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STUDIES IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE.

EDITED BY THE HON. W. PEMBER REEVES, PH.D.,
Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

No. 51 in the Series of Monographs by writers connected with the London
School of Economics and Political Science.

THE METAPHYSICAL
THEORY of the STATE

T

HE METAPHYSICAL
THEORY of the STATE

A CRITICISM by ET

D.LlT., MARTIN WHITE PROFESSOR OF
SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

501797

?v*. i? 43

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

JC
31S

do p. 3

First published in igi8

(All rights reserved)

DEDICATION
TO LIEUTENANT R. O. HOBHOUSE, R.A.F

MY DEAR OLIVER,

If you can carry your memory across the abyss
which separates us all from July 1914, you will remember
some hours which we spent reading Kant together in
a cool Highgate garden in those summer days of peace.
I think by way of relaxation we sometimes laid aside
Kant, took up Herodotus, and felt ourselves for a moment
in the morning of the world. But it is of Kant that
I remind you, because three years later I was reading his
great successor in the same garden in the same summer
weather, but not with you. One morning as I sat there
annotating Hegel's theory of freedom, jarring sounds
broke in upon the summer stillness. We were well
accustomed to the noises of our strange new world that
summer. Daily if the air was still we heard, as some one
said, the thud of guns across the northern sea, and mur-
mur of innumerable 'planes. But this morning it was soon
clear that something more was on foot. Gunfire, at first
distant, grew rapidly nearer, and soon broke out from
the northern heights hard by. The familiar drone of the
British aeroplanes was pierced by the whining of the
Gothas. High above, machine guns barked in sharp
staccato and distant thuds announced the fall of bombs.

6 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Presently three white specks could be seen dimly through
the light haze overhead, and we watched their course
from the field. The raid was soon over. The three
specks drifted away towards the east, the gunfire died
down, the whining faded away, and below the hill the
great city picked up its dead. The familiar sounds
resumed their sway, the small birds chirruped from the
shrubs, and the distant murmur of the traffic told of a
world going steadily on its accustomed course.

As I went back to my Hegel my first mood was one of
self-satire. Was this a time for theorizing or destroying
theories, when the world was tumbling about our ears ?
My second thoughts ran otherwise. To each man the
tools and weapons that he can best use. In the bombing
of London I had just witnessed the visible and tangible
outcome of a false and wicked doctrine, the foundations
of which lay, as I believe, in the book before me. To
combat this doctrine effectively is to take such part in
the fight as the physical disabilities of middle age allow.
Hegel himself carried the proof-sheets of his first work to
the printer through streets crowded with fugitives from the
field of Jena. With that work began the most penetrating
and subtle of all the intellectual influences which have
sapped the rational humanitarianism of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and in the Hegelian theory of
the god-state all that I had witnessed lay implicit. You
may meet his Gothas in mid air, and may the full power of
a just cause be with you. I must be content with more
pedestrian methods. But " to make the world a safe
place for democracy," the weapons of the spirit are as
necessary as those of the flesh. You have described to
me times when your lofty world is peaceable enough-
above the Canal in the dawn, when all the desert
lies gray and still before the first sunbeam sets the air
moving, or alone in the blueness, cut off by a bank of

DEDICATION 7

cloud from earth. When at such times the mind works
freely and you think over the meaning of the great
contest, I should like to think that you carried with you
some ideas from this volume to your heights. At any
rate you will bear with you the sense that we are
together as of old, in that in our different ways we are
both fighters in one great cause.

Your affectionate father,

L. T. HOBHOUSE.

NOTE

THE substance of this volume was given in a course
of lectures at the London School of Economics in the
autumn of 1917.

I have to thank my colleague Dr. A. Wolf for reading
the MS. and making several useful emendations of detail.

CONTENTS

PAGE

DEDICATION 5

LECTURE I
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION . . .II

LECTURE II
FREEDOM AND LAW 26

LECTURE III
THE REAL WILL 44

LECTURE IV
•THE WILL OF THE STATE 71

LECTURE V
VARYING APPLICATIONS OF THE METAPHYSICAL

THEORY 96

CONCLUSION 134

APPENDIX I
HEGEL'S THEORY OF THE WILL .... 138

APPENDIX II
THE THEORY OF THE ABSOLUTE .... 150

INDEX 155

THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY
OF THE STATE

LECTURE I

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION

PEOPLE naturally begin to think about social questions
when they find that there is something going wrong in
social life. Just as in the physical body it is the ailment
that interests us, while the healthy processes go on without
our being aware of them, so a society in which everything
is working smoothly and in accordance with the accepted
opinion of what is right and proper raises no question
for its own members. We are first conscious of diges-
tion when we are aware of indigestion, and we begin to
think about law and government when we feel law to be
oppressive or see that government is making mistakes.
Thus the starting-point of social inquiry is the point at
which we are moved by a wrong which we desire to set
right, or, perhaps at a slightly higher remove, by a lack
which we wish to make good. But from this starting-
point reflection advances to a fuller and more general
conception of society. If we begin by criticizing some
particular injustice, we are led on to discuss what justice
is. Beginning with some special social disorder, we are
forced to examine the nature of social order and the
purposes for which society exists. The social theory
which we reach on these lines is a theory of ends, values,
purposes, which leads us up to Ethics or Moral Philosophy,
to questions of the rights and duties of man, and the
means by which institutions of society may be made to

12 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

conform thereto. The principles of Ethics are supreme,
or, as they have been called, architectonic. They apply
to man in all relations and to life on all sides. They
guide, or are meant to guide, the personal life of man
no less than his collective and political activities. They
provide the standard by which all human relations are
to be judged. When, therefore, we study social and
political institutions with a view to ascertaining their
value or justification, our inquiry is in reality a branch
of Ethics. Our results rest in the end on the application
of principles of well-being to the social organization of
man. This is one perfectly legitimate method of social
inquiry, and as involving an analysis of common experi-
ence, leading up to or down from a theory of ends or
values, it is appropriately called Social Philosophy.

Legitimate as it is, this method of investigating society
' has its special danger. In pursuing the ideal it some-
times loses hold of the actual. In analysing the meaning
of institutions it may overlook their actual working, and
if we follow it too blindly we may end either in abstract
propositions which have little relation to practical
possibility and serve only to breed fanatics ; or in
abandoning the interest in actual society altogether and
amusing ourselves with the construction of Utopias.
In reaction from this tendency many students would
say that the primary business of social theory is to inves-
tigate the facts of social life as they are, the historical
development of society and its several institutions, the
statistical description of any given society as it is, the
endeavour to ascertain the laws of cause and effect which,
it is held, must permeate social life as they permeate every
other sphere of reality. In place of a social philosophy,
then, we have a social science, and it is held that by a
social science we can ascertain, measure and predict, just
as we can ascertain, measure and predict the behaviour
of any system of physical bodies.

Without touching here on the question whether in
social science prediction is possible or not, it is suffi-
cient to say that the scientific study of social life or the

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 13

endeavour to ascertain the relations of cause and effect
is not only a legitimate object but one which has in
point of fact yielded good results. Few would now deny
that the strictly scientific method has its place in social
inquiry. But objection may still be taken to the dis-
tinction between ideals and facts. To begin with, it
may be urged that the social inquirer could not if he
would lay aside his ideals. Whenever we are dealing
with social life we are dealing with a matter of profound
interest to ourselves. When the chemist wishes to
ascertain the temperature at which a solid liquefies, or
a liquid boils, he has in the end to read off a certain obser-
vation, and it is not a matter of profound human interest
whether the figure that he reads is 150° or 160° ; but
when a social student inquires how an institution is
working, whether a new law is attaining its object,
whether Trade Union activity is or is not succeeding in
raising wages, shortening hours or otherwise improving
the condition of the operatives, the answer to his question
is not only in reality much more difficult to ascertain
but is also one which stirs prejudices, confirms or refutes
presuppositions, is certain to be challenged by lively
interests. The difficulty is not peculiar to the study
of contemporary fact. History, even ancient history,
is written in a certain spirit and a certain temper de-
pendent on the personal presuppositions of the writer.
Human affairs are so complex and the interweaving of
cause and effect so subtle that in the presentation of an
historical development there will always be an element
dependent on the point of view of the writer and on the
selection and emphasis which may honestly seem the
fairest selection and the natural emphasis to the par-
ticular writer, but which may seem quite other to a
different investigator approaching the same object with
a different background of thought.

Nor is this all. Putting aside all that may be said
as to the bias of investigators, it may be urged that the
subject of investigation itself is charged throughout with
the ideals, emotions, interests of men and women, both

14 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

as individuals and as corporate bodies ; and, moreover,
the logic of those ideals, the very thing which social
philosophy investigates, the degree, that is, of their
mutual consistency or inconsistency, is a matter of pro-
found importance to their actual working. If two ideals
penetrate the same nation or the same class and those
two ideals are at bottom in conflict, the results must
show themselves in the tangle of history. They must
manifest themselves in divided aims and ultimately in
failure. If, on the other hand, they are coherent and
harmonious, then once more that result must appear in
the greatness of the success attending their historical
development. Thus, if we start with the most rigid
determination to adhere to facts, we shall find that ideals
are a part of the facts, and if we say that nevertheless
we will treat them as facts without examining their truth,
we shall find it hard to adhere to that position because
their consistency and coherence, which are intimately
relevant to their truth, deeply affect their practical
efficiency.

It may be granted that it is easier to distinguish the
philosophical and the scientific treatment of society in
principle than to keep them apart in practice. In prin-
ciple we call the philosophical inquiry that which deals
with the aim of life, with the standard of conduct, with
all that ought to be, no matter whether it is or is not.
The scientific method we call that which investigates
facts, endeavours to trace cause and effect, aims at the
establishment of general truths which hold good whether
they are desirable or not. The distinction of principle
is clear, but in point of fact the inquiry into ideals can
never deser,t the world of experience without danger of
losing itself in unreality and becoming that which the
poet of idealism was unfairly called, " a beautiful, ineffec-
tual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in
vain." The ideal, though it has never been realized
and perhaps may never be realized, must grow out of
reality. It must be that which we can become, not that
which is utterly removed from the emotions and aspi-

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 15

rations which have grown up within us in the actual
evolution of mind. The ethically right, Professor
Hoffding has said, must be sociologically possible. Thus,
even as pure theory, the philosophical view cannot afford
to disregard the facts. Still less can it do so if it passes
over, as philosophy should, into the constructive attempt
to reorganize life in accordance with its ideals. If the
principles which it discovers are to be realized in this
workaday world, this can only be by intimate knowledge
of the details of this world, by the control of events
through their causes, for the discovery of which we must
go to pure science. Social Science, on the other hand,
as we have seen, cannot ignore the elements of idealism
as a working factor, as one of the forces, if you will,
among the other forces, which it studies ; nor can it dis-
regard the logical consistency or inconsistency of ideas,
upon which their working force depends. Thus the
philosophical, the scientific, and the practical interest,
however distinct in theory, tend in their actual operation
to be intermingled, and it must be admitted that we
cannot carry one through without reference to the other.
Nevertheless, to keep the issues distinct at every point
is the first necessity of sound reasoning upon social affairs.
What is essential for social investigation, whether it starts
with the philosophic or scientific interest, is that in
putting any question it should know precisely what that
question is ; specifically, whether it is a question of what
is desirable, of what ought to be; or a question of what
has been, is, or probably will be. These two questions,
though necessarily related, are no less necessarily distinct,
and to confuse them is the standing temptation of the
social inquirer. If the social philosopher has sometimes
thought to legislate for society without first informing
himself of the facts as to what is possible and what is
not, the scientific sociologist on his side is not innocent
of all encroachments. It is a standing temptation to
overbear questions of right and wrong by confident pre-
dictions, which in reality rest more on the prepossessions
of the prophet than on his insight into cause and effect.

16 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

It is the weakness of human nature that it likes to be
on the winning side, and just as in an election the argu-
ment most effective in catching votes is- the demonstra-
tion that we are winning already — a demonstration which
might seem to make effort on that side superfluous — so
in the study of social and economic development it is
rhetorically effective to demonstrate that a particular
social change is at hand, that it is an inevitable conse-
quence of a concatenation of events that is bringing it
about whether we will or not ; and this demonstration
exercises, and is intended to exercise, a kind of coercion
upon our minds whereby we resign ourselves to accept
the change as desirable on the strength of arguments
which have never touched its desirability at all, but have
proved, if they have proved anything, nothing more than
the probable effect of certain operative causes. Intel-
lectually, this method is one of confusion ; morally, it
is paralysing to the will. If there were nothing for us
but to accept the trend of events as we find it, then our
science would relapse into fatalism, and, as members of
the society which we study, we should be in the position
simply of knowing the course of the stream which carries
us along without any increase in the power to guide it,
whether it happen to be taking us into the haven or
over Niagara.

When we allow Social Science thus to persuade us of
the inevitableness of things, we are reversing the normal
course of science. For, whatever else may be said of
science, one of its functions is to increase human power,
and this applies to sciences which deal with human life
as well as to sciences which deal with inanimate objects.
When we know the etiology of a disease we acquire for
the first time a real prospect of controlling it. So it
should be in social affairs, but so it can only be if we
hold firmly to the distinction between the desirable and
the actual, if we grasp clearly the principles which should
regulate social life, and do not allow ourselves to be
shaken in our hold of them by any knowledge of the
changes which are actually going on among us. The

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 17

foundation, therefore, of true social method is to hold
the ideal and the actual distinct and use our knowledge
of the one as a means to realizing the other. We may
pursue the two investigations, if we will, side by side,
for we have seen how very closely they are interwoven.
But every question that we ask and every statement that
we make ought to be quite clearly a statement as to fact ,
or an assertion of what ought to be, and never a hybrid
of the two.

This distinction would, I think, be accepted both by
the bulk of ethical thinkers and of scientific students of
society, but there exists a form of social theory which
repudiates it in principle. The foundation of this theory
is the belief that the ideal is realized in the actual world,
and in particular in the world of organized society, not
in the sense already noted above that there are ideals
operating as psychological forces in human beings, but
in the sense that the world at large, and in particular
the social world, is, if properly understood, an incarnation
or expression of the ideal ; that, as one thinker would
put it, the Absolute is perfection ; or, as Hegel, who may
be considered as the father of this school, laid down,
" the insight to which . . . philosophy is to lead us is
that the real world is as it ought to be." I The theory
of society on this view is not to be detached from general
metaphysics ; it is an integral part of the philosophy of
things. Just as in a simple form of religion, the powers
that be are ordained of God, so with the metaphysician
who starts from the belief that things are what they should
be, the fabric of human life, and in particular the state
system, is a part of an order which is inherently rational
and good, an order to which the lives of individuals are
altogether subordinate. The problem of social theory
upon this view will not consist in the formulation of
ideals as distinct from anything actual, yet capable of
becoming actual if once human beings grasp them with
a very firm determination to realize them ; still less
can it consist in investigating facts in distinction from
1 Philosophy of History, p. 38.
2

i8 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

ideals, for the very foundation of society as a part of
the fabric of things is the ideal which it enshrines.
The problem will be neither ethical nor scientific. It
will start by a repudiation of the distinction upon which
we have been insisting, and its task will be to state the
nature of society in terms revealing the ideal elements
which mere facts have a tendency to veil from our
human eyes.

This, then, is the metaphysical theory of the state.
It is the endeavour to exhibit the fabric of society in a
light in which we shall see it, in or through its actual
condition, as the incarnation of something very great
and glorious indeed, as one expression of that supreme
being which some of these thinkers call the Spirit and
others the Absolute. There is no question here of
realizing an ideal by human effort. We are already living
in the ideal. It does not much matter whether we are
rich or poor, healthy or enfeebled, personally aware of
happiness or misery ; nay, it does not seem to matter
very much whether we are just or unjust, virtuous or
depraved, for we all are integral parts in something much
wider and nobler than the individual life, something to
which mere human good and evil, happiness or misery,
are small matters, mere constituent elements that, what-
ever they may be for each one of us, play their part right
well in the magnificent whole. Evil is indeed necessary
to good. It is a part of the Perfection of the Absolute,
and anything which would point to its extirpation as an
ideal is condemned as an offshoot of popular notions of
progress or ridiculed as a piece of humanitarian enthusiasm.

Such, then, is the spirit of the metaphysical theory
of society which I propose to examine in the shape given
to it by its founder, Hegel, and his most modern and most
faithful exponent, Dr. Bosanquet. This theory is com-
monly spoken of as idealism, but it is in point of fact
a much more subtle and dangerous enemy to the ideal
than any brute denial of idealism emanating from a one-
sided science. Against every attempt to construe the
world as mere fact which we cannot modify, there will

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 19

always spring up the reaction of human hope, of human
endeavour, of the deep-seated indignation at injustice,
the " rebel passion " of pity. If the scientific man
insists that as this world rose out of the whirl of atoms,
agitated by mechanical forces, so it will ultimately dis-
appear in the cold and darkness, none the less men will
say " Here are we, conscious living beings palpitating
with emotion, with feeling, products it may be of your
whirl of atoms, yet allowed meanwhile some latitude to
shape our lives, to avoid the worst evils and to cultivate
' some fleeting happiness ; let us at least stand together
against this unkindly fate and make the best of life while
we can, not only for our short-lived selves, but for our
feeble race." Thus mechanical science stimulates at
least the ethics of revolt. But when we are taught to
think of the world which we know as a good world, to
think of its injustices, wrongs and miseries as necessary
elements in a perfect ideal, then, if we accept these argu-
ments, our power of revolt is atrophied, our reason is
hypnotized, our efforts to improve life and remedy wrong
fade away into a passive acquiescence in things as they
are ; or, still worse, into a slavish adulation of the Abso-
lute in whose hands we are mere pawns. These, it may
be said, are questions of general rather than social
philosophy, but the point is that to the idealistic school,
social philosophy is an application of the theory of the
Absolute to human affairs. As Dr. Bosanquet tells us,1
" the treatment of the state in this discussion is natu-
rally analogous to the treatment of the universe." The
happiness of the state is not to be judged by the happiness
of the individual ; the happiness of the individual must
be judged by the goodness of the state. It is to be
valued by the perfection of the whole to which he belongs.
In the conception, therefore, of the state as a totality,
'which is an end in itself, an end to which the lives of
men and women are mere means, we have the working
model of an Absolute. For the thoroughgoing idealist,
all the conscious beings that live under the shadow of

1 The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 311.

20 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

the Absolute seem to have just as much or as little
title to independent consideration as the cells of the
human body. Now, for Hegel, the state is a form of
the absolute spirit, which is the essence of all things.
" The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth." *
For " all the worth which the human being possesses—
all spiritual reality he possesses only through the state." »
" The state is the spirit which stands in the world and
realizes itself therein consciously. . . . The existence of
the state is God's movement in the world." 3 " The
state is the divine will as the present spirit unfolding itself
to the actual shape and organization of a world " (Ph. d. R.
p. 327). " It is the absolute power upon earth " (p. 417).
"It is its own end (Selbst-zweck). It is the ultimate end
which has the highest right against the individual, whose
highest duty is to be a member of the state" (p. 306).
The method followed by this theory is not ethical
because it does not seek to find reasons for human con-
duct in any ultimate goal of human endeavour or in any
rational principle of human duty. It does not seek
these because it denies that the reflective reason of the
individual is the method by which truth about ideals
is to be ascertained. All true ideals are actual ; they
belong to what is called the objective mind ; they are
incarnated in the laws, traditions, customs of the society
to which we belong. Nor, again, is the method scientific.
It is neither historical nor statistical. It does not con-
cern itself with the varying forms of social institutions,
nor with the correlations of co-existence or succession.
It assumes certain abstract conceptions 4 and expounds
them dogmatically in general terms, putting aside the
appeal to experience. If actual societies differ from
the idealistic conception of them, so much the worse for

1 Philosophy of History, E. T., p. 41;
1 Ibid. p. 40 f.

3 Philosophie des Rechis, pp. 312-13.

4 Not that they are admitted to be abstract. They are believed
by the idealist to be the very soul of reality (see, e.g., Phil, des
Rechts, p. 58).

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 21

those societies. Thus the centre of discussion is "the
state," as though there were precisely one and only one
type of social organization to which the name applies
and which can be described without reference to experi-
ence in universal terms. Dr. Bosanquet in his latest
restatement justifies this procedure. "The state," he
tells us, " is a brief expression for states qua states." *
Now it may be perfectly true that there are propositions
which hold of states as such, distinguishable from propo-
sitions which hold of some states and not of others ; but
the urgent question for any science is how such general
truths are arrived at. Is it by induction — a comparison
of states, from which the points of agreement and differ-
ence may emerge ? No such inductive process is to
be found in the metaphysical theory. Is it by self-
evidence ? Is it, for example, self-evident " that states
represent differentiations of a single human spirit . . .
whose extent and intensity determine and are determined
by territorial limits " ? * Is this a proposition which
commands acceptance by intuition like a mathematical
axiom ? If not, on what evidence is it based ? When
Hegel asserts that the state must have a monarch to
complete its personality and that the monarch must be
determined by a natural method, and this is primo-
geniture, are these self-evident propositions ? Do they
rest on intrinsic necessities revealed to Hegel's intuition
or do they really do no more than clothe the practice
of the Prussian state in sounding generalities ? The
truth is that in social investigation large and unproven
principles are apt to be either mere generalizations of
customs or institutions which happen to ba familiar to
the writer, or expressions of his ideals, or very possibly
a fusion of the two. Dr. Bosanquet thinks that his
critics, dealing unguardedly " with states " (positively
wandering off into the region of fact), " attribute to states
that which qua states they are not, namely, defects
which the state organization exists to remove." For
him the state is the power which, as the organization
1 Social and International Ideals (1917), p. 274. * Ibid., p. 275.

22 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

of the community, " has the function of maintaining the
external conditions necessary to the best life." If one
objects that many states maintain conditions that are
quite adverse to the best life, Dr. Bosanquet retorts that
we must distinguish a function from its derangement.
States qua states do not maintain bad conditions. It
results that the state is not the actual organized commu-
nity, but only so much of the organized community as
makes for good. This is to define the state by an ideal.
But elsewhere J Dr. Bosanquet defines the state as that
society " which is habitually recognized as a unit lawfully
exercising force," a definition which would apply to the
rule of the Czar or Sultan. The second definition is
much nearer to common usage, which certainly thinks
of the state as an organization which may serve good
or bad ends, maintain good or bad conditions, but is a
state as long as it holds together and maintains law and
government. It is a violent departure from usage,
which at best would only lead to constant misunder-
standing, to restrict the term to the good elements of
any such organization. But things are still worse if
the state means at one time that which is actually common
to stable political organizations and at another the ideal
functions of a possible political organization.3 Such
methods of definition are equally fatal to science and

i The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 186.

