance with the modern idea of freedom,

by allowing a greater emphasis and relief to its component parts, and
insisting (against Plato's Republic, for instance,) on the principle of
individual choice, initiative, and property, as necessary to the
complete communion of intelligent beings. As we have just seen, indeed,
he introduces reflective morality or conscientiousness into the sphere
of Right, to represent the full nature of mind, which is only exhibited
in a consciousness which pursues its aims of its own choice and for
their own sake. The Ethical System, then, or Social Ethics, is put
forward as the ideal fact which includes, and does the work of, both the
literal law and the moral will, alike in practice and as a theory. It is
the idea of freedom developed (i.) into a present world, and (ii.) into
the nature of self-consciousness. For (i.), in the first place, the
ethical system, or the ways of acting which make up social ethics,
constitute a present and actual world. So far it partakes of the nature
of the literal law and order, the system of property-holding, which, as
we have seen, is all but a natural fact. Social Ethic, we might say, is
a physical fact. The bodily habits and external actions of a people
incorporate it. It transforms the face of a country, "domesticating the
untamed earth." Each individual has his own bodily existence in a
determinate mode as a part of the ethical life of society. The rules and
traditions of ethical living are, as has been said, "the nature of
things." They are as hard, as "objective" an order as "sun, moon,
mountains, rivers, and all objects of nature." Man

lives according to them before he knows that he does so, and always, in
a great degree, independently of knowing that he does so. As this group
of facts, or considered from this point of view, the ethical system is
the body of the moral world. (ii.) But it is also and no less the very
nature of self-consciousness. It is as much a demand of man's
intelligence or an inner and universal law as the "pure will" itself.
The difference between them is that the Ethical System is a system, a
world, though from the point of view of will regarded as inner, that is
to say, as something which is the motive and fulfils the demand of
consciousness. Thus, it bears the character of a thoroughly systematised
theory, as contrasted with the idea of a good will, which is a mere
general point of view. And it is because of this systematic character
that it is enabled to connect the individual or particular will with the
universal spirit of the community. It is only in a system that a
particular fact can be connected with a universal law, as the planetary
motions are with the law of gravitation. The particular will, as we have
explained above, is universalised by its relation to a systematic
purpose which it partly implies and partly realises. A man wishes for
this thing or that thing, but not at any price. The reservations to
which his wish is subject, by reason of other purposes and postulates of
life, are known to him only in part; but if they could be stated in
full, they would constitute the system of his life as realised in the
universal life of the community. It is precisely

analogous to the process which a common judgment of perception has to go
through in becoming a scientific truth--the implications have to be
stated in full, and the perception modified in accordance with them. And
when this is done, we have no longer a fact, but a science. Regarded
from this point of view, as the substance of the individual Will, the
Ethical System is the Soul of the moral world. In analysing the Ethical
System, we shall say nothing of "duties" or "virtues." Duty is in each
case what the relation requires--the attachment of the universal system
of will to the individual life. Virtue is a habit of such action,
considered as embodied in the nature of an individual. The idea of
virtue and virtuousness is not, in Hegel's view, altogether suitable to
the members of an ethical commonwealth. It belongs rather to a time of
undeveloped social life, when ethical principles and the realisation of
them are ascribed to the nature of peculiarly gifted individuals. Virtue
or excellence, to the Greek moralist, for instance, suggested doing
something better than the average, or being in some way specially
gifted, and it is still apt to indicate the desire to be something
exceptional, and not simply to find yourself in genuine service. The
meaning of the words to-day tends to narrow itself to certain special
relations, and does not indicate that life of the member in the whole,
which is the essence of what we really value. The Ethical System, or the
Order of Social Ethics, then--the mind and conduct of the citizen in
Christendom --may be regarded as affirming freedom

in three principal aspects, necessarily connected, and supplementing one
another. Outwardly these aspects are different groups of
facts--different institutions; inwardly they are different moods or
dispositions of the one and indivisible human mind. Thus, Hegel's
analysis regards the social whole or system of social ethics from three
points of view. First, in respect of the Family; secondly, in respect of
what he has entitled Bourgeois Society; and thirdly, in respect of the
Political Organism, or the State in the strict sense. It is to be borne
in mind that, like the three principal divisions in the sphere of Right,
these headings represent explicit theories of society, as well as groups
of facts. 6. Beginning once more, within an ordered social sphere, at
the ethical factor which stands nearest to the natural world, and has
taken, so to speak, the minimum step into the realm of purpose and
consciousness, we start from the family. As the family exists in a
modern civilised community, it is something necessary to society and the
State, but absolutely distinct from both. It first (a) represents the
fact of the natural basis of social relations, being the embodiment of
natural feeling in the form of love, both as between the parents, and as
embodied for them in the children. It is in accordance with Hegel's
general views of the meaning of a system that he sees this element of
mind primarily represented by the family, as an organ preserved and
differentiated ad hoc, and not, or not merely, distributed indefinitely
throughout the community. Thus, the modern family represents for him a
higher stage

of civilisation--an organ to a fuller embodiment of mind--than the clan
or tribe, or, in short, than any form of community in which the whole
bond of union rests on merely natural feeling, kindness, generosity, or
affection. In the nation, indeed, a tinge of natural affection, a
colouring of unity by kinship, survives, just as feeling runs through
the experience of the individual mind. But the distinctive character of
the State is clear intelligence, explicit law and system, and so the
natural basis of feeling, though necessary to be preserved and
spiritualised, achieves these needs in the family as a special organ,
and not in the State as such. All those theories, therefore, which tend
to assimilate the State to a family by a sort of levelling down of the
former or levelling up of the latter (Plato's Republic, the phalanstery,
paternal government, and the like) involve for Hegel a mere confusion of
relations. They recognise an element which is essential to society, and
may truly be said to be even its foundation. But they do not see its
right place in the whole, and do not understand that in order to attain
a stronger and deeper unity (which is, in short, a stronger and deeper
mind) the different elements must be allowed a greater emphasis and
relief, and their respective characteristics must not be slurred or
scamped. But (b), in the second place, the family is a factor in the
rational whole, the State, though its function par excellence is that of
the natural basis of society. Hence its nature and sanction is
ethical--it rests neither on mere feeling on

the one hand, nor on mere contract on the other. It has a public side,
and the acceptance of a universal obligation by a declaration in
explicit language (language being the stamp of the universal), in face
of the community, is an essential part of marriage, and not a mere
accident or accessory, as the votaries of feeling have urged. This view
is aimed against the confusion which finds the sole essence of marriage
in feeling. This is a perpetually recurring contention, represented in
Hegel's day by Friedrich von Schlegel's Lucinde, which argues that the
form of marriage destroys the value of passion. Hegel's analyses are
everywhere directed against this inability to grasp the distinct sides
of a many-sided fact. (c) The ethical aspect of the family shows itself
in the nature and organisation of the household, as an institution
embodying permanent interests and relations of the two persons who are
its head, and as an organ of public duties in the bodily and spiritual
nurture of the children. The permanent and equal relation of the heads
of the household, involved in its nature as the ethical aspect of the
family, implies monogamy, and it is the monogamous family alone which
can count as a true element of the ethical order. (d) The household,
being the true and operative ethical organ which makes parentage into
family, is the unit which demands to be respected and protected by the
State against the less differentiated forms of consanguinity, such as
the clan. The true family starts from marriage and the foundation of a
household, and in the early

development of law we find the State, with a just instinct, protecting
the household against the clan, e.g. by conferring the power of bequest.
This power, though now it may imply a discretion mainly hostile to the
family, presented itself in early law rather as a means of perpetuating
the separate household as against the pretensions of the clan to
interfere with its property. Thus, the monogamous family is naturally
and necessarily, to some extent, a unit in respect of property; the
children, at least, being inevitably under tutelage and incapable of
self-support, even if economic equality asserts itself as between
husband and wife. This peculiar relation in respect of property is
rooted in the unique nature of the household, as an organ for the
guardianship of immature lives, and as a unity of feeling rather than of
explicit thought. It is noticeable that progress tends to introduce the
distinctions of property within its unity (though for children this can
never go very far), and very slightly to introduce the relations of the
family into the outside world. In as far as such distinctions come to be
made, the nature and functions of the household being undisturbed, a
somewhat higher intensity of ethical union is rendered necessary, and
will no doubt assert itself. 7. When the man (or woman) arrives at
maturity and leaves the safe harbour of the family, he finds himself,
prima facie, isolated in a world

of conflicting self-interests. He has his living to make, or his
property to administer. He is tied to others, in appearance, only by the
system of wants and work, with the elementary function which is
necessary to it, viz. its police functions and the administration of
justice. It is this phase of social life, and the temper or disposition
corresponding to it, which Hegel indicates by the expression Bourgeois
Society. It presents itself to him as the opposite extreme of life and
mind to that embodied in the family. It is an aggregate of families--for
the units of the Bourgeois Society are heads of households--as seen from
the outside, in the great system of industry and business, where a man
has to find his work and do it. It is, in mind, the presence of definite
though limited aims, calculation and self-interest. Bourgeois Society is
the aspect of the social whole insisted on by the classical political
economy, by which, as an achievement in the way of reducing complex
appearances to principles, Hegel was much impressed. It is, again, the
view of society embodied in the conception of the purely legal State,
and its principle is confused with that of the

State proper by one set of theorists, as that of the family is by
another. It is the peculiarity of Hegel's view--probably the most
definitely original, as it is the most famous, of all his political
ideas--to contend that this aspect of society, with the form of
consciousness belonging to it, is necessary to a modern State. According
to his logic, indeed, it is inevitable that every true whole shall have
an aspect of "difference," of breaking up into particulars. The
principle of the ancient State, as concentratedly expressed in Plato's
Republic, was weak and undeveloped, and fell short of the true claims of
intelligence, just because it dared not really let the individual
go--let him assert himself as himself. "Subjectivity" was a principle
fatal to it. Not that there was an iron oppression in the States of
antiquity. The individual was, for an onlooker, magnificently developed.
His limitations were in him, and did not oppress him; but for all that,
free choice and the career open to talents were not for him. The modern
demand--such is Hegel's conception--is harder and higher. The
individual's life is not predetermined by his birth, but he is thrown
face to face with economic necessity, which is a form of the universal
end. He has to strip off his crudeness and vanity, and, of himself,
mould himself into something which fulfils a want. This is a step
without which there can be no true

freedom--the giving one's self by one's own act a definite place in the
region of external necessity, the "becoming something," or attaching
oneself to a definite class of service renderers. Thus, we are startled
to find culture or education treated in general, and in respect of its
indispensableness, under the head of the Bourgeois Society. For culture
is the liberation from one's own caprices, and the acceptance of a
universal task. It is a severe process, and therefore unpopular, but it
is a necessary one if we are to have true freedom. The criticism that
such a world and temper is the world and temper of self-interest does
not appeal strongly to Hegel. We shall have to treat of it more fully
below. It may be noted in passing that the insecurity of life, which may
seem to attach to dependence on the vast system of wants and work, is
more and more seen, as modern economic relations develop, not to be
insecurity at all, except in as far as "culture" in the form of
industrial training is absent. There is, indeed, in modern life, nowhere
any absolute and oyster-like stability. The highest stability to be
anywhere attained is that due to fitness for service in the
interdependent system of needs. Therefore, as Hegel saw, but in more
ways than he saw, the system of Bourgeois Society--the economic and
industrial world--is not a separate reality, but only an appearance
within a larger system. The member of it is not so detached as

