[1] There is a difficulty in stating this point without confusion, just because the “ordinary” individual, being at the bottom different from what he seems, is actually determined in all sorts of ways, consciously and unconsciously, by demands and ideas which go far beyond what he would admit to determine him.
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 {127} 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. [1] 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”), {128} 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 [2] to recognise as imperative.
[1] For limitations see ch. viii. below.
[2] In principle, actual individual assent is not needed. The question when the assumption breaks down belongs to the subject of the duty of rebellion and the significance of punishment.
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 {129} 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 naïve theory, whether we find it in poets who portray the Golden Age, from Hesiod downwards, [1] or represented as a fallacy of social compact by Plato in the second book of the Republic [2] or adopted as a juristic theory by Tacitus [3] and the writers who relied on the idea of a “state of nature,” down to Rousseau.
[1] The resemblance between Hesiod’s dream of the Golden Age and modern doctrines of intensive culture is startling, and there is probably a true historical continuity between them. This does not involve the assertion that there can be no truth in the latter, but it does suggest that the disproportionate emphasis laid upon it (e.g. by Fourier and in Merrie England) indicates an element of the old “Nature” fallacy.
[2] Rep., 358 E.
[3] Annals, iii. 26; cf. Germania, ch. xix. 20, “Neque corrumpere et corrumpi ‘seculum’ vocatur. …” Note the identification of “our age” with corruption; cp. use of fin de siècle.
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 [1] by nature, {130} for it burns everywhere; but law is variable” [2] 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, [3] 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.
[1] Argument cited by Aristotle, Eth., v. 10.
[2] Just so, in strict science, from the Atomists downward, the primary qualities (spatial) are real, the secondary (colours) conventional (or, as we say, “subjective”); the former meaning holds good more generally than the latter.
[3] Plato, Gorgias, p. 484.
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 [1] (growth or evolution)”; and so, if we are to think of “nature” as a whole, it will not be, {131} 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.” [2] 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. [3] It may be of interest to cite the great passage in which Plato lays his finger on the common fallacy. [4]
“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; [5] but if really mind is earliest of all things, then it may rightly be said to be superlatively natural.”
[1] Aristotle, Pol., i. i.
[2] Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 116.
[3] Republic, x. 597.
[4] Laws, 889 ff. abridged.
[5] We are not dealing here with Platonic interpretation, but it seems necessary to point out that, literally taken, this passage accepts the principle that nature = primary genesis, and sets out to prove mind to be natural in this sense. We might rather reject the appeal to succession in Time altogether, as at bottom Plato means to. But we see how emphatically mind is for Plato the superlatively natural.
And so, as the universe is for the great thinkers {132} 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 Émile there is a compromise which points in some such direction. Yet a remarkable passage [1] from Burlamaqui, a Genevese jurist, the earlier contemporary of Rousseau, shows the reversion to the Greek view of social nature completed in principle.
“La liberté civile l’emporte de {133} beaucoup sur la liberté naturelle, et, par conséquent, l’état civil qui l’a produit est de tous les états de l’homme le plus parfait, et, à parler exactement, le veritable état naturel de l’homme. L’établissement d’un gouvernement et d’une puissance souveraine, ramenant les hommes à l’observation des lois naturelles, [2] et par conséquent dans la route de bonheur, les fait rentrer dans leur état naturel, duquel ils étaient sortis par le mauvais usage qu’ils faisaient de leur liberté.”
[1] Cited in Dreyfus-Brisac’s edition of the Contrat Social, p. 39.
[2] Note the value of “natural law” as a middle term equivalent to the general and rational features of positive law, and forming a step by which the “natural” is carried beyond the supposed “state of nature.”
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 [1] 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 {134} 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.
[1] Seeley, quoted p. 91 above.
(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. [1] 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 {135} 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.”
[1] We must assume, I suppose, that in Seeley’s sentence “Government” = “Constraint,” or its vraisemblance is lost.
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 {136} 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.” [1] 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.
[1] Hdt., v. 78.
(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 {137} 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. [1] 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. [2] 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 {138} 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. [3]
[1] In this and the following section I have made great use of Green’s discussion in the first chapter of the Principles of Political Obligation.
[2] Perhaps I may refer on this head to “Liberty and Legislation” in my Civilisation of Christendom (Sonnenschein).
