[1] See e.g. above, p. 232, how the idea of a system of rights may modify punishment.
Now, this emphasis and idea of law, being the exaggeration of a single and direct necessity, the {262} necessity of order and property, may be called “primitive” or barbarous, but it cannot of course be identified with the earliest state of social authority known to history or to anthropology. There we should probably find law undifferentiated from custom and from religious sentiment, and consequently, though rigid enough, not in any such one-sided absoluteness as we have been describing. All we can say is that this is the way in which law must come to be regarded whenever its living spirit is forgotten, and an unreal absoluteness is assigned to it; and this connection of principle verifies itself as a fact in recurrent historical phenomena, and in fallacies which perpetually reappear.
4. Within the whole fabric of right or realised will, the element which naturally asserts itself by antagonism to the letter of the law is the morality of conscience, conscientiousness, or the idea of the Good Will. It is connected with the letter of the law, as Hegel puts it, by the various degrees of wrong. The will, that is to say, finds itself at variance in or with [1] the order of law and property which it has created as its direct and necessary step to freedom. Its realised theory, so to speak, is found to break down at a certain point, by being in contradiction with the needs which it was created to meet. “Summum jus, summa injuria”. We may object that the anti-legal will is simply wrong. This may be so, and again it may not be so. What the will has awakened to, whether right or wrong, is {263} that it can acquiesce in nothing which does not come home to it as fulfilling its own principle. What so comes home to it is what it calls “good,” and it cannot accept any order or necessity which it cannot will as good, i.e. as satisfying its own idea.
[1] “In it,” when my will does not conflict with right as such, but claims the right in an object A to be mine and not yours—a civil dispute. “With it,” when my will rebels, and by its act, so far as in it lies, denies and destroys the whole fabric of right, e.g. takes the object A, without alleging a right to it—theft, a criminal offence, cf. p. 230.
When this phase of reaction is pushed to its logical extreme, we have the modern doctrine of my conscience and my pure will. It is the conflict of the inner self with the outer world, expressed in history through the Stoic and through some forms of the Christian consciousness (especially the Protestant consciousness), and in philosophy through the Kantian doctrine of the good will, uttered in the famous sentence, “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world or out of it which can be called good without qualification except a good will.” [1] Nothing is worth doing but what one ought, and because one ought.
[1] Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik d. Sitten, sect. I.
The criticism to which this principle has been subjected is familiar to students of ethics. Its point is, in brief, that there is no way of connecting any particular action with the mere idea of a pure will. The forms assumed by evasions of this difficulty, which we fall into when we desire wholly to separate the inner from the outer, or the “ought” from the “is,” are treated by Hegel with unsurpassable vigour and subtlety, as indeed the annihilating criticism of this conception is primarily due to him. The essence of the matter is that the pure will directed towards good for the sake of good, having no real connection with any detailed conduct, may be alleged by self-deception in support of any behaviour whatever, and out of this may spring the {264} whole sophistry and hypocrisy of “pure intention.” He makes the shrewd observation, [1] which is still of interest, that the extreme Protestant doctrine of conscience may take the form of ethical vacuity or instability, and that this had in his time been the cause of many Protestants going over to Rome, to secure some sort of moorings, if not precisely the stability of thought.
[1] Rechtsphil., sect. 141.
Still, out of all this one-sidedness, there survives the permanent necessity that an intelligent being can acquiesce only in what enters into the object of his will. It is his will which affirms the aim to which his nature draws him, and he is absolutely debarred from reposing in anything which does not appeal to his will. The subjective will is the only soil on which freedom can be a reality.
So, within the general organism of Right or realised Free-will, we have found two opposite groups of facts—for the aspirations of intelligent beings are facts—or tendencies or theories, which are connected by opposition, and yet are necessary to the expression of the same underlying need—the letter of the law, and the freedom of conscience.
5. Hegel’s name for the third term, which, as he puts it, expresses the “truth” of these extremes, may be rendered “the Ethical System,” or “the Moral Life,” or “Social Ethics.” It expresses “the truth” of the extremes, as a good theory may express the truth of two one-sided views. Only, as we have said, it is a fact as well as a theory, and therefore is something which actually contains what these two views demand, and does the work which they, and the facts they rely on, {265} exhibit as necessary to be done. This relation is not obscure or unprecedented. Every institution, every life, works as a theory, and either masters its facts or fails to master them; though not every theory is a life or an institution.
The German word which the above-mentioned phrases attempt to render is “Sittlichkeit” The word takes its meaning from “Sitte” which in common usage is equivalent to “custom.” Hegel’s use of the term, in his later writings, as opposed to “Moralität” and as indicating, in comparison with it, a fuller and truer phase of life, is an intentional declaration of war against the Kantian principle of the pure good will, and is the gist of Hegel’s ethico-political view in a nutshell. The word would most naturally apply to the life of a community in which law, custom, and sentiment were not yet very sharply distinguished. According to accepted views, the communities of ancient Greece, before they were stirred by the reflective movement which is associated with the names of Socrates and the Sophists, would be examples of a disposition and order of life which the word “Sittlichkeit” might denote. And it was in the Greek communities, as is shown by the work which he sketched as early as 1802, [1] that Hegel found this suggestion of a whole in which law and custom, duty and disposition, were absolutely at one. He subsequently modified the conception in accordance with the modern idea of freedom, by allowing a greater emphasis and relief to its {266} component parts, and insisting (against Plato’s Republic for instance,) on the principle of individual choice, initiative, and property, as necessary to the complete communion of intelligent beings. As we have just seen, indeed, he introduces reflective morality or conscientiousness into the sphere of Right, to represent the full nature of mind, which is only exhibited in a consciousness which pursues its aims of its own choice and for their own sake.
[1] The System d. Sittlichkeit. The Rechtsphil. was not published till 1817, in its earliest form. See Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, p. 187.
The Ethical System, then, or Social Ethics, is put forward as the ideal fact which includes, and does the work of both the literal law and the moral will, alike in practice and as a theory. It is the idea of freedom developed (i.) into a present world, and (ii.) into the nature of self-consciousness.
For (i.), in the first place, the ethical system, or the ways of acting which make up social ethics, constitute a present and actual world. So far it partakes of the nature of the literal law and order, the system of property-holding, which, as we have seen, is all but a natural fact. Social Ethic, we might say, is a physical fact. The bodily habits and external actions of a people incorporate it. It transforms the face of a country, “domesticating the untamed earth.” [1] Each individual has his own bodily existence in a determinate mode as a part of the ethical life of society. The rules and traditions of ethical living are, as has been said, “the nature of things.” They are as hard, as “objective” an order as “sun, moon, mountains, rivers, and all objects of nature.” [2] Man lives according to them before he knows that he {267} does so, and always, in a great degree, independently of knowing that he does so. As this group of facts, or considered from this point of view, the ethical system is the body of the moral world.