he may seem, or think. He is within, and sustained by, the general life
of the State, as the aims which are his motives in "business" or
industry are within and inseparable from the whole structure of his
intelligence. Thus, the world of Bourgeois Society--a world, on the
whole, of cash nexus and mere protection by the State-- has a structure
or tendency of its own which brings it back by necessary steps to
connection with the State proper or explicit and determinate social
unity. It is, we must observe, posterior to the State in time. It is
only within the State proper, and resting on its solid power, that such
a world as that of Bourgeois Society could arise or be conceivable. Its
priority to the State is, like that of the family, the priority of
comparative narrowness or simplicity, of dealing with fewer factors, and
of representing human nature in a more special, though necessary,
aspect. And for this very reason it could not exist by itself. It has
not the many-sided vitality indispensable to anything which is to hold
its own in the actual world. The working of the Bourgeois Society, then,
exhibits an inevitable connection with the State proper, and, so to
speak, leads up to it. In the first place, the economic world implies
the administration of justice. In this, as involving a developed system
of civilised law, there is an advance on the "letter of the law" in its
crudest and most barbarous acceptation. The system of law of a modern
State is, and still more ought to be, a fairly reasonable and intelligible

definition of the rights and relations of persons. By this determination
the economic system of particular wants and services enters upon a first
approximation, as it were, to a unity of principle. The law only
professes, indeed, to protect property and exchange, but in doing so it
unavoidably recognises that the particular want has a general bearing;
for the developed system of law only comes into existence to enable
wants to be supplied, and takes its definite shape according to the
system of wants. We may illustrate this first approximation to
universality, which law confers upon the particulars of private
interest, by a suggestive view which M. Durkheim has propounded. He has
pointed out that the current formula for social change, "from status to
contract," has a subtler significance than is apt to be recognised. For
contract is not really indeterminate, as if it arose in vacuo without a
precedent. It runs in forms determined by social experience through law
and custom; and thus the law, which professedly aims at protecting
property and exchange, necessarily regulates them by the modes in which
it chooses to protect them. A more intimate relation to the State
proper--to a definite principle, as we might say, of common good-- grows
out of the interests of Bourgeois Society which take the shape of what a
German calls "Police and Corporation," i.e. State regulation and Trade
Societies. The basis of State regulation is the emergence of aspects of
common interest in the system of particular interests. The region of
particular

interests (supply and demand) has an accidental side, and the State has
a right and a duty to protect the general good against accidental
hindrances. On the whole, no doubt, the right relation between producer
and consumer arises of itself, but miscarriages may occur which call for
interference on behalf of the explicit principle of the general good.
The general possibility of the individual's obtaining what he wants is a
public interest, and the State has a right to intervene with this end in
view, both by execution of necessary public works, by sanitary
inspection and the like, and by inspection and control of fraud in the
case of necessary commodities offered for sale to the general public.
For the public offer of goods in daily use is not a purely private
concern, but a matter of the general interest. If indeed there was
complete official regulation, there would be a risk of getting work like
the Pyramids, that represented no private want at all; but yet, in the
system of private wants, there is a public interest that demands
vigilance. A similar approximation of Bourgeois Society to the State is
constituted by the "Corporation," which rests on the facts of class.
Every member of the Bourgeois Society belongs by his vocation to a
class, and this breaking up into classes is a consequence of the
division of labour which prevails in the economic sphere, disguising the
common good as private interest or necessity. But in the formation of
classes society begins as it were to recover from the dispersion which
private interest

has occasioned. As a member of his class or "estate," the citizen
acquires solidarity with his fellows, and his particular interest
becomes ipso facto a common one. As a member of the class, again, he is,
or ought to be, a member of his "trade society" or "corporation." In
this he finds his honour or recognition, a definite standard of life
(apart from which he is apt to assert himself by aimless extravagance,
for want of a recognised respectability), a standard of work, insurance
against misfortune, and (as a candidate for admission) the means of
technical education. If the family is the first basis of the State, the
classes or estates are the second. The Corporation or Trade Society is a
second family to its members. It is the very root of ethical connection
between the private and the general interest, and the State should see
to it that this root holds as strongly as possible.

"If," Hegel writes, "in recent days the `Corporation' has been
abolished, this has the significance that the individual ought to
provide for himself. This may be admitted; but the corporation did not
alter the individual's obligation to earn his livelihood. In our modern
States the citizens have only a limited share in the universal business
of the State; but it is necessary to permit the ethical human being a
universal activity over and above his private end. This universal, which
the modern State does not always provide for him, he finds in the
`Corporation.' We saw before that the individual providing for himself
in the Bourgeois Society also acts for others. But this unconscious
necessity is not enough; it needs the Corporation to bring it to a
conscious and thoughtful social ethics. Of course the Corporation needs
the higher superintendence of the State, or it would ossify, shrink into
its shell, and be degraded into a wretched guild. But in and for itself
the Corporation is no closed guild; it is rather the bringing of an
isolated trade into an ethical connection, and its admission into a
sphere in which it wins strength and honour." 8. The State proper, or
political constitution, presents itself to Hegel as the system in which
the family and the Bourgeois Society find their completion and their
security. He was early impressed, as we have seen, with the beautiful
unity of

the ancient Greek commonwealths. And the first and last idea which
governs his representations of the modern State is that of the Greek
commonwealth enlarged as it were from a sun to a solar system. The
family feeling and the individual interest are in the modern State let
go, accented, intensified to their uttermost power; and it is out of and
because of this immense orbit of its elements that the modern State has
its "enormous strength and depth." It is the typical mind, the very
essence of reason, whose completeness is directly as the completeness of
each of its terms or sides or factors; and secure in the logical
confidence that feeling and self-consciousness, the more they attain
their fullness, must return the more certainly to their place in the
reasonable system which is their very nature. As ultimate power, the
State maintains on one side the attitude of an external necessity
towards the spheres of private life, of the family, and of the economic
world. It may intervene by force to remove hindrances in the path of the
common good, which accident and immaturity may have placed there. But,
in its essence, the State is the indwelling and explicit end of these
modes of living, and is strong in its union of the universal purpose
with the particular interests of mankind. It is, in short, the
incarnation of the general or Real Will. It has the ethical habit and
temper of the family as a pervading basis, combined with the explicit
consciousness and purpose of the business world. In the organism of the
State, i.e. in as far as we feel and think as citizens, feeling becomes
affectionate loyalty, and explicit consciousness becomes political
insight. As citizens we both feel and see that the

State includes and secures the objects of our affections and our
interests; not as separate items, thrown together by chance, but as
purposes transformed by their relation to the common good, into which,
as we are more or less aware, they necessarily pass. This feeling and
insight are the true essence of patriotism. It is easier to be
magnanimous than to be merely right, and people prefer to think of
patriotism as a readiness to make great sacrifices which are never
demanded. But true patriotism is the every-day habit of looking on the
commonwealth as our substantive purpose and the foundation of our lives.
The division of functions in the State is a necessary condition of its
rational organisation. But, as Rousseau had insisted, it is altogether
false to regard these separate functions as independent, or as checks on
one another. There could be no living unity, if the functions of the
State were ultimately independent and negative towards each other. Their
differentiation is simply the rational division of labour. The State is
an image of a rational conception; it is "a hieroglyph of reason."
Sovereignty, therefore, resides in no one element. It is, essentially,
the relation in which each factor of the constitution stands to the
whole. That is to say, it resides only in the organised whole acting qua
organised whole. If, for example, we speak of the "Sovereignty of the
People" in a sense opposed to the Sovereignty of the State--as if there
were such a thing as "the people" over and above the organised means of
expressing and adjusting the will of the community--we are

saying what is, strictly speaking, meaningless. It is just the point of
difference between Rousseau's two views. We saw that Rousseau clearly
explained the impossibility of expressing the general will except by a
determinate system of law. But what he seemed to suggest, and was taken
to mean, by popular Sovereignty, was no doubt just the view which Hegel
condemns. It is essentially the same question as how a constitution can
be made. Strictly, a constitution cannot be made except by modification
of an existing constitution. If, to put a case, you have a multitude new
to each other in some extra-political colony, they must assume a
constitution, so to speak, before they can make one. Law and
constitution are utterances of the spirit of a nation. The form of State
which Hegel analyses is a modern constitutional monarchy, with an
executive (ministers sitting in the chambers, as he is careful to urge)
and Chambers or Estates representing the classes developed in the civic
community. Representation, he urges, is of bodies or interests rather
than of masses of individuals, and the Corporations or Trade Societies
have also an important place directly, by their touch with the
departments of the executive government. The general principle is, as
indicated above, that the problems of connection between considerable
particular interests and the universal interests of the community are,
so to speak, prepared on the ground of the

Corporation and Bourgeois Society for a solution in the interest of the
common good by the Legislative and the Executive Government. The logical
division of power, in his language, is that the Legislature has to
establish universal principles, the executive has to apply these
principles to particular cases, and the prince has to bring to a point
the acts of the State by giving them, "like the dot on the i," the final
shape of individual volition. The distinction of States into Monarchy,
Aristocracy, and Democracy, Hegel refuses to regard as applicable to the
modern world. At best, it could only apply to the undeveloped
communities of antiquity. The modern State is a concrete, and, according
to its principle, all the elements of a people's life are represented in
it as an indivisible unity. A curious point is Hegel's insistence on the
function of the personal Head of the State. By a junction of the
extremes, he connects it with the recognition of free individuality,
which is usually regarded as the democratic principle of the modern
world. There is no act, we may say in illustration, according to the
modern idea of an act, if it is not done in the end by an individual,
though in a developed political system the monarch's action may only
consist in signing his name. It is at least remarkable to compare this
view with the tendency to one-man government in the administration of
the United States of America. The State, then, is on one side the
external force and automatic machinery implied in the maintenance and
adjustment of the rights and purposes

of the family and the Bourgeois Society as an actual life. On the other
side, and most essentially, it is that connection of feeling and
insight, working throughout the consciousnesses of individuals as parts
in a connected structure, which unite in willing a certain type of life
as a common good in which they find their own. It has the same content
as that of Religion; but in an explicit and rationalised form as
contrasted with the form of feeling. Only the separation of Church and
State, and the division of the Churches against one another, have made
it possible for the State to exhibit its own free and ethical character
in true fullness, apart from both dogmatic authority and anarchic
fanaticism. 9. Publicity of discussion in the assembly of the classes or
estates is the great means of civic education. It is not in the least
true that every one knows what is for the good of the State, and has
only to go down to the House and utter it. It is in the work of
expression and discussion that the good takes form by adjustment of
private views to facts and needs brought to bear by criticism. "The
views a man plumes himself on

when he is at home with his wife and friends are one thing; it is quite
another thing what happens in a great assembly, where one shrewd idea
devours the other." The free judgment of individuals based on the
publicity of political discussion is "public opinion." In public opinion
we have an actual existent contradiction. As public, it is sound and
true, and contains the ethical spirit of the State. As expressed by
individuals in their particular judgments, on which they plume
themselves, it is full of falsehood and vanity. It is the bad which is
peculiar, and which people pride themselves on; the rational is
universal in its nature, though not necessarily common. Public opinion
is a contradictory appearance, in which the true exists as false. It is
no accident, but inevitable insight, that leads both of these characters
to be proverbially expressed, as in "Vox populi, vox Dei," contrasted
with Ariosto's "Che'l Volgare ignorante ogn'un' riprenda E parli piu di
qual che meno intenda"; or Goethe's "Zuschlagen kann die Masse Da ist
sie respektabel; Urtheilen gelingt ihr miserabel." or the "mostly fools"
of Carlyle. Now, as public opinion thus combines truth and falsehood,
the public cannot be in earnest with

both, i.e. both cannot be its real will. But if we restrict ourselves to
its express utterance, we cannot possibly tell what it is in earnest
with--because it does not know. Therefore, the degree of passion with
which a given opinion is maintained throws no light on the question, on
what points the public is really in earnest, in the sense of the "real
will." This can only be known from the substantive reality, which is the
"true inwardness" of public opinion. This substantive reality, the true
merits of any case, is not to be got by the study of mere public opinion
as expressed, but when it is successfully divined and asserted, public
opinion will always come round to it. If we ask how it is to be divined
or known, we must go back to the analogy of a theory. The solution must
be constructed so as to satisfy the real facts or needs, and the real
facts or needs only become known in proportion as it is constructed,
just as in scientific discovery. The man who can see and do what his age
wills and demands is the great man of the age. Public opinion, then,
demands to be at once esteemed and contemned; esteemed in its essential
basis, contemned in its conscious expression. It is, however, the
principle of the modern world that every one is allowed to contribute
his opinion. When he has contributed it, and so far satisfied the
impulse of self-assertion, he is likely to acquiesce in what is done, to
which, he can feel, he has thrown in some element of suggestion or
criticism. 10. In concluding this chapter, we will attempt to estimate
the nearness of such an analysis of the State to the actual facts of
life, admitting certain