» It may be permissible to define a structure by its function,
provided the definition be unambiguous. For this purpose the
structure must only have one function, and we must know what
it is, and that it is invariably performed. If every government
performed the function of promoting the common good and no
other, there would be no harm in defining the state as that which
exists for the common good, but if, e.g., the state is in the hands
of a governing class which governs for selfish ends, it does not
perform this function. Do we then mean by the state the organ-
ization which sustains government or the organization which
sustains a peculiar kind of government aiming at a particular
kind of purpose ? If the latter, we must get another name instead
of the state for every actual organization in so far as it deflects
from our ideal, otherwise we shall never know whether we are
talking about the ideal world or the real world.

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 23

philosophy, and our general charge against the method
of idealism must be that it starts with and never corrects
the fundamental confusion of the ideal and the actual.1
In older days we passed by the Hegelian exaltation
of the state as the rhapsodical utterances of a meta-
physical dreamer. It was a mistake. The whole con-
ception is deeply interwoven with the most sinister
developments in the history of Europe. It is fashionable
to conceive German militarism as a product of the reaction
against a beautiful sentimental idealism that reigned in
the pre-Bismarckian era. Nothing could be more false.
The political reaction began with Hegel, whose school
has from first to last provided by far the most serious
opposition to the democratic and humanitarian con-
ceptions emanating from eighteenth-century France,
sixteenth-century Holland and seventeenth-century Eng-
land. It was the Hegelian conception of the state which
was designed to turn the edge of the principle of freedom

1 The truth seems to be that idealists suppose actual states to
be so good that the error is insignificant. Thus, Hegel interrupts
one of his rhapsodies (Phil, des Rechts, p. 313) with the caution,
" In the idea of the state one must not have particular states before
one's eyes nor particular institutions. One must rather treat the
idea of this actual god on its own account (fiirsich)." For the moment
the reader thinks that after all Hegel has only been romancing
harmlessly about an ideal world. But he goes on, " Every state,
though one may recognize this or that fault in it, has always,
especially when it belongs to the developed states of our own time,
the essential moments of its existence in itself." The god, it seems,
is actually incarnated in actual states, though it seems to have
some little trouble in the flesh.

There is a case for restricting the use of the term " state " to those
political organizations which recognize the rule of law and some
measure of self-government. The present writer has himself used
the term in this sense (Morals in Evolution, ch. ii), but this still
defines the state by actual and assignable features of its organ-
ization, not by the way in which that organization performs its
functions ; and the term " state " is in practice used by many writers
in a much wider sense, as applicable to all communities that
possess an organized government. In the Hegelian state in par-
ticular, though the reign of law is certainly postulated, there is
no notion of self-government.

24 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

by identifying freedom with law; of equality, by substi-
tuting the conception of discipline; of personality itself,
by merging the individual in the state ; of humanity, by
erecting the state as the supreme and final form of human
association.1

The direct connection between Bismarckian ethics and
Hegelian teaching was ably worked out many years ago
by a close student of the relations of ideas and facts in
the political sphere, Mr. William Clark, but it is not in
Germany alone that the Hegelian influence has pro-
foundly affected the course of thought in one form or
another. It has permeated the British world, dis-
crediting the principles upon which liberal progress has
been founded and in particular depreciating all that
British and French thinkers have contributed. Perhaps
it has been none the less dangerous because it has capti-
vated men of real humanity, genuinely interested in
liberal progress, so much so that in the hands of T. H.
Green the Hegelian theory was for a time transmuted
into a philosophy of social idealism, a variant which has
a value of its own and does not lack distinguished living
disciples. But as a fashionable academic philosophy
genuine Hegelianism has revived, and the doctrine of
the state as an incarnation of the Absolute, a super-
personality which absorbs the real living personality of
men and women, has in many quarters achieved the
position of an academic orthodoxy. For academic
purposes, indeed, it is a convenient doctrine ; its bed-rock
conservatism is proof against all criticisms of the existing
order. It combats the spirit of freedom in the most
effective method possible, by adopting its banner and
waving it from the serried battalions of a disciplined
army. It justifies that negation of the individual which

1 Above the state stands the Spirit which realizes itself in world
history and is the absolute judge of the state. There is here a
hint of a wider view which perhaps explains how it was that Karl
Marx could reach internationalism from a Hegelian basis. But
for Hegel combinations of states are only relative and limited (Phil,
des Rechts, p. 314).

THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 25

the modern practice of government is daily emphasizing.
It sets the state above moral criticism, constitutes war
a necessary incident in its existence, contemns humanity,
and repudiates a Federation or League of Nations. In
short, we see in it a theory admirably suited to the period
of militancy and regimentation in which we find ourselves.
The truth or falsity of such a theory is a matter of no
small interest ; indeed, it is not a question of theory
alone but of a doctrine whose historical importance is
written large in the events of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. I propose in the following lectures to set
out the fundamentals of this theory and endeavour to
discover the processes of thought by which, in the judg-
ment of so many able men, the state assumes in the
modern world a position which earlier ages might have
given to the church or to the Deity Himself.

FREEDOM AND LAW

DURING the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries estab-
lished authority came under criticism from many points
of view. The authority of the church was challenged
by the claims of conscience ; the authority of law and
government was opposed by the natural right of the
individual. Presently the whole social structure, the
notions of political prosperity and national well-being
were scrutinized in the interest of the happiness of
individual men and women. It is not my purpose here
to trace the movements of these theories, nor to show
how in some forms they were brought round to a justi-
fication of the social order, while in others they issued
in a more or less revolutionary ideal. I call attention
only to the tendency to judge the state, the fabric of
law and government, the structure of social institutions
in terms of and by reference to the conscience or the
rights or the happiness of individuals. This tendency
is not very happily or fairly described when it is called
a tendency to put the individual above society. This
suggests a kind of egoism, as though one man counted
for more than millions. It is more fairly to be described
as an effort to go back from institutions, laws and forms,
to the real life that lay behind them, insisting that this
was a life of individual men and women with souls to be
saved, with personalities to be respected, or simply with
capacity for feeling anguish or enjoying their brief span
of life. The danger was that the emphasis on personality
might be exaggerated to the point of depreciating the

FREEDOM AND LAW 27

common life, that criticism might degenerate into
anarchy, and what was valuable in the social tradition
might be thrown away along with what was bad. The
natural man might be endowed with none of the vices and
all the virtues of his civilized counterpart, and it might
be supposed that, if left to himself, or enabled to start
afresh without the incubus of the established order upon
him, he would build up a new life incomparably more
free and beautiful. The exaggeration of revolution is
the opportunity of reaction, and in the new world of
theory, partly reflecting, partly anticipating the world of
action, exaggerated individualism paved the way for
reconstructions. Of these the most far-reaching and in
the end the most influential was the metaphysical theory
which challenged the whole assumption, tacit or avowed,)
of the critical school in all its forms, by setting up the
state as a greater being, a spirit, a superpersonal entity, j
in which individuals with their private consciences or
claims of right, their happiness or their misery, are merely
subordinate elements.

The starting-point of this theory, reduced to its lowest
terms, is the principle that organized society is some-
thing more than the individuals that compose it. This
principle cannot be as quickly disposed of as some indi-
vidualists think. Every association of men is legitimately
regarded as an entity possessing certain characteristics
of its own, characteristics which do not belong to the
individuals apart from their membership of that associa-
tion. In any human association it is true, in a sense,
that the whole is something more than a sum of its parts.
For example, the whole can do things which the parts
severally cannot. If two men in succession push a
heavy body, they may be wholly unable to move it. If
they work together, they bring it along. Mechanically
the summed output of energy in the two cases is equal,
but in the one case it will be dissipated physically in heat,
morally in the sense of frustration and loss of temper.
In the other case it will succeed in its object and shift
the resisting weight. The association of the two there-

28 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

fore has palpable effects which without the association
could not be achieved. On the other hand, it is important
to remark that the result of the joint effort of the two
men working together is simply the sum of their efforts
as they work together, though it is something other than
the sum of those efforts when not co-ordinated. Any
association of people involves some modification, tem-
porary or permanent, superficial or far-reaching, in
the people themselves. The work or the life of the
association is something different from the work which
could be achieved or the life lived by the same people
apart from that association. But it does not follow that
it is anything other than the sum, the expression or the
result of the work that is being done, or the life that is
being lived, by all the members of the association as
members. When we are told, then, that the whole is

I more than the sum of its parts, we must reply that this
depends on the sense in which the " parts " are taken.
Further, we must observe that the statement, so far as
it is true, is true generally ; it holds of all associations,
not only of that particular association which we call the
state. Family life, for example, necessarily exercises
a profound influence upon its members. The family is
a whole which co-operates for certain purposes and in
which the various members lead lives quite other than
that they would do if the family were scattered. On
the other hand, the family as it stands at any given
moment is simply the co-ordinated or associated whole
of its members as they stand at the same moment. It
is an expression of their lives so far as lived in common
or in close association with one another. The family
in particular has no well-being, no happiness, no good
or evil fortune, which is not the well-being, the happiness,
good or evil fortune of its members one or more. In an
organized body, a profession, for example, a Trade Union,
a business, a factory, there is again a whole numbering
so many scores, hundreds, thousands of individuals as
its members. In every case the members are in greater
or lesser degree modified by the association into which

29

they enter. Of the Trade Union, of the profession or
business, certain things will hold true, which would not
hold true of the individuals who belong to any of those
associations if they did not belong to them. But again
in the whole there is nothing but the co-ordinated or
associated activity of the individuals which constitute
it. This remains true though the organization may be
permanent and the individuals changing. A college may
have for hundreds of years a certain peculiar character
and stamp of its own. The number of individuals pass-
ing through it and affected by it is quite indefinite. It
is not constituted solely by the number present within
its walls at any given time ; nor can we enumerate those
who may have come within its influence during the whole
period of its establishment. Nevertheless its tradition,
its spirit which seems to be lodged in no single individual,
is maintained by individuals, propagated from generation
to generation, sometimes perhaps broken by the influx
of a new type of character which fails to assimilate the
tradition which it encounters.

Thus, in discussing society, we are liable to two fallacies.
On the one hand we may be tempted to deny the reality
of the social group, refusing to conceive it as a distinct
entity, insisting on resolving it into its component indi-
viduals as though these individuals were unaffected by
the fact of association. On the other side, in reaction «?
from this exaggerated individualism, we are apt to regard
society as an entity distinct from the individuals, not
merely in the sense that it is an aggregate of individuals
viewed in some special relation, but in the sense that
it is a whole which in some way stands outside them,
or in which they are merged to the prejudice of their
individual identity. Further, having reached the con-
ception of a superpersonal entity in which individuals
are submerged, we are inclined to look for this entity,
not in all the varied forms of associated life which inter-
sect and cut across one another, but in some particular
form of association which seems to include the rest and
so to present itself as a whole to which the individual

30 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

must belong as an element. This entity, idealist writers
have found in the state. There are thus two points
which we have to consider, first the general notion of a
/superpersonal entity and, secondly, the identification of
this entity with the state.

We have seen that the notion of a superpersonal entity
appears at first sight to express a very obvious fact. It
may also appear to formulate a clear principle of ethics.
The conception of duty, it may be said, teaches us that
the individual lives not for himself but for a greater
whole to which his own claims must be subordinated.
An abstract individualism might regard the individual
as possessed of certain rights, but rights are a function
of the social group, since rights involve demands made
upon others either for positive services or for negative
forbearances. The rights of A impose obligations on B
and C. They are obligations incident to and arising out
of social relations, and can only be justified if their fulfil-
ment is held to be for the good of the society — temporary
or permanent — for which they are prescribed. Thus the
individualistic conception defeats itself and leads us back
to the whole and the duties rendered to the whole by
each of its members. Now, in maintaining the superiority
of the whole to any of its parts, the idealist, it may be
thought, is merely asserting the superior claims of society
to any one of its members. But here again there is
an element of danger in the contrast between society and
the individual. Any one individual is but an insignifi-
cant element in the great society, and may justly feel
that his small interests must be subordinated to those
of the greater body. But we cannot thus contrast a
society with all the individuals which belong to it.
Ethically there would be no sense in the demand for the
sacrifice of all the individuals who belong or may belong
to a society to the interests of that society. The million
is more than the one, the interests of the million greater
than the interests of the one. The question is whether
the society of the million has any interests other than the
conjoint interests of the million belonging to it. If the

FREEDOM AND LAW 31

society is something other than the individuals, such a
position is arguable, and we shall have to consider it as
we proceed. What has to be said here is that it by no
means follows from the ethical claim that the interests
of the individual must give way to those of the whole
to which he belongs. That claim is satisfied by the
conception of the whole as the organized body of living
men and women. We are not speaking here of associa-
tions that exist to promote objects beyond themselves —
a conspiracy, for example, aiming at a political revo-
lution. Here the whole society of conspirators might
rightly judge that it were better for them all as individuals
to perish than that the movement should be lost. " Que
mon nom soit fletri, que la France soit libre." This,
indeed, might be the motto not only of the individual
but of the association too. We are speaking of a society
regarded as an end in itself. If we ask what good is
actually realized in a society other than the good of its
members, we certainly get no answer from the ethical
consciousness which bids us do our duty to others and
love our neighbours as ourselves. These requirements
are amply recognized by the conception of ourselves as
human beings placed among other human beings, whose
happiness and misery our actions sensibly affect.

The method by which the idealist turns the flank of
these arguments is to contend in substance that the I
individual possesses no independent value, ultimately we '
may say no independent life of his own. He is absorbed
in the organized political society, the state of which he
is a member. He claims freedom. The claim is ad- !
mitted. Freedom is the starting-point of the Hegelian
philosophy of the state, but freedom in Hegel's sense
turns out to be conformity with the law and custom as
interpreted by the ethical spirit of the particular society
to which the individual belongs. He claims the right of
judgment, he aims at a rational order of ethics. The
claim is admitted but the rational order is that of the
objective mind, and this on analysis turns out to be
the system of institutions and customs which the state has

32 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

engendered and maintains. Finally he claims to be at
least himself, an independent centre of thought and
feeling, palpitating with its own emotions, subject to its
own joys and sorrows, but not even selfhood is left to
him, for his self is realizable only in the organized whole
in which he is a kind of transitory phase. Thus the
edge of the revolutionary weapon is turned, or rather
the hilt is grasped and the point directed towards the
revolutionary himself. The freedom which the revolu-
tionary, the liberal, or for that matter the plain man of
the modern world, asserts is accepted and transmuted
into obedience to law. His demand for rationality in
society is granted, but granted in order to be attributed
to the existing social order. The very sense of person-
ality, instead of being checked and chastened by the
stern assertion of duty, is gently and subtly resolved into
a phase or expression of the general will. There can be
no finer example of the supreme maxim of dialectical
art, that the admission of an opponent's contentions is
the deadliest method of refutation.

It will be convenient to set out in briefest possible
terms the central points in the conception of society with
which we have to deal. The point of departure in Hegel
is his doctrine of freedom. Free^gm is, in his view,
I falsely conceived in ordinary thought as equivalen\_tg
W absence of constraint. That is a negative and, in the
en^rHegej_argues^a self-contradictory ideaT True freer
dom is something positive. It is self-determination.
The free will is the will which determines itself. The
sense in which the will can determine itself is this, that
Hrforms a rational whole or system of conduct, in which
'any ^particular act or deliverance of the will performs a
certain necessary function. Such a system of conduct
is~not achieved by the indiyirlnal on his nwn arr.onn,t
but Ts~incbrporated in the law and custom_of__snciely_,
taw "atone is merely the ~exterfiaT^ide"of this system,
but law, developed by the moral consciousness of man
and worked out into the detail of custom that regulates
daily life and society, constitutes the actual fabric that

FREEDOM AND LAW 33

we require and is the objective expression of freedom.
That which sustains this fabric of a rationaF life is the
state, which is therefore the realization of the moral
idea. The state is its own end, and the highest duty of
the individual is to be a member of the state. Beyond
the state there is no higher association and states
have no duties to one another or to humanity, but their
rise and fall is the process of universal history, which
is the ultimate court of judgment before whose bar
they come.

In order to examine this very summary account, we
see we have (i) to consider the meaning of freedom. We
have to understand the process of argument by which
freedom is defined as self-determination and self-deter-
mination as the subordination of action to an articulate
system ; (2) we have to inquire into the identification
of this system with law and custom, and that will bring
us (3) to the conception of the state and the reasons
why it is regarded not only as an end in itself but as the
supreme and the highest form of human association.

In his theory of the freedom of the will lies the key
to the Hegelian theory of the state, of morality and of
law. This theory consists in essentials of three posi-
tions. I (i) The underlying principle is that freedom consists
not in the negative condition of absence of constraint
but in the positive fact of self-determination. Will is
freedom because it is self-determination. What then
does self-determination mean ? This will bring us to
the second position. The will is determined by its
purposes or objects, and we are apt to think of the object
as something external, pulling at it, so to say. So to
think is to abandon self-determination, and in reaction
from this view we think of the will as exerting free choice
as between its objects. But again freedom, so con-
ceived, is an uncharted, motiveless freedom, for if I
choose one thing rather than another, there must surely

1 I confine myself here to the essentials of the argument as I
understand it. A somewhat expanded statement of Hegel's view
will be found in Appendix I.

3

34 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

be something in the thing which moves me or my choice
appears groundless and irrational. Here arises a
form of the familiar controversy between determinism
and free will which Hegel holds to be insoluble on this
plane of thought. The position (2) reached then is that
the will must be determined by its object, but that if
this object is independent of the will, an insoluble
dilemma ensues. This brings us to the third position,
namely, (3) that the object of the will is determined by the
will itself. Before asking how this could be, let us note
the reasoning. Freedom is understood to be self-deter-
mination. The will is determined by its object, but the
object is determined by the will. Ultimately, therefore,
the will is self-determined and free.

But in this reasoning there appears to be a circle.
How can the will be determined by its object and yet
determine the object ? To escape the circle we must
realize that the object of the will is not outside the will
at all, it is the will itself. At first sight this seems peri-
lously near to sheer nonsense. How can the will will
itself ? The line of answer seems to be that the will at
any given moment and in any given relation may have
the whole nature of the will as its object. Thus, to
suggest an example, we might think of the consistent
Christian who directs his action from hour to hour by
the light of a principle running right through his life.
This principle he has adopted for good and all. It has
become the comprehensive expression of his will. So
in each act of his will it is his own will that is its object.
If then the will is determined by its object, it is here
determined by itself, that is, it is free.

Two lines of criticism suggest themselves. First, the
Christian himself would probably say that it is not his
own will but the will of God which he seeks to obey,
and whatever illustration we might take, the answer
would in essentials be the same. I must will something
that is not yet realized, otherwise I achieve nothing.
Even if I will to reform myself, the one case in which
I do seem to have my own will for an object, this means

35

that I, as I am now, set a different self before myself
as something to be achieved. And if I could attain
perfect consistency of action, this would mean that I
should consistently serve some comprehensive end beyond
myself and only to be realized by my action. The end
or object then is always other than the will as it is
when acting for the end. Will, like other acts of mind,
has relation to an object, and things that are related
are not the same. The identification of subject and
object fails here as elsewhere and with it the whole scheme
of self-determination breaks down.

The second criticism has a special bearing on the use
which Hegel makes of his definition of freedom. Grant,
for the sake of argument, that self-determination is some-
thing more than absence of constraint. But it is not
less than absence of constraint. Where and in so far
as an act of will is constrained, it is not free. What is
absolutely free is absolutely unconstrained. What is
relatively free is relatively unconstrained. Freedom in
one thing may indeed imply restraint on something else
—if I am secure in freedom to go about my business,
this implies that others are prevented from hindering me
in doing so — but the thing which is free is not in the
respect in which it is free also restrained. To be free
in one part or in one relation it will have to be restrained
in another part or relation, but in that in which it is
restrained it is not also free.

Now in adopting a principle of conduct we may be
acting on our own motion in response to an internal
conviction. So far we are free. But the principle may
be such as to put heavy constraint on a part of our
nature, and if so, that part of our nature is not free. We
may be slaves to our principles, as well as to our impulses,
and in fact common experience tells us that there are
those who would be better men without their principles,
if they would only give their natural emotions free play.
But a life of uncharted impulses cannot be free, because
unregulated impulses not only restrain but utterly frus-
trate and destroy one another. But neither is a life

36 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

of narrow principle free, because such a principle at best
holds a great part of us subdued, perhaps sullen and
unsatisfied.1 In a word freedom for one element in
our nature, be it an impulse or a conviction, may mean
the subjection of the rest of our nature. If there be
such a thing as freedom for our personality as a whole,
its parts must have as much scope as is compatible with
their union. This cannot mean absolute freedom for
each part, for no one must override the remainder. It
means freedom limited by the conditions of develop-
ment in harmony, and by nothing else. If we suppose

a whole of many partsj:aj3ab|e of a hnrmnm'nnc.

ment, and if we_sup2p_se ; jthis_ whole_jto_be .subject to no

restraintiTexcept those which it itself imposes on its parts_

to sprnrp J^hg romrnnrL ffovplnpmpnf f thpn WP havp ap
intelligible sense in which the whole may be termed freer
Now the self is a whole capable of a harmonious develop-
ment, and it may be termed free when it orders its life
accordingly. The principle of freedom then springs from
the nature of the self as a coherent whole. It is to be
distinguished from a principle cramping harmony of
development, even if accepted by our own consent.
Still more is it to be distinguished from one imposed
from without by suggestion, authority and perhaps
some mingling of compulsion. Now Hegel does not
draw these distinctions. Discarding absence of con-
straint from the idea of freedom, and concentrating
attention on the element of unity which the will un-
doubtedly introduces into action, he tends to identify
freedom with mere acceptance of a principle of conduct
and thus paves the way for its further identification
with law. He saw that freedom involved restraint on
something but did not see that it was restraint on some-
thing else, that which is free being in the respect in which
it is free necessarily unconstrained.

1 It may be said that it is the function of will to subdue nature,
but this is precisely to give it the freedom of a despot, and leave
the personality unfree. To do Hegel justice, no such antithesis
seems contemplated in his argument.

FREEDOM AND LAW 37

Hegel's first position is now before us. Freedom for •
him rests not on absence of constraint but on the accept-
ance of a principle expressing the true nature of rational
will running through and unifying all the diverse pur-
poses of men. The embodiment of such a principle
and therefore of freedom Hegel finds in the system of
right and law. Two terms here require some consider-
ation before the meaning of this principle can be under-
stood. By the term " embodiment " I have rendered the
word Daseyn. Daseyn in the Hegelian philosophy is
a term used in contradistinction to what we ordinarily
call a mere idea or bare thought of a thing, for example,
or to its mere potentiality. We must not, however,
translate the word Daseyn by "reality" or even by "exist-
ence," as both of these terms are assigned to distinct
phases in the Hegelian dialectical development. We
may, however, think of the embodiment of a political
idea in an Act of Parliament or of a political principle
in an institution or a constitution, as giving what Hegel
would call Daseyn to that idea or that principle.
That being understood, we see in general the meaning
of the phrase that freedom is embodied in right. But
the term " right " or law also requires comment. Hegel's
term is Recht, and it would seem better to use the
German term whenever ambiguity is to be feared. Ac-
cording to Dr. Bosanquet it is the advantage of the
German term that it maintains in itself the intimate
relation between right and law. It may be urged on
the contrary that the very fact that German writers
use one term for these two related but quite distinct
notions is an obstacle to clear thinking in their Juris-
prudence and Ethics in general, and in the Hegelian
philosophy in particular. The consequence of its use
is that we begin and go on with the confusion of two
issues, which it is the particular purpose of social philo-
sophy to hold distinct. The one issue is the nature
of right, the foundation of moral obligation, the meaning,
value and authority of a moral system ; and the other
the meaning, value and authority of law; and the final

38 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

question of political philosophy consists of the relation
between these two distinct things. That relation can
never be clearly set forth if we use terms which imply
a confusion between the terms related.