[1] Aeschylus, Eumenides, I. 14. [2] Rechtsphil., sect. 146.
(ii.) But it is also and no less the very nature of self-consciousness. It is as much a demand of man’s intelligence or an inner and universal law as the “pure will” itself. [1] The difference between them is that the Ethical System is a system, a world, though from the point of view of will regarded as inner, that is to say, as something which is the motive and fulfills the demand of consciousness. Thus, it bears the character of a thoroughly systematised theory, as contrasted with the idea of a good will, which is a mere general point of view. And it is because of this systematic character that it is enabled to connect the individual or particular will with the universal spirit of the community. It is only in a system that a particular fact can be connected with a universal law, as the planetary motions are with the law of gravitation. The particular will, as we have explained above, is universalised by its relation to a systematic purpose which it partly implies and partly realises. A man wishes for this thing or that thing, but not at any price. The reservations to which his wish is subject, by reason of other purposes and postulates of life, are known to him only in part; but if they could be stated in full, they would constitute the system of his life as realised in the universal life of the community. It is precisely {268} analogous to the process which a common judgment of perception has to go through in becoming a scientific truth—the implications have to be stated in full, and the perception modified in accordance with them. And when this is done, we have no longer a fact, but a science.
[1] On all this portion of the subject, see Mr. Bradley’s Essay, “My Station and its Duties,” in Ethical Studies.
Regarded from this point of view, as the substance of the individual
Will, the Ethical System is the Soul of the moral world.
In analysing the Ethical System, we shall say nothing of “duties” or “virtues.” Duty is in each case what the relation requires—the attachment of the universal system of will to the individual life. Virtue is a habit of such action, considered as embodied in the nature of an individual. The idea of virtue and virtuousness is not, in Hegel’s view, altogether suitable to the members of an ethical commonwealth. It belongs rather to a time of undeveloped social life, when ethical principles and the realisation of them are ascribed to the nature of peculiarly gifted individuals. Virtue or excellence, to the Greek moralist, for instance, suggested doing something better than the average, or being in some way specially gifted, and it is still apt to indicate the desire to be some thing exceptional, and not simply to find yourself in genuine service. The meaning of the words to-day tends to narrow itself to certain special relations, and does not indicate that life of the member in the whole, which is the essence of what we really value.
The Ethical System, or the Order of Social Ethics, then—the mind and conduct of the citizen in Christendom—may be regarded as affirming freedom {269} in three principal aspects, necessarily connected, and supplementing one another. Outwardly these aspects are different groups of facts—different institutions; inwardly they are different moods or dispositions of the one and indivisible human mind.
Thus, Hegel’s analysis regards the social whole or system of social ethics from three points of view. First, in respect of the Family; secondly, in respect of what he has entitled Bourgeois Society; and thirdly, in respect of the Political Organism, or the State in the strict sense.
It is to be borne in mind that, like the three principal divisions in the sphere of Right, these headings represent explicit theories of society, as well as groups of facts.
6. Beginning once more, within an ordered social sphere, at the ethical factor which stands nearest to the natural world, and has taken, so to speak, the minimum step into the realm of purpose and consciousness, we start from the family. As the family exists in a modern civilised community, it is something necessary to society and the State, but absolutely distinct from both.
It first (a) represents the fact of the natural basis of social relations, being the embodiment of natural feeling in the form of love, both as between the parents, and as embodied for them in the children. It is in accordance with Hegel’s general views of the meaning of a system that he sees this element of mind primarily represented by the family, as an organ preserved and differentiated ad hoc, and not, or not merely, distributed indefinitely throughout the community. Thus, the modern family represents for him a higher stage {270} of civilisation—an organ to a fuller embodiment of mind—than the clan or tribe, or, in short, than any form of community in which the whole bond of union rests on merely natural feeling, kindness, generosity, or affection. In the nation, indeed, a tinge of natural affection, a colouring of unity by kinship, survives, just as feeling runs through the experience of the individual mind. But the distinctive character of the State is clear intelligence, explicit law and system, and so the natural basis of feeling, though necessary to be preserved and spiritualised, achieves these needs in the family as a special organ, and not in the State as such.
All those theories, therefore, which tend to assimilate the State to a family by a sort of levelling down of the former or levelling up of the latter (Plato’s Republic, the phalanstery, paternal government, and the like) involve for Hegel a mere confusion of relations. They recognise an element which is essential to society, and may truly be said to be even its foundation. But they do not see its right place in the whole, and do not understand that in order to attain a stronger and deeper unity (which is, in short, a stronger and deeper mind) the different elements must be allowed a greater emphasis and relief, and their respective characteristics must not be slurred or scamped.
But (b) in the second place, the family is a factor in the rational whole, the State, though its function par excellence is that of the natural basis of society. Hence its nature and sanction is ethical—it rests neither on mere feeling on {271} the one hand, nor on mere contract on the other. It has a public side, and the acceptance of a universal obligation by a declaration in explicit language (language being the stamp of the universal), in face of the community, is an essential part of marriage, and not a mere accident or accessory, as the votaries of feeling have urged. This view is aimed against the confusion which finds the sole essence of marriage in feeling. This is a perpetually recurring contention, represented in Hegel’s day by Friedrich von Schlegel’s Lucinde, which argues that the form of marriage destroys the value of passion. Hegel’s analyses are everywhere directed against this inability to grasp the distinct sides of a many-sided fact.
(c) The ethical aspect of the family [1] shows itself in the nature and organisation of the household, as an institution embodying permanent interests and relations of the two persons who are its head, and as an organ of public duties in the bodily and spiritual nurture of the children. The permanent and equal relation of the heads of the household, involved in its nature as the ethical aspect of the family, implies monogamy, and it is the monogamous family alone which can count as a true element of the ethical order.
[1] Cf. Green’s Principles of Political Obligation, p. 235.
(d) The household, being the true and operative ethical organ which makes parentage into family, is the unit which demands to be respected and protected by the State against the less differentiated forms of consanguinity, such as the clan. The true family starts from marriage and the foundation of a household, and in the early {272} development of law we find the State, with a just instinct, protecting the household against the clan, e.g. by conferring the power of bequest. This power, though now it may imply a discretion mainly hostile to the family, presented itself in early law rather as a means of perpetuating the separate household as against the pretensions of the clan to interfere with its property.
Thus, the monogamous family is naturally and necessarily, to some extent, a unit in respect of property; the children, at least, being inevitably under tutelage and incapable of self-support, even if economic equality asserts itself as between husband and wife. This peculiar relation in respect of property is rooted in the unique nature of the household, as an organ for the guardianship of immature lives, and as a unity of feeling rather than of explicit thought. It is noticeable that progress tends to introduce the distinctions of property within its unity [1] (though for children this can never go very far), and very slightly to introduce the relations of the family into the outside world. In as far as such distinctions come to be made, the nature and functions of the household being undisturbed, a somewhat higher intensity of ethical union is rendered necessary, and will no doubt assert itself.