appearances against it, but rejecting pessimistic views which rest on
false abstractions. I will state the difficulties as they appeared to T.
H. Green, a cautious and practical Englishman, well experienced in local
politics, and acquainted with different classes of men. "To an Athenian
slave, who might be used to gratify a master's lust, it would have been
a mockery to speak of the State as a realisation of freedom; and perhaps
it would not be much less to speak of it as such to an untaught and
underfed denizen of a London yard with gin shops on the right hand and
on the left." "It is true that the necessity which the State lays on the
individual is for the most part one to which he is so accustomed that he
no longer kicks against it; but what is it, we may ask, but an external
necessity, which he no more lays on himself than he does the weight of
the atmosphere or the pressure of summer heat and winter frosts, that
compels the ordinary citizen to pay rates and taxes, to serve in the
army, to abstain from walking over the Squire's fields, snaring his
hares, or fishing his preserved streams, to pay his rent, to respect
those artificial rights of property which only the possessors of them
have any obvious interest in maintaining, or even (if he is one of the
`proletariate') to keep his hands off the superfluous wealth of his
neighbour when he has none of his own to lose?" "A conception does not
float in the air. It must be somebody's conception. Whose conception,
then, of general good is it that these institutions represent?" "Is it
not seriously

misleading, when the requirements of the State have so largely arisen
out of force directed by selfish motives, and when the motive of
obedience to these requirements is determined by fear, to speak of them
as having a common source with the morality of which it is admitted that
the essence is to be disinterested and spontaneous?" I have quoted these
passages--the whole section should be carefully read--in order to state
plainly a paradox which affects the theory of society from beginning to
end. It continually shows itself in the pessimistic criticism of
economic motive, political motive, and of every-day social motive. The
whole question really depends on our understanding of the relation of
abstract and concrete. It is plain, as Green says, that the idea of a
common good has never been the sole influence operative in the formation
or maintenance of States. And, in as far as it has operated at all, it
has only done so in very imperfect forms. Green goes so far as to say
that Hegel's account of freedom as realised in the State does not seem
to correspond to the facts of society as it is, or even as, under the
unalterable conditions of human nature, it ever could be; though, no
doubt, there is a work of moral liberation, which society, through its
various agencies, is constantly carrying on for the individual. Now, the
truth of these criticisms may be granted in the same sense in which we
grant the imperfection of knowledge (as currently conceived) or of
morality-- imperfections not accidental, but inherent in each particular
form of human

experience. The conflict of interests, the failure to reconcile rights,
and the weight and opaqueness, so to speak, of law and custom to the
individual mind, are contradictions of the same type and due to causes
of the same kind as those which arise in the world of ethics and of
theory. And, though the new relations which spring up in society are
perpetually resulting in new contradictions, there is no reason to
compare the State unfavourably, in this respect, with Morality or with
Science. The contradictions, in fact, are the material of organisation.
Without differing profoundly from Green in theory, therefore, we venture
to assign a greatly diminished importance to his criticisms. This is due
in part to the growth of a more intimate experience, owing in some
measure to his initiative, which seems to show the essentials of life to
be far more identical throughout the so-called classes of society than
is admitted by such a passage as that cited above about the dweller in a
London yard. It is due, further, and in connection with

such experience, to the psychological conceptions developed in previous
chapters, according to which the place of actual fear of punishment in
maintaining the social system is really very small, while the place of a
habituation, which is essentially ethical, is comparatively large. These
suggestions, which lead us to lay decreasing stress on Green's criticism
of Hegel, point wholly in the general direction of his own convictions,
and we may finally meet the general difficulty, which expresses itself
in pessimism, by considerations such as Green himself alleges in
mitigation of his own criticism. We may approach the matter in this way.
The paradox is, that if you scrutinise the acts which have made States,
and which carry them on, or which go on under and within them, you will
everywhere be able to urge that they spring from self-interest and
ambition--not from a desire for the common good. How then can we say
that the State exists for a common good? Hegel's large conception of a
social fabric and the temper of mind which maintains it should have done
something to meet this problem. But we may come a little closer to the
precise difficulty. Nothing is so fallacious as mere psychological
analysis applied to the estimation of the purposes which rule a mind. In
every act there is necessarily an aspect of the agent's particular self.
One way or another he is satisfied in it. So the pessimistic or
superficial psychologist can always--not in some acts merely, but in
all--discover a form of self-seeking. Life is a whole made up of
particulars, and the universal is a connection within them, not another
particular outside them; it is a mistake

of principle to suppose that any act can be outside the tissue of aims,
impulses, and emotions which affect the sensitive self. Great purposes
work through these affections and transform them, but cannot obliterate
them without obliterating life. "There is nothing degrading in being
alive." But there is a kind of eye which sees all these particulars
apart from the substantive aims which give them their character, and
treats them as if they were the sole determining motives of the agent.
Hegel calls such a critic--he is thinking especially of historians--"the
psychological valet, for whom there are no heroes, not because they are
no heroes, but because he is only a valet." On the whole, a man is what
he does. If his series of actions has the root of the matter in it, it
is wrong either for him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because
they bring him gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement.
To shrink from particular occasions of action because one's self may
find satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing
of the abstract good. And "the laurels of mere willing are dry leaves
that never have been green." We may illustrate these ideas from the life
of the ordinary members of States, and from the career of a great ruler
or conqueror. The life of an English labourer, for example, may concern
itself with no such abstract ideas as are expressed by the words "State"
or "common

good." But, to begin with, he is a law-abiding citizen. He keeps his
hands off others and their belongings by the same rule by which he
expects others to keep their hands off him and his belongings. He
recognises fairness of bargaining, and is prepared to treat others
fairly, as he expects them to treat him. He is aware of his claims, that
is to say, as depending on something in common between himself and
others; and if he does not practically admit any such community, "he is
one of the `dangerous classes,' virtually outlawed by himself." So far
he is a loyal subject only. If he is to have a fuller sense of a social
good, he must either take part in the work of the State, or at least be
familiar with such work, through interest in his fellows' share of it,
and in the organisations which connect his class interests with the
public good. His mind must not merely work in its place in the social
mind, but must be in some degree aware of the connection between its
place and the whole--of the appercipient structure to which it belongs.
He must, in short, have touch with the connection which Hegel represents
as that between the Bourgeois Society and the State proper. And this, in
modern States, is in principle open to him. And, further, he must have
the feeling for his State, which is connected with the idea of home and
fatherland. In a modern nation the atmosphere of the family is not
confined to the actual

family. The common dwelling-place, history, and tradition, the common
language and common literature, give a colour of affection to the
every-day citizen-consciousness, which is to the nation what family
affection is in the home circle. Thus, it is not true that either the
feeling or the insight which constitute a consciousness of a common good
are wanting to the every-day life of an average citizen in a modern
State. It may seem full of selfish care, but this is only a narrow view.
If we look at the spirit of the whole life we shall see that it is
substantially dependent on the recognition of a good, and feels that
dependence in concrete form. And, secondly, to take the paradox in its
extreme shape, in which the order of the State appears to arise out of
the selfish ambition of the most unscrupulous of men. The contradiction
may be stated in the form that the actions of bad men are it
"over-ruled" for good. But this would mean that the "psychological"
critic or historian had first mis-stated the cause, and then had
rectified his mis-statement by a meaningless phrase. The great ideas and
causes which were advanced, for example, by the career of Napoleon, owed
neither their nature nor their existence to his selfish ambition. They
did not, however, owe them to any non-human cause; to any operation of
ideas otherwise than in the minds of men. They came into existence
through the working of innumerable minds towards objective ends by the
inherent logic of social growth, with various degrees of moral insight,
and they were promoted by Napoleon's career in virtue of the common
character which united his aims, in so far

as they had a reasonable side, with the movement shaped by the ideal
forces of the age. There is no reason to doubt, if we do not wilfully
narrow our view of the situation, that a conception of good was as much
operative in the cause as it is present in the effect--say, in the unity
of Italy. We cannot attempt, on the ground of mere ethical and political
philosophy, to deal with the problem of the existence of evil; and we
are not concerned to deny or to minimise the presence of greed and
selfishness as distorting forces in the minds of men, or in the
organisation of States. All that we needed to show, was that what makes
and maintains States as States is will and not force, the idea of a
common good, and not greed or ambition; and that this principle cannot
be overthrown by the facts of self- interest in ordinary citizens, or of
selfishness in those who mould the destinies of nations.
--------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER XI INSTITUTIONS CONSIDERED AS ETHICAL IDEAS 1. WE have been
guided throughout our argument by the idea that the relation of a given
mind to the mind of society is comparable to the relation between our
apprehension of a single object and our view of nature as a whole. The
former term, in each case, we cannot but suppose to be an individualised
case of the latter. The latter seems inevitably to imply a universal
principle corresponding to every feature of the former. We can never see
through the connections, and the connections of the connections--e.g. of
gravitation and of colour-- in every part. But our ideal as theorists
would be to analyse the physical object into features, every one of
which should be a case of a natural law, and the whole taken together a
case of the whole system of natural law, which would be our scientific
view of the world. In treating of a human mind in its relation to

Society and the State, our ideal is comparable to this. We should like
to analyse any given mind into features each of which should be an
individual case of a universal principle, and the whole of which, taken
together, should be a case of the whole system of principles incarnate
in the world, and proximately in the social world. Plato, simplifying
for the sake of elucidation the City-state, which to our minds was
already simple, represented a community, in diagrammatic form, as
consisting in a threefold structure of classes, in which were incarnate
the three main features which he discriminated in the individual
soul--the desires necessary to living, the spirit of action, and the
power of seeing things as a whole. 2. The principles which constitute a
society are facts as well as ideas, and purposes as well as facts. This
threefold character is united in what we describe by the general term
"institutions," a term which would apply perfectly well to Plato's
"classes" in virtue of the definite relations with which he invests
them. It is unnecessary to insist on the external aspect of institutions
as facts in the material world; but it will be worth while to gather up
the leading conceptions of our analysis by tracing the nature of some
prominent "institutions," as ideas, constituent elements of the mind,
which are also purposes; that is, as ethical ideas. An institution may
have grown up without special ordinance, or may have been called into
existence by an act of public will. But it has always the character of
being recognised as if it had been "instituted" or established to fulfil
some public or quasi-public

purpose. An old servant is sometimes said to be "quite an
institution"--he is characterised by the function of keeping alive
certain common traditions of a school, perhaps, or a family--an annual
custom may be an institution in virtue of the same kind of recognition;
Sunday is an institution; the word is indeed very vaguely applied, for
obviously almost every object or event can have a significance of this
kind attached to it in jest or earnest. But for all that, we can see
pretty plainly what usage is driving at. An institution implies a
purpose or sentiment of more minds than one, and a more or less
permanent embodiment of it. "Of more minds than one," because it is to
fix the meeting point of minds that the external embodiment is
necessary. In institutions, then, we have that meeting point of the
individual minds which is the social mind. But "meeting point" is an
unhappy term, suggesting objects in space that touch at certain spots.
Rather let us say, we have here the ideal substance, which, as a
universal structure, is the social, but in its differentiated cases is
the individual mind. And it is necessary to observe that the material of
this fabric has determinate sources. Mind is not an empty point. It is
the world as experienced. The institutions, which as ethical