But in what sense is Recht the embodiment of free-
dom ? Let us first, for the sake of accuracy, supply
a correction, without which we should do injustice to
Hegel, though the correction does not touch the essence
of the question. Mere law is only an external embodi-
ment of freedom, Hegel fully admits. Law is abstract,
general, and regards primarily the externals of behaviour ;
to complete it we want something which is on the one
hand more concrete, more closely adapted to the require-
ments of individual life, and, on the other hand, some-
thing expressing the inner acceptance of the rule of
society as well as its external observance. This con-
ception we find in the word Sittlichkeit, a term which
can hardly be rendered in English by a single word. We
cannot translate it " morality," because Hegel uses the
word Moralitat as something which is purely inward and
subjective, whereas Sittlichkeit is objective as well. Dr.
Bosanquet translates it by the phrase " ethical use and
wont," and we may understand it as the whole system
of customs and traditions as accepted by the normal
member of a society, as forming the fabric within which
he has to live. This system is, in Hegel's phrase, the
conception of freedom come to self-consciousness in the
world in which we live.1 Restating our question there-
fore we have to ask, in what sense is the social tradition
an embodiment of freedom ? The examination of this
question takes us into the heart of the Hegelian concep-
tion of the relation of the individual man to society,
and this again will be found to be a particular case of
the relation of the individual to the universal, which
is the central point of the Hegelian metaphysics.

It will have been noticed in discussing the Hegelian
theory of the will we have always to speak of the will.
We have not spoken of the wills of different men and
1 Phil, des Rechts, p. 205.

FREEDOM AND LAW 39

their relations to one another. We have never used
the plural term. We have always spoken of the will
as though it were one substantive reality ; and this is
in fact the Hegelian view. But in society there are
many wills and in obedience to law we conform, as we
suppose, to the will of another. How then can we talk
of the will as if there were only one ? The question
will lead us ultimately into the metaphysical problem
of the one and the many, for the Hegelian theory of the
universal underlies the whole issue. But let us first
set out the problem with more fullness and consider the
solution proffered by Hegel's most recent and most
faithful exponent.

At the first blush it must be owned it is difficult to
attach any clear meaning to the statement that the social
tradition is the actual or concrete realization of freedom.
Freedom, as we have been told, means self-determination.
Self-determination, we were further told, implies deter-
mination by a principle as against mere impulse. But
even if we waive for the moment all controversies on
these points, it remains that if there is self-determination,
the determining principle must be a principle of our own
choosing, an expression of our own character, the real
bent of our own selves. The established ethical tradition
may of course fall in with our desires, and if so, we
are aware of no constraint in accepting it, but socially
and ethically the question of freedom only arises where
there is a clash of wills. Suppose then that our will
happens to be in conflict at one point with the social
tradition, what are we to understand ? To say that
in such a case we ought to yield up our judgment and
conform is at least an intelligible, though sometimes a
disputable proposition ; but that is not what is said
or intended. The proposition before us is that in con-
forming to the social tradition and only in conforming
to it we are free. It does not appear to matter whether
we ourselves find the rule which it propounds contrary
to our happiness or opposed to our conscience. Our
freedom lies, it would seem, in the surrender of our own

40 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

happiness, even in the stifling of our own conscience,
for we are free only as we conform to the moral tradition
embodied in and supported by the state. Freedom is
self-determination, yet freedom is realized only in the
submission of self to something which may at any time
conflict with all that is strongest and all that is deepest
in ourselves. The use and wont of the organized political
society to which we belong may, for example, at certain
points conflict with the teaching of the religious body
to which we belong, or it may involve injustices and
oppressions against which our conscience comes to revolt.
Now it is not merely contended that in such a conflict
we ought to surrender our judgment. That is at least
arguable. It is contended that in submitting ourselves,
and in this alone, we are actually free. We seem faced
with something like a contradiction. And, however
we define the state, this particular contradiction does
not seem to be resolved. For we may think of it as
essentially an organization of persons like ourselves. In
that case, in obeying it against our own will we are
simply under the constraint of others ; or we may think
of it as something impersonal, superpersonal, or, as
Hegel calls it, divine, and in that case we are obeying
an impersonal or divine authority. Even if we are free
in yielding to it, that would seem to be the last act of
our freedom. It is an abdication, a final discharge of
our authority over ourselves.

Now something like this conception of the relation
of freedom to the general will goes back to Rousseau.
Dr. Bosanquet * quotes Rousseau as saying " that who-
ever shall refuse to obey the general will shall be con-
strained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing
else than that he will be forced to be free." He goes
on to say, " In this passage Rousseau lays bare the very
heart of what some would call political faith and others
political superstition. This lies in the conviction that
the ' moral person which constitutes the state ' is a
reality." If we follow the development of this con-
1 The Philosophical Theory of the State, pp. 95, 96.

FREEDOM AND LAW 41

ception, we shall find the key to the difficulty before
us. Reviewing his examination of Rousseau, the details
of which we need not follow, Dr. Bosanquet writes :
" (a) The negative relation of the self to other selves begins
to dissolve away before the conception of the common
self and (b) the negative relation of the self to law and
government begins to disappear in the idea of a law
which expresses our real will as opposed to our trivial
and rebellious moods. The whole notion of man as
one among others tends to break down and we begin
to see something in the one which actually identifies
him with the others and at the same time tends to make
him what he admits he ought to be." This passage
really seems to contain the sum and substance of Idealistic
Social Philosophy. There is a common self, and this
is no metaphor. It does not mean a community among
selves because " the whole notion of man as one
among many tends to break down." It is a self
which is a higher unity than the legal or moral
person, and this self seems to be identified with the
real will, which is also, it seems, the self that one ought
to be.

We now begin to see why that which appears to us a
stark contradiction is seen in quite a different light by
the idealist. Our difficulty was that self-determination
cannot be the same thing as determination by other
selves, or by an impersonal state. The answer is that the '
division between self and others dissolves away into the
conception of a common self and the division between
the individual and the state disappears in the conception
of a law expressing our own real will ; so that in con-
forming to law, we are submitting ourselves neither to
other persons nor to something impersonal. We are
conforming to our own real will. But if in point of
fact we happen to will just the opposite to that which
the law ordains, how can this be ? The answer lies in
the distinction between the actual and the real will.
We must give Dr. Bosanquet's statement of this dis-
tinction with some fullness.

42 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

" It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him
in his notion of the General Will might be described as the ' Will
in itself,' or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a con-
trast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem
to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one's
Will ? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully
aware of, or which I am even averse to ? This question will be
treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter.
For the present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact
that often when people do not know what they mean, they yet
mean something of very great importance ; or that, as has com-
monly been said, ' what people demand is seldom what would
satisfy them if they got it.' We may recall the instances in which
even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to infer, from the inherent
nature of the will, that people do not really ' will ' something
which they desire to do at a given moment. . . . Now the con-
tradiction, which here appears in an ultimate form, pervades the
' actual ' will, which we exert from moment to moment as conscious
individuals, through and through. A comparison of our acts of
will through a month or a year is enough to show that no one
object of action, as we conceive it when acting, exhausts all that
our will demands. Even the life which we wish to live, and which
on the average we do live, is never before us as a whole in the
motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a full state-
ment of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least
be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments ;
and this cannot be done without also correcting and amending
it so as to harmonize it with what others want, which involves
an application of the same process to them. But when any con-
siderable degree of such correction and amendment had been gone
through, our own will would return to us in a shape in which we
should not know it again, although every detail would be a neces-
sary inference from the whole of wishes and resolutions which
we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented and
readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole
we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction,
it would appear to us quite remote from anything which we know."

Postponing for a moment any critical examination
of this conception, let us take stock of our position.
According to Dr. Bosanquet, then, there is underlying
the actual will, of which we are aware, a deeper real
will, which is the actual will reorganized and made
completely consistent or coherent. It is in fact that
organized system of purposes which we found in the

FREEDOM AND LAW 43

Hegelian will, and in a later passage Dr. Bosanquet
adopts the Hegelian phrase — " the will that wills itself."

But now, if we grant for the moment this underlying
will and suppose ourselves to be free only when we con-
form to it, we still have not reached the connection
between the real self and the common self, which is the
state, in which the distinction between self and others
is absorbed and whose will is expressed in the social
tradition. The connection is explained by Dr. Bosanquet
(p. 123), where we are told, " The habits and institutions
of any community are, so to speak, the standing inter-
pretation of all the private wills which compose it."
And this seems to be taken as the content both of the
general and the real will. It is an imperfect represen-
tation of the real will because " every set of institutions
is an incomplete embodiment of life." On the other
hand " the complex of social institutions " is " very
much more complete than the explicit ideas which at
any given instant move any individual mind in volition."

The essence of the position is now before us. Moral
freedom — we shall see later that Dr. Bosanquet candidly
recognizes the distinction between moral and legal liberty
— lies in conformity to the real will. The real will is
the general will and is expressed in the social fabric.
The expression is not perfect and admits of progressive
development, but it is in the main what we require.
Social tradition, if not the complete expression of our-
selves, is the fullest available to us at any given time.
The vehicle of social tradition, or rather the organizing
principle which gives it vitality, meaning and coherence,
is the state. The state, therefore, is the true self in
which the mere individual is absorbed. This is the
corner stone of moral and political obligation. Briefly,
we are morally free when our actions conform to our
real will, our real will is the general will, and the general
will is most fully embodied in the state. These are the
governing positions of the metaphysical theory which
we have to examine.

LECTURE III
THE REAL WILL

(a) THE steps by which the conception of the real will is
reached by Dr. Bosanquet are contained in the passage
quoted in the last lecture, and may be summarized
thus. What we will from moment to moment is called
our actual will. This actual will is always incomplete
and often contradictory and inharmonious. To get at
a full statement of what we will it would have to be
corrected by (a) what we want at all other moments, and
(&) by what others want. If this correction were carried
far enough, our " own will would return to us in a shape
in which we should not know it again." Yet the whole
process would only have been a logical series of inferences
from the whole of the wishes and resolutions which we
actually cherish. And if, going further than this, we
suppose criticism carried to a point at which it would
achieve a life ideally without contradiction, then the
will to such a life " would appear to us quite remote
from anything which we know." Remote as it is, this
is what Dr. Bosanquet seems to mean by the real will.
We are then left with the paradox that our real will may
be something which we never really will because we do
not even know it and could not recognize it if it were
set before us.

What is the explanation of this paradox ? How does
Bosanquet arrive at it ? (i) The justification appears
to be that the objects which we set before us, at
which we consciously aim, are not always what we
really want. They do not really satisfy us. This is a

44

THE REAL WILL 45

form of words expressing of course a perfectly well-known
truth. A man's nature is constantly driving him on to
ends which he imperfectly appreciates and the concrete
shapes which these ends take are often quite unsatis-
factory. They give illusions of desirability which cheat
him on attaining them. None the less, so far as he really
chooses them that choice is for the time being his real
will, in the true sense of real as that which is not merely
supposed to be but is. Moreover, the fact that he so
chooses them and makes a mistake in doing so is a real
limitation of his will. The illusoriness of the will is pre-
cisely as hard a fact, as stubborn a reality, as the persistent
background of want and unrest, which is the other side
of the matter. The man's will is in short just what it
is with all its limitations and not what it might be if
these limitations were removed. It may be suggested,
and this is what Bosanquet seems to mean, that logically
a man must be taken to will all that his actual will implies.
But this is quite fallacious. On the contrary, show me a
consequence following from an act of my will, which I
have not yet seen, and it is quite possible that I may
recoil from it. In any case the act seen with fresh impli-
cations is a different act, the will which chooses it a
different will. We may reasonably say that the man
who has gone through the long process of criticism
and judgment described by Bosanquet in the evolution
of the real will has become in that process a very
different man.

But there is a more fundamental objection to the term
"real will." Strictly there is no part in me which is more
real than any other part. There are elements in me
which are more permanent, and if the self is permanent,
there are, let us say, moods or actions which really
belong to myself more than others do, but one mood
is not more real a mood or one act more real an act than
another. The term " Real "is in fact in such passages as
these used rhetorically, that is, in a way which does not
distinguish between its adjectival meaning, connecting a
particular phase of myself with myself as a whole, and

46 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

its substantival meaning, in which the term " Reality " is
something which must either be simply asserted or simply
denied, and there is no more or less. A particular emotion
is either something which I have and then it is real,
whether permanent or transitory, reasonable or un-
reasonable ; or it is something which, say, you falsely
attribute to me and then it is unreal. For the contrast
between the real and the unreal then should be substi-
tuted the contrast between the self as it is permanently
constituted and the self as it acts in some transitory
excitement.

(2) The real will then, if it means anything, means
the permanent underlying nature of any one of us, but
this again does not mean our nature as it might be if
we were spiritually born again, transformed by no matter
what process of rational reflection, hortatory suggestion
or moral and emotional re-orientation. This has a most
important bearing on our second position. Dr. Bosan-
quet's assumption is that the real will is in fact
identical with the general will. The supposed ground is
that the real will must be one which would be perfectly
harmonious with itself. This is assumed to involve a
harmony with other wills. The assumption begs the
principal question of Ethics, but let it pass for the moment.
Let us agree that the perfectly rationalized will involves
a harmony of self and others. What ground is there
for assuming that this harmony would express the true
permanent nature of John Jones ? John Jones, if you
unrolled before him the life which you expected him to
lead as a rational being, might repel it with scorn. He
might say, if articulate enough, that it makes no room
for certain elements which he finds very real in him,
his passions, his physical appetites, his desires to get the
better of others. How are you to prove to him that
these are not real parts of himself ? The answer seems
to be that if you carry John Jones through the pro-
cess of rational criticism, he will discover elements of
contradiction in these warring desires. As long as you
present this to him as an intellectual proposition, how-

THE REAL WILL 47

ever, John Jones will reply, " Consistency be hanged !
I will have my life in parts, each as good as I can make
it. It is these that are the true John Jones." To this
again the only reply available seems to be that the process
of revealing the true rational harmony to John Jones
cannot be an intellectual process merely, it must be one
which touches his emotions, his will itself. But what
is this but to admit that the true John Jones must
undergo a change ? If he is to be formed into a rational
will, he must be transformed. I would be far from
denying that every human being is capable of such refor-
mation. I insist only that it is a reformation which is
a transformation and that the will, which Bosanquet
calls real and which I would call rational, harmonious
or simply good, is not real in the average man, nor even
in its completeness in the best of men.1 Bosanquet's

1 In the discussion of the criminal (pp. 226, etc.) there are some
instructive remarks, illustrating the nature of the real will.
Bosanquet says justly that if an uneducated man were told that
" in being punished for an assault he was realizing his own will,
he would think it cruel nonsense." Some who are not the criminal
might also think it nonsense ; and the only reason why they should
not think it assigned by Bosanquet is (a) that the criminal would
quite well understand that he was being served, as he would say,
in the same way as somebody else would be served who had done
the same thing, (b) That the punishment is the reaction on the
criminal of a system of rights to which he is a party. As to (a)
the essential difference between the criminal and the good will
is that while the criminal may be prepared to judge others, he
makes exceptions in favour of himself. Very often he cannot
see the identity of his act with another which he condemns and
even if he can see it, so far as he is criminal, his attitude is " I
don't care." If an acute dialectician were to argue with him,
he would no doubt entangle him in inconsistencies and show that
if he were a reasonable man, and if he admitted universal rules
applying to himself and others, he would not be a criminal. But
if this argument is to have effect, it must not only convince the
man's intelligence but convert his will. In order genuinely to
condemn himself, the criminal must therefore become another
man than that which he in fact is. And we see very clearly from
this instance that the good, rational or social will imputed to the
criminal as his real will is precisely the will that the criminal, as
criminal, really does not possess. The fallacy consists in describ-

48 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

own description of course shows he is perfectly aware
of this, yet he confuses the whole issue by the use of the
adjective "real." It is misleading to contrast real with
transitory, trivial aims. It is not merely one's super-
ficial or casual interests that clash with others and exhibit
contradiction with one another so that they interfere
with the best life, it is also the deepest passions and some-
times the most fervid conscience. A man may feel, and
the feeling may be no illusion, that a personal passion
goes to the very foundation of his being, and yet the
passion may be lawless or it may collide with the entire
bent of his life in other directions, his devotion to public
duty, for example, or perhaps deeprooted obligations of
family and friendship. If the real self means that
which goes deep, we cannot deny that it contains possi-
bilities of contradiction far more serious than the collision
between permanent interest and passing desire.

There is conceivable a will which is perfectly rational
and harmonious in all its deliverances. There is con-
ceivable a system of wills so harmonizing with themselves

ing as a real will something which a logician regards as being
implied in the actual will of the criminal. This implication rests
on some principle of impartiality which the logician may have
very good grounds for maintaining ; but this is precisely the
principle which the criminal, as criminal, either ignores or
definitely rejects. As to (&), at bottom the same analysis applies.
The criminal acquiesces in the system as far as he chooses, as far
as he finds it suits him, or perhaps as far as he is unable to resist
it, but, qua criminal, does not in the least care for the incon-
sistency, as a rational man would judge it to be, involved in his
departure from the system where that departure suits him better.
In brief, the murderer does not really want himself to be hanged
unless he has repented and ceased to be the man that he was when
he committed the murder.

It must be added here that the conception of punishment as
expressing the will of the offender has a sinister application to
the rebel. It may be said that the rebel has accepted the social
system and thereby the punishment which will follow upon him
when he comes to challenge it. From the rebel's point of view
the answer may be that he never willingly accepted the social
system as a whole but found himself involved in it and could
not react against it until the moment for rebellion had arrived.

THE REAL WILL 49

and with one another ; such a perfect harmony we may
legitimately speak of as the ideally rational life and the
ideally good life and, as such, may contrast it with any
actual life which is imperfect in these respects. Again,
we may grant that there is something real within us
which answers to the conception of such a life, and some-
thing real within any society of human beings which,
in a sense, moves us towards such a life. At any rate,
from the nature of the case contradiction tends to defeat
itself and harmony to fructify. Thus by continual trial
and error society moves on. Unfortunately the inhar-
monious elements are equally real and the disharmonies
are not merely trivial, transitory, superficial, but rooted
in the structure of the self and, what is almost as im-
portant, in the social structure. Every group of human
beings acquires a corporate life and with it only too
probably a collective selfishness, which over long periods
may hold the development of other groups in arrest. The
contrast is between the rational harmonious good and the
irrational conflicting bad. When this contrast is con-
fused with the contrast between the real and the unreal
the problem is stated in wrong terms and does not admit
of solution. The peculiar vice of this statement is that,
in laying down a certain kind of life as expressing the
real will of the individual, the ground is prepared for the
argument that in the compulsion of the individual to
lead such a life there is no interference with his real will.
He is supposed to be merely unable to judge for himself.
Thus, in principle, there is no limitation to restraints
upon the individual, no core of freedom which collective
action should not touch. And yet it must be plain that
no actual human being, or association of human beings,
knows what the real will is, for it is admitted that the
process of eliciting it is so roundabout and involved that
a man would not recognize his real will if it was put before
him. Why not then admit that it is not real but ideal —
an ideal which is beyond human nature though it may
be a legitimate object of human endeavour ?

(6) The General Will. If for the " real " we write the

4

50 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

ideal or rational will, we have next to ask whether this
would be a general will. We may grant that if the will
in you or me were made completely rational, it would
accept principles upon which we should agree. Thus,
in all rational wills there would be a qualitative identity.
We should so far be like one another in our fundamental
attitude towards life and conduct. But when we pass
from the conception of like persons or like selves to a
corporate person or a common self, there is an inevitable
transition from qualitative sameness to the sameness of
continuity and numerical unity. The assumptions are
(i) There is in me a real self, my real will, which is opposed
to what I very often am. (2) This real will is what I
ought to be as opposed to what I very often am. (3) There
is in you a real will and in every other member of society
a real will. All these real wills are what you and every
other member of society ought to be. In quality and
character these real wills are indistinguishable. They are
therefore the same. (4) This sameness constitutes of all
the real wills together one self. But the kind of unity
involved in what is called qualitative identity or sameness
of character is quite a different unity from that involved
in the self or from that involved in the state. The self
is a . continuous identity united by strands of private
memory and expectation, comprising elements of feeling,
emotion and bodily sensation, which are its absolute
exclusive property. No such continuity unites distinct
selves, however alike, or however united in their objects.
So at least it seems to those whom Dr. Bosanquet dis-
misses with contempt as " theorists of the first look."
For them human individuality is and remains some-
thing ultimate. To Dr. Bosanquet on the other hand x
individuality is only a particular case of the distinct
contribution offered by parts within a system which he
calls the universal. The differences within the self are
for him in their essential nature identical with the differ-
ences between selves. I am of course in a sense one, but
I am in a sense many. I am a centre of many experiences,
1 The Philosophical Theory of the State, ch. vii.

THE REAL WILL 51

and even of many groups of experiences, each of which
has its own controlling principle. This makes me, as
popular metaphor has always recognized, a kind of
miniature state ; and for Bosanquet this metaphor ex-
presses the real truth. Two passages may be taken as
summing up his discussion.

" If we consider my unity with myself at different times as the
limiting case, we shall find it very hard to establish a difference
between the unity of what we call one ' mind ' and that of all the
' minds ' which enter into a single social experience." l

And again in the following chapter : 3

" Individuals are limited and isolated in many ways, but their
true individuality does not lie in their isolation but in that dis-
tinctive act or service by which they pass into unique contributions
to the universal."

Common sense confronted by these statements has a
feeling of outrage which makes it disinclined to argue.
It is inclined to say that the difference between self and
another is as plain as the difference between black and
white, and that if a man does not see it, there is nothing
plainer to appeal to. It is inclined to add that, if certain
views of the state are reduced to justifying themselves
by such confusion as this, that is their sufficient refutation.

But it is not quite satisfactory to leave the argument
at this point. We must trace the roots of the fallacy.
Let us first ask in what sense it is true that individuals
have a common life or a common experience. To begin
with they live in the same world. A and B may be said
to have a common experience when they both perceive
the same object. For example, both are reading the
same book, studying the same subject, have before
their eyes the same rose, are partners in one enterprise,
members of one society. Here is a real unity, a numerical
unity, but this unity is in the outer world, the world
with which both minds are in contact. It may be in
the actual existing world, as in the case of the rose which
' P. 178. • P. 183.