[3] But see below, p. 145.
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 {139} 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. [1] 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 [2] 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 {140} 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.” [3]
[2] Republic, 430 E.
[3] Principles of Psychology, ii. 548.
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 {141} 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; [1] 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, [2] 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 {142} based, when applied to the life of man considered apart from external constraint. [3]
[1] See Green’s Principles of Political Obligation, p. i.
[2] This remains substantially true, even if we agree with Socrates that it is impossible to know the better and prefer the worse at a given moment. Our normal self will repudiate the view we took at some moment.
[3] There is something worthy of Dante in Rousseau’s observation (Contrat Social, Bk. iv. ch. 2, note) that the convicts in the galleys at Genoa had “Liberty” stamped on their chains. The fetters of the bad self are the symbol of freedom. Rousseau turns his remark to commonplace, after his fashion, by referring it to the mere liberation of society from malefactors.
(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, [1] 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.
[1] Republic, ix. 577 E.
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 {143} 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, [1] is not satisfactory; and {144} 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.”
[1] See, however, note on p. 125 above.
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 some thing very different from yourself as you are. And it has been well pointed out [1] 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 {145} 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 [2] 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 anyrate 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 {146} 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. [3]
[1] Green’s Principles p. 18. [2] Loc. cit.
[3] Nettleship’s Remains, i. 27 and 30.
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 {147} 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 {148} 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 {149} 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 {150} 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 {151} 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 the conception by the guidance of which every living member of the commonwealth is enabled to perform his function, as Plato has taught us. 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 {152} 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 {153} 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 [1] exist at all. The State is, as {154} 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.
[1] Not “of our individuality.” Individuality is not, in principle, a limitation which makes us unequal to our part in the whole.
{155}
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. [1] 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 [2] 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 {156} given persons, and in looking for its interpretation and completion in law and institutions as the embodiment of the social spirit.
[1] Cf. ch. ii., p. 43.
[2] The faith may of course exist in minds which would absolutely repudiate the theoretical form here propounded for it. No one could have had a more ardent actual faith in the reality of the greater self than Bentham and Mill.
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 {157} 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, {158} 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 between 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.
{159} 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, [1] 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.
[1] An “Association,” it may be urged, generally has a definite purpose, and so far, as indeed we said above, the associates come together, and do not merely find themselves together. But this is only an apparent difficulty. In comparison with the whole compass of their nature, associates who come together for some limited purpose—Bimetallism, Philanthropy, a political cause—do merely find themselves together. They form, as the cynic will say, an extraordinary menagerie, and their association may break up without any apparent effect upon their nature. Obviously, however, there are some purposes which go deeper into men’s characters, and others which are shallower; and this merely illustrates our point that the most casual association is a universal connection of qualities in disguise.
Beginning, as before, with the connection between {160} 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, [1] 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 {161} 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 {162} 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. [2]
[1] The illustration was suggested to me by a passage in Mr. Stout’s Analytic Psychology.
[2] Ultimately, of course, the distinction is one of degree. What operates is always a general connection between members of a whole; the only question is what kind of whole, and, therefore, what kind of connection.
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 [1] is brought back to his point by his hearer.
[1] Claude Halcro in the Pirate.
In mind, as in the external world, the higher stage of association is organisation. The characteristic of organisation is control by a general scheme [1] as opposed to influence by juxtaposition {163} 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. [2] 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.
[1] For the psychological theory of such control see Stout, Analytic Psych. ii. 3.
[2] If it has not enough control to complete a significant sentence, of course there is insanity or idiocy.
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 {164} 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.” [1] 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, {165} 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. [2] For it is a universal tendency, a scheme partly defined, and in process of further defining itself by moulding the material presented to it.
[1] Steinthal, in James’ Psychology, II., 108.
[2] See Mr. Stout on “Proportional Systems,” Analytic Psychology, ii. 167.
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 {166} 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 {167} 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. {168} 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. [1]
[1] The group to which he belongs, as bound together by differences, is often rather that of his clients or customers than of his colleagues in his vocation. But there is generally a differentiation within the vocation-group also.
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 {169} 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 {170} 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 {171} them. But in what does its actual working really consist, and on what does it depend?