ideas constitute mind, are, like a theory, attempts at unity in face of
needs, pressures, facts, and suggestions which arise in what we call our
surroundings, and to each of which mind reveals a different quality; as
every tone of a landscape elicits its peculiar shade of feeling, which
but for it might have remained latent for ever. It takes the whole world
to call out the whole mind. But it will be enough if we can trace, in
some prominent examples, the nature of an institution as at once a
dealing with surroundings, an ethical idea, and a social principle. 3.
The family starts from the universal physical fact of parentage, but
takes its ethical value mainly from the special phase of parental
relation which leads to the formation of a household. The association of
parents and children in a household, which is permanent until broken up
into other households, is due to economic conditions. Calling to mind
the original meaning of words, we see that we are asserting the
formation of a household to be due to "household" conditions. And this
is something more than a pun. Whatever the surroundings may be which
favour the formation of households, whether the difficulty of procuring
livelihood, which makes the father's continued care essential, or the
chances offered by agriculture to a stable group, they operate as
elements in a human world, in a world which is constituted by

the focussing of "surroundings" (circumstances) in a whole. Conditions
which have become "economic" have ceased to be material. They are
motives, interests, means to ends. They bring the world into the mind,
but in doing so they become factors in the purposiveness and
re-adjustment, which the mind, as unity asserting itself throughout
varied suggestions, is busied in bringing to pass. By demanding
permanence, for instance, economic conditions elicit in the relation of
parent and child the simplest form of universality necessary to an
ethical idea. We will not venture upon the history of phases of the
family life, but will attempt at once to sketch its position and value
in the typical civilisation of a modern State. Only it must be insisted
on once more, that the family or household as an ethical structure is
not anterior to the State, but is rather a growth dependent on the
spirit and protection of the State, and intentionally fostered by it as
against forms of kinship which do less justice to the ethical
possibilities of parentage. As an ethical idea, then, the monogamous
family, which is in the normal case also a household, has a unique place
in the structure of the citizen mind. Its peculiarity is in being a
natural union of feeling with ideal purpose. That is to say, the ideal
purpose, a permanent interest in a comparatively permanent and external
life, attaches itself by imperceptible links to the most universal
incident of animal existence. The mere remaining together of the units,
a demand of their physical needs, is almost enough of itself to
transform their inevitable

mutual dependence into a relation of intentional service, rooted in
affection, and tinged with some degree of forethought. And, being thus
"natural," the idea of the family has a hold like no other upon the
whole man. In this respect it anticipates the powers which have been
claimed for the love of beauty. The very animal roots of life, and every
detail of man's appetitive being, are made, without conscious effort or
moralising interference, factors in a round of social service. The meal
of a lonely individual is perhaps, at best, a refined and lawful
pleasure. But the family meal, quite apart from over-strained
religionism, has in it, as a plain matter of fact, the fundamental
elements of a sacrament, none the less effective that they are not
thought of by that name. And both through maintaining the fitness of the
parents for their life work, and through the training of the children to
the same end, the natural ethics of the family have an indispensable
logical hold upon the more explicit common good known to the social
will. And, in the last place, it should be noted that a feeling and
atmosphere of this kind is not confined to members actually living in
households formed by families. There is no race, it has been said, that
parts with its children so readily, or retains their affections so
permanently, as the Anglo-Saxon race. When the type and spirit are once
formed, they are contagious and persistent; they

affect all who have seen or known them, and even those who have never
formed part of a household bound by kinship. If we contrast the idea of
the household with monasticism as its repudiation, and with the tribal
state or phalanstery as its exaggeration, we shall see its uniqueness in
the strongest light. The naturalness of its foundation, and the
completeness of the reciprocal interest (involving monogamy) on which
its idea rests, distinguish it from all other forms of union or disunion
in which the sexes are concerned. It may be added that the family, and
it alone, has the right adjustment of population in its power. The fully
trained and equipped human being can never be superfluous in the world.
And the production of the fully trained and equipped human being depends
on the capacity of forming a true family and meeting its requirements,
and when this capacity and idea regulate the union of the sexes no
growth nor apparent decrease of population need cause anxiety. It seems
as idle to discuss whether civilisation is conceivable without the
family as whether human nature can change. All that we can attempt, as
philosophers, is to ascertain the distinctive part which its idea plays
in human life as such. There must be, we can see, some such idea--an
ethical idea covering some such sides of life--while man is a spiritual
animal. But by what precise "institution" such an idea might come to be
represented in circumstances which we do not know, it would be beyond
the modesty of philosophy to predict. The institution of Property may be
mentioned

as a corollary to the household-family. Its natural basis and ethical
value are very markedly correlative to those of the latter. The outlook
upon life which it essentially implies is co-extensive with that
demanded by the household, although in the relations of acquisition and
exchange many further rights and duties may attach to it. It depends on
the fact that, in order to express a will in an individual life (which
is incomplete except as the life of a household), there must be a power
of moulding the material world in the service of ideas, which is
conditioned by free acquisition and utilisation. The institution of
property, then, as an ethical idea, consists in the conception of
individual (properly speaking, household) life as a unity in respect to
its dealings with the material instruments of living. It is not merely
the idea of provision for the future; still less the certainty of
satisfying wants as they arise from day to day. It is the idea that all
dealings with the material conditions of life form part of a connected
system, in which our conceptions and our abilities express themselves.
It binds together the necessary care for food and clothing with ideas of
making the most of our life and of the lives dependent upon us. A being
which has no will has so far no property--a child has in practice, and a
slave had by Roman law, property in a secondary sense--and a being which
has no property has so far no actual will. The "person," or responsible
head (or heads), of a household, is the true unit to whom the idea of
property attaches, because he is the unit to which we normally ascribe
an individualised will, a single

distinctive shape of the social mind. A child has not yet such a will; a
group of mature persons has more than one. The change which is passing
over the household in consequence of the recognition of married women as
individual wills is highly instructive on this point. They can hold and
manage their own property, because it is admitted that they can have
their own view of life. It is not proposed that young children should
hold and manage property, because every one knows that they have no
mature individualised view of life. The corporate person of the
household is so far dissolved by legal recognition of its more
individual components; and it is most important, theoretically, to note
that its unity is not diminished by the recognition, but is raised to a
higher power. 4. It might seem fanciful to say that our district is to
our family as space to time; but it would suggest something of the point
of view from which it is well to look at the structure of our ethical
ideas. It is desirable to realise how the simplest characters of our
surroundings and their necessary connections are ethically important,
not because they impose anything upon us, but because they respond to
something within us, or rather, to a possibility which is to be realised
by the world, as in us its variety strives towards unity. Parentage, we
saw, was a universal animal fact, and from it, in an experience capable
of unity and permanence, springs the family household and all that it
implies for our lives. One's district, as an element of life, implies,
of course, some stability--a home, not merely permanent as a

home, like the Scythian's waggon, but located on some spot of earth. The
nomad, we must suppose, to a great extent carries his neighbourhood--his
tribe--along with him, and for that very reason the fact of
neighbourhood has not its full effect on him. But when a permanent home
is fixed on some spot of earth, presumably with the beginnings of
agriculture, a new condition begins to operate--the "indifference" of
space. Perhaps we are surprised that "indifference" should be an ethical
stimulus. But nothing is more instructive than to note how qualities of
our surroundings, which by themselves seem negative or the barest
natural necessities, spring into significance when taken up into the
unity of life. Locality means a potential neighbourhood. It may be long
before any one comes near you except your own cousinhood, your tribe or
clan. But the indifference of space is a standing invitation, and it is
pretty certain that some day strangers will become your neighbours, and
that you will have to take up some mental attitude towards them.
Historians and jurists have described to us the struggle between the
principle of kinship and the principle of neighbourhood. When we read
that a plebeian, in the eyes of a Roman patrician, simply could not make
a real marriage any more than the beasts of the field, this is not, as
it may have become by survival, intentional arrogance on the patrician's
part. It was rather the state of mind of Mrs. Transome towards Rufus
Lyon, "sheer inability to consider him." A proof of what a struggle it
involved to reach a new attitude of mind as regarded the resident alien
is given by

the half-way house at which it was found necessary to pause in the
process. The recognition of kinship on the ground of residence was the
fiction, we are told, by which the mind assisted itself to a positive
attitude towards those whom the indifference of space insisted on
bringing within its range. And the positive attitude towards which it
was groping its way was of course the recognition of humanity, the
equality of man in the truest sense which that ambiguous phrase will
bear. In modern States, in which this struggle is on the whole behind
us, our district or locality asserts its full indifference. Its
"negative" here becomes a "positive." That is to say, on the whole, and
under some reasonable reservations as to evidence of intention to accept
duties, and to renounce incompatible ones, men are full members of the
district to which they choose to belong. The challenge thrown down by
the indifference of space has resulted in a recognition of universal
humanity. Our district is our neighbourhood. We will look a little more
closely at the ethical idea implied. We notice at once, at least in
English experience, that each of us belongs to a variety of districts
which are concentric as regards him. Each of these districts represents
a different purpose, and we are told that for practical purposes great
confusion results. But it is a useful training to be made aware of the
distinct purpose of each

organised locality which surrounds us--to have the care of our health,
of public order, of education, of the relief of the destitute, and of
religion according to our view of it, represented by different, or
possibly different, boundary lines on the map. Each of these boundaries
indicates some common element of thought and feeling-- some common
interest--in the mind of the neighbourhood, and the difference of the
boundaries, where they differ --the difference, e.g., between the civil
and ecclesiastical parish--may have a long growth of ideas behind it. At
any rate, all these are moral or physical needs, which, like our
household necessities, draw us out of ourselves, and reveal us to
ourselves as cases of a larger mind. Every locality, then, is, however
imperfectly and unconsciously, a body which has a mind. It is, as an
idea which enters into us, the spiritual reflection of our adjacent
surroundings, both human and natural, as the family is of our animal
parentage. The neighbourhood is for the mind its immediate picture of
the world, the frame into which its further vista of society as a whole
must be fitted, or, in other words, its sphere of direct relations. The
family is a group of natural relations; but the neighbourhood consists
of relations which are as natural in a different way, not through blood,
but through contact. It is not a selection, but rather a specimen of
life as a whole, for it must include as a rule all the necessary
elements of the social fabric. It includes all that comes to us by
direct sense-perception from day to day; all our chance meetings and
dealings with those outside our household, and probably the nearer

and more reliable illustrations of all social and political problems.
For it is a context of life which we know and feel in its total working,
which is impossible with what we only gather from writings or from
hearsay. As such a reflection of our direct surroundings, it colours our
whole basis of feeling. A peculiar tinge of happiness, anxiety,
depression, or resolution attaches to the streets or fields which we
pass through day by day, and the faces which we meet. How far these
feelings are true interpretations of what we see, and how far they
spring from superficial or sentimental associations, is one of the
greatest tests of the mind and heart. Do we see the body of a soul, the
symbols of character and happiness, in the houses, the streets, the
tillage, the workshops, or the gardens? No other element of mind can be
the substitute for the neighbourhood. It is the faith in which we live,
so far as embodied in our contact with a sensuous world. It is a
microcosm of humanity, in which, by the very indifference of space, we
are liable to the direct impact of all possible factors. It is
particularly the sphere of charity and courtesy, of the right behaviour
in immediate human relations of all possible kinds. The District or
Neighbourhood, in short, as an ethical idea, is the unity of the region
with which we are in sensuous contact, as the family is that of the
world bound to us by blood or daily needs. Local self- government, for
example, acquires a peculiar character from the possibilities of
intimate knowledge of each other among those who carry it on. A man's
whole way of living

is in question when he sets up to be locally prominent, and though the
result may often be corruption or vulgarity, these are only the failure
of what, at its best, is a true type of the relation of fellow-citizens.
As with the family, we may illustrate the significance of Neighbourhood
by the case in which it fails to be duly recognised, and that in which
nothing else is recognised. To a great extent, in the life of modern
cities, especially when supplemented by suburban residence, the
principle is disregarded. In a great city, the actual neighbourhood is
more than can be dealt with, and has often no distinctive physical
character--at least no attractiveness--and the idea of a special
relation to it falls away. The fact, indeed, is less universal than is
often asserted, and nearness in space, together with local government,
retain and will retain a certain predominance over the mind. The total
disregard of an ethical purpose connecting us with the surroundings
nearest to us in bodily presence, tends to deprive the general life of
its vitality, its sensuous health, strength, and beauty. In many ways,
circuitous perhaps, but ultimately effective, it may be that this factor
of immediacy will regain a proper place in the national mind. We may
observe that in as far as electoral districts are treated as mere
circumscriptions of such and such numbers of electors, the life of a
neighbourhood is disregarded. To make the constituency a mere number