52 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

both see and both smell, or it may be in the processes
of the world and the changes to which both contribute,
the purpose which both desire to realize, but in any case
it is external to both. The unity is in the object — a
term here which may be conveniently used in its popular
ambiguity as meaning sometimes a real thing, sometimes
a purpose. The individuals are subjects, distinct centres
of sensation, perception, thought, feeling, active will,
standing in relation to that object. They are two, while
the object is one. But, secondly, even between A and
B, as two, there is a kind of unity. They are, or may
be, similarly affected by or to the object. The rose
smells sweet to both. The success of the business is an
object of eager interest to both. The relation here is
one which some would call resemblance, others identity
of character. When spoken of as identity of character
it is easily merged in thought with the numerical identity
belonging to the object. Nevertheless it is a distinct
relation. These then are the two foundations of identity
as between individuals, the relationship to an identical
world and the partial identity of character in themselves.
How do these relations differ fundamentally from the
relations between parts of my experience to one another ?
For example, I may smell the same rose twice and pursue
the same object through successive days and with con-
siderable differences of mood, slackening and tensioning
of interest and so on. The answer is that there is some-
thing common in me to all my acts and experiences which
is never common to you and me. I am aware in myself
not only of the object that I experience but of the act
of experiencing it, but I am never aware of your act of
experiencing any object. Certainly I believe that you
experience objects but I believe it on inference, you
being a person like myself and acting in ways sufficiently
similar to mine to enable me to interpret them. When
it is said that our experience is common there is an
ambiguity in the term " experience " which is overlooked.
There is a sense in which you share my experience. There
is also a sense in which your experience is absolutely

THE REAL WILL 53

and for ever private to you, and mine absolutely and for
ever private to me. Experience may mean a series of
objects that is before the mind, and in that sense it may
be common, or it may mean what Professor Alexander
calls enjoyment, or what might with more propriety be
called suffering. Mind is always dealing with objects,
apprehending them, thinking about them, operating upon
them and so on. The dealing, the thinking is not the
object dealt with, the object thought about, it is the
act or state that is enjoyed or suffered. True it becomes
known and is in that sense an object, but it is an object
of a distinct class, the character of which class is that
everything in it is known as the subject of some other
object. The entire system of these subjective acts or
states forms a continuum, constituting what I know within
me as my individuality or myself. My consciousness of
myself rests upon a distinction between this thread of
enjoyment and suffering and the entire system of the
objects to which it relates, and my sense of personal
identity is my recognition of the continuity of this thread.
This is the element of isolation which, in contradiction
to Bosanquet's dictum, is the true core of individuality.
This isolation is not merely physical. My body is a part
of the objective world to me. I know it by the senses
as I know the rose, but the experience, as suffering, is
always located in the body, felt within the body, and the
physical separateness of my body from another, though
not the ground of my isolation, is inseparably connected
with it. What in practical philosophy is even more
important is that the whole series of my feelings belongs
to the thread of suffering. True, I am aware of my
feelings and can name and classify them and to that
extent they are objects to me, but I always know them
as feelings of my own, which I enjoy or suffer as being
attributes or states of the subjective continuum that is
distinct from the outer world as being in me incom-
municably private. When I am said to share another's
feeling, that is confused metaphor. The sight of another's
pain may arouse pain in me but it is another pain.

54 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Normally, it is not even qualitatively the same pain. I
do not feel toothache when my child is suffering from
toothache but pity or anxiety, an emotion not a sensation.
There are cases of what is sometimes conceived to be
sympathy in the strictest sense in which the sight or
description of physical torture seems to stimulate some-
thing of the same anguish in myself, but even here it is
a qualitative and not a numerical identity that is in
question. And it is fortunate that it is so, for if I felt
all the real anguish of the sufferer, I should hardly be
in a position to come to his relief.

We trace the foundations of Dr. Bosanquet's identi-
fication of individuals then to a confusion in the use of
the term "experience." Experience as meaning a world
of objects may be common to many selves. Experience
as that which each self enjoys or suffers is absolutely
private. In the former sense different minds can enter
into a single experience ; in the latter sense never, though
they may know about one another's experience. In the
former sense experience is not as such a universal but
rather one comprehensive world of objects to which all
individuals are related. In the latter sense it is a uni-
versal in the true sense of a class of individual beings
resembling one another or possessing identities of
character.1

1 It would be unfair to Dr. Bosanquet to suggest that he ignores
the exclusiveness of consciousness. In the present work he tells
us, for example (p. 183), " In a sense it is true that no one con-
sciousness can partake of or can actually enter into another."
And similarly in his Principle of Individuality and Value he writes
(p. 47) : " No one would attempt to overthrow what we have
called the formal distinctness of selves or self. This consists in the
impossibility that one finite centre of experience should possess
as its own immediate experience the immediate experience of
another." But he seems to regard what we have called enjoy-
ment as a kind of form, to which the object of experience gives
content. So in the same work a little earlier (p. 38) we read :
" The pure privacy and incommunicability of feeling as such is
superseded in all possible degrees by the self-transcendence and
universality of the contents with which it is unified ; and as these
contents are constituents of our individuality, the conception that

THE REAL WILL 55

The privacy of enjoyed experience , and in particular of
feeling, has an important bearing on the doctrine of force

individuality or personality has its centre in the exclusiveness
of feeling, neglects the essential feature of individuality or person-
ality itself. It has an aspect of distinct unshareable immediacy ;
but in substance and stuff and content, it is universal, communi-
cable, expansive." And so we learn a little later (p. 48) that the
inevitable distinctness of any immediate experience, which is said
to contain the essence of individuality, is a very different thing
from the inexplicable and fundamental foreignness commonly
postulated as between different persons. " It merely comes to
this, that they are organizations of content, which a difference of
quality, generally though not strictly dependent on belonging to
different bodies, prevents from being wholly blended." There
must, it would seem, be some characteristic differences between
you and me, just as there are characteristic differences between
any two parts of the same thing, but not such as to interfere with
our fundamental sameness, not radically distinct from the differ-
ences which may be discerned within myself at different times
or in different relations. This position is developed on p. 58.
" With the one exception, of the thread of ccenaesthesia, com-
patible with any degree of hostility and foreignness, there is no
ground of unity with our past and future selves which would not
equally carry us to unity and fellowship with others and with the
world. Our certainty of their existence is in both cases inferential,
and on the same line of inference, both are cemented to it by the
same stuff and material of unity, language, ideas, purposes, contents
of communicable feeling ; and, as we have seen, the other may
in these ways be far more closely knit with me than is my
previous self." Hence we are not surprised to learn in the same
book (p. 62) that " Separateness is not an ultimate character of
the individual, but is a phase of being akin to externality, and
tending to disappear in so far as true individuality prevails."
It appears from these passages that in spite of admissions as to
the exclusiveness of finite centres of experience, the radical dis-
tinction between the subject and the object, between enjoyment
and things experienced, escapes Dr. Bosanquet. His whole
world is, as it were, on one plane. It is all experience more or
less articulate and complete, more or less partial and confused.
Individuality means a relatively high level of articulateness, and
for that reason all individualities, in proportion as they develop,
approximate to one and the same limit, the single experience which
is wholly articulate. This conception of the entire fabric leading
up to it and down from it falls to the ground as soon as subject
and object are distinguished.

and freedom. When Bosanquet comes in chapter viii
to deal with the limits of state action he finds the
difficulty to lie in the antithesis between force and the
spiritual character of the real will. The state has to
rely on rewards and punishments (p. 190) that destroy
the value of an action " ap an element in the best life."
" An action performed in this sense under compulsion
is not a true part of the will." This, so far as it goes,
is very sound and undoubtedly touches one of the true
motives for restricting the operations of the state,1 but

1 It is only fair to Dr. Bosanquet to say that he recognizes the
character of moral liberty more fully than some other writers
and in particular than Hegel. His general conception of liberty,
as explained in The Philosophical Theory of the State, is that the self
is free when it is master of its passions, or, more precisely, when
the real will is the master of the false will. But it is recognized
by a piece of candour, which should be acknowledged, that this
is not the literal or elementary sense of liberty. That literal sense
means the absence of constraint exercised by one upon others,
and in going beyond that we are more or less making use of a
metaphor (p. 137). It is, however, maintained that we may
acquiesce as " rational beings in a law and order, which on the
whole makes for the possibility of asserting our true or universal
selves, at the very moment when this law and order is constraining
our particular private wills in a way which we resent or even con-
demn." The term " condemn " here is odd. Does it mean we
condemn the law judicially, that is rationally ? If so, there would
seem to be a contradiction. What Bosanquet must mean is that
we recognize law to be necessary, or rather perhaps recognize law-
abidingness to be necessary even if a particular law is bad. But
the real question lies beyond this. In what sense is law as such
an instrument of moral liberty ? The suggestion is apparently that
the coercive repression of warring impulses in me sets my real,
that is rational, will free. Thus, there would be no objection in
theory to the plan of making men good by legislation. But this
hardly seems to express Bosanquet's own meaning because at a
later stage he frankly recognizes the limits of coercion, and
fundamentally the whole idea is untrue. If my rational will has
conquered the erring impulse, then it has established its own
mastery, and may be called free in the moral sense. But, if and in
so far as the erring impulse is overcome by an external restraint,
my will is not only not free but not even effective. The best that
can be said for making men good by coercion is that coercive
restraints at a given moment may prevent an irreparable error

THE REAL WILL 57

the denial of individuality leads Bosanquet to repudiate
the view that force, or generally speaking state inter-
ference, lies in the intrusion of others upon the self (see
p. 183). To him in principle there are no others. I
should be inclined to subjoin that, if that is so, there is
no force. What is at the back of force and what does it
rest upon ? The isolation of the individual. When we
speak of forcing a man to do a certain kind of action,
we do not mean thzt we take hold of his hands and make
him do it. A nurse may do that with a small child but
it is not what is intended or practical in adult life. What
we mean is that pains and penalties are imposed, that
there is an appeal to fear of future suffering or to the
hope of future reward. Now when A puts forth force
on B, what is the situation ? B, let us suppose, is the
subject of a certain impulse, craving or feeling which is
absolutely private to him, not shared and not necessarily
in the least understood by A. B, if he yields to this
impulse, is under the fiat of A to suffer a penalty. Once
more the feeling of pain, grief, perhaps agony, is abso-
lutely private to him, unshared and perhaps little
appreciated by A. The danger is that A may be indifferent
to B's feelings. There is nothing necessarily to com-
municate to A the experience either of the craving or of
the penalty by which he represses it. Now if A literally
shared all B's experiences, there would not be this danger.
In prescribing for B, A would have to go through the same
thing himself and would have to take his own prescription.
If there were always this community of experience in
the sense of a community of suffering, there would be no
special practical danger in the use of force, and in a
democratic and uniform society we do in fact expect
to find greater mildness in the use of penalties to which
all are equally exposed. But in so far as there is a dis-

and so make it possible for me to recover my genuine self-control
later on ; just as, if I am prevented from suicide, I have at least
the opportunity of living to do better another day. But if I am
permanently in tutelage, I am permanently unfree and without
means of freedom.

58 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

tinction between the governors and the governed, the
use of force is subject to great abuse, which consists
precisely in the fact that it is an intrusion on one set
of people by others who are in a large measure immune
from the practical working consequences.

We may carry the theoretical point a little further,
and we may ask if a man could ever put force upon him-
self in the sense in which he could put force upon another.
We have seen that when he puts force upon another
there is the threat of pain, not necessarily following from
the action and not a pain which he will feel himself.
Neither of these conditions is realized when a man puts
force on himself. When a man puts force upon himself
he conquers an impulse, that is to say, he brings the
whole force of his nature to bear, or more accurately,
the organized system of convictions, principles, interests,
which is his personality, and does not in truth so much
conquer himself as win a victory for himself. He does
not threaten himself with a penalty which he will not
share. He does not, strictly speaking, threaten himself
at all. It is true he may fear a penalty, remorse it may
be, or a headache it may be, and he may say to himself
that this will follow as surely as day follows night. This,
however, is not a threat but an anticipation, and it is an
anticipation, not of something arbitrarily attached ab
extra to the act, but of something following from it as an
inherent consequence. Obviously, too, it is not some-
thing from which the author of the supposed menace
is to be immune. The only sense in which a man can
be said to threaten himself would be under some artificial
form of self -reformation in which a man undertakes a
vow to himself to undergo a specific penance for a specific
trespass. Such a case, if we may regard it as real, would
be an analogical transfer to the sphere of self of the re-
lation of self and others, and can only belong to the sphere
of play-acting with our moral nature.

I conclude, therefore, that the use of force is essentially
what Bosanquet denies it to be. It is an imposition on
the individual by others, and its practical dangers lie

THE REAL WILL 59

precisely in that isolation of the individual feelings through
which force acts, which Dr. Bosanquet dismisses as of
secondary importance.

We cannot, therefore, accept the definition of freedom
suggested by Dr. Bosanquet in his new volume. To the
question how self-government is possible, he replies that
the answer is drawn " from the conception of the general
will which involves the existence of an actual community
of such a nature as to share an identical mind and feeling.
There is no other way of explaining how a free man can
put up with compulsion and even welcome it." * On the
surface this theory is attractive. In an ordered society
I am free, though under compulsion, because the will of
society is my own will, and the compulsion is exercised
by myself upon myself. But these are mere words.
The will of society may be radically opposed to my own,
and yet I must obey. It may even be my duty to obey,
and normally it is so, even though I think the law wrong,
because society must be kept together ; and if its deliberate
decision is to carry no weight with its dissentient members,
profound disorganization must ensue. The evil of one
bad law is not, unless in a very extreme case, to be weighed
against the evil of diminishing the authority of all law.

The only sense, therefore, in which I am conforming
to my own will, in obedience, is that of two evils I prefer
the lesser. If in this I am free, it is not because I am a
member of a society like-minded with myself, but simply
because I am master of my own actions and can choose,
if I will, to abide by the penalties which disobedience
will entail. If freedom depended upon identity of will,
there would not be much of it in a complex world. In
general freedom depends (i) on the defined and restricted
use of compulsion. If the state prevents another man
from coercing or oppressing me by force or the use of
superior economic power, it augments my freedom ; and
the uniform compulsion of law is in fact the only known
method by which individuals can be assured in the enjoy-
ment of a common liberty from possible oppression by
1 Social and International Ideals, p. 271.

60 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

one another. If, on the other hand, the law prevents me
from drinking or compels me to serve in the army, it is
absurd to maintain that it is in these very respects
augmenting my freedom. It may be justified in either
of these actions by other considerations — even by the
consideration of other kinds of freedom — if, for example,
it has been right in judging that compulsory service is
necessary to national freedom. That does not alter the
fact that freedom is impaired at one point even if it is
gained at another, and the man who is compelled against
his will to give up his drink or to join the army is mocked
if you tell him that in doing that which he most resents
his will is free because the decision of society is his own.
Essentially political freedom does not consist in like-
mindedness, but in the toleration of differences ; or,
positively, in the acceptance of differences as contributing
to richer life than uniformity. Freedom, as something
shareable by all members of a community, involves
restraint upon that which prevents such sharing. A
society is on the whole free not because there is in it
little law or much law, but because the law is such as to
secure scope for personal development and free associ-
ation as a common possession by restricting those develop-
ments, and those only, in which the fulfilment of one is
the frustration of another. It is free, not where a common
mind shapes the individual, but where all minds have
that fullness of scope which can only be obtained if certain
fundamental conditions of their mutual intercourse are
maintained by organized effort.1

1 Properly interpreted, the dictum of Lycophron the Sophist,
that the law is a guarantee of mutual justice, is nearer the truth
than the contrary proposition of Aristotle, that it is such as to
make the citizens good and just (Aristotle, Politics, Book III,
ch. ix, § 8). It is not the business of compulsion to make men good
and just, but the guarantee of protection for him who acts justly
is a condition under which men may make themselves good and
just. The state can, however, without serious increase of coercion
apply the resources of organization to secure more positive condi-
tions of development than the mere restraint of injustice, and in
particular it is only the state which can accumulate for social ends

THE REAL WILL 61

(2) In a second and more specific sense, political free-
dom implies active citizenship. The claim of the free
individual is not the impossible one that the common
decision should coincide with his own, but that his de-
cision should be heard and taken into account. He
claims his part in the common councils ; he takes his
share of responsibility. In so far as he makes this claim
effective he contributes to the common decision even
though in a particular case it goes dead against him. He
is free, not because the social will is his own, but because
he has as much scope for expression as any one man can
have if all are to have it and yet live and act together.
More than this is the beginning of tyranny, less is the
beginning of slavery.

We cannot, however, do justice to the argument from
the likeness between individuals to a common self which
actually unites them without reference to the ultimate
metaphysical theory of which this transition is a par-
ticular case. Let us restate our position as we have
maintained it against Dr. Bosanquet's attacks. For us
the system of law, the social tradition, is clearly not
the product of one will, unless in the imaginary case
of an omnipotent despot who imposes a complete system
of laws on a subject people. It is rather the product of
innumerable wills, acting sometimes in concert, some-
times in opposition to one another, and through their
conflicts and combinations issuing in a more or less orderly
system, part of which gets itself inscribed on the statute
book, while part is incorporated in customs and insti-
tutions, and as such passes through generations, con-
serving its main outlines through long periods, but also
subject to expansion, growth and decay. Such is the
system of Recht, partly moral, partly legal, as under-
stood by the plain man, and as more fully understandable

that large element of wealth which does not depend on the energy
of living individuals. It should be remarked in this connection
that to restrict the functions of the state is by no means to place
a limit on the value of voluntary co-operation, but rather the
reverse.

62 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

by comparative and historical investigation. If we call
it an expression or embodiment of the will, we do not
mean by that term a single continuous entity but a
universal, that is, something which in reality consists
of thousands and millions of wills, all distinct in their
existence, though acting on and acted on by one another.
But to the Hegelian this statement implies a false view
of the universal. We are contending for individuality,
for the irreducible distinction between self and others,
and we have met some of the arguments directed
against that distinction. But now we have admitted a
" universal " running through thousands and millions of
selves. This admission, according to the idealist, will
be fatal to the separateness which we have maintained.
The universal for him unites the instances which fall
under it just in the manner which we dispute. We have
maintained a radical distinction between the identity of
character found in different individuals and the identity
of continuous existence which constitutes each indi-
vidual. But the idealist will deny the radical character
of this distinction. For him identity is universality, and
the two cases of identity that we distinguish are mere
specific forms of the universal. We come, therefore, to that
theory of the universal which, as we said above, underlies
the whole question. This theory is due to Hegel.

What then for Hegel is the universal ? x Like other
things in his dialectic it can only be understood by sur-
mounting certain false and partial views. Firstly, then,
for him the universal is apprehended in contrast with
the particular cases in which it is manifested. Thus the
colour red is a universal, but it is not the red rose, nor
the red cloth, nor the red blood. The red rose is a par-
ticular instance of the universal, the red blood is another.
Redness, the universal, here is something distinct from,
and in a manner opposed to, the cloth and the rose which
are red. This is the abstract universal, the universal
arrived at by taking away all the particulars in which
it appears. But if we take away all the particulars,
1 See especially Wissenschaft der Logik, II, Werke, vol. v. pp. 36-63.

THE REAL WILL 63

what remains ? If it is neither the red rose, nor the
red cloth, nor the red blood nor red anything else, there
is no red, nothing appears to remain for the abstract
universal, and we seem forced to say that only particulars
exist. To escape this difficulty we might perhaps say
that red means the common element in the flower, the
cloth and the blood. It is the character in which all
agree and in which they all share as distinct from the
characters in which they differ. But here another diffi-
culty arises. The character of redness is not exactly
identical in the different cases. The rose is of one tint
or shade, the cloth of another, the blood of a third. The
red that is common to all becomes something thinner
and more attenuated, of which we can no longer form
even a perfectly clear and unambiguous image. If we
try to picture the red that is all these things, we stumble,
as Hume says, in our minds not upon red in general but
some particular shade of red. The difficulty becomes
greater the higher we go in the region of abstraction.
Red, blue and green are all colours, for example, but
what precisely is the colour that is above all, which is
not red, nor blue, nor green, nor of any other particular
tint ? If we try to think upon these lines, we get into
the way of constructing our conception into a kind of
mosaic. If colour is an element which is common to two
coloured objects, then let us say redness is another element
common to one set of coloured objects and distinct from
others, and crimson a third element, and luminosity,
transparence, opaqueness again further elements, and in
this red rose before me several of these particular elements
must coexist. Here then in another sense the universal
has passed into the particular — the common element,
colour, being just one of the constituent parts of the
actual colour which is before me. On the other hand,
it may be said each of these particulars is also universal,
since the colour is common to the entire class of objects,
the redness is common to a section of that class, and
the particular tint to a smaller section, while certain
characteristics like luminosity cut across the distinctions

64 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

of tint and are common to colours of many different
tints. The conclusion of this argument is that the uni-
versal as placed in opposition to the particulars, and the
particulars placed in opposition to the universal, both
involve contradictions. They pass into one another.

What is the truth then ? The truth may be seen in
this way. Colour is not a distinguishable element common
to red, blue, green, etc. It is rather that which is now
red, now blue, now green, and so all of them, though
it is not all of them at one and the same time and place.
Nor is it the sum or totality of them all. This would
ultimately be only the collection of all the individual
things that are coloured. It is rather the principle that
permeates them and that develops itself into the one or
the other, and the thought appears to be that, if we had
insight into the nature of the universal, we should under-
stand that all these differences arise out of it, as the
different organs of the body come from the development
of a germ. Hegel expresses this by saying that the true
or concrete universal is the individual. By this he does
not mean, as he explicitly says, the individual object
that our senses appreciate, e.g. the red rose. He means
an individuality which permeates or runs through differ-
ences of development or expression, so that the differences
are related to the universal as are the attributes of an
individual thing to the thing itself, or the phases or
activities of life to the living being. This distinction is
much more plausible as applied to a concept than to the
reality to which a concept refers. If one thinks of colour,
for example, as an attribute of the material world, to
describe it as an individual becomes paradoxical in the
highest degree. Colours appear here, there and every-
where under all sorts of changing conditions. There is
among them nothing at all resembling the continuity
and self sameness of an individual object. On the other
hand, if we think of the concept colour in our mind, we
can with more reason regard it as a kind of scheme, which
to be realized at all must be filled in in some definite way,
but which as a scheme is a permanent unity, and is main-

THE REAL WILL 65

tained without changing its character through all its
differences of fulfilment. We can then understand that
to say of a thing that it has a particular colour is to place
it in the scope of this scheme, so that we escape from
the difficulty of trying to assign to the term " colour " a
meaning which gives it some definite quality distinguish-
able from other definite qualities, an attempt which Hegel
rightly says leads us further and further into meaningless
abstraction.