[1] Married Women’s Property, Protection of Earnings of Children, Property assigned by understanding within household to young children.
7. When the man (or woman [1]) arrives at maturity and leaves the safe harbour of the family, he finds himself, prima facie, isolated in a world {273} of conflicting self-interests. He has his living to make, or his property to administer. He is tied to others, in appearance, only by the system of wants and work, with the elementary function which is necessary to it, viz. its police functions and the administration of justice.
[1] Hegel would say only or chiefly the man, who is for him the natural earner and chief of the household.
It is this phase of social life, and the temper or disposition corresponding to it, which Hegel indicates by the expression Bourgeois Society. [1] It presents itself to him as the opposite extreme of life and mind to that embodied in the family. It is an aggregate of families—for the units of the Bourgeois Society are heads of households—as seen from the outside, in the great system of industry and business, where a man has to find his work and do it. It is, in mind, the presence of definite though limited aims, calculation and self-interest. [2]
[1] Bürgerliche Gesellschaft. “Society,” Wallace points out, is here opposed to “community,” and indicates a looser phase of union.
[2] Cf. the merchant in Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, viii. 2. “I can assure you that I never reflected on the State in my life. My tolls, charges, and dues I have paid for no other reason than that it was established usage” (cited from Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, p. cci.).
Bourgeois Society is the aspect of the social whole insisted on by the classical political economy, by which, as an achievement in the way of reducing complex appearances to principles, Hegel was much impressed. It is, again, the view of society embodied in the conception of the purely police State, and its principle is confused with that of the State proper by one set of theorists, as that of the family is by another.
It is the peculiarity of Hegel’s view—probably {274} the most definitely original, as it is the most famous, of all his political ideas—to contend that this aspect of society, with the form of consciousness belonging to it, is necessary to a modern State. According to his logic, indeed, it is inevitable that every true whole shall have an aspect of “difference,” of breaking up into particulars.
The principle of the ancient State, as concentratedly expressed in Plato’s Republic, was weak and undeveloped, and fell short of the true claims of intelligence, [1] just because it dared not really let the individual go—let him assert himself as himself. “Subjectivity” was a principle fatal to it. Not that there was an iron oppression in the States of antiquity. The individual was, for an onlooker, magnificently developed. His limitations were in him, and did not oppress him; but for all that, free choice and the career open to talents were not for him.
[1] “Was not ideal enough” (Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie, ii. 254). The “notion” for him necessarily involves identity, differentiation, and re-integration; and in this respect the ancient State falls short of a true notion, while the modern realises it.
The modern demand—such is Hegel’s conception—is harder and higher. The individual’s life is not predetermined by his birth, but he is thrown face to face with economic necessity, which is a form of the universal end. He has to strip off his crudeness and vanity, and, of himself, mould himself into something which fulfils a want. This is a step without which there can be no true freedom—the giving one’s self by one’s own act a definite place in the region of external necessity, the “becoming something” or attaching oneself to {275} a definite class of service renderers. Thus, we are startled to find culture or education treated in general, and in respect of its indispensableness, under the head of the Bourgeois Society. For culture is the liberation from one’s own caprices, and the acceptance of a universal task. It is a severe process, and therefore unpopular, but it is a necessary one if we are to have true freedom. The criticism that such a world and temper is the world and temper of self-interest does not appeal strongly to Hegel. We shall have to treat of it more fully below. [1]
[1] See p. 291.
It may be noted in passing that the insecurity of life, which may seem to attach to dependence on the vast system of wants and work, is more and more seen, as modern economic relations develop, not to be insecurity at all, except in as far as “culture” in the form of industrial training is absent. There is, indeed, in modern life, nowhere any absolute and oyster-like stability. The highest stability to be anywhere attained is that due to fitness for service in the interdependent system of needs. [1]
[1] I may refer to The Standard of Life, by H. Bosanquet, essay on “Klassenkampf”.
Therefore, as Hegel saw, but in more ways than he saw, the system of Bourgeois Society—the economic and industrial world—is not a separate reality, but only an appearance within a larger system. The member of it is not so detached as he may seem, or think. He is within, and sustained by, the general life of the State, as the aims which are his motives in “business” or industry are within {276} and inseparable from the whole structure of his intelligence.
Thus, the world of Bourgeois Society—a world, on the whole, of cash nexus and mere protection by the State—has a structure or tendency of its own which brings it back by necessary steps to connection with the State proper or explicit and determinate social unity. It is, we must observe, posterior to the State in time. It is only within the State proper, and resting on its solid power, that such a world as that of Bourgeois Society could arise or be conceivable. Its priority to the State is, like that of the family, the priority of comparative narrowness or simplicity, of dealing with fewer factors, and of representing human nature in a more special, though necessary, aspect. And for this very reason it could not exist by itself. It has not the many-sided vitality indispensable to anything which is to hold its own in the actual world.
The working of the Bourgeois Society, then, exhibits an inevitable connection with the State proper, and, so to speak, leads up to it.
In the first place, the economic world implies the administration of justice. In this, as involving a developed system of civilised law, there is an advance on the “letter of the law” in its crudest and most barbarous acceptation. The system of law of a modern State is, and still more ought to be, [1] a fairly reasonable and intelligible definition of the rights and relations of persons. By this determination the economic system of particular wants and services enters upon a first {277} approximation, as it were, to a unity of principle. The law only professes, indeed, to protect property and exchange, but in doing so it unavoidably recognises that the particular want has a general bearing; for the developed system of law only comes into existence to enable wants to be supplied, and takes its definite shape according to the system of wants. We may illustrate this first approximation to universality, which law confers upon the particulars of private interest, by a suggestive view which M. Durkheim has propounded. [2] He has pointed out that the current formula for social change, “from status to contract,” has a subtler significance than is apt to be recognised. For contract is not really indeterminate, as if it arose in vacuo without a precedent. It runs in forms determined by social experience through law and custom; and thus the law, which professedly aims at protecting property and exchange, necessarily regulates them by the modes in which it chooses to protect them.
[1] Hegel pleads strongly for codification.
[2] De la Division du Travail Social, 225 ff.
A more intimate relation to the State proper—to a definite principle, as we might say, of common good—grows out of the interests of Bourgeois Society which take the shape of what a German calls “Police and Corporation,” i.e. State regulation and Trade Societies.
The basis of State regulation is the emergence of aspects of common interest in the system of particular interests. The region of particular interests (supply and demand) has an accidental side, and the State has a right and a duty to protect the general good against accidental {278} hindrances. On the whole, no doubt, the right relation between producer and consumer arises of itself, but miscarriages may occur which call for interference on behalf of the explicit [1] principle of the general good. The general possibility of the individual’s obtaining what he wants is a public interest, and the State has a right to intervene with this end in view, both by execution of necessary public works, by sanitary inspection and the like, and by inspection and control of fraud in the case of necessary commodities offered for sale to the general public. For the public offer of goods in daily use is not a purely private concern, but a matter of the general interest. If indeed there was complete official regulation, there would be a risk of getting work like the Pyramids, that represented no private want at all; but yet, in the system of private wants, there is a public interest that demands vigilance.