(Hare's scheme) would be the climax of this tendency. In the ancient
City-state, on the other hand, the district was all-powerful. The State
was almost a sensuous fact. The members of the State were essentially
friends and neighbours, who for business or pleasure were meeting all
day long. When the district thus absorbs the State, there is a want of
what we call freedom, though there may be enough of sensuous
unconstraint. The State and its ideal purposes are not clearly set above
all flesh and blood. A great legal system is not created till the State
ceases to be a neighbourhood. Individual intimacy and the "hard case"
obscure the idea of universal law. The possibility of representative
government, of a political faith which does not work by sight, is not
conceived. The district, as a natural fact, was at first only a degree
more liberating than the natural fact of kinship. It was not conceived
that man, as man, belonged "neither to this place nor to Jerusalem."
With the ideal unity of a modern nation such conceptions harmonise much
more readily, and the neighbourhood can lend them flesh and blood
without hiding them. 5. "Class" is in democratic countries no longer a
political institution. A man's vote is secured to him on a minimum
qualification, and his practical influence and acceptance depend neither on

birth nor on occupation, but on the power which he can exercise by his
qualities or his possessions. This is a consequence of the recognition
of humanity as such, and has its bad side and its good side according to
the baseness and nobility of the influences which tell de facto upon
human nature. It is horrible, we may say, that influence should belong
to wealth without any security whatever for a discharge of social
function. But this, given human nature as it is to-day, is a result of
the same causes which enable us to boast, with some truth, that a man
ranks in the general world by his powers, character, and behaviour, and
that we do not know or care whether his livelihood comes to him as a
miner or as a duke. Wealth has weight because people give it weight; but
no one need give weight to wealth in politics or social intercourse
unless he likes. It is a consequence, then, of the recognition of free
humanity that "class" no longer is an institution in political right as
such, while in social intercourse, though it practically exists as an
institution, it claims to be an expression of what people are in
character and behaviour, and its differences are not annexed by any iron
bond to differences of occupation. But though occupation no longer
determines either social or political class, in the sense of

graduation by any formal bond, yet it remains and must always remain a
determinant of class in a narrower sense, and one of the main ideas
which constitute the ethical structure of the mind. The necessities
which we compared roughly to time and space--the proximate permanent
group and the adjacent locality--give a value to man's animal routine,
and a significance to the area of his every-day perceptions. It is when
the division of labour, the requital of one service by a different one,
becomes prominent in a community, that a further grasp is laid upon the
distinctive capacities of the individual consciousness, in which must be
reckoned the surroundings which constitute its horizon of possibilities.
We still answer the general question, "What is he?" by naming a man's
industry or profession. The family and the neighbourhood sustain and
colour the individual life, but the vocation stamps and moulds it. The
more definite and articulate summons of the organising world--in which
of course intelligence is active, ever discerning new purposes in old
routine--elicits a deeper response from, or takes a more concrete shape
in, the particular centre of consciousness. The individual has his own
nature communicated to him as he is summoned to fit himself for
rendering a distinctive service to the common good. He becomes
"something"; an incarnation of a factor in the social idea. The Roman
word "class," which the English language has adopted, not for every
separate employment, but for the character and position roughly
connected with a whole group of employments, has an origin worth
recalling. Plato's classes

were "genera" = clans, extended families. The German classes were
"St?nde" = statuses, positions, estates (compare the French "?tat,"
which practically = trade). But the Roman "classis" was "a summoning" to
public service; the first and second classes were the first and second
summonings; then indeed to military service in an order based on wealth.
But the idea may survive. Our "class" may be thought of as the group or
body in which we are called out for distinctive service. One's class,
then, in the sense in which it indicates the type of position and
service involved in one's occupation, approaches very near the centre of
one's individuality. In principle, as an ethical idea, it takes the man
or woman beyond the family and the neighbourhood; and for the same
reason takes him deeper into himself. He acquires in it a complex of
qualities and capacities which put a special point upon the general need
of making a livelihood for the support of his household. In principle,
his individual service is the social mind, as it takes, in his
consciousness, the shape demanded by the logic of the social whole. He
is "a public worker," by doing the service which society demands of him.
And just because the service is in principle something particular,
unique, and distinctive, he feels himself in it to be a member of a
unity held together by differences. And in this sense the bond of social
union is not in similarity, but in the highest degree of individuality
or specialisation, the ultimate point of which would be to feel that I
am rendering

to society a service which is necessary, and which no one but I can
render--the closest conceivable tie, and yet one which, in a sense,
really exists in every case. Your special powers and functions supply my
need, and my special powers and functions supply your need, and each of
us recognises this and rejoices in it. This ethical idea of unique
service, or the service of a unique class, involves of course a more or
less conscious identity in difference. That is to say, the individual's
mind is not reduced to his special service, or he would be a machine.
Rather, the whole social consciousness is present in him, but present in
a modified form, according to the point of view from which it is
looking. The problem is simply put by Plato's diagrammatic scheme of
classes. The statesman's function is to be wise for the community; the
carpenter's to carpenter for the community. But plainly the community
for which the statesman knows that he has to be wise, must include the
carpenter's life and the conditions of his work, and the community for
which the carpenter knows that he has to work must include some of the
order and organisation which belong to it in the statesman's vision. The
individual, in short, is unique, or belongs to a unique class, not as an
atom, but as a case of a law, or term of a connection. This is what is
meant by individuality in the true sense; the character of a unit which
has a great deal that, being his very self, cannot be divided from him;
not one which has so little that there is nothing by subtraction of
which he can be imagined less. Such individuality is in a sense the
whole ethical idea, but more particularly is embodied in

the idea of a vocation. Our vocation, like our neighbourhood, and
usually of course in connection with it, stamps both mind and body; and
what we consider most intimately ourself is really the structure of
ethical ideas which we are describing, with the feelings and habits in
which they are rooted, but of which none is unmodified by them. Like the
other ideas of which we have spoken, the idea of class or specialised
function may be illustrated both by the extreme in which it is nothing,
and the extreme in which it is everything. The less a society is
differentiated--the less that, considered as a mind, it has developed
intense and determinate capacities--the more its structure repeats
itself from household to household, and fails to exhibit lines of
formation pervading the community as a whole. Dicey's The Peasant State
gives an idea of a social mind thus undifferentiated, without classes,
without ambitions, and without interests. Both in this case and in that
of the Boers of the Transvaal it would be rash for an outsider to
pronounce dogmatically on the value of the life which is achieved. But
as cases of social formation and of social minds, they illustrate our
present theme. To say that there is no specialised function, is the same
as to say that there is no developed intelligence. "Class" appears to be
everything, an absolute and inflexible rule of precedence and privilege,
when it has lost or has not gained the power of accommodating itself to
function, and function to social logic. Such denials of free adjustment, of

the career open to talents, may take the form of a confusion of the
principle of class with that of birth, or even with that of private
property. In the former case function and position are inherited, in the
latter they are bought and sold. The two confusions may even be
combined, as when public functions are inherited like or with a house or
an estate. Such a "class" system may be an oppression to its members, or
to the community, or to both. But the essence of the evil is that a
function of mind is divorced from its characteristic of free logical
adaptation within the social system. The institution has become
ossified; and instead of moulding itself, like a theory or a living
organism, to the facts and needs which it is there to meet, it nails
itself to an alien principle, and becomes a fallacy in social logic, or
a dead organ in the social body. In both of these extreme cases
individuality is minimised. In the former the individual does not
pretend to any high capacity. In the latter he pretends to a
considerable capacity, but this being cut apart from the principle of
the whole, and pretending to be everything in itself--to exist
absolutely or for its own sake--has lost the connection which gave it
value, and becomes a mere pretension. There is a strange and sad
institution in which, it may be suggested, the two extremes of error are
combined. This is the institution of "the

poor" as a class, representing, as an ethical idea in the modern mind, a
permanent object of compassion and self- sacrifice. "Poverty," it has
been said, "has become a status." The "d?class?s" have become a social
class, with the passive social function of stimulating the goodness of
others. Let any one consider carefully, from the point of view which
regards ethical ideas as an embodiment of human or social purposes, the
offertory sentences of the Church of England. It is needless to press
the criticism, for no one would be likely to deny that here we have
ideas gathered from other soils and climates, and rightly applicable
only in the spirit, but not in the letter. "Give alms of thy goods, and
never turn thy face from any poor man; and then the face of the Lord
shall not be turned away from thee." "He that hath pity upon the poor
lendeth unto the Lord, and look, what he layeth out it shall be paid him
again." The victims of misfortune in a small community, under strict
regulations, as were the Jews, for the promotion of industry, are one
thing. The recognition of a class marked by the function of
dependence--to use a contradictory expression--in a vast community whose
industrial organisation rests on the individual will, is another thing.
The idea of pity and self-denial, inherited, I presume, largely from the
Jewish scriptures as also from the New Testament, has tended, in the
modern world, to become mechanical, and combine with a false
class-conception. All who know the inner life of evangelical Christians a

generation ago will admit that, among earnest persons of this type, the
notion of the tithe--the devotion of one tenth or more of the income to
purposes of religion or benevolence--had been inherited as a guiding
idea, representing an end valuable per se, almost according to the
letter of the offertory. I am not suggesting any vulgar charge of
other-worldliness, but recalling a genuine conviction that the surrender
of a portion of income to a less fortunate class of the community was in
itself desirable and a religious duty. It would not be difficult to show
that the true and highest idea of Christian charity is remote from this
conception of a dependent status as inherent in a certain portion of
society. What seems to be needed here, as in so many aspects of morality
and religion, is to combine the inspiration and abandon of the modern
mind with the definiteness of purpose and lucidity of plan that
characterised the ancient City-state. Socialism, at its best, unites
with recent political economy and with those who try to "organise" or
rationalise charity, in challenging the preconception that poverty must
be recognised as a permanent class-function. And this brave denial may
remain written to its credit when the controversies of immediate method
are forgotten. We may attempt to indicate in a few words the direction
in which the ethical idea incarnate in the institution of the "poor" is
tending to supplement and modify itself as clearer notions of

a commonwealth arise. It may be observed, by way of introduction, that
we cruelly misconceive the Greek mind when we ascribe to it a want of
love and compassion, because we miss in its utterances the religious
note of devotion to the poor. To a great extent the truest idea of
charity was presupposed in the very axioms of a Greek commonwealth. The
Greek spoke little of "the poor," because he recognised no such status.
It would have meant to him a functionless class, a dislocation of the
body politic. This, in fact, is what it did mean when pauperism began to
press upon the Greeks, and the philosopher at once diagnoses the evil,
and uses the term, "people without means," i.e. without ways of
supporting themselves, instead of the older word, which rather suggests
the "object of `charity.'" To get them back into a function, "a means,"
is the course which ipso facto rises before him; not to create a new
ethical idea for their sake qua d?class?s.