Let us agree then that when we predicate a universal,
e.g. colour, we bring an object into relation with a certain
system which is operative in our minds, and that generally
speaking it is true to say that our concepts are systems of
this kind and systems of such systems. The fallacy in
the Hegelian theory consists in identifying the system of
our thought with the reality to which it refers. The
system of our thought is not identical with the system
of reality, except in the sense that our thought itself
is an event, but has reference to that reality, and reality
itself is not finally intelligible until we take the relation
between it and thought into account by a further and
more comprehensive thought. For example, in the par-
ticular case before us we have to recognize that while
in classifying things we form certain systems of universals
and particulars, and while these systems describe things
accurately in one aspect, they do not describe them
under other aspects. If we ask how a thing grows, comes
to be, disappears, for example, we do not get the answer
by exhibiting its place in a classification, but by tracing
its relation to its antecedents, concomitants, consequents
The classificatory system, being all held together in our
thought, has within our thought a unity, even if you
will an individuality. The thinking of it is an individual
act. But the objects to which this unified thought refera
the objects to which the system applies, may be in any
degree scattered through the universe, and devoid of all
the interconnecting threads that make an individual
whole. This then in the last analysis is the fallacy in-
volved in the famous Hegelian doctrine of the concrete

5

66 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

universal. It attributes the unity which belongs to the
concept as contained in the act of thinking to the mass
of objects to which the concept refers.1 The reality
which the universal describes consists of indefinite numbers
of individuals related by identities and differences of
character, i.e. by more or less exact resemblance, and
not by any substantive or causal continuity such as
constitutes the individual.

The confusion of the individual with the universal,
however, would never have commanded any acceptance
if it had not some plausible basis in fact. What is this
plausible basis ? It is that if you consider the individual
under a certain partial aspect, and allowing one funda-
mental point to drop, its resemblance to the universal
leaps to the eyes. Consider the living being, for example,
a man. He is in a sense one and the same thing from
birth to death, but he is also different from babyhood
to youth and youth to manhood ; in a lesser degree,
from moment to moment. You have in him a sameness
running through difference, which is just what you have
in the colour that is common to red, blue and green.
He is, moreover, many things in one. He is a thinking,
willing being, a spiritual being and a physical being, and
his unity pervades all these just as the redness pervades
all its tints. Here, too, the question arises whether he
is distinct from all the different things that he is, or
whether he is all these things regarded as a whole, or
whether he is something that is now one and now the
other, something which must be the one or the other
and which finally manifests itself completely only in the
whole series. In all these ways the self-identity of the
individual resembles the universal. The fundamental
difference is that the individual is continuous throughout
his existence. The man's life is not broken, he is always

1 It may be said that every time we make use of the same concept
we refer to the same mass of facts. There is thus an identity of
reference as well as identity in the thought which makes the
reference. But this is not to say that the mass of facts so
identified constitute in their internal relations an individual.

THE REAL WILL 67

there at a given spot at any particular time, and never
breaking the continuity of his temporal existence. In
speaking of him as an individual we affirm or imply a
belief in a substantial continuity. We believe, that is,
that what he is at one moment is the basis of what he
is at the next, that he has become whatever we find him
to be by a process of self-determination. That self-
determination is certainly not absolute, for his environ-
ment affects him, but there is always an element of self-
determination which makes up the continuous thread of
his identity. Now as between individuals of the same
class, there is no necessary continuity of this kind. Two
men may come into relation with one another or they
may not. They are nevertheless both members of the
same universal and they share a common character which
has nothing whatever to do with any substantive con-
tinuity. On the other hand — and here is a further source
of confusion — as between different individuals there may
also be in certain relations important inter-connections,
so that while each is an individual and while they con-
stitute members of a class, they may nevertheless be so
united as to form a totality which has a certain substan-
tive continuity of its own. Now this is precisely the
case with any society. Take a family, for example.
All the members are individuals, that is, each has his
own substantive continuity. But the family is also a
close union of these individuals who in certain relations
very intimately affect one another, and so build up a
common life. Thus the family is both the class of indi-
viduals which compose it, say, all the Thomas Browns —
the members of the family Thomas Brown — and also a
true individual of a higher order, the family of the Thomas
Browns possessing a certain life and unity of its own
which makes it behave for many purposes as a single
self-contained entity. So regarded, however, the family
is not a universal but an individual, though of a different
order from the physical individual. It is the confusion
of these two aspects of the community which dominates
the whole theory of the general will.

68 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Let us see how the logic of it works. In the first place,
the particular, as such, is unreal. Every particular must
be a case of the universal, a manifestation of the universal.
Thus the particular man, as particular, has no real exis-
tence. He is only a phase in some universal. Where
then are we to look for the universal ? Not in his identity
of character with other men. That is the false or abstract
universal. We should look for it in something which is
to be called an individual, that must be in some systematic
totality, some fabric or union of human beings, self-
sustaining, self -determining, a sort of system of wills.
Now there are several such systems, but in the Hegelian
view that which includes them all is the state, and thus
the state is the highest universal to which a particular
man belongs as a case or a manifestation, and the will
of the state is the real will, the universal will of which
particular wills are only incidents or phases. Accordingly
the Hegelian logic abolishes on the one side the inde-
pendence of the individual living human being, and on
the other side the universal ties of identity of character
which relate the individual to the human species as a
whole, and substitutes for it as the reality the organized
body of human beings, which in its highest manifestation
is the state. How far there is an error in fact here, that
is, how far it is true that the state is the highest human
organization, we need not for the moment inquire. The
point is that by identifying the universal with the indi-
vidual, Hegel has destroyed the universality of character
on which all the highest ethics and the highest religions
are founded. They mean nothing to him because they
are mere abstract universals. At the same stroke he
has destroyed the self-dependence of the individual
which is the root of freedom, and we can understand why
for him all that unsophisticated men call freedom is an
irrational and unmeaning caprice, a caprice of the par-
ticular, imagining itself to be a substantive reality instead
of a mere fold in the garment of the all-covering universal.
And yet Hegel's doctrine may be said to have contradicted
itself, for if it is true that universality of character rests

THE REAL WILL 69

on membership of some organized whole, then that uni-
versality of character, which we do as a matter of fact
find in human beings, must imply that humanity is in
some sense an organic whole, and the mere fact that we
speak of the state as a generic term and recognize that
there are many states must imply a universal element
connecting them, and therefore must lead to the con-
ception after all of a super-state, at any rate of some-
thing that is above all states, comprehending them all
and forming an organic unity among them. It is just
this organic unity which Hegel denies, recognizing above
the state only a spirit of world history which is essentially
a process and a process in which states contend and destroy
one another, not a unity inspiring them with a single
spirit and finding for them also a true freedom in con-
formity to universal law.1

1 Dr. Bosanquet in his Principle of Individuality a-nd Value
(Lecture II) recognizes the distinction between generality and
what he calls the individuality. He takes the line of depreciating
generality, e.g. p. 34, " the most general knowledge . . . must
obviously be the least instructive and must have its climax in
complete emptiness." To this it may be replied that the law of
gravitation is neither uninstructive nor empty, because it applies
to all bodies. On the contrary, it was precisely the discovery
that it did apply to all bodies, and not only the earth and the
objects on its surface, that enabled Newton to draw inferences
of extraordinary range and interest. He goes on to argue that
" you cannot explain a human body or a steam-engine by classi-
fying the parts in each under their resemblances to one another."
This is of course one part of the truth, though not the whole
truth. We should not understand the operation of any part of the
steam-engine if we could not regard it as an instance of a general
law of the operation of bodies precisely similar to that part.

For the rest, Bosanquet's contention only goes to illustrate the
difference between the general and the individual, and does not
justify the use of the term "universal" derived from generality
to characterize the individual. Bosanquet justly finds a certain
correspondence, the correspondence noted above, between the
individual and the general. " The ultimate principle we may
say is sameness in the other. Generality is sameness in spite of
the other. Universality is sameness by means of the other "
(p. 37). We should say rather generality implies a plurality of
objects similar, but not necessarily connected in any other way.

70 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Individuality is a connection, psychical, physical, or whatever
it may be, running through many parts and constituting of them
one whole. Being unable to deny the distinctness of what we
call generality, Bosanquet seems to set himself to minimize its
value. He almost seems to scold its obstinacy in remaining a
part of the universe. Exclusiveness, we are told, is a kind of minor
mark of the individual. It is misleading if too strongly insisted
on. It is admitted (p. 104) that a potential generality or repe-
tition is a corollary of the universal infinite experience, " but it
is a character of imperfection in such experience and not of per-
fection . . . why should any being express a second time what
has been adequately expressed before?" So, again, on p. 116,
" repetition suggests failure." Is it not rather that the admis-
sion of repetition suggests the failure of the theory which
identifies the universal with the individual ? A true proposition
is not refuted by belittling its significance.

LECTURE IV

THE WILL OF THE STATE

So far we have dealt with two of the three main propo-
sitions of the metaphysical theory of the state. Of these
three the first is that true individuality or freedom lies
in conformity to our real will. The second is that our
real will is identical with the general will, and the third —
with which we have not yet dealt — is that the general
will is embodied more or less perfectly in the state. On
analysing th? first proposition we found that it rested
upon a confusion of two distinct conceptions. The first
is the conception of human nature, which .is richer and
more various than the conscious and deliberate will.
The second is the ideal will which would express the
practical possibilities of harmony in human nature. The
first of these is real, but is neither identical with will
nor with rationality. The second is rational will, but
is not real. It is something which at best may only
be attained by that great transformation of ourselves
which is symbolized by the religions in such phrases as
" being born again."

The term "real will," therefore, we discarded as a source
of nothing but confusion. But having accepted the
phrase provisionally from the idealist, we found a further
confusion, the argument by which he identifies it with
the general will. This argument confused identity of
character with identity of continuous existence, the
result of which was to set up a common self wherein
the difference between one person and another is lost
and the whole problem of social relations accordingly is
misstated.

71

72 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

These are the two leading fallacies in the metaphysical
theory of society, but there is a third fallacy emerging
from them which is no less important in its practical
applications. That is that the common self or the general
will is to be identified with the state. It might be thought
that, if we altogether repudiate the conception of a
common self, the application falls to the ground along
with the principle. None the less the argument needs
examination both because it brings out certain elements
of fallacy in the central conception and because it bears
upon the whole question of the relations of the state
to the social life of man.

Waiving all our criticism of the metaphysical identi-
fication of the real and the general will, we can understand
what is meant by the contention that the full expression
of a man's nature is social, that his interests, in the fullest
sense of that term, are bound up with those of others
and extend in endless ramifications into the texture of
the social fabric. But why are they in particular bound
up with the state ? Is the state then another name
for the entire social fabric, for the family, for the mass
of one's social interests, for science, art, literature and
religion ? To the modern mind, at any rate to the non-
German mind, the question answers itself in the negative,
and outside the metaphysical school most thinkers would
regard this as one of the points on which the modern
outlook differs essentially from the Greek. To the Greeks x
the city-state was the focus of all life, and on this fact
depended at once the completeness and the harmony of
the Greek conception within a certain range and the
narrowness and final insufficiency of that range. The
self-sufficiency of the city-state was bound up with
the failure of the Greeks to achieve a wider nationality
and with the undeveloped condition of their religion, which
made it impossible to set up a spiritual over the temporal
power. Nevertheless, for the Greek thinkers themselves
the boundaries to state life were too narrow. Plato

1 I.e. the Greeks of the orthodox tradition. The Cynics and,
following them, the Stoics, laid the foundation of the larger view.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 73

might hold that the happiness of his guardians was not
to be considered apart from the well-being of the state,
to which it was their prime function to contribute, but
none the less it is clear that for him the real desires of a
trained philosopher are to graze apart in the Elysian
Fields of contemplation, and that to recall him to the
service of the state is to bring him back into the cave
from which he had escaped into the upper air. We do
him no wrong, he contends, in demanding this service
of the philosopher, for we are merely expecting him to
repay what the state has given him in education. None
the less it is clear that the philosophic life, which is for
Plato the spiritual life, has begun to develop an interest
of its own. And so in Aristotle philosophic wisdom is
the mistress, not the servant, of the practical wisdom
of the statesman, and the theoretic life is primarily con-
cerned with things much higher than man. In the
modern world again, apart from Germany, the state had
until recent times receded into the background. It was
rather the prosaic necessity of social life than the living
principle itself. In the metaphysical theory the entire
modern tendency is reversed. The state has become, as '
we have seen, an end in itself, and the reason is that
the stale is regarded as the sum and substance of our
social activities, the organized fabric of civilized life.

Let us follow the reasoning by which Dr. Bosanquet
arrives at this conclusion, by which, that is to say, he
passes from his conception of the real will as the foun-
dation of our individuality to the state as the supreme
object of our allegiance. This transition is introduced
by a passage which runs : " The imperative claim of
the will that wills itself is our own inmost nature and we
cannot throw it off. This is the ultimate root of political
obligation." Should we not rather say, a rational harmony
of life has an imperative claim on us, and this claim is what
we call moral obligation ? Such a proposition would
harmonize better with the sentence preceding our quota-
tion, in which rebellion is recognized as a possible duty
on the ground that the particular system which claims

74 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

our obedience may be irreconcilable with the conditions
essential to a rational will. If this is understood, it is
clear that there is no political obligation that is not sub-
ordinate to moral obligation and politics are subordinate
to ethics. Thus, the main question of political or social
philosophy has to be answered in a manner adverse to
those who, like Bosanquet, are seeking to make political
philosophy an independent discipline.

None the less Bosanquet goes on to say l that the real
will is that which thinkers like Rousseau have identified
with the state. The justification offered is, that if, starting
from the human being, you try to devise that which will
furnish him with " an outlet of stable purpose," you
will be driven on " at least as far as the state and perhaps
further." The " perhaps further " is a saving clause
that may be considered later. Meanwhile we have to
deal with Dr. Bosanquet's conception of the state. It
is not, we are told, " merely the political fabric, but
is the entire hierarchy of institutions by which life is
determined, including e.g. the family, trade, the church,
the university. It is the structure which gives life and
meaning to them all." It is " the operative criticism
of all institutions." A perfect conception of the end
of the state would mean " a complete idea of the realiza-
tion of all human capacity." At the same time the state
is necessarily force. Force is inherent in the state, being
exercised not only in the " restraint of disorderly persons
but in the form of instruction and authoritative suggestion
to the ordinary law-abiding citizen." It forms a kind
of automatism, which underlies our more conscious and
intelligent behaviour. But though necessary as a basis
of life, force and automatic suggestion are in their nature
" contradictory to the nature of the highest self-assertion
of mind," not because in the use of force the state is
controlling the individual or one man controlling another,
for there are no others and there is no individuality
opposed to the state, but because the element of force is
antagonistic to the best life. It is "a dangerous drug"
1 See The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 149, etc.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 75

which must be administered " as a counter-poison to
tendencies which would otherwise give no chance to the
logical will." The consequence is that the state, as
exercising force, must be rigidly limited in its functions.
It must not seek the direct promotion of the good
life. " What it can effect is to remove obstacles, to
destroy conditions hostile to the realization of the
end." Its business is to " hinder hindrances " to the
best life.

We have thus a definition of the state, consisting of
two clauses, which we must examine separately. As to
the first, which identifies the state with the entire social
fabric, Dr. Bosanquet seems partly aware that here the
state is used in an unusual sense. By the state we
ordinarily mean either the government or, perhaps a
little more accurately, the organization which is at the
back of law and government. The state is the organi-
zation of society for the control of its common interests,
an organization of which the various departments of
law and government are the particular organs. This is
something less than the entire fabric. Dr. Bosanquet
might argue that there must be organization in order
to support the fabric. In advanced societies this is
probably true, but (a) many simple societies enjoy a
fairly well-ordered fabric of social life without any govern-
mental organization, and others have the very rudest
forms of governmental organization, (b) It is quite
possible to hold, with the philosophical anarchists, that
societies more advanced than our own may achieve an
equally good order of social life on a large scale and in
complex relations without governmental organization, or
at any rate without the use of force. And it is still more
possible to hold that the reduction of the use of force to
a minimum is a desirable element in the advance of society.
If that is so, while it would remain true to identify moral
obligation and social obligation, true to maintain that
the best life can only be realized in society, it would be
untrue to identify that best life with the state. Under-
lying Bosanquet's account, in fact, there is a serious

76 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

confusion between the state and society.1 The state is
at present necessary to society, but it is only one of its
conditions. The bony skeleton is necessary to the human
body and in a sense holds it together, but it is hardly
that which constitutes the life of the body, still less that
which makes the life of the body desirable and possibly
beautiful. Nor is it correct to describe the state as the
" operative criticism of institutions." The entire life of
society is a whole, of which the parts act and react upon
each other. Institutions and customs gradually change
and modify each other in large measure without any
conscious criticism, just through the actions of individuals
seeking to adapt themselves as best they may to their
medium. But the bulk of explicit criticism also proceeds
through discussion and through all sorts of voluntary
agencies, which have not the power of the state, and it
is only at certain turning-points that acts of government
and legislation have to be called in to make some decisive
change. The entire fabric, we may say, carries out its
own self-criticism, and once again it is only misleading
to identify the entire fabric with a state organization
which is only one of its necessary components.

Lastly, much of the organization of life is more extensive
than any organized state, and many social divisions cut
across state divisions. Bosanquet's own ideas are mostly
derived from Germany. The Christian church, in ideal,
has always been a cosmopolitan and not a national
organization ; and the same is true of other higher religions
and of higher ethics and the entire republic of letters,
science, philosophy and art. The same is true in another
relation of the economic market, which is a world market,
and even of economic ideas and to some extent of economic
organizations, such as the Socialist International. In a

* In the Introduction to his second edition (p. xxix) Dr.
Bosanquet seems to recognize some of the difficulties of his position,
and speaks of a social co-operation which does not belong strictly
either to the state or to the private person. If this admission is
pressed, it will be found fatal to his first definition of the state
as the entirety of the social fabric.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 77

word, the state, as an organization, is a mere means to
an end. It is one of the ways in which human beings
are grouped. In its present form it is the product of
certain modern conditions not of very long standing
and probably not destined to very long endurance. To
confuse the state with society and political with moral
obligation is the central fallacy of the metaphysical
theory of the state.

The truth is that Bosanquet's double definition of the
state, on the one hand as the operative criticism of insti-
tutions and on the other hand as force, is an abortive
union of two radically opposed conceptions. Criticism
is the very opposite of force. It is something essentially
spiritual. It belongs to the mind, it demands the maxi-
mum of freedom. It lives in discussion unconstrained.
It is no respecter of persons. It fills up no forms. It
is bound by no traditions. It is free as air. Force, on
the other hand, moves on the solid ground. As law,
its principles must be defined and established, executed
by authority, regardless of finer meanings and subtle
differences. It closes its ear to discussion, which is taken
to be complete at the moment when force is decided upon.
Human society has not often found it possible to dispense
with force because, though mind is free as air, the body
to which mind is attached must have the solid rock to
stand on, and men have judged an imperfect order better
than no order at all. The modern mind, aware of this
contrast, of the necessity of force and of the threat which
it contains to the life of the spirit, has sought unceasingly
for some theory of the limits of force, has asked itself
anxiously how much and how little is the state bound
to exact from its members. But the idealistic theory,
far from illuminating, serves to confuse the entire issue.
In Dr. Bosanquet's presentation in particular we get a
most confusing oscillation between the two principles
conveyed by his definition. If we ask about the duties
of the individual to the state, we find him leaning on the
state as operative criticism. The duty of the individual
appears to be absolute, his very personality is merged

78 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

in the state, and for the same reason, as we shall see
presently, the state has no authority over it, but is the
final form of human association. If, on the other hand,
we ask about the duties of the state to the individual,
what it can do for the promotion of the well-being of its
members, we find that the state is only force and all its
action is limited by the clumsiness and externality of
compulsion. It cannot directly promote freedom, but
only hinder hindrances.1 By playing between these two
meanings, we get the worst of both worlds ; on the one
side a state which absorbs and cancels individual per-
sonality and knows little or no morality in its external
relations ; and on the other side the social morals of the
Charity Organization Society, a state which cannot
actively promote the well-being of its members, but can
only remove obstructions and leave to them a fair field
in which to run the race. The truth is that the state
jjis only one element in the society of humankind. It is
'an organization which men have built up, partly with
' conscious purpose, but largely through a clash of purposes
which has settled down into an order exhibiting some

1 The hindrance of hindrances is indeed so vague an expression
that almost anything can be extracted out of it, e.g. we are told
(p. 172) that the state hinders illiteracy by compelling education.
When formulae are so stretched it is a sign of something wrong in
the theory underlying them. In public education two functions
of the state are involved, (i) Compulsion, which is necessary to
secure the right of the child against a neglectful parent, a right
which, like all rights, is a condition of social welfare, and (2) the
organization of public resources for a public object. We too often
tend to think of such organization in terms of compulsion because
it involves taxation. But taxation is not adequately conceived when
thought of as the compulsory taking from individuals of property
which is absolutely theirs. There are social factors in production,
and therefore elements due to society rather than to the individual,
which can only be secured for the community by the mechanism
of the state. Taxation is a very rough, and in practice not always
an equitable, method of securing these elements of collective
wealth, but to secure them for common objects and organize their
application is one of the functions of the state which is entirely
missed by Dr. Bosanquet's account.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 79

permanence, but constantly threatened with more or
less revolutionary changes. In this order there is nothing
sacrosanct. On the contrary, government, law and the
institutions lying behind and supporting them are far
from being the most successful of the experiments of
mankind. They call aloud for radical criticism, and to
deify them is to establish false gods, gods who at the present
time figure as veritable Molochs before whom our sons
are made to pass in millions through the fire.

But there is a further point. Let us for the moment
take the state in the extended sense which the Hegelians
assign to it. Let us regard it as the entire fabric of exist-
ing society. What then is the nature of our obligations
to this fabric ? What is its authority and its claim upon
our reason and conscience ?

The idealist maintains that the customs, traditions and
institutions of society are the expression of an objective
mind or spirit. These are contrasted by Hegel with the
abstractions which the subjective reason evolves, and he
speaks of the French Revolution as a monstrous display
of the result of overthrowing the given and existing con-
stitution of a great actual state, and endeavouring to
make the mere supposedly rational the basis of a consti-
tution in place of the historic reality. " Against the
principle of the individual will we are to remind our-
selves of the fundamental conception that the objective
will is rational in its concept, whether it is recognized
by individuals and willed with pleasure or not." x In
the same way 3 Dr. Bosanquet tells us that in the system
of institutions we have objective mind :

" We have only to repeat what many great men have explained
at length, that in this world of content, the work of thinking will,
we have in an external and factual form the body and substance
of thinking will itself. Here is its concrete and actual content,
what it finds to affirm in its volition from moment to moment,
what forms the steps and systematic connections by which its

Phil, des Rechts, p. 308.
Principle of Individuality, p. 112.