[1] The explicit idea of common good always belongs in Hegel to the State proper.
A similar approximation of Bourgeois Society to the State is constituted by the “Corporation,” which rests on the facts of class. Every member of the Bourgeois Society belongs by his vocation to a class, and this breaking up into classes is a consequence of the division of labour which prevails in the economic sphere, disguising the common good as private interest or necessity. But in the formation of classes society begins as it were to recover from the dispersion which private interest has occasioned. As a member of his class [1] or {279} “estate,” the citizen acquires solidarity with his fellows, and his particular interest becomes ipso facto a common one. As a member of the class, again, he is, or ought to be, a member of his “trade society” or “corporation.” In this he finds his honour or recognition, [2] a definite standard of life (apart from which he is apt to assert himself by aimless extravagance, for want of a recognised respectability), a standard of work, insurance against misfortune, and (as a candidate for admission) the means of technical education.
[1] The term “Stände” it must be remembered, has for a German the association of elements of the representative assembly; “états”, estates of the realm.
[2] Cf. the English workman’s phrase, “a good tradesman,” i.e. a competent member of his trade.
If the family is the first basis of the State, the classes or estates are the second. The Corporation or Trade Society is a second family to its members. It is the very root of ethical connection between the private and the general [1] interest, and the State should see to it that this root holds as strongly as possible. [2]
[1] “We can only say that these men, if they leave us, will bitterly regret it. … The man who is so unselfish as to care nothing for himself or his fellow-men will soon find himself, as years creep over him, and grey hairs and glasses, completely cut out.”—“Branch Trade Report (Birmingham) to National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, January, 1896.”
[2] Sects. 201 and 255. I omit Hegel’s characterisation of the classes, which has a good deal in common with theories which represent occupations as determining character. The contrast between agricultural and industrial or commercial life, between country and town, is of great importance in his view. He almost seems to confine Bourgeois industrialism as such to the life of town-dwellers; though, again, ultimately the whole division into classes is characteristic of Bourgeois Society (cf. sects. 256 and 305).
“If,” Hegel writes, [1] “in recent days the “Corporation has been abolished, this has the significance {280} that the individual ought to provide for himself. This may be admitted; but the corporation did not alter the individual’s obligation to earn his livelihood. In our modern States the citizens have only a limited share in the universal business of the State; but it is necessary to permit the ethical human being a universal activity over and above his private end. This universal, which the modern State does not always provide for him, he finds in the Corporation. We saw before that the individual providing for himself in the Bourgeois Society also acts for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough; it needs the Corporation to bring it to a conscious and thoughtful social ethics. Of course the Corporation needs the higher superintendence of the State, or it would ossify, shrink into its shell, and be degraded into a wretched guild. But in and for itself the Corporation is no closed guild; it is rather the bringing of an isolated trade into an ethical connection, and its admission into a sphere in which it wins strength and honour.” [2]
[1] Sect. 255.
[2] It is obvious that this treatment of associations arising among classes in industry and commerce does not apply in principle exclusively to trade or professional societies. It would include, e.g., Friendly Societies and Co-operative Societies, by which members of the economic world bind themselves together for help, recognition, and the assertion of their general interests.
8. The State proper, or political constitution, presents itself to Hegel as the system in which the family and the Bourgeois Society find their completion and their security. He was early impressed, as we have seen, with the beautiful unity of the ancient Greek commonwealths. And the first and last idea which governs his representations of the modern State is that of the Greek commonwealth enlarged as it was from a sun to a solar {281} system. The family feeling and the individual interest are in the modern State let go, accented, intensified to their uttermost power; and it is out of and because of this immense orbit of its elements that the modern State has its “enormous strength and depth.” It is the typical mind, the very essence of reason, whose completeness is directly as the completeness of each of its terms or sides or factors; and secure in the logical confidence that feeling and self-consciousness, the more they attain their fulness, must return the more certainly to their place in the reasonable system which is their very nature. As ultimate power, the State maintains on one side the attitude of an external necessity towards the spheres of private life, of the family, and of the economic world. It may intervene by force to remove hindrances in the path of the common good, which accident and immaturity may have placed there. But, in its essence, the State is the indwelling and explicit end of these modes of living, and is strong in its union of the universal purpose with the particular interests of mankind. It is, in short, the incarnation of the general or Real Will. It has the ethical habit and temper of the family as a pervading basis, combined with the explicit consciousness and purpose of the business world. In the organism of the State, i.e. in as far as we feel and think as citizens, feeling becomes affectionate loyalty, and explicit consciousness becomes political insight. As citizens we both feel and see that the State includes and secures the objects of our affections and our interests; not as separate items, thrown together by chance, but as purposes transformed by their relation to the common good, into {282} which, as we are more or less aware, they necessarily pass. This feeling and insight are the true essence of patriotism. It is easier to be magnanimous than to be merely right, and people prefer to think of patriotism as a readiness to make great sacrifices which are never demanded. But true patriotism is the every-day habit of looking on the commonwealth as our substantive purpose and the foundation of our lives.
The division of functions in the State is a necessary condition of its rational organisation. But, as Rousseau had insisted, it is altogether false to regard these separate functions as independent, or as checks on one another. There could be no living unity, if the functions of the State were ultimately independent and negative towards each other. Their differentiation is simply the rational division of labour. The State is an image of a rational conception; it is “a hieroglyph of reason.”
Sovereignty, therefore, resides in no one element. It is, essentially, the relation in which each factor of the constitution stands to the whole. That is to say, it resides only in the organised whole acting qua organised whole. If, for example, we speak of the “Sovereignty of the People” in a sense opposed to the Sovereignty of the State—as if there were such a thing as “the people” over and above the organised means of expressing and adjusting the will of the community—we are saying what is, strictly speaking, meaningless. It is just the point of difference between Rousseau’s two views. We saw that Rousseau clearly explained the impossibility of expressing the general {283} will except by a determinate system of law. But what he seemed to suggest, and was taken to mean, by popular Sovereignty, was no doubt just the view which Hegel condemns. It is essentially the same question as how a constitution can be made. Strictly, a constitution cannot be made except by modification of an existing constitution. If, to put a case, you have a multitude new to each other in some extra-political colony, they must assume a constitution, so to speak, before they can make one. Law and constitution are utterances of the spirit of a nation.