The full modern conception of the "poor" as an institution, if they must
be an institution, ought at least to avoid the pitfall of acquiescence.
Granting the fire and love of the Christian mind to be a gain, yet its
object must be brought into relation with the true meaning of a mind or
a commonwealth. Devotion to man at his weakest must not be separated
from devotion to the possibilities of man at his
strongest--possibilities either existent or at least symbolised in the
most unhappy of the functionless poor. Self-sacrifice for the poor
should not mean a tribute to the maintenance of a vicious status, but an
abiding and pervading sense of the claims which the weaker humanity has
to be made strong. 6. The Nation-State, we have already suggested, is
the widest organisation which has the common experience necessary to
found a common life. This is why it is recognised as absolute in power
over the individual, and as his representative and champion in the
affairs of the world outside. It is obvious that there can be but one
such absolute power in relation to any one person; and that, so far as
the world is organised, there must be one; and, in fact, his discharge
from one allegiance can only be effected by his acceptance of another.
The analysis of the previous chapter releases us from the task of
setting out the elements which combine in the Nation-State, as the
conception of sovereign and ultimate adjustment between the spheres
which realise the elements of our ethical life. It should be noted,
however, that the principles of the family, the district, and the class,
not only enter into the nation in these

definite shapes, but affect the general fabric of the national State
through the sense of race, of country, and of a pervading standard of
life and culture. The reaction of ideal unity on the natural conditions
of a state is exemplified by the tendency to substitute ideal
frontiers--a meridian or a parallel-- for frontiers determined by
natural boundaries. The Nation-State as an ethical idea is, then, a
faith or a purpose--we might say a mission, were not the word too narrow
and too aggressive. It seems to be less to its inhabitant than the
City-state to its citizens; but that is greatly because, as happens with
the higher achievements of mind, it includes too much to be readily
apprehended. The modern nation is a history and a religion rather than a
clear cut idea. Its power as an idea-force is not known till it is
tried. How little the outsider, and even members of the community
concerned, were able to gauge beforehand the strength of the sentiment
and conception that pervaded the United States through the war of
secession. The place of the idea of the Nation State in the whole of
ethical ideas may be illustrated by the Greek conception of Happiness,
as that organisation of aims, whatever it may be, which permits the
fullest harmony to life. The State, as such, we saw, is limited to the
office of maintaining the external conditions of a good life; but the
conditions cannot be conceived without reference to the life for which
they exist, and

it is true, therefore, to say that the conception of the Nation- State
involves at least an outline of the life to which, as a power, it is
instrumental. The State, in short, cannot be understood apart from the
nation, nor the conditions from the life, although in exerting political
force it is important to distinguish them. As an ethical idea, the idea
of a purpose, it is essential to hold the two sides together, if we are
not to walk blindly. 7. Our analysis of the Nation-State suggests a
point of view which may be applied to the vexed question of whether
State action is to be judged by the same moral tests as private action.
The first step is to get a clear idea of the nature of State action. It
must be confined, one would think, to what is done in the name of the
State, and by something approaching to an act of will on its part as a
State. We only pass moral judgment on individuals in respect of their
acts of will, and we ought to extend the same justice to a State. The
question is complicated by the fact that a State has, as its accredited
agents, individuals whose acts it must normally avow. But it can hardly
be saddled with moral responsibility for their personal misdoings,
except under circumstances which are barely conceivable. The State, as
such, can have no ends but public ends; and in practice it has none but
what its organs conceive to be public ends. If an agent, even under the
order of his executive superior, commits a breach of morality, bona fide
in order to what he conceives to be a public end desired by the State,
he and his superior are certainly

blamable, but the immorality can hardly be laid at the door of the
public will. Indeed, a strict definition of State action might raise a
difficulty like that of defining the General Will--if the act was
immoral, can the State, as such, really have willed it? And waiving this
as a mere refinement, it still seems clear that the selfishness or
sensuality, which has at least a good deal to do with the immorality of
private actions, can hardly be present in an act of the public will, in
the same sense as in a private volition. The State, as such, certainly
cannot be guilty of personal immorality, and it is hard to see how it
can commit theft or murder in the sense in which these are moral
offences. To speak of the question as if it concerned the conduct of
statesmen and their agents, instead of the volition of a State as such,
seems to introduce confusion. We are discussing the parallel between
public and private acts, and we are asked to begin by treating the
public acts as private. It may be said that this distinction between
public and private acts leads to the casuistry of pure intention. We are
saying, it will be urged, that the State remains pure, because its will
is on the whole towards a public interest, whatever crimes its agents
may commit. And, no doubt, this line is often taken in practice. A
successful agent finds his evil deeds are winked at; an unsuccessful one
is disavowed. In either case the State pleads innocence. But this danger
cannot alter the conditions of a moral action, and we cannot impute that
as an action to the State, of which it knew no particulars, which it never

willed, and which can hardly indeed be the object of a public will. It
has a duty to see to the character of its agents and punish their
excesses; but the conditions under which it is true that qui facit per
alium facit per se, can seldom apply to a public body with regard to
actions of its agent which are not of a nature to embody public ends.
Promises and treaties, however, are acts which embody public ends. And
here the State, on its side, is bound to maintain good faith; but still
its agent is likely to go wrong if he mixes up the obligations of the
State with his private honour. The question for him, if he has to keep
or break a public undertaking, is, to what is the State substantially
bound, not to what extent would he be bound if he had made the promise
or engagement in question in his private capacity? He, or the power
which is to act, must consider the obligations and aims of the State, as
a whole, and work for the best fulfilment of them as a whole. The
question may be parallel to that of a private case of honour, but it is
not his honour nor his promise that is in question. Just so, if he
introduces his private conscience about religion or morality into his
public acts on behalf of the State, he may cause frightful persecutions
or disasters. The religious persecutions, and our position in India,
supply examples. The State, then, exists to promote good life, and what
it does cannot be morally indifferent; but its actions cannot be
identified with the deeds of its agents, or morally judged as private
volitions are judged. Its acts proper are always public acts,

and it cannot, as a State, act within the relations of private life in
which organised morality exists. It has no determinate function in a
larger community, but is itself the supreme community; the guardian of a
whole moral world, but not a factor within an organised moral world.
Moral relations presuppose an organised life; but such a life is only
within the State, not in relations between the State and other
communities. But all this, it may be urged, is beside the question. The
question is not, can a State be a moral individual (though this is
certainly one question)? but, does an interest of State justify what
would otherwise be immorality or wrong-doing on the part of an officer
of State? Again, I think, we must distinguish between acts essentially
private and acts essentially public. To steal or murder, to lie, or to
commit personal immorality, for instance, as we said, cannot be a public
act. Such acts cannot embody a general interest willed by the public
will. A State agent who commits them in pursuit of information or to
secure a diplomatic result cannot be justified on the ground that they
are not his acts but the State's; and they are as immoral in him as in
anyone else. Ultimately, indeed, it may be true that there is no act
which is incapable of justification, supposing some extreme alternative;
and in this sense, but in this sense only, it might be that, treating
the interest of a commonwealth like any other ethically imperative
interest, such acts might be relatively capable of justification. But
this justification would only mean that some supreme interest was
subserved by them, and would have

no special relation to the supposed public character of the interest. It
is then a case of the conflict of duties. And the commoner occurrence,
which results in doubtful acts, probably is that an agent, charged with
some public service, finds it easiest to promote it by some act of
rascality, and acts on his idea. But over readiness to make capital out
of an apparent conflict of duties is neither made worse nor better by
the fact that one of the duties is the service of the State. A public
act which inflicts loss, such as war, confiscation, the repudiation of a
debt, is wholly different from murder or theft. It is not the act of a
private person. It is not a violation of law. It can hardly be motived
by private malice or cupidity in the strict sense, and it is not a
breach of an established moral order by a being within it and dependent
upon it for the organisation and protection of his daily life. It is the
act of a supreme power, which has ultimate responsibility for protecting
the form of life of which it is the guardian, and which is not itself
protected by any scheme of functions or relations, such as prescribes a
course for the reconciliation of rights and secures its effectiveness.
The means adopted by such a supreme power to discharge its
responsibilities as a whole, are of course subject to criticism as
respects the conception of good which they

imply and their appropriateness to the task of realising it. But it is
mere confusion to apply to them names borrowed from analogous acts of
individuals within communities, to impute them, as it were, to
individuals under dyslogistic predicates, and to pass moral judgment
upon them in the same sense as on private acts. The nearest approach
which we can imagine to public immorality would be when the organs which
act for the State, as such, exhibit in their public action, on its
behalf, a narrow, selfish or brutal conception of the interests of the
State as a whole, in which, so far as can be judged, public opinion at
the time agrees. In such a case the State, as such, may really be said
to be acting immorally, i.e. in contravention of its main duty to
sustain the conditions of as much good life as possible. This case must
be distinguished, if I am right, from the case in which the individuals,
acting as the public authority, are corrupted in their own private
interests not shared with the public. For then the case would rather be
that the State, the organ of the public good, had not been given a
chance to speak, but had simply been defrauded by those who spoke in its
name. We do not suggest, then, that the action of States

is beyond moral criticism, nor that action of individuals in their
interest is above or below morality, except in the sense in which one
moral claim has constantly to be postponed to another. But we deny that
States can be treated as the actors in private immoralities which their
agents permit themselves in the alleged interest of the State; or,
again, can be bound by the private honour and conscience of such agents;
and we deny, moreover, that the avowed public acts of sovereign powers,
which cause loss or injury, can be imputed to individuals under the
names of private offences; that someone is guilty of murder when a
country carries on war, or of theft when it adopts the policy of
repudiation, confiscation, or annexation. 8. It is obvious that the idea
of humanity, of the world of intelligent beings on the surface of our
earth, conceived as a unity, must hold such a place in any tolerably
complete philosophical thinking, as in some way to control the idea of
particular States, and to sum up the purposes and possibilities of human
life. The idea of humanity is universal, and whatever limits we have
tacitly in mind--whatever limits the Greek thinker had in mind while he
based his ethics on the distinction between man and beast--yet, when we
rely on the idea of man as man, we are committed to treat in some way of
the world of mankind. (a) The first point which forces itself upon our
attention is, that the idea which we tacitly entertain when we refer to
humanity, is not true of the greater part of mankind. No doubt, we are
quite aware of imperfection and

inconsistency in the family and the State. But here, in the case of
mankind, the problem reaches an acuter form. According to the current
ideas of our civilisation, a great part of the lives which are being
lived and have been lived by mankind are not lives worth living, in the
sense of embodying qualities for which life seems valuable to us. It is
true that, in all to whom we give the name of man, we suppose a
possibility of such living, in the sense that they have an intelligence
distinguishable from that of animals. But it is a possibility which, for
the most part, has been very slightly realised, and which involves no
conscious connection, so far as we can see, with any realisation. Our
idea of man is not formed by simple enumeration, but by framing a law
which explains the less perfect and consistent facts with reference to
the more perfect and more consistent facts. (b) This being so, it seems
to follow that the object of our ethical idea of humanity is not really
mankind as a single community. Putting aside the impossibilities arising
from succession in time, we see that no such identical experience can be
presupposed in all mankind as is necessary to effective membership of a
common society and exercise of a general will. It does not follow from
this that there can be no general recognition of the rights arising from
the capacities for good life which belong to man as man. Though
insufficient, as variously and imperfectly realised, to

be the basis of an effective community, they may, as far as realised, be
a common element or tissue of connection, running through the more
concrete experience on which effective communities rest. Such a relation
as that of England and India brings the matter home. Englishmen cannot
make one effective self-governed community with the Indian populations.
It would be misery and inefficiency to both sides. But our State can
recognise the primary rights of humanity as determined in the life of
its Indian subjects, and enforce or respect these rights, whether India
be a dependency or an independent community. The problem is not unlike
that raised by the idea of a universal language. As a substitute for
national languages, it would mean a dead level of intelligence unsuited
to every actual national mind, the destruction of literature and poetry.
As an addition to existing languages, or more simply, if it became
customary for every people to be acquainted with the tongues of other
nations, there would be a common understanding no less firm, and a vast
gain of appreciation and enjoyment, a levelling up instead of levelling
down. The recognition of human rights through communities founded on
organic unity of experience may be compared in just these terms to the
idea of a universal society including the entire human race. (c) The
contrast between humanity and mankind has always uttered itself through
a dichotomous mode of expression--Jew and Gentile, Greek

