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 {172} 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.
{173} 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 {174} 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 [1] from which it plays a part in some human function. About the precise relation of a human function to the fact that, as a {175} 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.
[1] I owe this comparison to a lecture by Prof. S. Alexander.
(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 {176} 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. {177} 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 {178} 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, [1] 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.
[1] Cp. p. 110 above.
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 {179} 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.
{180}
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, [1] 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, except the limit of the nature {181} which makes it contributory to the social universal, then we find that the advancements of the universal and of its differences vary together, and are indeed one and the same thing. It is idle to think of dissociating them as means and end.
[1] Chapter III.
The only way 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 {182} 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 {183} 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 strictly meaningless; 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 itself exists. In other words, it is to be ascertained how far the fullest self-assertion of the social {184} 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 _your_self and I to _my_self, 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. [1] 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 {185} 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 his “real” will might have no working representative at all, but all be sheer conflict. 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 {196} 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.
[1] See, however, p. 150 ff.
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 {187} 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 {188} 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. For an ultimate authority 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 [1] 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. With out 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 {189} 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?
[1] Green, Principles of Political Obligation, pp. 34, 35.
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. [1] 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.
[1] The theory of punishment will modify this proposition in some degree.
The State, then, as such, can only secure the performance of external actions. That is to say, it can only enforce as much intention [1] as is {190} 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.
[1] On this question vide Green’s very thorough discussion. It is true, of course, that the law takes account of intention, and does not, e.g., treat accidental homicide as murder, the difference between them being a difference of intention. But it is obvious that, in attempting to influence human action at all, so much account as this must be taken of intention; for intention is necessary to constitute a human action. An unintentional movement of the muscles cannot be guarded against by laws and penalties; it is only through the intention that deterrent or other motives can get at the action, and a constant law-abiding disposition is the best security for law-abiding action. On the importance of intention and disposition as affording a certainty of action, Bentham, who wholly rejects judgment according to moral motive, is as emphatic as possible.
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, [1] and in its bare statement strongly resembling Mill’s contention. When force is opposed to {191} 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 [2] 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.
[1] W., ix. 34. Fichte remarked on the pregnancy of this principle.
[2] See p. 72, above.
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 {192} 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. [1] 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 [2] 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. [3] For it should be remarked that {193} 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.
[1] “You will admit,” it was once said, “that compulsory religion is better than no religion.” “I fail to see the distinction” was the reply.
[2] Among true students bona fides is presupposed. The range opened to sophistry by a principle of this kind, which commends positive action with a negative bearing for a positive end, is, of course, immeasurable. Practically, I believe that bona fides is about the first and last necessity for the application of political ideas.
[3] Perhaps I may adduce an instance of real interest. It has been argued that ship-masters should be induced by a premium to ship boys as apprentices to the trade of seamanship, and that training for this trade should be fostered by local authorities like any other form of technical education. The argument which really told in the discussion, consisted of statistics which seemed to prove a wide-spread eagerness on the part of boys and their parents that they should enter a maritime life, and the existence of a hindrance simply in the absence of adequate training for a few years during boyhood.
It is the same principle in other words which Green lays down when he says in effect [1] that only such acts (or omissions) should be enforced by the public power as it is better should take place {194} 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.”
[1] Principles of Political Obligation, p. 38.
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 {195} 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. [1] 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.
[1] See the author’s essay, “Liberty and Legislation,” in Civilisation of Christendom (Sonnenschein).
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 {196} 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 [1] to separate mind from its embodiment in {197} 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, [2] 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?
[1] Page 31.
[2] See Thring on the importance of this, in Parkin’s life of him. Note, however, also the modification of his view by the adventure of Uppingham on the Sea.
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 {198} must, so to speak, be reckoned against it [1] in comparing its products with those which are spontaneous social growths throughout.
[1] Subject to what will be said on the theory of rights and punishment.
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, {199} 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 with out 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 [1] to effect the change without the deadlift from outside, then the result is certain and wholly to the good.
[1] Many forms of social co-operation, it must be remembered, need no deadlift from the State as such. We are not setting self-help against co-operation, but will against automatism.
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 {200} 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 {201} or authoritative suggestion. Thus, the general will when it meets us as force, and authority resting on force, and not as a social obligation 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 {202} idea of a positive law which is what it ought to be. A right, [1] 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.
[1] This is a right in the fullest sense. The nature of a merely legal or merely moral right will be illustrated below.
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 {203} 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.” [1] 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 {204} 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.
[1] Krause and Henrici, cit. by Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 35. Cp. “The system of right is the realm of realised freedom, the world of the mind produced by the mind as a second nature” (Hegel, Philosophie d. Rechts, sect. 4).
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, [1] 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 {205} 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.
[1] I do not say merely social functions, i.e. functions dealing directly with “others” as such.
{206} 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 {207} 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 [1] if I claim the task as {208} 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 [2] 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.
[1] I do not know that I can compel my parents to be maintained by me, and therefore it is not my legal right to maintain them; but at least the obligation, if I claim it, ceases to depend on force. An East-End Londoner will say, “He had a right to maintain his father,” meaning that he was bound to do so; and Jeannie Deans says, “I have no right to have stories told about my family without my consent,” representing her own claim as an obligation on herself as well as on others. She represents the thought, “I have a right that you should not tell stories, etc.,” in a form which puts it as a case of the thought, “You have no right to tell stories,” disregarding the distinction between herself and others as accidental.
[2] The law used to interfere with bad sanitation only as a “nuisance,” i.e. as an annoyance to “others.” It now interferes with any state of things dangerous to life as such, which probably means that a change of theory has unconsciously set in. Legislation for dangerous trades almost proves the point, though here it is possible to urge that the employer is put under obligation for the sake of his workers, and not the workers for their own sake. But the distinction is hardly real.
(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 {209} 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 {210} 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 {211} 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 {212} conscious adoption [1] of an attitude towards others, embodying the relations between the “positions” which social logic assigns to each.
[1] To call this imitation is something like calling fine art imitation. Really, in both cases, we find a re-arrangement and modification of material, incident to a new expression. The process, if we must name it, is “relative suggestion” rather than imitation.
(ii.) But then the question of page 210 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, [1] 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 {213} 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.
[1] As distinct from hunting. We do not go to war with lions and tigers.
But no right can be founded on my mere desire to do what I like. [1] 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 {214} 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.
[1] Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 149.
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 {215} 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 {216} 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 {217} 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, [1] 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 {218} 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.”