The form of State which Hegel analyses is a modern constitutional monarchy, with an executive (ministers sitting in the chambers, as he is careful to urge) and Chambers or Estates representing the classes developed in the civic community. Representation, he urges, is of bodies or interests rather than of masses of individuals, and the Corporations or Trade Societies have also an important place directly, by their touch with the departments of the executive government. [1] The general principle is, as indicated above, that the problems of connection between considerable particular interests and the universal interests of the community are, so to speak, prepared on the ground of the Corporation and Bourgeois Society for a solution in the interest of the common good by the Legislative and the Executive Government.
[1] Much as through inspectors and commissions the opinion of Trade Unions, Friendly Societies, and Co-operators is elicited by our Government Departments with a view to legislation, independently of the House of Commons.
The logical division of power, in his language, {284} is that the Legislature has to establish universal principles, the executive has to apply these principles to particular cases, and the prince has to bring to a point the acts of the State by giving them, “like the dot on the i,” the final shape of individual volition.
The distinction of States into Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, Hegel refuses to regard as applicable to the modern world. At best, it could only apply to the undeveloped communities of antiquity. The modern State is a concrete, and, according to its principle, all the elements of a people’s life are represented in it as an indivisible unity.
A curious point is Hegel’s insistence on the function of the personal Head of the State. By a junction of the extremes, he connects it with the recognition of free individuality, which is usually regarded as the democratic principle of the modern world. There is no act, we may say in illustration, according to the modern idea of an act, if it is not done in the end by an individual, though in a developed political system the monarch’s action may only consist in signing his name. It is at least remarkable to compare this view with the tendency to one-man government in the administration of the United States of America.
The State, then, is on one side the external force and automatic machinery implied in the maintenance and adjustment of the rights and purposes of the family and the Bourgeois Society as an actual life. On the other side, and most essentially, it is that connection of feeling and insight, working throughout the consciousnesses of {285} individuals as parts in a connected structure, which unite in willing a certain type of life as a common good in which they find their own. It has the same content as that of Religion; but in an explicit and rationalised form as contrasted with the form of feeling. Only the separation of Church and State, and the division of the Churches against one another, have made it possible for the State to exhibit its own free and ethical character in true fulness, apart from both dogmatic authority and anarchic fanaticism.
9. Publicity of discussion in the assembly of the classes or estates is the great means of civic education. It is not in the least true that every one knows what is for the good of the State, and has only to go down to the House and utter it. It is in the work of expression [1] and discussion that the good takes form by adjustment of private views to facts and needs brought to bear by criticism. “The views a man plumes himself on when he is at home with his wife and friends are one thing; it is quite another thing what happens in a great assembly, where one shrewd idea devours the other.” [2]
[1] It is a remarkable point in English politics to-day that legislation is practically in the hands of the Government departments. Bills are rejected or “knocked about in Committee”; but the mass of organised knowledge necessary to initiate legislation in a complex society can hardly be found outside the gathered experience of an office which has continuity in dealing with the same problems. This tendency more than justifies Hegel’s point of view. An act of the “General Will” has not only, as he said, to be moulded by running the gauntlet of public and critical discussion, but has even to be first drafted by the help of immense piles of experience, which the general mind does not possess, and could not deal with, but which, nevertheless, enable its typical wish and intention to be embodied in effective form.
[2] Rechtsphil., sect. 315.
{286} The free judgment of individuals based on the publicity of political discussion is “public opinion.” In public opinion we have an actual existent contradiction. As public, it is sound and true, and contains the ethical spirit of the State. As expressed by individuals in their particular judgments, on which they plume themselves, it is full of falsehood and vanity. It is the bad which is peculiar, and which people pride themselves on; the rational is universal in its nature, though not necessarily common. Public opinion is a contradictory appearance, in which the true exists as false. It is no accident, but inevitable insight, that leads both of these characters to be proverbially expressed, as in “Vox populi, vox Dei,” contrasted with Ariosto’s
“Che’l Volgare ignorante ogn’un’ riprenda
E parli plu di qual che meno intenda”; [1]
or Goethe’s
“Zuschlagen kann die Masse
Da ist sie respektabel;
Urtheilen gelingt ihr miserabel.” [2]
or the “mostly fools” of Carlyle.
[1] “That the ignorant vulgar reproves everyone, and talks most of what it understands least.”
[2] “The masses are respectable hands at fighting, but miserable hands at judging.”
Now, as public opinion thus combines truth and falsehood, the public cannot be in earnest with both, i.e. both cannot be its real will. But if we restrict ourselves to its express utterance, we cannot possibly tell what it is in earnest with—because it does not know. Therefore, the degree of passion {287} with which a given opinion is maintained throws no light on the question, on what points the public is really in earnest, in the sense of the “real will.” This can only be known from the substantive reality, which is the “true inwardness” of public opinion. This substantive reality, the true merits of any case, is not to be got by the study of mere public opinion as expressed, but when it is successfully divined and asserted, public opinion will always come round to it. If we ask how it is to be divined or known, we must go back to the analogy of a theory. The solution must be constructed so as to satisfy the real facts or needs, and the real facts or needs only become known in proportion as it is constructed, just as in scientific discovery. The man who can see and do what his age wills and demands is the great man of the age. Public opinion, then, demands to be at once esteemed and contemned; esteemed in its essential basis, contemned in its conscious expression. It is, however, the principle of the modern world that every one is allowed to contribute his opinion. When he has contributed it, and so far satisfied the impulse of self-assertion, he is likely to acquiesce in what is done, to which, he can feel, he has thrown in some element of suggestion or criticism.
10. In concluding this chapter, we will attempt to estimate the nearness of such an analysis of the State to the actual facts of life, admitting certain appearances against it, but rejecting pessimistic views which rest on false abstractions.
I will state the difficulties as they appeared to T.H. Green, a cautious and practical Englishman, {288} well experienced in local politics, and acquainted with different classes of men. [1]
“To an Athenian slave, who might be used to gratify a master’s lust, it would have been a mockery to speak of the State as a realisation of freedom; and perhaps it would not be much less to speak of it as such to an untaught and under-fed denizen of a London yard with gin shops on the right hand and on the left.”
“It is true that the necessity which the State lays on the individual is for the most part one to which he is so accustomed that he no longer kicks against it; but what is it, we may ask, but an external necessity, which he no more lays on himself than he does the weight of the atmosphere or the pressure of summer heat and winter frosts, that compels the ordinary citizen to pay rates and taxes, to serve in the army, to abstain from walking over the Squire’s fields, snaring his hares, or fishing his preserved streams, to pay his rent, to respect those artificial rights of property which only the possessors of them have any obvious interest in maintaining, or even (if he is one of the proletariate) to keep his hands off the superfluous wealth of his neighbour when he has none of his own to lose?”
“A conception does not float in the air. It must be somebody’s conception. Whose conception, then, of general good is it that these institutions represent?”
“Is it not seriously misleading, when the requirements of the State have so largely arisen out of force directed by selfish motives, and when the motive of obedience to these requirements is determined by fear, to {289} speak of them as having a common source with the morality of which it is admitted that the essence is to be disinterested and spontaneous?”