and barbarian, Mussulman and infidel, Christian and heathen, white
civilisations and the black and yellow races. It will be noted at once
that some of these divisions contradict each other, and this fact may
suggest the probability that to every people its own life has seemed the
crown of things, and the remainder of mankind only the remainder. Such a
suggestion may have a real bearing on our problem, and we will return to
it. In the meantime, however, it is plain that humanity as an ethical
idea is a type or a problem rather than a fact. It means certain
qualities, at once realised in what we take to be the crown of the race,
and including a sensibility to the claims of the race as such.
Sensibility to the claims of the race as such, is least of all qualities
common to the race as such. The respect of States and individuals for
humanity is then, after all, in its essence, a duty to maintain a type
of life, not general, but the best we know, which we call the most
human, and in accordance with it to recognise and deal with the rights
of alien individuals and communities. This conception is opposed to the
treatment of all individual human beings as members of an identical
community having identical capacities and rights. It follows our general
conviction that not numbers but qualities determine the value of life.
But qualities,

of course, become self-contradictory if they fail to meet the demands
imposed on them by numbers. And thus we recur to a suggestion noted
above. Every people, as a rule, seems to find contentment in its own
type of life. This cannot contradict, for us, the imperativeness of our
own sense of the best. But it may make us cautious as to the general
theory of progress, and ready to admit that one type of humanity cannot
cover the whole ground of the possibilities of human nature. Our action
must, no doubt, be guided by what we can understand of human needs, and
this must depend ultimately on our own type of life. But it makes a
difference whether we start from the hypothesis that our civilisation as
such stands for the goal of progress, or admit that there is a necessity
for covering the whole ground of human nature. And it may be that, as
the ground is covered, our States may go the way which others have gone,
without, however, leaving things as they are. If the State, moreover, is
not ultimate nor above criticism, no more is any given idea of humanity;
and reference to "the interests of mankind" only names the problem,
which is to find out what those interests are, in terms of human
qualities to be realised. (d) Neither the State, however, nor the idea
of humanity, nor the interests of mankind, are the last word of theory.
And even political theory must so far point ahead as to show that it
knows where to look for its continuation. We have taken Society and the
State throughout to have their value in the human capacities which they
are the means of realising, in which realisation

their social aspect is an inevitable condition (for human nature is not
complete in solitude), but is not by itself, in its form of multitudes,
the end. There is, therefore, no breach of continuity when the immediate
participation of numbers, the direct moulding of life by the claims and
relations of selves, falls away, and the human mind, consolidated and
sustained by society, goes further on its path in removing
contradictions and shaping its world and itself into unity. Art,
philosophy, and religion, though in a sense the very life-blood of
society, are not and could not be directly fashioned to meet the needs
and uses of the multitude, and their aim is not in that sense "social."
They should rather be regarded as a continuation, within and founded
upon the commonwealth, of the work which the commonwealth begins in
realising human nature; as fuller utterances of the same universal self
which the "general will" reveals in more precarious forms; and as in the
same sense implicit in the consciousness of all, being an inheritance
which is theirs so far as they can take possession of it. We have thus
attempted to trace in outline the content of the self, implied, but
imperfectly and variously reached, in the actual individual
consciousness. It is because of this implication, carrying the sense
that something more than we are is imperative upon us, that
self-government has a meaning, and that freedom--the non-obstruction of
capacities--is to be found in a system which lays burdens on the untamed
self and "forces us to be free." What we feel as mere force cannot as
such be freedom; but in