8o THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

self-expression from day to day is linked with — enters into —
the total world of its satisfaction in a law which is at once its own
nature and a high expression of the absolute. What a contrast
with the abstract formulas of Hedonist or intuitionist axioms ! "

It comes then to this. The attempts of thinking men
to conceive and establish a rational order of society are
mere fantasies of the subjective reason. The actual
institutions of a given society are the objective reason.
Society, any society it would seem that ever has been,
is a higher embodiment of reason than any of the conscious
reflections of the philosopher or statesman. When we
think of the actual inconsistencies of traditional social
morality, the blindness and crudity of law, the elements
of class-selfishness and oppression that have coloured it,
the mechanical dullness of state .institutions even at
their best, the massive misery that has lain at the foun-
dation of all historic civilizations, we are inclined to say
that no mere philosopher, but only the social satirist,
could treat this conception as it deserves.

But we must endeavour to understand the conception
on which it rests and the reason why it is wrong. For
this purpose we may start from the passage in which
Dr. Bosanquet sums up the theory of state action in the
Rousseauite formula " sovereignty is the exercise of the
general will." He justifies this by saying that all state
action is general ; that is, it consists in customs, laws
and institutions of general application. And, secondly,
by saying that " all state action is at bottom the exercise
of the will," and this is " the real will." To say that
state action is general 'and that it is willed, is not, how-
ever, the same thing as to say that it is the exercise of
a general will. The distinction seems dialectical, but it
touches the substance of the question. It is true that
laws and customs are general, but, as general, h6w far are
they willed ? How far, that is, are they the products of
an intelligence that has clearly foreseen all their bearings ?
How far are they the products of a unitary will that has
taken all social life into its account as a single coherent
system and thought out the bearings of one part upon

THE WILL OF THE STATE 81

another ? The answer to this question is, not very far,
hardly at all. The life of society is not the product of
coherent thinking by a single mind. On the contrary,
many customs and institutions, which make up social
life, have grown up in a detached, sporadic, unconscious,
often unreasonable fashion, and even the more conscious
and deliberate ones are rather efforts to correct some
particular mischief, amend some particular anomaly, than
clearsighted applications of a governing principle to
social life as a whole. And so, secondly, when Dr.
Bosanqutt says that society rests on will, the answer
is rather that it rests on wills. We seldom find in a great j
society, as a whole, a will comparable to that in you or
me relative to our personal ends. When I will a thing
I clearly see what I mean to do. I have weighed it in
the balance with its advantages and disadvantages,
brought it into relation with emotions and desires, some
of which it may satisfy while others it may thwart, and
I have in the result identified myself as a whole with a
particular course or particular object, whatever it may
be. It is rare that society does anything of this kind
collectively. The nearest approach is found in a war,
and for instructive reasons. It is in a war, when pitted
against others, that the millions of men, constituting a
society, find themselves to be most distinctly an individual
whole contending with other individuals, when they
must win or lose as a whole and make up their minds
definitely whether the struggle with all its losses is worth
continuing.

In the internal developments of a nation, where no j'
such external pressure exists, it is rare to find decisions \
clearly taken by the people as a whole. True, in a
democratic notion laws are in the end passed by parlia-
mentary majorities, which may and should represent
the majority of the nation, but any one who considers
the actual process of legislation, the steps by which a
bill reaches the form in which it is ultimately inscribed
in the statute book, to say nothing of the form in which
it is really applied by the courts, must recognize that

6

82 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

it is a process made up of innumerable conflicts of in-
numerable wills, in which there is every sort of give and
take, compromise and adjustment, contrasting very
clearly with the simple and crisp decisions of an individual
mind. It is true that with political education and the
development of effective democracy the sphere of intelli-
gent social control is extended, and it would be a sound
statement of the democratic ideal to say that it con-
ceives a possible society regulating its common life by
common consent, in which a larger and larger proportion
of its members actively participate until a position be
reached in which society would control itself as simply
and effectively as the individual controls himself. This is
an ideal, and not one very near to realization. Of the
social structure of any state that exists it is generally
untrue to say that it is clearly conceived by the minds
of the majority of those who live in it, and it is profoundly
untrue to regard the actual development of any society,
as we have known it in history, as the product of an
intelligent purpose alone.1

Too often it h not the state as a whole which sets definite
ends before itself. In the normal development of peace-
time, and for that matter even in the concentrated purpose
of war- time, there are many sections within the state
which have each for itself a general will, far more properly
so called because much more clearly conscious and united
than any will which permeates the state as a whole. The
actual institutions of society have been in large measure
determined by class conflicts, struggles of churches, racial
wars, and everywhere Jhere are the marks of the struggles.
If and in so far as there is any meaning in the term
" general will " at all, there are many general wills within
the state, and too often the institutions of society are
just the result of the victory, resting not on logic but on
superior organization, which one of these wills has attained

1 It is remarkable that in another connection Dr. Bosanquet
writes, " Nothing is properly due to finite mind, as such, which
never was a plan before any finite mind." — Principle of Individuality,
p. 152.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 83

over others. Green, who, whatever the idealistic basis
of his theory, retained his fundamental humanity, saw
that there were instances in which it was a mere mockery
to describe the institutions of a state as the realization
of freedom for all its members, and contended forcibly
that the requirements of the state have " largely arisen
out of force directed by selfish motives." It is inter-
esting to see how Dr. Bosanquet deals with these uncom-
fortable criticisms. He partly admits their truth, but
turns the edge of them by insisting on a rational element
running through the selfishness and shortsightedness of
the particular wills that have gone to make up the social
order, dwelling at the same time on the potential and
implied recognition of the interests of society in the minds
of its selfish members. If state organization were radically
and fundamentally well-meaning, and marred only by
imperfection of insight and inadequacy of means to an
end, this answer might be sufficient, but in so far as
civilized society throughout its history has in very large
measure consisted in the imposition upon the many of
an order of life wherein the essential benefits are reaped
by the few, Bosanquet fails to meet the real point of
Green's challenge. We come back again to the central
point that the institutions of society are not the outcome
of a unitary will but of the clash of wills, in which the
selfishness and generally the bad in human nature is
constantly operative, intermingled with but not always
overcome by the better elements.

The point is very clearly seen in a Note in the chapter
which follows on p. 296 as to the term " the mind of
society/' " 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 and not of direction." The
comment to be made on this is that the difference is so
fundamental that it cannot be neglected even for a moment
without risk of the most serious fallacy. So far as the
metaphorical expression " mind of society " can be

84 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

justified at all, it must be said that it is mind at a very
low stage of its development. In other words, social
institutions may be regarded as outcomes of a mentality
of a kind, but that mentality, when viewed in relation
to the objects which it has to subserve, is of a low type
compared, let us say, to the mentality of a mother con-
sidering the welfare of her child. A good mother will
act with a clear vision and an unselfish prompting for
the child's good, unmixed with thought of her own. If
there were a social will which so conceived the good of
all the vast numbers of human beings affected by social
institutions, it would be on a level with the mind of the
mother, and be something much greater than her mind
in proportion to the vastness of its object. But just
because the object is so vast and so impersonal, the " social
mind " falls lamentably short in attaining it, and we may
rather compare social mentality to the gropings of one
of the lower orders of animals which shifts itself from
side to side, straining after a momentary adjustment
which it does not even distinctly conceive. But even
in this image we have somewhat overestimated the
mentality of society, for the animal is after all one, and
suffers discomfort as a whole. We might think rather
of the separate tentacles of a sea-anemone, of which
experiment has shown that one may be educated to reject
a non-nutritious object while another is still seeking to
grasp it.

Dr. Bosanquet speaks of an ideal that one hopes may
be realized somewhere on the far horizon of human pro-
gress, but one of the surest ways of arresting that progress
is to speak as though that horizon had already been
reached.

We have quoted above the passage in which Dr.
Bosanquet speaks of the habits and institutions of any
community as "so to speak the standing interpretation
of all the private wills which compose it." Though an
imperfect representation of the real will " because every
set of institutions is an incomplete embodiment of life,"
they are " very much more complete than the explicit

THE WILL OF THE STATE 85

ideas which at any given instant move any individual mind
in volition." The logic of such passages is this. The real
will would work itself out in a harmony of actions. The
institutions of society produce some kind of order and so
are a partial embodiment of the real will. But (a) when
it is said that these institutions are more complete than
the explicit ideas of individual minds, it seems to be
forgotten that they may also be very much less explicit,
much less reasoned out, much less clearly reduced to
principle than the ideas of a reflecting mind. An individual
mind may not be able to grasp, and certainly could not
create the complex of institutions and customs that is
the work of many millions of minds, but these complex
customs have in very large measure grown up in a groping,
unreflective fashion, with little or no reference to any
general and comprehensive principle of social well-being,
and to grasp such principles is the work of the reflective
individual consciousness, which moves on a much higher
level than the general will, if we adopt for the moment
Dr. Bosanquet's name for the complex of psychological
forces which generate and maintain a tradition, (b) When
Dr. Bosanquet speaks of the institutions of a community
as the standing interpretation of all the private wills
that compose it, he speaks as though all society were a
real working democracy. Of the working of society as
a whole this is invariably untrue. In ordinary workaday
life the individual man has simply to accept the fabric
within which he finds himself a part. Many features in
it he may resent or dislike, but he has simply to deal
with them as best he may. And wherever a community
is governed by one class or one race, the remaining class
or race is permanently in the position of having to take
what it can get. To say that the institutions of such a
society express the private will of the subject class is
merely to add insult to injury. It was not by the private
wills of the peasantry of England that their land was
enclosed. It may be said they did not revolt. The
answer is that they could not do so with effect, and that
if, in Bosanquet's language, their real will means the

expression of what they really wished, they would have
revolted and prevented it. The actual institutions of a
society are not the imperfect expression of a real will,
which is essentially good and harmonious, but the result
into which the never-ceasing clash of wills has settled
down with some degree of permanency, and that result
may embody much less of justice, morality and ration-
ality than the explicit ideas of many an individual mind.
As to the problems of social philosophy, Dr. Bosanquet
has a very easy solution. " The end. of the state, as of
the individual, is the realization of the best life." As to
this we may all agree, but Dr. Bosanquet proceeds, " The
difficulty of denning the best life does not trouble us
because we rely throughout on the fundamental logic
of human nature qua rational." Yet it is supposed to
be the object of philosophy to exhibit this logic, and the
despised " theorists of the first look " have made it their
business to do so. They have confessed that the object
of the state is to consist in realizing a good life, and they
have sought by reason, that is, by actually following, as
far as in them lies, the logic of human nature, to ascertain
the principles of the best life and the way in which these
principles should be realized in society. Dr. Bosanquet
professes to skip all that, which is in effect to take the
substance out of social philosophy. The underlying
explanation of this is the fundamental conservatism of
the idealistic attitude. The idealist sees the good or the
rational realized in the existing order, not perfectly, he
would admit, but in its essential outlines. The rationalist
approaches the existing order with an unbiassed mind,
and testing it by inquiry, he finds in it elements of radical
good and radical evil blended. Tha reason for this blend
goes right back to the roots of social and mental evolution ;
it rests on the fact that society i? precisely not the outcome
of one real will but of millions and millions of wills
through the generations. In these millions and millions
of wills there is a social element working. There are
elements of idealism, sparks of justice, uniting threads
of human kindness, and there are also selfishness and vanity

THE WILL OF THE STATE 87

and pride and hardness, corporate and collective as well
as individual, and these elements acting upon one another
make up the piebald pattern of human society.

To sum up. The conception of social institutions as
objective reason annuls the function of reason in human
society. It teaches the man who would think about
social order, who would try to work back from it to
some set of ethical principles commending themselves to
rational reflection, that in seeking to reason he is sinning
against reason. He is to realize that in society he is in
the presence of a being infinitely higher than himself,
contemplating a reason much more exalted than his own.
His business is not to endeavour to remodel society,1 but
to think how wonderfully good and rational is the social
life that he knows, with its Pharisees and publicans, its
gin-palaces, its millions of young men led out to the
slaughter, and he is to give thanks daily that he is a
rational being and not merely as the brutes that perish.
And, having so given thanks, he is to do his duty in that
state of life to which it has pleased the state-god to call
him. The root of this conception is the common self.
It is the notion that one mind, one will vastly greater
than yours or mine, constitutes the life and directs the
course of each organized society. Against this concep-
tion both philosophy and science may protest, philo-
sophy claiming the ultimate right of reason, the conscious
reason which each individual may and must acquire
for himself, to criticize the established fact and to form
its own ideal for the best life that is within its power;
science on the ground that human society, as it has grown
up, is the product of unnumbered wills, of their clash as
well as their harmony. We may say truly that ethical
philosophy cannot construct the state without reference
to the established fact. We must start from the place
in which we find ourselves. We must understand society,
know how it works, before we can improve it. Science
must be added to philosophy before we can have a social

1 For Hegel philosophy comes after reality, and has merely to
interpret it. — Phil, des Rechts, p. 20.

88 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

art ; and if this had been their line of criticism, much
of what the idealists from Hegel onwards have had to
say about the shortsighted revolutionaries might have
been justified. But this is not their point of view. They
use the failures, the wrongs, and the wilful dogmatism
of some social philosophers to discredit philosophy itself,
and with it all genuine reason.

But now, it may be asked, if we deny the ultimate
authority of law, custom and tradition, what do we set
in its place ? We make political obligation subordinate
to moral obligation. But what is moral obligation ?
The details of political obligation are written down in
a code of law or incorporated in judicial decisions, or
more vaguely, but still with sufficient precision, in the
customs and understandings of society. This is the
concrete rule of life which Hegel calls Sittlichkeit. Apart
from some fringes of uncertainty, where there is a latitude
of interpretation, it is something objective and impersonal.
When a man refuses to recognize it, on what authority
does he fall back ? In many historic cases the answer
has been that in place of the law of the state or the custom
of society, a rebel has appealed to the law of God or
the church. In the case of the church he is appealing
from one society to another society, from the secular to
the spiritual, from the supposedly lower, therefore, to
the supposedly higher. And, if the appeal is not to the
church but to God, it has been the belief of many men
that the written word of God is n.o less clear or certain
than the written law of the state. In the case of the
appeal to the church we have a conflict, not between
one organized socisty and the individual, but between
one organized society and another ; and historically men
have attempted to solve the difficulties which have
arisen on one of three possible lines, by making the church
subordinate to the state, by making the state subordinate
to the church, or by an attempt to delimit the affairs
of the church and the state, a compromise which has on
the whole been accepted in the modern world, which in
the main has found the means of compelling the citizen

THE WILL OF THE STATE 89

to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, while
allowing him to render unto God the things which he
believes to be God's. Both in practice and theory this
demarcation, if not finally satisfactory, is at least a better
solution than either of the alternatives. For, on the
one side, in so far as the church rules by a spiritual
influence, its authority is morally the higher. Every
church worthy of the name is in principle that which
the idealist falsely maintains the state to be : a society
founded upon principles laying down what are believed
to be the conditions of a good and righteous life. If
any church had in fact succeeded in grasping the entire
spiritual meaning of life, its authority would be absolute
and it would absorb the state as a subordinate branch.
But as churches, like other human associations, are
fallible, and as they are founded upon principles which
are obscure and upon which, therefore, men differ, it has
not in point of fact been found possible to place govern-
ment and citizenship in a free society on the basis of a
common acknowledgment of certain dogmas of religion.
Thus the maintenance of certain common requisites of
social life has either been kept out or has passed out of
the hands of the church. With regard to these common
requisites, the state will exert an authority against or
over the authority of any church to which its members
may happen to belong. Hence the necessity of defining
as closely as possible the common requisites for the sake
of which the state must exercise compulsion even in
defiance of spiritual authority, (i) The state, as the
organized power of the community, is the guarantor of
the rights of all its members and will not allow a wrong
to be done to any one of them in the name of any other
authority. The state is fallible and may err in its
definition of rights as in other things, but it is its business
to form the best judgment in this matter according to
its lights, and, having formed it, to enforce it. (2) The
state operates through universal laws, and it may find
that objects essential to the common welfare, even to
the common existence, cannot be secured if exceptions

go THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

are admitted in such cases. Again, as a guardian of the
common existence, the state is within its right in exact-
ing conformity. The other side of this principle, perhaps
more readily forgotten, is that it is only whi;n universal
conformity is provedly necessary that compulsion is
justified in overriding religious conviction.

But let us a: sume bona fides on both sides, and let
us suppose that every effort has been made on the part
of the state to reduce its requirements to its lowest terms,
and on the part of the church to equate its spiritual
teaching with the temporal duties of the citizen. None
the less, as we are dealing with fallible human beings
in a complex world, there is always a marginal possi-
bility of conflict. In case of such conflict it is not possible
to say a priori that either the state is right or the church
is right. It is a case of one association of fallible human
beings against another. Each owes a certain consider-
ation to the other. The state is bound to respect religious
conviction, the church to have regard for the value of
law and order in society. But when the last word has
been said and those responsible for the state can see no
other way to the preservation of social order or national
existence but the enforcement of a given law upon all
citizens regardless of creed, then those responsible for
the state, and all citizens as owing allegiance to the state,
are bound to act in accordance with their final judgment,
fallible as it may be, of what is necessary to social pre-
servation. And similarly, the churchman, when he has
taken the state's point of view fully into account and
weighed it in the scale against his own law, if he can find
no way of escaping from the spiritual duty incumbent
upon him, seems bound to take the risks, moral as well
as legal, of disobedience.

There is indeed a court of appeal. There is an objective
moral order underlying all disputes, an order which if
once apprehended would settle all controversies. But,
unless and- until this objective order is apprehended
and agreed upon by men, moral conflicts will not cease.
Appeal indeed is always open until agreement is reached.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 91

New facts and new arguments are never barred, and no
opinion is to be silenced ; but if no clear verdict is col-
lected and both parties remain firm in their conviction,
there is nothing for it but that the case should go to
the ordeal, the barbaric ordeal of endurance. That this
is a satisfactory solution no one would contend, but it
is better to recognize frankly that in the region of ultimate
moral conflict each party is bound by its own conviction
than to obscure the issue by such subterfuges as the con-
tention that true freedom would consist in subordination.
What has been said of the possible conflict between
church and state, which now has for the most part only
a historic interest, is also applicable in principle to con-
flicts between the state and the individual which have
a present, and, it is to be feared, a future significance of
a tragic kind. The difference is that where the church-
man pleads the recognized law of an organized body, the
individual pleads his conscience. We are thus brought
to the question of the rights of conscience, their reality
and their limitations. In a simpler time, and in our
own time to the more simple-minded men, conscience
can be taken as the voice of God within and its deliver-
ances may be fortified by an appeal to the written word
of God without. So conceived, conscience is as much
above state law in authority as it is below it in power ;
but in a sceptical age men realize more fully that there
is a subjective element in conscience. Consciences differ,
and the word of God, even if we take it to be an inspired
document, is manifestly liable to the greatest diversities
of interpretation. What I call my conscience is my final
judgment, when all things bearing on the situation have
been summed up, of my right and my duty. This judg-
ment, common experience and psychological analysis
will alike show, is in part dependent on idiosyncrasies
of my own, on special experiences that have impressed
me, on emotional tendencies that make me attach more
weight to one thing and less to another, on partial appli-
cation of principles, on obscurity of ideas. Conscience,
then, would seem to have but little final authority. It

92 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

falls short of the objectivity attached to law and the
social tradition. How can it be set up as a standard
of nonconformity in some vital matter ? The answer
of the individual in the first place is that conscience may
be a poor thing, but it is his own ; and the answer of the
moral law must be that, though there may be many
errors incident to the principle that men should do
ultimately what is right in their own eyes, yet, if they do
anything else than what is right in their own eyes, there
is no moral law at all. Moral action is action in con-
formity with an inward principle, an action that the
agent considers to be right and performs because he
believes it to be right. If people are required to give
up what they consider to be right, morality is annulled.
May a man act, then, without regard to law or the
judgment of others ? On the contrary, what experience
in practical matters will often teach him is that others
are wiser than he, what morality will teach him is that
the law which is right for him must in principle be a law
of universal application, holding for all men similarly
situated. What duty and practical sense will combine
to show him is that he is a man among many, a member
of an organized society, and if morality teaches him that
he must do what he thinks good, it inculcates at the same
time that what is good for him must be a common good.
Nevertheless, he is in the end to stand by his judgment
of the nature of the common good and the means by
which it is to be realized. Once given, as in the case of
the churchman, that he has well and truly weighed all
that law and society have to say, that he has taken into
account the limitations of his own experience and the
fallibility of his own judgment as one weak individual
opposed perhaps to the millions of all organized society ;
when he has then asked himself frankly if it is not his
final duty to waive his first judgment, to stifle the inwrard
prompting from respect for an outward order built up by
the organized efforts of men, valuable in itself and en-
dangered if any one rebels against it ; when, having duly
tested the case in a spirit of humility, he has nevertheless

THE WILL OF THE STATE 93

come finally to the conclusion that, all said and done,
the obligation is upon him to disobey, then, as a free
agent, nonconformity is his only course.

It should be observed that when we say he is right
in following this course our proposition has two meanings,
which must not be confused. To disentangle them, let
us for a moment put ourselves on the side of the state.
Let us suppose the state is justified in its behest, that
if we were gods knowing good and evil, we should give
our verdict on the side of the state, then in that sense
and from that point of view, the nonconformist is clearly
wrong just as, if the verdict were given the other way,
he would be clearly right. But even in the case where
he is wrong in one sense he is also right in another. It
is right that he should do what he thinks right although,
as it happens, he thinks wrong ; the ultimate reason of
this is that, though by so acting he is wrong on occasion,
if he acted otherwise as a matter of principle he would
never do right at all, and if every one so acted, right and
wrong as moral terms would disappear. And by the
same reasoning, the state, in so far as it holds itself trustee
for the final good of society, will recognize that it is better
for its members to be free men who will from time to
time give trouble by mistakes of judgment, than con-
forming persons with whom everything is smooth because
they never think at all. For this reason the state will
avoid coercion of conscience up to the last resort, but
once again, as in the case of the church, we have to admit
as correlative to the ultimate right of conscience, an
ultimate right of coercion. The state, a fallible organi-
zation of fallible men, has nevertheless to act according
to its lights for the safety of the whole. Where it can
see no escape from a universal rule, where this rule would
be frustrated by individual acts of disobedience, where
by disobeying A would in its judgment do a wrong to B,
there in the end it has to exercise constraint, and there
seems to be no appeal. The judgment of mankind may
ultimately say that the state was wrong, but even so
it will have to extend to the state the same charity which

94 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

is due to the nonconforming individual. If the state
acted bona fide by its best lights, it could do no better.
What the state has no right to do is to exercise cruelty
or insult. It has no right to place the conscientious
objector on a level with the felon or to use the weapon
of derision, contumely and degradation.1

It may be asked finally whether the duty which we
have recognized in a subordinate place of surrendering
our judgment to that of others and in particular to the
organized will of society, is not of a more authoritative
character. If conscience is not the voice of God, why
should we attach so much importance to what one or
two individuals happen to think ? Does not the wisdom
of our ancestors, enshrined in institutions, supply a better
test of truth ? What social value attaches to individ-
uality ? The answer is that the individual, fallible and
weak as he may be in his isolation, is still the centre of
a rich diversity of relations, of which his relation to a
society claiming his allegiance is only a part. The
organized system of life only covers a portion of the
ground. What is recognized and formulated is but a
fragment of living experience. Every individual draws
from deeper wells of being than those revealed in current

1 In the actual controversy with the conscientious objectors to
military service the state has definitely put itself in the wrong.
For a mechanism was devised for exempting the small number
of men whose principles were perfectly well known and who could
not be expected to change them on demand without incurring
personal dishonour. This mechanism was such as to leave the
general obligation to service untouched, and the refusal of the hand-
ful of objectors in no way obstructed the organization of the
man-power of the country as a whole. But the machinery was
not consistently applied, with the result that some conscientious
objectors were left unmolested and others sentenced to long and
repeated terms of rigorous imprisonment. This is state action
at its worst, arbitrary, inconsistent and vindictive, and persistent
in its wickedness. I rejoice to read in Dr. Bosanquet's new volume
that " the conscientious objector will follow his conscience to the
end, and if we believe him to be sincere we all respect him for it."
I rejoice, but with some bewilderment, for I cannot fuse the spirit
of this remark (and of some others in Social and International Ideals)
with the general spirit of The Philosophical Theory of the State.