[1] Principles of Political Obligation, p. 8; cf. p. 127 ff.
I have quoted these passages—the whole section should be carefully read—in order to state plainly a paradox which affects the theory of society from beginning to end. It continually shows itself in the pessimistic criticism of economic motive, political motive, and of every-day social motive.
The whole question really depends on our understanding of the relation of abstract and concrete. It is plain, as Green says, that the idea of a common good has never been the sole influence operative in the formation or maintenance of States. And, in as far as it has operated at all, it has only done so in very imperfect forms. Green goes so far as to say that Hegel’s account of freedom as realised in the State does not seem to correspond to the facts of society as it is, or even as, under the unalterable conditions of human nature, it ever could be; though, no doubt, there is a work of moral liberation, which society, through its various agencies, is constantly carrying on for the individual.
Now, the truth of these criticisms may be granted in the same sense in which we grant the imperfection of knowledge (as currently conceived) or of morality—imperfections not accidental, but inherent in each particular form of human experience. The conflict of interests, the failure to reconcile rights, and the weight and opaqueness, so to speak, of law and custom to the individual mind, are contradictions of the same type and {290} due to causes of the same kind as those which arise in the world of ethics and of theory. And, though the new relations which spring up in society are perpetually resulting in new contradictions, there is no reason to compare the State unfavourably, in this respect, with Morality or with Science. The contradictions, in fact, are the material of organisation. [1]
[1] Take, for instance, the chaos of the medical charities of London. It consists of endeavours to adjust help to needs, which endeavours are themselves unadjusted to each other. Thus, precisely as in the theoretical progress, the unadjustment of adjustments brings out ever new contradictions which demand readjustment.
Without differing profoundly from Green in theory, therefore, we venture to assign a greatly diminished importance to his criticisms. This is due in part to the growth of a more intimate experience, owing in some measure to his initiative, which seems to show the essentials of life to be far more identical throughout the so-called classes of society than is admitted by such a passage as that cited above about the dweller in a London yard. [1] It is due, further, and in connection with such experience, to the psychological conceptions developed in previous chapters, according to which the place of actual fear of punishment in maintaining the social system is really very small, while {291} the place of a habituation, which is essentially ethical, is comparatively large. These suggestions, which lead us to lay decreasing stress on Green’s criticism of Hegel, point wholly in the general direction of his own convictions, and we may finally meet the general difficulty, which expresses itself in pessimism, by considerations such as Green himself alleges in mitigation of his own criticism.
[1] Not much stress should be laid on an isolated expression of this kind, used in making clear the difficulties of a theory which on the whole he supported, and putting these difficulties, as was his custom, as high as possible. But it is worth noting that no one, who really knows the class thus rhetorically alluded to, fails to experience in them the same great relations and recognitions which make life worth living for more fortunate persons, and, as they feel very keenly, the experience is often more emphatic there than in the richer class. Probably, in fundamental matters, there is as large a proportion of persons untaught and bred up between temptations among the rich as among the poor.
We may approach the matter in this way. The paradox is, that if you scrutinise the acts which have made States, and which carry them on, or which go on under and within them, you will every where be able to urge that they spring from self-interest and ambition—not from a desire for the common good. How then can we say that the State exists for a common good? Hegel’s large conception of a social fabric and the temper of mind which maintains it should have done some thing to meet this problem. But we may come a little closer to the precise difficulty.
Nothing is so fallacious as mere psychological analysis applied to the estimation of the purposes which rule a mind. In every act there is necessarily an aspect of the agent’s particular self. One way or another he is satisfied in it. So the pessimistic or superficial psychologist can always—not in some acts merely, but in all—discover a form of self-seeking. Life is a whole made up of particulars, and the universal is a connection within them, not another particular outside them; it is a mistake of principle to suppose that any act can be outside the tissue of aims, impulses, and emotions which affect the sensitive self. Great purposes work through these affections and transform them, but {292} cannot obliterate them without obliterating life. “There is nothing degrading in being alive.” [1] But there is a kind of eye which sees all these particulars apart from the substantive aims which give them their character, and treats them as if they were the sole determining motives of the agent. Hegel calls such a critic—he is thinking especially of historians—“the psychological valet, for whom there are no heroes, not because they are no heroes, but because he is only a valet.” On the whole, a man is what he does. If his series of actions has the root of the matter in it, it is wrong either for him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because they bring him gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement. To shrink from particular occasions of action because one’s self may find satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing of the abstract good. And “the laurels of mere willing are dry leaves that never have been green.”
[1] Rechtsphil., sect. 123.
We may illustrate these ideas from the life of the ordinary members of States, and from the career of a great ruler or conqueror. [1]
[1] Green, Principles of Political Obligation, sects. 121 and 128.
The life of an English labourer, for example, may concern itself with no such abstract ideas [1] as are expressed by the words “State” or “common good.” But, to begin with, he is a law-abiding citizen. He keeps his hands off others and their belongings by the same rule by which he expects others to keep their hands off him and his belongings. {293} [2] He recognises fairness of bargaining, and is prepared to treat others fairly, as he expects them to treat him. He is aware of his claims, that is to say, as depending on something in common between himself and others; and if he does not practically admit any such community, “he is one of the dangerous classes, virtually outlawed by himself.” [3]
[1] Although the literary class are liable very seriously to under-rate the significance of forms of thought unfamiliar to them.
[2] Habits, such as our habit of relying on security of life and property, are secondarily automatic, i.e. are very intimately connected with ideas. See chap. viii.
[3] Green, Loc. cit.
So far he is a loyal subject only. If he is to have a fuller sense of a social good, he must either take part in the work of the State, or at least be familiar with such work, through interest in his fellows share of it, and in the organisations which connect his class interests with the public good. His mind must not merely work in its place in the social mind, but must be in some degree aware of the connection between its place and the whole—of the appercipient structure to which it belongs. He must, in short, have touch with the connection which Hegel represents as that between the Bourgeois Society and the State proper. And this, in modern States, is in principle open to him.
And, further, he must have the feeling for his State, which is connected with the idea of home and fatherland. In a modern nation the atmosphere of the family is not confined to the actual family. The common dwelling-place, history, and tradition, the common language and common literature, give a colour of affection to the every-day citizen-consciousness, which is to the nation what family affection is in the home circle.
{294} Thus, it is not true that either the feeling or the insight which constitute a consciousness of a common good are wanting to the every-day life of an average citizen in a modern State. It may seem full of selfish care, but this is only a narrow view. If we look at the spirit of the whole life we shall see that it is substantially dependent on the recognition of a good, and feels that dependence in concrete form.