our subtle and complex natures the recognition of a force may, as we
have tried to explain, sustain, regularise, and reawaken the operation
of a consciousness of good, which we rejoice to see maintained, if our
intelligence fails of itself to maintain it, against indolence,
incompetence, and rebellion, even if they are our own. This is the root
of self-government, and true political government is self- government.
-------------------------------------------------------- INDEX A
Absolutism, Administrative, 63. Actual Will, contrast Real Will, 118.
Albion, Launch of, 96 note. Alexander, Prof., 174 n. All and each, as
Society and Individual, 81, 180. Will of All dist. General Will, 111.
Allness, Judgment of, 112. Altruism in H. Spencer, 24. and Egoism, 47,
81, 83. Amiel, cit., 236 note. Analysis of motive, fallacy of, 291 ff.
Anglo-Saxon race, 301. Anthropology in Hegel, 254. Appercipient masses,
165 ff. cpd. social groups, 169. Aristocracy, Monarchy and Democracy,
284. Aristotle, 5 ff., 32, 129 ff., 295 note. on the poor, 319 note.
Army, opp. crowd, 160 ff. Art, how far a social good, 333. Artisan or
public worker, 313 note. Association, of persons and of ideas, 156 ff.
see ORGANISATION. Athens, 115. Attention, 217, see AUTOMATISM,
APPERCIPIENT. Austin, theory of Law, 261. Authority of Society over
Individual in Mill, 62. Automatism in Society, 184, ch. viii. Autonomy,
in Greece, 4 moral, in Plato, 253. B Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 19.
Baldwin, Prof., Social and Ethical Interpretations, 44, 253. Baron of
Bradwardine, 316. Beauty, reconciliation of Nature and State (Schiller),
237. Beccaria, 56. Bentham, 56 ff., 82, 180. Bequest, power of, 272.
Bergson, xxxvi note. Biology and Sociology, 21 ff. double influence on
Sociology, 23 ff. Birth, surviving as qualification, 306 note.
Bluntschli, 273 note. Boeckh, 33 note. Bona fides, in political theory,
193. Boot and Shoe Operatives, Trade Report, 279 note. Bourgeois Society
(in Hegel), 27, 269, 273 ff. Bradley, F. H., Principles of Logic, 49
note. on Punishment, 223. Ethical Studies, 267 note. B?chsensch?tz, 33
note. Buckle, 28. Burlamaqui, 132. Butcher, Prof. (on Nature),
Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 131. C Caird on Kant, xxvi
note. Calvin at Geneva, 61. Capacities, social, distinction of, 168,
173. Cash nexus, 276. Causation, physical, in human life, 31. Cause,
idea of, in Sociology, 21. Charity Organisers, 318. Christian
consciousness, 263. Church and State, 285. Church of England, offertory,
317. Cicero, 10. Citizen of the World, 8. City and town, distinguished
in Rousseau, 92 note. City-State, 36, 116. as a district, 310. Civil
condition, in Rousseau, 97, 100. Civil Dispute, 262 note. Civil
Government, Locke, 101. Civil Liberty, in Rousseau, 98. Civilisation of
Christendom, 137, 195. Clan v. Family, 272. Class, 278, 310 ff.
derivation, 312. its absence, 315. Classes in community, 7, 30. Closed
Commercial State, Fichte, 246. Codification, 276 note. Collectivism,
uncritical, 70, 182. Commonwealth and Soul, 6. Comparative Politics, 41.
Competition and Co-operation, 24 ff. Compulsion, ch. viii., in
elementary education, 67. Comte, 18 ff., 41. Conditions and purpose, in
Greek thinkers, 32. which comes close to life, 198. Conditions, man and
his, 31. Conscience, morality of, 259. in public acts, 324.
Consciousness of Kind, 43. Consent, in Locke, 101. Constituencies, of
mere numbers, 309, Constraint and self-assertion, 58. Continuity, idea
of, 23. Contract, true province of, 260, see STATUS. Contrat Social, see
ROUSSEAU. in Kant, 244. in Fichte, 245. in Hegel, 239, 261. Convention,
Law treated as, 8. Co-operative Societies, 280 note. Corporation, or
Trade Society, 278, 283. Cosmopolitanism, 9. Crawford, Marion, Corleone,
227 note. Crime, sociological analysis of, 37. Criminal offence, 262
note. Crowd, 160 ff. mind of a, 43. Culture, 275. Curtius, E., on
Peloponnese, 33 note. Czar, the (in 1818), 248. D Dante, 31. Decadence
in Rousseau, 85. D?class?s, as a class, 317. De Coulanges, La Cit?
Antique, 44. Demarcation between self-regarding and other regarding
action, 64, 68, 76. Democracy, see ARISTOCRACY. Democratic principle,
74, 284. true d. passion, 98. De Morgan, Prof., Budget of Paradoxes, 20.
Despotic Government, 53. Deterrent, see PUNISHMENT. Dicey, The Peasant
State, 315. Difference and Identity compared with Invention and
Imitation, 46. Dijon, Academy of, 85. District, the, as Ethical Idea,
304 ff., 308. Division of Labour, 278. Dress, 8. Dreyfus-Brisac, M.,
editor of Contrat Social, 101. Duncker, 33 note. Duproix, Kant et
Fichte, 236 ff. Durkheim, E., Ann?e Sociologique, 30. De la Division du
Travail Social, 34, 37 ff., 43, 221 ff., 228 note, 315. Duty, dist.
right and obligation, 208 ff. E Each, see ALL. Economic view of History,
28. facts, pressure of, 30. world, the, 275. Education, elementary, and
the State, xxxiv note. Egoism, see ALTRUISM. ?mile, Rousseau's, 98 note.
Emma, Jane Austen's, 162. End and means in society, 81, 180 ff. of
Society and the State, 182. English people, the, 116. Epicureanism, 9.
Epiphenomena, 29. Equality and Inequality, natural in Rousseau, 87.
Equivalence of punishment and offence, 228. ?tats, 279 note. Eternal
Relations, in Montesquieu, 59. Ethical purpose of Philosophy, 50.
obligation, paradox of, 55, 139. aspect negative in Spencer and Huxley,
72-3, cp. 124. use and wont, 259. ideas, ch. xi. *tre de raison, State
is not, 95. "Evangel of a Contrat Social," 14. Examination in Elementary
Education, 67. Extenuating circumstances, 231. External aspect of
action, 64, 189 ff. F Family meal, the, 301. Family, monogamous, in
Mill, 66, 269 ff., ch. xi. Faust, 97 note. Fichte, on Kant, 191 note,
ch. ix. Fiction, historical of contract in Rousseau, 91 ff., 98. Force,
in relation to end of State, ch. viii. Foreigners' Court at Rome, 10.
Form and Matter, in life of peoples, 32. Freedom, see ROUSSEAU.
Rousseau's idea of, 237 ff. and thought (Hegel), 240. as understood by
Kant and Fichte (Hegel), 247. Freeman, Comparative Politics, 42. French
Republic, 321 note. Friendly Societies, 280 note. Fries, 249. Frontiers,
ideal, 321. Fyffe, History of Modern Europe, 248. G Geddes, Prof.
Patrick, "Parasitism," 26. "Regional Survey," 48 note. General Will, 59,
93, ch. v. "always right," 121. see SOVEREIGNTY. misunderstanding about
(Hegel), 240. Geneva, Calvin at, 61. Geneva and Rousseau, 86. Genevese,
Rousseau's father a, 98. Giddings, Prof., Principles of Sociology, 18,
51. Goethe, 41. G?tz von Berlichingen, 237. Golden Age, the, 129. Good,
meaning of, 182. Good Will, see CONSCIENCE, MORALITY. Government
Departments, legislation by, 285. Graduation of Punishment, 229.
Gravitation, 19. Green, T. H., Principles of Political Obligation, 93,
110, 137, 141, 144, 189 ff., 204, 214, 228. principle of State
interference, 194. criticism of Hegel, 288 ff. Greeks, poor among, 319.
Grotius, 59. H Happiness, Greek idea of, 321. Hardenberg, 248. Hare's
scheme, 310. Hegel, 13, 27, xxvii note, 204, chs. ix. and x. Henrici
cit. by Green, 204. Herder, 237. Herodotus, 136. Hesiod, 129. Hindrance
of hindrances, in State action, 192 ff., 199. History of Aesthetic, 235.
Hobbes, 13, 59, 77, 93, 104 ff. Holland, Prof, 56. Homer, 31, 135.
Honour, private, in public acts, 324. Household, 271. Housing of poor,
198-200. Howard, "the Philanthropist," 56. Humanity, and man, 328 ff.
compared with idea of universal language, 330. dichotomous appellations
for, 330. Huxley, Prof., Evolution and Ethics, 26 ff., 73. I Ideal, 274.
Ideas, influence of, in economic sphere, 30. and community, 7. Identity,
see DIFFERENCE. Imitation and Invention, 43, 212, 252 ff. Immorality,
prevention of, by law, 65. Indifference of space, 305. Individual,
fuller and narrower meaning of term, 79. independent existence of, 95.
Individual Mind, see MIND. Individualism, 70, 79, 80, 182.
Individuality, in Mill, 61, cp. 79, 125. limits of, 176. highest point
of, 313 ff. Industrial world, the, 275. Inequality, see EQUALITY.
Influence, Rousseau's double, 16. Insanity, as loss of systematic
control, 163. Institutions, ch. xi., real nature of, 170 ff. Intention,
in theory of State coercion, 189 ff. Interference by State, ch. viii.
Irreligion, prevention of, by law, 65. Isonomy, in Greece, 4. J Jacobi,
at Geneva, 237. James, Prof W., xxxv, xxxix, 140, 164. Joint-stock
company and community compared, 76. J*kai, Maurus, Die sch?ne Michal,
316. Jurisprudence, 34 ff. Juristic meaning of liberty, 135. Justice,
administration of, 276. K Kant, 13, xxv, 59, 191, ch. ix., 263. Kinship
and Neighbourhood, struggle of principles, 305. Klassenkampf, 275 note.
Klinger, Sturm und Drang, 237. Kotzebue, murder of, 248. Krause cit. by
Green, 204. L Labourer, an English, and the State, 292. Law of Nature
(and of Nations), 10. Law, province of, in Mill, 63. Law, sociological
analysis of, 37. and sentiment, 38. Le Bon, G., Psychologie des Foules,
43. Legislation, idea of, in Rousseau, 117 ff. Le Play, 28. Letter of
the Law, 259, 276. L?vy-Bruhl, 236 ff. Liberty, ch. vi. in Bentham, 57
ff. Mill's Liberty, 60 ff. "real," in Mill, 69. in Spencer and Seeley,
71, 133. see NATURAL, CIVIL, MORAL, JURISTIC. "the quality of man," 99,
118, 126. in Locke, 101. on convicts' chains, 142 note. bare and
determinate Liberty contrasted, 195 ff. Life, human, some of its
elements, 31. Limitation of earth's surface, Kant on, 330 note.
Locality, mind of, 307. Loch, C. S., 142 note. Locke, 13, 101, 104 ff.
Logic of social progress, 258. Lucinde, Schlegel's, 271. M Mafia, the,
227. Maine, origin of penal law, 228 note. Maitland, on Gierke, xxiii
and note. Majority, will of, 4, 5. "tyranny of," 75, 240. Marett,
Threshold of Religion, 181 note. Marriage, prohibition suggested by
Mill, 68, 271. Married Women's Property, 272. Marx, 28, 29 note.
Materialism, 28 ff. Matter and form, in life of peoples, 32.
Maximisation, 187. McCulloch, Literature of Political Economy, 33 note.
McDougal, Introduction to Social Psychology, xxxviii note. Means, see
END. Medical Charities of London, 290 note. Merrie England, 129 note.
Metternich, 249. Mill, J. S., 60 ff., 82, 118, 191, 195. Mind and body
of community, 7. as a structure of systems, 173. as a reflection of
society, 174. see ASSOCIATION, ORGANISATION, APPERCIPIENT MASSES.
subjective and objective, 254-5. absolute, 255. of Society, 296.
Minority, see MAJORITY. Mommsen, 313 note. Monarchy, 284. see
ARISTOCRACY. Monasticism, 302. Montesquieu, 13, 40, 59. Moral freedom in
Rousseau, 98, 100. Moralit?t, 265. Morality, province of, in Mill, 63.
of conscience, 259. of State action, 322. Murray, Prof. Gilbert, 33
note. N Napoleon, 294. Nation-State, 3, 11, 116, 321 ff. Natural Law,
133 note. Natural Liberty in Rousseau, 97. Natural Right, 10 ff., 59. on
biological basis, 70. Nature 128 ff. in Aristotle, 130 ff. as
self-assertion, 27. State of, in Rousseau, 86. in Burlamaqui, 132.
Neighbourhood, see KINSHIP, 308. Nettleship, R. L., 79 note, 146.
Newman, W. L., edition of Aristotle's Politics, 33 note. New Testament,
10. Newton, Sir Isaac, 20. Nihilism, Administrative, see ABSOLUTISM. O
Obligation, ethical and political, 55. enforcement of moral, 67 ff.
dist. right, 207. Offer for Sale, a public matter, 278. Organisation of
ideas or persons opp. Association, 156 ff., 162. Organism, comparison of
society to, in Fichte, 245. Origin of Inequality (Rousseau's Discourse),
86. "Others," in Society, 58, 66, 83, 113, 183, 208. see INTERFERENCE. P
Parsimony, political, 185. Paternal Government, 270. Pattison, Rev.
Mark, on Calvin, 60. Person or Persona in Law and Politics, 12, 93, 104.
Phenomenology, 254 note. Philanthropy and public honours, 219 note.
Philosopher, ancient, compared with Sociologist, 18. Philosophical
Theory described, 1. Philosophy, purpose of, 50. relation to social
good, 333. of Right (or Law) of Kant, 243. of Hegel, 247 ff. its
position in Philosophy of Mind, 252 ff. of Fichte, 244. Pirate, the
(Scott), 162. Plato, 5 ff., 20, 27, 32, 55, 74 note, 131, 139, 142, 219
note, 222, 253. Police State, dist. "Rechtsstaat," 273. Political
Economy, 27, 273. Political Obligation, paradox of, 55. Political
Speculation, in 17th century, 11. Politics and Science, relations of, 5.
Poor, the, as a class, 316, 320. Poore, G. V., Rural Hygiene, 34 note
Dwelling House, 234 note. Position in society, dist. Right and
Obligation, 206. Property, 260, 302. Proportional systems, Stout on,
165. Protection, mere, as function of the State, 276. of children's
earnings, 272. Protestant consciousness, 263. Psychology, a natural
science, 49. two tendencies in, 51. Public or State action, dist.
private 322. Public opinion, 287. Publicity of discussion, 285.
Punishment, ch. viii. 37 ff., 221 ff. right of capital, in Rousseau, 90.
Purposes and conditions in Greek philosophers, 32. Pyramids, 278. R
"Real" Will, ch. v., and Actual, contrasted, 118. Rebellion, duty of,
214-5. Re-establishment of Sciences and Art (Rousseau's Discourse), 85.
Referendum, 105 note. Reformation of offenders, see PUNISHMENT Religion
and State, 285, 333. Repetition, 44. Report of Poor Law Commission,
1909, xxxii and note. Representation of the People, 104. Representative
Government, 115, 244. Republic of Plato criticised, 274. Republic of San
Marino, 106. Retribution, see PUNISHMENT. Return to Nature, 8, 23.
Returns to Social Science, 42 note. Revolution, French, 14. Reward, 218
ff. Richard the Second, Shakespeare's, 12. Right, science of, 34 ff. see
PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT. of first occupant, 99. dist. obligation, 207.
unrecognized, 211. Rights, natural, 35 ff. in Bentham and Spencer, 70
ff. in Rousseau, 99. system of, 127, 202 ff. negative basis of, 192.
sphere of, 258-9. Ritchie, Prof., Natural Rights, 12, 14 note, 88.
Rogers, J. D., 17 note. Roman Jurisprudence, 10. Roman Rule, 10.
Rousseau, 13, 40, 59, 70 note, 74, chs. iv. and v., 142 note. his idea
of freedom, 237-8. on force and right, 238 n., 282. S St. Paul, 29.
Salamis, 115. Scheme, general, in thought and in society, 162 ff.
unconscious operation of, 166. Schiller, R?uber and Letters on Aesthetic
Education, 237. Scott, Sir Walter, 162. Seamanship, Technical training
in, 192 note. Seeley, J., 42 note, 133. Self, the given, 143.
Self-assertion and self-restraint, 27, 72. Self-government, ch. iii.,
101, 139, 155, 182, 186, 334. Self-improvement as freedom, 144 ff.
Self-mastery, Plato's account of, 139. Self-regarding conduct, 62 ff.
Shakespeare, 31. Sidgwick, Prof., 44, 88. Similarities, etc., in social
consciousness, 43. Sittlichkeit, see Moralit?t. Slavery, 8, 69. Social
contract, 59, ch. vi. see "Contrat Social." groups compared with
appercipient masses, 169. Logic, 43. observance = ethical use and wont,
259. Physics, 20. Spirit, 40, 122. Science, ch. ii. Social Invention and
the State, xxxiii. Socialism, 318. Society as self-restraint, 27, 73.
for Greeks implies self-assertion, 73 note. as a psychical whole, 175,
178. and Individual, demarcation between, 62, 64. relation to plurality
of individuals, 176. dist. State, 185. as restraint, 27. compared with
animal species, 23. compared with individual organism, 24. as viewed by
Philosophy, 50. Sociological Review, xxxii. Sociologists, criticism of,
21 ff. Sociology, ch. ii. Socrates, 5 ff., 265. Sophists, 265. Soul and
Commonwealth, 6, see MIND. Sources in Sociology, 47. Sovereign, fallacy
respecting, in Rousseau, 99 ff. nature of, 103, 108. Sovereignty, as
exercise of General Will, 233 ff. Sovereignty, of people, 282. Spencer,
Herbert, 24 ff., 69 ff., 82, 145. Spinoza, 14 ff. Standard of Life, 30.
St?nde, 279 note. State, see CITY-STATE AND NATION-STATE. dist.
Bourgeois Society, 27, 93, 273. not an abstraction, 95. inclusive notion
of, 150 ff. interference by, ch. viii. analysis of, ch. x. dist.
Society, 185. v. Nature, 237. actual and ideal, 250. political organism,
269, 280 ff. and Religion, 285. Regulation, 277. Statistics, 42. Status
to Contract, Durkheim, 277. Steinthal, 164. Stephen, Mr. Leslie, on
cruelty, 326 note. Stoicism, 9, 263. Stout, G. F., Analytic Psychology,
49, 162 note, 165 note. Struggle for life, 23. Subjectivity, 274.
Successes in social research, not due to Sociology, 22. Suggestion in
Society, 45, 184. Super-organic, 26. Supply and Demand, 278 ff. Survival
of fittest, see STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. Sutherland, A., Origin and Growth of
the Moral Instinct, 27 note. T Tacitus, Annals and Germania, 129. Tarde,
G., 43 note, 44 ff. Teleological character of Philosophy, 52.
Themistocles, 114. Theories of the first look, 80, 82, 96, 144. Theory,
society compared to, 258. Thomson's Seasons, 237. Thring, Life of, 197
note. Thucydides, 219 note. Tithe, the, 318. Trade Societies, 277, 279
ff., 283. Traffic returns, French, 43. Training for Seamanship, 193
note. Transvaal, 315. Truth, meaning of, 182. U Uniqueness of service,
25, 314. United States of America, 284, 321. Units, Delimitation of
political, 185. Unity of Social Mind, 177. Universal good and common
good, 110. Judgment dist. Judgment of Allness, 112 ff. Self, realised
not solely in State, 332 ff. Universe of Discourse, 163. Unlawful Games,
Statutes respecting, 66. V Valet, the psychological, 292. Vegetarianism,
8. Vengeance dist. retribution, 228. Vico, New Science, 13, 17, 40.
Victor Hugo, xxxv. Virtue, 268. W Wallace, Prof. W., Lectures and
Essays, 85. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, 249, 265. War, dist. hunting,
213. Wartburg, demonstration at, 248. Water-drinking, 8. Webb, Mr. and
Mrs., 22 note. Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre cit., 273 note. Will, Real or
General, 96, ch. v. in Hobbes and Locke contrasted, 106. of All
contrasted with General, 111. Real with Actual, 118. that wills itself,
146. implies a whole, 177. particular, how universalised, 267. see
SOVEREIGNTY, SOCIAL OBSERVANCE. Wycliffite cry, 12. THE END


This text was transcribed from Robert Bamford's Golden Gale format by
Pieris Berreitter. Other Golden Gale </goldengale> e-texts are available
at pmb.net/goldengale