THE WILL OF THE STATE 95

speech and custom. If we do not any longer think of
him as directly in converse with God, we can think of
him as a part of nature, the product physically and
spiritually of a long ancestral line of development, sus-
ceptible to emotional and ideal suggestions from all
manner of experience. If it is through all these that
error comes, it is always through one individual that
each new truth first comes, and it is better for society
in the end to be exposed to many errors than to run the
risk of losing one truth. Given freedom of discussion
and even of experiment in living, errors will reveal them-
selves for what they are, and sometimes, the husk being
stripped off, the kernel of truth will be found within them.
What the state has to prevent is the emergence of error
is such a form as will destroy society, and that is one
reason why the dictum of Hegel is profoundly false that
the claim to say and write what you will is parallel to
the right to do what you will. If nonsense is freely
uttered and freely controverted, it will reveal that it is
nonsense. What is true will be found not by silencing error
but by confuting it, and in its regard for the individual,
however troublesome he may be, the state is conserving
the conditions of its own progress. The line between
speech and action is not always clear, but the difference
of principle is not obscure. A man may claim a right
which invades the rights of another or paralyses the
organized effort of the community. In the former case
the right claimed by A is resented as a wrong by B, and
the state is in its proper sphere in judging between them,
deciding where right lies and seeing the limit is not over-
stepped. In the latter the recalcitrance of one man might
wreck the purpose, perhaps endanger the safety of a
community. The community has a right through the
state to protect itself against such injury. Where both
these grounds fail the state has no right to put compul-
sion upon conscience. Where there is no question of
conscience the limits of state activity are matters of
convenience, good organization and the relative merits
of individual spontaneity and collective regulation

LECTURE V

VARYING APPLICATIONS OF THE METAPHYSICAL
THEORY

THE idealistic conception of the state has sometimes
figured as an organic theory of society. In the form given
to it by Green this description is not unjust, for to Green,
the ethical basis of the state is a common good, which
at the same time is the good of each individual citizen.
The state rests, for Green, on a mutual recognition of
rights, rights being for each the conditions under which
he can live the best life. We have here bej'-ond doubt
the elements of an organic theory, or, if the term be pre-
, ferred, of a harmony between the state and the individual.
Now such a harmony, it is only fair to say, is contemplated
by Hegel himself as the true relation between the state
and the individuals which compose it. The individual, he
says,1 " must, in the fulfilment of his duties, in some way
or other at the same time find his own interest, his satisfac-
tion, and from his relations ii the state a right must accrue
to him whereby the universal interest (Sache) is his own
particular interest. The particular interest should not
actually be set aside or altogether suppressed, but put
into agreement with the universal, whereby both it and the
universal are sustained." And again, " All turns on the
unity of the universal and particular in the state " ; and
in this the modern state is distinguished from the ancient.
This points to the true ideal, but unfortunately there
is nowhere in Hegel a clear distinction between the
ideal and the actual. The idealistic habit of talking
of " the state " as though there were only one type that

1 Phil, des Rechts, p. 317.
96

VARYING APPLICATIONS 97

is real, while all existing instances may be regarded as
merely casual and secondary aberrations, bars the way
to a frank exposition of the contrast of which in experience
we are painfully aware between that which might be and
that which is.

Hegel recognizes bad states, but he deals with them
very summarily. " The state (p. 339) is actual (wirklich)
and its actuality consists in this, that the interest of the
whole realizes itself in the particular aims. ... In so far
as this unity is absent, a thing is not actual, even if its
existence might be assumed. A bad state is such a one
as merely exists. A sick body also exists, but it is no true
reality." Thus in place of asking to what extent it is really
true that individual and universal interests coincide and
what we are to do when they are palpably in conflict,
how we are to cure the sick state and what is the duty of
the individual when he finds himself unable to do so, we
find the whole question waved aside by a radically unsound
distinction between reality and existence. A sick body,
as the sufferer has too much reason to know, is as hard a
reality as a sound body, and if Hegel's criterion of reality
were to be accepted, no state that is or has ever been is
real. Regard the harmonic conception of society as an
ideal and you give us something to work for, regard it as
something actually realized and you confuse every issue
of practical reform and theoretic right. In particular,
in the notion that the state has the authority of a common
self standing above the individual, we have a principle
which may but too easily develop into a complete denial
of the organic conception, because, instead of recognizing
that the value of the state lies in its service to the har-
monious development of all its component members,
it subordinates that development in each and therefore
in all to the fictitious whole which contains them but is
not them.

Had Hegel carried through the organic conception
of the state, he would have found room for the conception
of liberty, equality and democracy ; but his state system
is a negation of all these. By an inconsistency which goes

7

98 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

to the root of his whole metaphysical argument, he
suddenly declares that the personality of the state is
only real as a person, a monarch (p. 359). The monarch
at one point appears as little more than the figure-head.
If the constitution is fixed and formed, he has often nothing
to do but to sign his name (p. 363). It is wrong to
demand objective qualities of the monarch. He has
only to say " yes " and to dot the i (p. 365). And so
there is no objection to his being chosen in "a natural
way " through natural birth (p. 364). An election of
a ruler by popular choice will be something dependent
on the opinions and expressions of the many and is gener-
ally opposed to the idea of " Sittlichkeit " (p. 367). Yet
this monarch, who is only to dot the i and requires no
objective qualities, may in short be a fool or a brute, is
to have the choice of counsellors responsible for the govern-
ment, in his unlimited caprice (Willkur, p. 370).

To ask for consistency in these deliverances would
no doubt be censured by Hegel as a demand of reflective
reasoning. But if the king may be a fool, whose caprice
may yet determine the government of the state, the
opinion of the people is allowed no such latitude. The
people, without the monarch and the articulation of
the whole into ranks, classes, corporations and so forth,
is the formless mass which is no longer a state (p. 360).
That the organization of the people as a voting power
might be a necessary corrective of the social divisions
incident to a large and developed society, does not seem
to have suggested itself to Hegel. The people, as far as
that word expresses a special portion of the members of
the state, is that portion which does not know what it
wants (p. 386). Special interests should be represented,
but to let the many elect representatives is to give hostages
to accident (p. 398). Goethe is quoted with approval
as saying that " the masses can fight. There they are
respectable. Their judgment is miserable," or, as the
modern German phrase puts it, they are " cannon fodder."
Public opinion always contains an underlying truth,
but is always false in its expression. It must be as much

VARYING APPLICATIONS 99

despised as respected (p. 403). It contains all error and
truth, and to find the truth in it is the work of the great
man (p. 404). We must not ask the people themselves
what they think apparently, but we must tell them what
they think. The principal guarantee of the freedom
of the press is the guarantee of contempt. The claim to
say and write what one will is parallel to the freedom to
do what one will (p. 404). The landowning class is alone
suited for participation in political power on account of
its property, which secures it both against the government
and against the uncertainty of trade (pp. 391-2).

From all this we can see how much participation in
the general will means for the ordinary individual in the
Hegelian scheme. Those who have taken the Hegelian
conception as a stable framework for democracy on the
ground that simple membership of the community involves
a share in the common self, would be condemned by Hegel
himself for adherence to an abstract conception ; even the
rational, thinking element within the common man is to be
elicited for him by the great man, the ruler or the law. He
is to be told what he thinks. It may be admitted that
these are not necessary consequences of the doctrine of
the common self ; they are not even natural consequences.
It would be more reasonable to expect of a thinker who
started from the spiritual unity of society that he would,
with Green, insist upon including the humblest along
with the highest in the moral unity and would emphasize
that which the common man has to contribute no less than
that which he has merely to accept. He would, in the
spirit of Green, lay bare the elements of a higher meaning,
the filaments, however incompletely developed, that bind
the humble man to the whole to which he belongs, the
half- understood emotions and desires in which higher
and wider purposes are implied. It would be unfair to
deny that in Hegel himself there are hints of such a
development of thought. That they are not carried out
is a consequence traceable in the end to that conception
of will as having its freedom in determination by a principle
rather than in a harmony of impulses which we found to

ioo THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

be the starting-point of the Hegelian conception of the
state.

The state being the individual writ large, its own inde-
pendence is the primary condition of its internal life and
indeed of its freedom (p. 409). And for this reason it
imposes an absolute sacrifice on the individual when it is
necessary to maintain it. Hegel finds in this circumstance
a contradiction of the view that the end of the state is
the security of life and property of individuals, because
he says this security would not be reached by the sacrifice
of that which was to be secured (p. 410), as though the
life of some might not willingly be offered up for the well-
being of othersj However, in the security of the state
lies the " ethical moment " of war, which is to be regarded
as not an absolute evil or as merely an external accident
(p. 410). Its good side is that it compels us to risk life
and property. We hear much in the pulpit of the
insecurity, the vanity and instability of temporal things,
but each of us thinks that he will still hold his own. If,
however, the insecurity comes " in the form of hussars,"
this readiness to forsake all turns into curses on the con-
querors. We are apparently to think it is positively good
if not only our property but also the lives of those dearest
to us should be destroyed from time to time by the god-
state in order to teach us the vanity of earthly affections.
This is one advantage of war. Another is that it inculcates
discipline and moral soundness. People who will not
endure sovereignty within are brought under the heel of
others (pp. 411-13). Kant's proposal of a League of
Peace is specifically repudiated. Those know little of the
spirit of the people who think that they can make a
whole along with others (p. 409) (as e.g. the proud Scot
has made with the Englishman), and even if a number of
states can make themselves into a family, this union as
an individuality would create an opposite and engender
an enemy (p. 412). That in all this argument Hegel
is in touch with some dismal realities must be admitted.
War, like other public calamities, does teach sacrifice
to some who did not know it before. It does impose

VARYING APPLICATIONS 101

discipline and make democracy difficult. Wider unions
are hard to achieve and most easily consolidated by a
common enemy. A great humanitarian thinker, like
Kant, is not unaware of these grave disharmonies in
human life and in the social order. The peculiar vice of
Hegel is that to him they are part of the ideal and they
receive a non-moral justification from the inhuman con-
ception of the state as a god with a life of its own, reckless
of the fibres of human feeling that it rends and mangles
to assist its vital processes, devouring its children. Yet
the conception of the selfhood of the state is not even
carried through with consistency. The state is a self-
dependent totality (p. 417), and yet it cannot be an actual
individual without relation to other states. The inter-
state relations are necessarjr, therefore, to the existence of
each state. As these states are spiritual beings, one would
suppose that their relations were of spiritual and, a fortiori,
of moral and legal character. Not at all. When we
consider their relations their dependence on one another
vanishes, and they are put above the moral law. Their
relation is other than one of mere morality or private law.
Private persons have a court over them. State relations
should be of a legal kind (rcchtlich), but, as there is no
power above them to decide what is right, we are here
merely in the region of what should be. States may make
a stipulation between one another, but at the same time
stand above this stipulation, or, as the current phrase
goes, their treaties are scraps of paper. As there are no
judges, disputes must be decided by war, and the causes
of war are quite indeterminate. The state must judge
for itself what it will treat as a matter of honour, and is
the more inclined to susceptibility (Rcizbarkeit) in this
respect, the more a strong individuality is driven, through
a long internal peace, to seek and procure for itself some
matter for activity beyond its bounds (p. 420). Thus
there seems no moral limit to the restless ambition of
this god. He should in some sense have regard to right
in dealing with his fellow-gods, but he may be expected
to disregard this recommendation when he is conscious

102 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

of his own strength, and he need not even wait for any
actual injury. The idea of a threatening danger is sufficient.
Anticipatory wars are justified (p. 420). Nor is the state
to be guided by any philanthropic conception in war. It
is to think of its own well-being, the well-being of the state
having a quite other justification than that of the individual.
It is only the state's concrete existence, not any of the
general conceptions that are thought of as moral com-
mands, that can be taken as the principle of its action
(p. 421). In only one respect has Hegel failed to anticipate
the whole practice of modern Germany, and that is that he
lays down that the relations of states remain in war and
that, in war the possibility of peace is preserved. It is
not waged against inner institutions, family and private
life. And this is why modern wars are humanely con-
ducted. With this amiable inconsistency, in which Hegel
seems to fail to interpret the spirit of his own teaching,
we may take leave of the Hegelian state, having seen
perhaps enough of it to recognize the germ of the colossal
suffering of Europe and of the backward movement that
went so far to arrest the civilizing tendencies of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dr. Bosanquet follows Hegel in conceiving the state as
necessarily one unity among others, a conception which
rules out the possibility of a world-state. " We have
hitherto (p. 184) spoken of the state and society as almost
convertible terms." Having said this, Bosanquet pro-
ceeds to a definition of the state. " By the state, then,
we mean society as a unit recognized as rightly exercising
control over its members through absolute physical
power." Questions arise here as to the unit, as to the term
" recognize " and as to the term " rightly."

First as to the unit. The limits of this Bosanquet admits
" to be determined by what looks like historical accident."
But he contends that there is " logic underneath the
apparent accident." This so-called logic may be nothing
but physical force. What logic incorporated Alsace-
Lorraine with Germany ? Bribery incorporated the
Irish with the British Parliament. If it is untrue to say

VARYING APPLICATIONS 103

with Treitschke that force alone has built up states, it is
equally false to shut our eyes to the fact that force has
had a great deal to do with the building up of a great
many states.

But there is perhaps a more fundamental point. Bosan-
quet regards the state as necessarily a unit among others
(p. 185). " A single independent corporation among other
independent corporations." If it is of the essence of the
state, as Hegel certainly thought and as Bosanquet seems
to think, to be one among many, then society is always
something wider than the state. Bosanquet thinks that
the area of the state should be as great as is " compatible
with the unity of experience which is demanded by effective
self-government." In reality there is no such thing as
a unity of experience as between the members of a state
contrasted with the lack of unity as between members of
different states. In the civilized world the ramifications
of mutual influence are not bounded by a frontier, but the
whole is potentially one society, and for many purposes
the relations between corresponding classes of different
states are closer than the relations between very different
classes within the same state. Instead of denning the
state, then, as society, we should speak of it as a society,
and the difference is much greater than it appears. " A "
society is simply a particular organization which may be
of great value but which yet might be destroyed and leave
society standing. The ultimate obligations of man as a
social being are not to any particular society, but to
society as such.

Next the state is recognized. We may well ask, By
whom ? Must it be recognized by all its members ? If not
recognized as rightly exercising control by some consider-
able section of its members, does it cease to be a state ?
And what are the limits, if any, of political obligation in
this direction ? The question seems unanswerable unless
you refer politics back to ethics. A disobedient section
will probably put forward certain claims of right which
they say that the state that exercises authority over them
ignores. If these claims of right are ethically well founded,

104 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

then their denial of the right of the state to exercise control
appears to be justified, and if not, not. So far then from
the rights being derivable from the state, the moral
authority of the state rests upon the validity of the rights
which it asserts.

With this we pass to the third point, of the state as
rightly exercising control over its members through
absolute physical power. The state has absolute physical
power in the sense that it can inflict imprisonment, torture
or death if it has an army and a police force, but how
far does it do so rightly ? Here again we have a question
that runs back to ethics. The states in the modern world
which claim to be free owe much of their history to the
protest of individuals, classes or churches against various
applications of physical force which they have denied
to be right applications. In a word, Dr. Bosanquet's
definition is an intermixture of moral considerations with
questions of fact, just those questions which it is the
business of philosophy to disentangle.

Dr. Bosanquet goes on to say that every individual
must belong to one state and one only because there must
be some power which makes the ultimate adjustment of
claims. What is the one state to which a Canadian
belongs ? Is it Canada or is it the British Empire ? In
all working relations of the Canadian's life it is Canada,
and the Canadian law and Canadian custom with which
he is in contact. To the non-British world he is simply
a British subject and the relations of Canada as a whole
are principally, though not wholly, adjusted by the
British Empire. It may be said that the British Parlia-
ment delegated the bulk of its rights to the Dominion
Parliament and can resume them. As a fact it can
certainly do nothing of the kind, and the realities of the
situation are only expressed by admitting a dual state,
a dual loyalty, which under certain circumstances might
give rise to sharp conflict. All this is very intelligible
if we simply understand the state as an organization
coming into being for certain purposes and capable of
being adapted, expanded, changed, and even abolished,

VARYING APPLICATIONS 105

as may suit those particular purposes. In modern
political structure the interweaving of such organizations
is playing a growing part. And it is of practical as well
as theoretical importance that this growth should not
be checked by overdrawn distinctions between what is a
state and what is not a state.

The limits of the state which can achieve the kind of
individuality required appear to Dr. Bosanquet to admit
of simple statement. " The nation-state is the widest
organization which has a common experience necessary
to found a common life." We have already criticized
Dr. Bosanquet 's conception of the limitation of common
experience to the boundaries of any state short of humanity
as a whole. That any philosopher should suggest that the
nation-state is the last word in political development is
surprising.

In the first place the identity of the nation with the
state is perhaps not perfectly realized in any single known
political community, while the divergencies in many
political communities constitute one of the acute standing
problems of most modern states. The only value of the
term "nation-state " is that it serves as a mark of distinc-
tion on the one hand from the city-state of antiquity and
on the other hand of the purely non-national empire, while
it further indicates the kind of ideal to which the more
fortunate political societies approximate and to which
closer approximation is requisite if the problems referred
to above are to be solved. These problems, however, are
insoluble if the state is the unity on which Bosanquet
insists. They are soluble only by recognizing detached
allegiances within the state. Austria, for example, solved
one of her difficulties fifty years ago by dualism. She
may solve her present difficulties by trialism or possibly
quadruplism. If her statesmen begin by saying that
there must be one Austro-Hungarian state, to which
Czech, Slovene, Croat and Serb owe unqualified allegiance,
then .the future for Austria holds no prospect but the
continued menace of warfare.

In the Introduction to his second edition Dr. Bosanquet

106 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

seems to have modified his view of the limitation of the
state to the boundaries of the nation. " How far even
the absolute power of any one group in relation to indi-
viduals within it may be interfered with by constitutional
tradition or by a conflict of authorities ... or by inter-
national courts or leagues, is a question of degree and
detail. . . . There is therefore no technical difficulty in
the modification of the nation-state towards larger forms
of authoritative co-operation so long as it is made clear
to what system of authorities every separate human being
is subject in respect to the ultimate adjustment of claims
upon him."

Finally, in his recent book Social and International
Ideals, he carries the subject further by a discussion of the
idea of the League of Nations, which has now become a
matter of practical politics. Each state, we are now told,
is " a member of an ethical family of nations, so far at
least as the European world is concerned " — we can hardly
suppose Dr. Bosanquet intends to exclude America and
other civilized nations — and Mazzini's doctrine is accepted
that each state has its individual mission, furnishing its
specific contribution to human life. Fundamentally this
mission is discharged by the right performance on the part
of each state of its internal function, the maintenance of
the conditions of a good life, and an entire chapter is given
to the development of the thesis that, if each state would
look at home and reform itself, there would be no conflict
of states and no wars. As a remedy for war, this is a little
like the proposal that each man should reform himself as
a remedy for social injustice. It is quite true that, if
every one would reform himself, injustices would disappear,
and similarly, if every state would reform itself, conflicts
of states would disappear, but what is to happen if one
or two or three states cultivate their own gardens, while
other states cast covetous eyes on these gardens ? That
is the question which exercises the supporters of the
League of Nations, who find in the requirement for internal
reform nothing but a pious platitude as long as security
against external disturbance is not guaranteed.

VARYING APPLICATIONS 107

Dr. Bosanquet contends that beyond the state " there
is no organized moral world," and that an organized
moral world involves a unity which must grow out of a
pervading will.1 The advocate of the League of Nations
will reply that he is seeking to establish an organized
moral world, such as may give expression to the pervading
desire for peace. Dr. Bosanquet answers 3 that " though
you may find several communities desiring peace and
though they make a league to enforce it, their general
wills taken together are not one will ; that is, they have
not in common the same object or views of life." It will
be found that the real bond in a league of communities
will be the bond of force. There will be a solid foundation
for international unity only if there is a prevailing general
will. This cannot be effected by setting up a machinery.
The machinery must be a consequence, not the cause.
Whether a true general will can in fact be realized in an
area " exceeding what has generally been called the
territories of a nation " is a problem for the future.
The essential thing for the present is to insist that
" the foundation of all sound political thinking is the
supremacy of absolute values in the self-moulded life
of the community."

The entire argument rests at bottom on an assertion
of distinction in kind where there is only distinction of
degree. The unity of the will in the state, except as an
expression of a partial agreement for certain purposes, is,
as we have seen, a fiction. The state itself frequently
transcends what has been usually called the territories
of a nation. The British Empire consists of many nations
and many dependencies, but it has been shown to act
together for certain purposes with great effect. Should
it seek to unify itself for other purposes, it would be
wrecked. Why cannot all civilized humanity then unite
itself for some purposes and not others ? Such a union,
for Dr. Bosanquet, is mere machinery. We may agree
that without a will to back it, the machinery would be
unavailing. But Dr. Bosanquet himself admits the
1 P. 313- * P. 314-

io8 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

converse proposition that the will would be unavailing
without the machinery. What are those to do who have
the will and desire to cultivate it ? What can they do
but endeavour to persuade others to agree with them in
setting up the institutions required to express that will ?
If they get their way, the will has won its first victory.
It has so far •* established itself, and that is the first step
to consolidation. The machinery, Dr. Bosanquet objects,
involves force, but the state itself involves force. In
the procedure of the state we do not wait until every one
agrees. We win enough agreement to make possible the
application of force to the remainder who differ.