And, secondly, to take the paradox in its extreme shape, in which the order of the State appears to arise out of the selfish ambition of the most unscrupulous of men. The contradiction may be stated in the form that the actions of bad men are “over-ruled” for good. But this would mean that the “psychological” critic or historian had first misstated the cause, and then had rectified his mis-statement by a meaningless phrase. The great ideas and causes which were advanced, for example, by the career of Napoleon, owed neither their nature nor their existence to his selfish ambition. They did not, however, owe them to any non-human cause; to any operation of ideas otherwise than in the minds of men. They came into existence through the working of innumerable minds towards objective ends by the inherent logic of social growth, with various degrees of moral insight, and they were promoted by Napoleon’s career in virtue of the common character which united his aims, in so far as they had a reasonable side, with the movement shaped by the ideal forces of the age. There is no reason to doubt, if we do not wilfully narrow our view of the situation, that a conception of good was as much operative in the cause as it is present in {295} the effect—say, in the unity of Italy. We cannot attempt to deal with the problem of the existence of evil, on the ground of ethical and political philosophy; and we are not concerned to deny or to minimise the presence of greed and selfishness as distorting forces in the minds of men, or in the organisation of States. All that we needed to show, was that what makes and maintains [1] States as States is will and not force, the idea of a common good, and not greed or ambition; and that this principle cannot be overthrown by the facts of self-interest in ordinary citizens, or of selfishness in those who mould the destinies of nations.
[1] Aristotle’s saying of the State, that it “comes to be for the sake of life, but is for the sake of good life,” expresses in the first instance an apparent contrast between origin and purpose of States. But its real point is that the purpose is implied in the origin, for the State is natural, and in every “natural” genesis its purpose is implied; and the origin is implied in the purpose, for the State, in the processes which maintain it, “originates,” i.e. renews its material basis, daily, and must do so in order to “be.”
{296}
1. We have been guided throughout our argument by the idea that the relation of a given mind to the mind of society [1] is comparable to the relation between our apprehension of a single object and our view of nature as a whole. The former term, in each case, we cannot but suppose to be an individualised case of the latter. The latter seems inevitably to imply a universal principle corresponding to every feature of the former. We can never see through the connections, and the connections of the connections—e.g. of gravitation and of colour—in every part. But our ideal as theorists would be to analyse the physical object into features, every one of which should be a case of a natural law, and the whole taken together a case of the whole system of natural law, which would be our scientific view of the world.
[1] I neglect, for the moment, the difference between the mind of society and mind at its best. The difference is practically considerable, but I shall attempt to make it appear, in the course of the present chapter, to be a difference of progress but not of direction.
In treating of a human mind in its relation to {297} Society and the State, our ideal is comparable to this. We should like to analyse any given mind into features each of which should be an individual case of a universal principle, and the whole of which, taken together, should be a case of the whole system of principles incarnate in the world, and proximately in the social world. Plato, simplifying for the sake of elucidation the City-state, which to our minds was already simple, represented a community, in diagrammatic form, as consisting in a threefold structure of classes, in which were incarnate the three main features which he discriminated in the individual soul—the desires necessary to living, the spirit of action, and the power of seeing things as a whole.
2. The principles which constitute a society are facts as well as ideas, and purposes as well as facts. This threefold character is united in what we describe by the general term “institutions,” a term which would apply perfectly well to Plato’s “classes” in virtue of the definite relations with which he invests them.
It is unnecessary to insist on the external aspect of institutions as facts in the material world; but it will be worth while to gather up the leading conceptions of our analysis by tracing the nature of some prominent “institutions,” as ideas, constituent elements of the mind, which are also purposes; that is, as ethical ideas. An institution may have grown up without special ordinance, or may have been called into existence by an act of public will. But it has always the character of being recognised as if it had been “instituted” or established to fulfil some public or quasi-public {298} purpose. [1] An old servant is sometimes said to be “quite an institution”—he is characterised by the function of keeping alive certain common traditions of a school, perhaps, or a family—an annual custom may be an institution in virtue of the same kind of recognition; Sunday is an institution; the word is indeed very vaguely applied, for obviously almost every object or event can have a significance of this kind attached to it in jest or earnest. But for all that, we can see pretty plainly what usage is driving at. An institution implies a purpose or sentiment of more minds than one, and a more or less permanent embodiment of it. “Of more minds than one,” because it is to fix the meeting points of minds that the external embodiment is necessary.
[1] Why is not a memorial statue or building, which expresses a public idea, an “institution” apart from its uses? Apparently because it has not the notion of bringing persons together or inducing persons to act in some definite way. An “institution,” then, belongs to the level of society, as such, conceived as a number of persons. Thus, a work of art is hardly an institution, though it expresses the “universal” of many minds; but a weekly concert is an institution, because many persons act together in giving and attending it.
In institutions, then, we have that meeting point of the individual minds which is the social mind. But “meeting point” is an unhappy term, suggesting objects in space that touch at certain spots. Rather let us say, we have here the ideal substance, which, as a universal structure, is the social, but in its differentiated cases is the individual mind. And it is necessary to observe that the material of this fabric has determinate sources. Mind is not an empty point. It is the world as experienced. The institutions, which as ethical {299} ideas constitute mind, are, like a theory, attempts at unity in face of needs, pressures, facts, and suggestions which arise in what we call our surroundings, and to each of which mind reveals a different quality; as every tone of a landscape elicits its peculiar shade of feeling, which but for it might have remained latent for ever. It takes the whole world to call out the whole mind. But it will be enough if we can trace, in some prominent examples, the nature of an institution as at once a dealing with surroundings, [1] an ethical idea, and a social principle.
[1] There are, of course, no absolute surroundings. At every point experience rests on mind. But at any point at which we are observing, we must take some facts as, comparatively speaking, given.
3. The family starts from the universal physical fact of parentage, but takes its ethical value mainly from the special phase of parental relation which leads to the formation of a household. The association of parents and children in a household, which is permanent until broken up into other households, is due to economic conditions. Calling to mind the original meaning of words, we see that we are asserting the formation of a house hold to be due to “household” [1] conditions. And this is something more than a pun. Whatever the surroundings may be which favour the formation of households, whether the difficulty of procuring livelihood, which makes the father’s continued care essential, [2] or the chances offered by agriculture to a stable group, they operate as elements in a human world, in a world which is constituted by {300} the focussing of “surroundings” (circumstances) in a whole. Conditions which have become “economic” have ceased to be material. They are motives, interests, means to ends. They bring the world into the mind, but in doing so they become factors in the purposiveness and re-adjustment, which the mind, as unity asserting itself throughout varied suggestions, is busied in bringing to pass. By demanding permanence, for instance, economic conditions elicit in the relation of parent and child the simplest form of universality necessary to an ethical idea.
[1] “Economy” = household management.
[2] It is said that the household does not readily form itself in very easy conditions of life.
We will not venture upon the history of phases of the family life, but will attempt at once to sketch its position and value in the typical civilisation of a modern State. Only it must be insisted on once more, [1] that the family or household as an ethical structure is not anterior to the State, but is rather a growth dependent on the spirit and protection of the State, and intentionally fostered by it as against forms of kinship which do less justice to the ethical possibilities of parentage.
[1] Cf. p. 272.
As an ethical idea, then, the monogamous family, which is in the normal case also a household, has a unique place in the structure of the citizen mind.
Its peculiarity is in being a natural union of feeling with ideal purpose. That is to say, the ideal purpose, a permanent interest in a comparatively permanent and external life, attaches itself by imperceptible links to the most universal incident of animal existence. The mere remaining together of the units, a demand of their physical needs, is almost enough of itself to transform their inevitable {301} mutual dependence into a relation of intentional service, rooted in affection, and tinged with some degree of forethought.
And, being thus “natural,” the idea of the family has a hold like no other upon the whole man. In this respect it anticipates the powers which have been claimed for the love of beauty. The very animal roots of life, and every detail of man’s appetitive being, are made, without conscious effort or moralising interference, factors in a round of social service. The meal of a lonely individual [1] is perhaps, at best, a refined and lawful pleasure. But the family meal, quite apart from over-strained religionism, has in it, as a plain matter of fact, the fundamental elements of a sacrament, none the less effective that they are not thought of by that name. And both through maintaining the fitness of the parents for their life work, and through the training of the children to the same end, the natural ethics of the family have an indispensable logical hold upon the more explicit common good known to the social will.
[1] Note, however, what is said below of the secondary or transferred idea of the family. The solitary may partake of the family sacrament, so to speak, “by faith.”
And, in the last place, it should be noted that a feeling and atmosphere of this kind is not confined to members actually living in households formed by families. There is no race, it has been said, that parts with its children so readily, or retains their affections so permanently, as the Anglo-Saxon race. When the type and spirit are once formed, they are contagious and persistent; they {302} affect all who have seen or known them, and even those who have never formed part of a household bound by kinship.
If we contrast the idea of the household with monasticism as its repudiation, and with the tribal state or phalanstery as its exaggeration, we shall see its uniqueness in the strongest light. The naturalness of its foundation, and the completeness of the reciprocal interest (involving monogamy) on which its idea rests, distinguish it from all other forms of union or disunion in which the sexes are concerned. It may be added that the family, and it alone, has the right adjustment of population in its power. The fully trained and equipped human being can never be superfluous in the world. And the production of the fully trained and equipped human being depends on the capacity of forming a true family and meeting its requirements, and when this capacity and idea regulate the union of the sexes no growth nor apparent decrease of population need cause anxiety.
It seems as idle to discuss whether civilisation is conceivable without the family as whether human nature can change. All that we can attempt, as philosophers, is to ascertain the distinctive part which its idea plays in human life as such. There must be, we can see, some such idea—an ethical idea covering some such sides of life—while man is a spiritual animal. But by what precise “institution” such an idea might come to be represented in circumstances which we do not know, it would be beyond the modesty of philosophy to predict.
The institution of Property may be mentioned {303} as a corollary to the household-family. Its natural basis and ethical value are very markedly correlative to those of the latter. The outlook upon life which it essentially implies is co-extensive with that demanded by the household, although in the relations of acquisition and exchange many further rights and duties may attach to it. It depends on the fact that, in order to express a will in an individual life (which is incomplete except as the life of a household), there must be a power of moulding the material world in the service of ideas, which is conditioned by free acquisition and utilisation. The institution of property, then, as an ethical idea, consists in the conception of individual (properly speaking, household) life as a unity in respect to its dealings with the material instruments of living. It is not merely the idea of provision for the future; still less the certainty of satisfying wants as they arise from day to day. It is the idea that all dealings with the material conditions of life form part of a connected system, in which our conceptions and our abilities express themselves. It binds together the necessary care for food and clothing with ideas of making the most of our life and of the lives dependent upon us. A being which has no will has so far no property—a child has in practice, and a slave had by Roman law, property in a secondary sense—and a being which has no property has so far no actual will. The “person,” or responsible head (or heads), of a household, is the true unit to whom the idea of property attaches, because he is the unit to which we normally ascribe an individualised will, a single {304} distinctive shape of the social mind. A child has not yet such a will; a group of mature persons has more than one. The change which is passing over the household in consequence of the recognition of married women as individual wills is highly instructive on this point. They can hold and manage their own property, because it is admitted that they can have their own view of life. It is not proposed that young children should hold and manage property, because every one knows that they have no mature individualised view of life. The corporate person of the household is so far dissolved by legal recognition of its more individual components; and it is most important, theoretically, to note that its unity is not diminished by the recognition, but is raised to a higher power.
4. It might seem fanciful to say that our district is to our family as space to time; but it would suggest something of the point of view from which it is well to look at the structure of our ethical ideas. It is desirable to realise how the simplest characters of our surroundings and their necessary connections are ethically important, not because they impose anything upon us, but because they respond to something within us, or rather, to a possibility which is to be realised by the world, as in us its variety strives towards unity. Parentage, we saw, was a universal animal fact, and from it, in an experience capable of unity and permanence, springs the family household and all that it implies for our lives. One’s district, as an element of life, implies, of course, some stability—a home, not merely permanent as a {305} home, like the Scythian’s waggon, but located on some spot of earth. The nomad, we must suppose, to a great extent carries his neighbourhood—his tribe—along with him, and for that very reason the fact of neighbourhood has not its full effect on him.
But when a permanent home is fixed on some spot of earth, presumably with the beginnings of agriculture, a new condition begins to operate—the “indifference” of space. Perhaps we are surprised that “indifference” should be an ethical stimulus. But nothing is more instructive than to note how qualities of our surroundings, which by themselves seem negative or the barest natural necessities, spring into significance when taken up into the unity of life. Locality means a potential neighbourhood. It may be long before any one comes near you except your own cousinhood, your tribe or clan. But the indifference of space is a standing invitation, and it is pretty certain that some day strangers will become your neighbours, and that you will have to take up some mental attitude towards them. Historians and jurists have described to us the struggle between the principle of kinship and the principle of neighbourhood. When we read that a plebeian, in the eyes of a Roman patrician, simply could not make a real marriage any more than the beasts of the field, this is not, as it may have become by survival, intentional arrogance on the patrician’s part. It was rather the state of mind of Mrs. Transome towards Rufus Lyon, “sheer inability to consider him.” A proof of what a struggle it involved to reach a new attitude of mind as regarded the resident alien is given by {306} the half-way house at which it was found necessary to pause in the process. The recognition of kinship on the ground of residence was the fiction, we are told, by which the mind assisted itself to a positive attitude towards those whom the indifference of space insisted on bringing within its range. And the positive attitude towards which it was groping its way was of course the recognition of humanity, the equality of man in the truest sense which that ambiguous phrase will bear.