Dr. Bosanquet 's discussion brings out the contrast
between the metaphysical way of regarding social problems
and the way which is at once ethical and scientific, or, in
a word, practical. The metaphysical method says that
in the state there is a real self and beyond it there are
only external and mechanical relations. The practical
spirit says men are involved in innumerable relations
with their fellows, which require organization because, if
unorganized, they are left to anarchy and disaster. All
sorts of different organizations are required to deal with
the different relations of men. They must be united for
some purposes and left free for others. One sphere of
life may be controlled by one organization and another
by another, and both organizations may in turn be brought
as parts within some common organization for certain
purposes. Where there is to be unity and where there
is to be freedom, what purposes are to be assigned to one
organization and what to another, these are questions
to be determined with such wisdom and foresight as
we can win from experience in practical affairs. The
utmost plasticity is required in adapting the form of
organization to the multiplicity of human requirements.
What ruins everything is the conception of an abso-
lute sovereignty that admits no independent rights, an
absolute unity that leaves no room for divergence, an
absolute demarcation between a state which claims the
entire devotion of its citizens and all other political or

VARYING APPLICATIONS 109

social organizations which are conceived as mechanical,
arbitrary and insignificant.

At the conclusion of his earlier work,1 Dr. Bosanquet
passes to the question of the morality of state action.
The discussion is inconclusive and so involved that it is
difficult to grasp the real upshot. He seems to have great
difficulty in admitting that the state can act immorally,
but not wholly to repudiate its possibility. When he
draws a distinction between the state and its agents, he
seems to open the door to very Jesuitical interpretations.
First he asks the question, When an act is immoral, can
the state as such really have willed it ? He waives this,
however, as a mere refinement, so that one does not like
to press the point against him personally. But it must be
remarked that for the state as one organization of human
beings to will something unjust to another organization
of human beings seems no more difficult than for a family
to act under an impulse of collective selfishness for its
own good against the rights of another family, or for a
Trade Union to inflict unjustifiable injury on another
Trade Union. It is merely the confusion of the state as
an organization with the rational will which causes any
difficulty in the matter.

Bosanquet finds it hard to. see how the state can commit
theft or murder. History has not found it difficult to
conceive governments and statesmen committing theft
of other people's territories, and when Bosanquet denies
(on p. 338) that a country is guilty of murder when it
carries on war, he overlooks the justice or injustice of
that war. Is it not in all seriousness collective murder
on a large scale to carry war into the bounds of another
country without a justification which must not only satisfy
the state that plans the war but an impartial tribunal ?
Between an unjustifiable war and an act of brigandage
there is no moral difference. The difficulty is to fix the
guilt of individuals, but this is because the responsibility
is diffused. It would generally speaking be harsh to
charge the citizen soldier, acting partly under compulsion,

1 P. 322.

no THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

partly from a sense of loyalty, with bloodguiltiness ; and
yet the finer minds would, and do, refuse to fight in a
quarrel which they are convinced is unjust. The Biglow
Papers contain a sounder morality than Bosanquet's —

" Ef you take a sword an' dror it,

Go an' stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
God '11 send the bill to you."

But the responsibility of statesmen is surely much more
direct, and those who are actively responsible for bringing
on a war cannot as individuals shift the moral burden
from their own consciences. If a higher international
morality is to be achieved, it is precisely by reversing the
argument of the idealist. The individual must not be
able to shelter himself from moral responsibility behind
the state. But the actions of the state being judged on
the same principle as those of individuals, every individual
supporting the state in its action must be rightly regarded
as assuming a personal responsibility in so doing. As to
the state itself, it may be said that an intangible thing like
an organization cannot be the subject of moral guilt.
Nevertheless that organization may be condemned as a
bad organization and it may justly suffer punishments in
the infliction of losses or penalties.

By a curiously involved argument the private honour
of the agents of the state is distinguished from the good
faith of the state itself. Dr. Bosanquet argues, so far
justly, that the state is not to be blamed for the ill-faith
or other misdeed of its agents. That is of course true on
condition that the state does not consciously benefit by
this misdeed. So much Bosanquet seems to admit, but
he goes on to say that the agent is likely to go wrong if
he mixes up the obligations of the state with his private
honour. Precisely the contrary view must be maintained.
If the agent of the state enters into an undertaking which,
as an honourable man, he would not do on his own account,
he is doing wrong and no reason of state justifies him. So
low is the reputation of states that, for example, it was

VARYING APPLICATIONS in

palpable that the personal respect for Sir Edward Grey's
character was a greater asset to British diplomacy in the
years before the war and in the events leading up to it
than any word of any government as government. The
private standard is above the public standard, and therefore
it is by insisting rather that statesmen are bound to act
as honourable men than that honourable men should act
as servants of the state that we can best hope to raise
the moral level of the state.

The cause of all the hesitancy with which Bosanquet
deals with this question is to be found in a paragraph on
pp. 324-5. The state, we learn here, " has no determinate
function in a larger community, but is itself the supreme
community ; the guardian of a whole world, but not a
factor within an organized moral world. The moral
relations presuppose an organized life ; but such a life is
only within the state and not in the relations between the
state and other communities." The smaller part of the
profound error found in this passage is the mistake as to
fact. Organized relations of many kinds do exist at
present outside the boundaries of the state, commercial
relations, religious relations, the more ideal relations of
community of thought, literature, art and the rest. But
the fundamental fallacy is the conception that morality
depends upon the legal organization which is the distinctive
mark of the state. Moral relations exist as between all
human beings, if not between all living beings, that come
into any sort of contact with one another. For their full
and adequate expression these relations no doubt require
an organized expression. If, where they are close and
frequent, they fail to obtain such organized expression,
there is danger of moral anarchy. This is exactly the
position which has arisen among nations of the present
day. Here we have relations becoming ever closer and
more vital, but a failure in the attempt to build up
institutions to express, to shield and to develop the moral
requirements which those relations impose. The vice of
the idealist theory of the state is that it denies the need
and even the possibility of such transcendence of state

112 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

limits. This theory, true to its fundamental misconcep-
tion that the ideal is inherent in the nature of the exist-
ing order, proceeds to justify and apply the fallacy. There
is no more glaring instance of that fallacy of philo-
sophic idealism which has been expressed by saying that
instead of seeking to realize the ideal it idealizes the real.

In his new volume Dr. Bosanquet discusses the question
anew and repudiates with some warmth the accusation
of denying the moral responsibility of the state. One is
glad to think this was never his intention, but in view
of the character noted above of his earlier discussion, it
is not surprising if he laid himself open to some mis-
understanding. He now asks his critics : l "Is our fault
in saying that the community, which asserts itself through
the state, is a moral being and has a conscience, or is not
a moral being and has not a conscience ? They seem to
me in effect to say both at once, but only one can be true."
The reply to this is that Dr. Bosanquet has appeared to
his critics to say both at once, that he has greatly exag-
gerated the moral character of the state in certain relations
and appeared to depreciate it as unduly in others. This
double and opposite exaggeration still, I feel, subsists in
his new statement. The moral character of the state is
exaggerated to the point of caricature when it is spoken
of as " sole organizer of rights and as guardian of moral
values." » On the other hand, it is depreciated unduly
in its external relations. Dr. Bosanquet repeats the
allegation that there exists no organized moral world,
prescribing the course of duty to the state. It is not the
mere absence of sanction that makes the difference
between the state and the individual ; it is more — " the
absence of a recognized moral order such as to guide the
conscience itself."

On this I have two comments to make. In the first
place, if the state is the conscience of mankind, the sole
guardian of rights and duties, the moral individual in a
much more real sense than the simple man or woman,
how comes it that it has built up no moral order in its
* P. 282. » P. 284.

VARYING APPLICATIONS 113

external relations ? Here are states (Dr. Bosanquet
must in this relation admit the plural) in constant inter-
course with each other. Each of them is a moral being
with a conscience much more highly developed than
that of any individual, yet on his showing these gifted
beings have built up no recognized order to guide their
consciences. They are left to anarchy and to do what is
right in their own eyes, for this is what it comes to when
it is said that the state must see in the moral world of
which it is the guardian, the only definite guide in any
difficult problem of its relations to others. It is a paradox
that verges on contradiction that highly moral beings in
close relations to one another should evolve no moral
order and no common understanding.

Secondly, Dr. Bosanquet depreciates unduly the partial
moral order which has actually been established. I do
not recollect to have come across the phrase " international
law " in the course of his discussion, nor in fact do I see
it in the index. There is a law as between states and
there has been " Sittlichkeit " between them, very imperfect
no doubt, yet not without its value. What has paralysed
the development of international law and morality is, on
the side of theory, just that doctrine of state absolutism
of which the idealistic theory of the state is the most
subtle justification. Every organization of men tends to
become conscienceless because it forms an internal public
opinion wherein men back one another in the pursuit of
everything that tends to the interest or feeds the pride
in which, as members of the organization, they share.
But in so great an organization as the state the impartial
opinion of outsiders scarcely makes itself heard and every
plea for right or reasonableness is denounced as treacherous.
It is the high duty of philosophy to look beyond this narrow
standpoint and seek the universal view. When philosophy
deserts its duty, who will fulfil it ? International anarchy
is not due to philosophy but to the passions of men, but
the restraint which humanitarian philosophy has sought
to impose has been fatally loosened by the sophistications
of idealism.

8

H4 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Developing his position in his recent volume, Dr.
Bosanquet finds a double difficulty in the conception of
" an organism of humanity " which he admits to be the
natural extension of the idea of the social organism. The
difficulty is (a) that humanity in fact possesses no com-
munal consciousness whatever. Neither did England
under the Heptarchy, nor France under the Merovingians.
A common consciousness is a thing which grows, and
Dr. Bosanquet admits that the defect might be overcome.
The idea of humanity is due in part to the Stoic philosophy
and in part to the great world religions, and if it has never
fully matured, neither has it ever perished. It has never
lost its appeal to the greater and deeper thinkers and
teachers and it has continually inspired the missionary
effort of the church. The conditions of an effective unity
of mankind to-day are at least as matured as the conditions
of an effective German unity in the eighteenth century, or
an effective French unity during the Hundred Years' War.
And just as a farsighted and wide-minded Frenchman or
German was he who realized the unity underlying dif-
ferences and prepared the way for its growth, so the far-
sighted man of to-day is he who holds to the unity of human
nature and the common interests of mankind and places
them above all causes of quarrel. But (b) Dr. Bosanquet
finds no adequate expression of the higher human qualities
in the aggregate of human beings. The valuable things
are the possessions of particular communities and, " to
put it bluntly, a duty to realize the best life cannot be
shown to coincide with the duty to the masses of mankind."
We do not need to be told that the achievements of ancient
Athens and modern France are not shared by Hottentots
and Kaffirs. But it does not follow that Hottentots and
Kaffirs are outside the pale of rights and duties, and I
do not suppose Dr. Bosanquet would contend that they
are. But to say this is to admit the fundamental principle
of universalism, that all human beings, as human, are
within the scope of the fundamental moral law. Special
obligations arise in distinct communities, but these are
developments of common obligations which man owes to

VARYING APPLICATIONS 115

man. To make them override these fundamentals, to
push devotion to a group to the point at which it breaks
with the common rule, is the sin of all group morality, of
which the Machiavellian doctrine of the state is the standing
example.

Finally, Dr. Bosanquet imputes to the Comtists the
mistake of identifying humanity as a real corporate being
with the aggregate of human beings. That this is a com-
plete misapprehension will be shown by the following
passage by a distinguished Comtist :

" No one thinks that when he mentions the word England or
France or Germany, he is talking of a ghost or a phantom. Nor
does he mean a vast collection of so many millions of men in the
abstract ; so many million ghosts. Man in the abstract is of all
abstractions the most unreal. By England we mean the pre-
judices, customs, traditions, history, peculiar to Englishmen,
summed up in the present generation, in the living representatives
of the past history. So with Humanity. ... Is such a religion
self-worship ? . . . What explains the error is the belief that by
Humanity we mean the same thing as the human race. We mean
something widely different. Of each man's life, one part has
been personal, the other social : one part consists in actions for
the common good, the other part in actions of pure self-indulgence,
and even of active hostility to the common welfare. Such actions
retard the progress of Humanity, though they cannot arrest it :
they disappear, perish, and are finally forgotten. There are lives
wholly made up of actions such as these. They form no part of
Humanity. Humanity consists only of such lives, and only of
those parts of each man's life, which are impersonal, which are
social, which have converged to the common good." x

The " Comtist " Humanity is mankind in so far as it
forms a spiritual unity. To this unity individuals, races,
communities contribute, some more and some less, some
perhaps not at all ; and the contribution may be conscious
or unconscious. Dr. Bosanquet should find no difficulty
here. The state is for him a real corporate being which
has an aggregate of citizens for its members, some of whom
contribute to its unity much, some little, and others, as
individuals, perhaps not at all, while the contribution
1 J. H. Bridges, Essays and Addresses, pp. 86-8.

u6 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

may in any case be conscious or unconscious. There are
difficulties in the Comtist conception, but it is both more
spiritual and truer to fact than the idealistic conception.
More spiritual because it goes below the externals of
unity and relies on the permanence and penetrativeness
of the inward forces which, uniting man to man, have built
up the fabric of collective achievement. It is, so to say,
a unity of the church rather than of the state. More
true to fact because it recognizes that the higher values,
on which Dr. Bosanquet insists, are not the achievements
of one state or one nation, but of many, that the history
of thought, ethics, religion or art, is not a history of separate
communities but a world history. The co-operation,
conscious or unconscious, which has wrought the best
things in civilized life, is one to which races and peoples
have contributed unequally, and some have not contributed
at all, but it is one which far transcends the limit of any
people or nation, not to speak of any state.

But below the idea of humanity, which he deems merely
a confusion, Dr. Bosanquet detects a darker and more
dangerous aspiration. He " suspects " current ideas of
the international future to be seriously affected by popular
notions of progress and an evanescence of evil, which
should " compensate for the wrongs and sufferings of the
past." To the idealist this is sheer blasphemy against
the Absolute. Dr. Bosanquet tells us that he personally
believes in a nobler future, but since the Absolute is
perfection and since evil exists, evil is necessary to per-
fection and its evanescence seems " altogether contra-
dictory." Its disappearance is certainly a remote danger.
The world need not be under the apprehension of a pre-
mature drying up of the springs of misery and wrong. In
the meanwhile it is instructive to find that in the last
resort the gospel of state absolutism and opposition to the
League of Nations rests on the necessity of evil as a part
of the permanent scheme of things. Dr. Bosanquet may
say that at any rate future good is no compensation for
past wrong. In a sense, we must all agree, wrong done
cannot be undone. Blighted and ruined lives cannot

VARYING APPLICATIONS 117

be lived anew. Yet, if it is a question of the depth and
genuineness of the feeling that a better future for the world
is worth the sacrifice of the present generation, the idealist
may bethink himself of many a young man, German as
well as English, who has found in this thought an alleviation
of the stark horrors of the trenches and the near approach
of mutilation or death. It is not a question of compensa-
tion, but of the final meaning of the painful struggle of
human life. If the world cannot be made incomparably
better than it has hitherto been, then the struggle has no
issue, and we had better strengthen the doctrine of the
militant state and arm it with enough high explosive to
bring life to an end. At any rate the final question is
laid bare. There are those who believe life can be made
good. There are those who believe it is good enough
already. There are those who see life as an effort towards
a harmony, of which as yet we see only the germs. They
are well aware of all the tragedy that is involved in growth
and do not delude themselves with any dream of personal
reparation, but they recognize in the evolutionary process
a principle which is neither the blind whirl of conflicting
passions nor the clash of egoisms, but the emergence of
a spirit of harmonious freedom, and on this they rest, and
with this they identify themselves. There are those again
for whom the world as it is is the incarnation of the ideal,
for whom change is secondary and of no vital significance.
For them evil must be justified as essential to good, though
a more self-contradictory conception than that of good
maintaining evil for its own purposes cannot well be devised.
To the former the turning-point in the development of
harmony is the clear consciousness and the adequate
expression of the unity of mankind. To the latter it is
a source of apprehension because it would cut the tap-
root of those egoisms of state and nation, class and sex,
colour and race, which engender the massive miseries of
the world.

We have summed up the metaphysical theory in three
propositions, (i) The individual attains his true self

n8 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

and freedom in conformity to his real will ; (2) this real
will is the general will ; and (3) the general will is embodied
in the state. We have seen reasons for denying all
these propositions. We have maintained that there is
no distinction between the real will and the actual will,
that the will of the individual is not identical with the
general will and that the rational order, which the general
will is supposed to maintain, is not confined and may be
opposed to the state organization. We have suggested
that serious fallacies, as calamitous morally as they are
logically vicious, are involved in the political philosophy
which turns upon this conception. But it would be unfair
to the metaphysical theory of the state to leave the im-
pression that it has always received the kind of interpreta-
tion which we have here examined. In the hands of
Green, for example, the notion of the general will is stated
in terms which bring it into closer relation to the facts of
experience, and the relation of the state to the individual
is so defined as to approach far more closely to the
organic conception of society. It is not my purpose
here either to explain or criticize Green's Principles oj
Political Obligation, a work of great power and of some
weaknesses, which could not be adequately examined in
anything short of an independent treatise, but for the sake
of fairness to Green and to living writers who have drawn
their principal inspiration from him rather than Hegel,
I would call attention to one or two points in which Green
departs notably from the Hegelian model.

First and above all, the right of the individual runs
through Green's entire argument. For Green, each man
has to attain his own good, realize his own perfection as
an integral part of the common good. If society has a
claim upon him for the performance of his duty, he like-
wise has a claim upon society for the power to fulfil it.
(P. 347:) "The claim or right of the individual to have
certain powers secured to him by society, and the
counterclaim of society to exercise certain powers
over the individual, alike rest on the fact that these
powers are necessary to the fulfilment of man's

VARYING APPLICATIONS 119

vocation as a moral being, to an effectual self-devotion
to the work of developing the perfect character in him-
self and others." The state does not absorb the indi-
vidual. It is (p. 443) " a bod5' of persons, recognized
by each other as having rights and possessing certain
institutions for the maintenance of those rights." The
reciprocal relations of state and society could not be put
better in a single and succinct phrase. The rights of the
individual certainly do not exist independently of society,
but they are conditions of its own best life and therefore
of the best life of the individuals which constitute it, which
society is bound to recognize. (P. 351 :) " Only through
the possession of rights can the power of the individual
freely to make a common good his own have reality given
to it. Rights are what may be called the negative realiza-
tion of this power. That is, they realize it in the sense of
providing for its free exercise, of securing the treatment
of one man by another as equally free with himself ; but
they do not realize it positively, because their possession
does not imply that in any active way the individual
makes a common good of his own. The possession of
them, however, is the condition of this positive realization
of the moral capacity, and they ought to be possessed
because this end (in the sense explained) ought to be
attained."

Where Green is less happy, as I think, is in his discussion
of the rights which society ought to recognize but does not.
Thus he tells us on p. 416 " a right against society, in
distinction from a right to be treated as a member of
society, is a contradiction in terms." The truth which
this sentence contains is that a right is a social relation
just as much as a duty is a social relation, your right
being something which I or some one else or society at
large owes to you. But Green is apt to confuse the social
character of rights with the recognition of rights, even
going so far as to say (p. 446) " rights are made by recog-
nition. There is no right ' but thinking makes it so.' '
This is not consistent with his admission (p. 351) of " rights
which remain rights though any particular state or all

120 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

states refuse to recognize them " ; a sense in which he has
justly said a slave has natural rights. He gives the truth
in the following sentence (p. 450) : " They are ' natural '
in the sense of being independent of, and in conflict with,
the laws of the state in which he lives, but they are not
independent of social relations." What is needed to make
these positions consistent is merely to observe that social
relations are not all conscious relations. The position is
well stated in an early lecture (p. 353) : " The capacity,
then, on the part of the individual of conceiving a good
as the same for himself and others, and of being determined
to action by that conception, is the foundation of rights ;
and rights are the condition of that capacity being realized."
Such a condition is something objective, independent of
recognition. If any one can prove that some specific
condition is in fact requisite to the realization of a good
life, then that condition is scientifically demonstrated to
be a right, though it may never have been recognized
from the beginning of time to the present day, and though
society may refuse to recognize it now. It is in this sense
that all true rights are natural rights.

In all this discussion Green is on the track of the truth,
but is obstructed by his idealistic presupposition that what
is real must somehow be in the minds of men. Enough,
however, has been said to show that Green's conception
of the common good, far from overriding the individual,
assumes his participation as an individual, and, far from
ignoring his rights, jealously preserves them as conditions
under which he is a free and rational being to achieve a
good which is his own as well as the good of society.1

1 In his new volume, Social and International Ideals, Dr. Bosanquet
advances a fresh definition of the state, which is more in line with
Green's way of thinking. " I understand by the state the power
which, as an organ of the community, has the function of main-
taining the external conditions necessary to the best life. These
conditions are called rights. They are the claims recognized by
the whole of the community as the sine qua non of the highest
obtainable fulfilment of the capacities for the best life possessed
by its best members." This seems to carry a much fuller recognition
of the individual than is usual in Dr. Bosanquet's writings. If

121

Nor does the general will in Green figure as the common
self. It is rather an element in popular psychology, which
Green finds in experience. Thus he speaks (p. 404) of
" that impalpable congeries of the hopes and fears of a
people, bound together by common interests and sympathy,
which we call the general will." For Green it is the common
will and reason of men, that is " the will and reason of
men as determined by social relations, as interested in
each other, as acting together for common ends." In
these expressions we are at any rate in contact with reality.
It may be said that they are vague, but Green might reply
that so also are the facts which he is describing. That is
to say, the actual extent to which men are swayed by com-
mon interests, the degree of their allegiance to the social
order, the strength of the emotion prompting to obedience
or warring against it are not rigidly determined, they
fluctuate from people to people, even from district to
district and from occasion to occasion. There is, he seems
to say, a common good, which to the reflective mind is
a definite conception and a clear ideal, but which is vaguely
and partially apprehended by the ordinary man, so that
it is rather the diffused sense of the common good than a
clear purpose of realizing it which operates as a force in
the ordinary life of society. These are propositions, I
would suggest, rather in social psychology than in meta-
physics.

When Green goes on to contend that will, in the sense
which he has described, and not force is the basis of the
state, it becomes clear that his conception of the state has
to be shaped to suit his definition. But of course he ad-
mits the element of force and shows how it is fused with
moral factors and in the end saves his general proposi-
tion by excluding political organizations based on power.
(P. 443:) "We only count Russia a state by a sort of

consistently pressed, it would, I think, lead to the reconstruction
of his entire theory, but the chapter from which it is taken is pro-
fessedly not a correction but a restatement of his theory of the
state, and the criticisms on this theory in general must therefore
stand unaffected.

122 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

courtesy on the supposition that the power of the Czar,
though subject to no constitutional control, is so far exer-
cised in accordance with a recognized tradition of what
the public good requires as to be on the whole a suscainer
of rights."

Green's principle, therefore, is less paradoxical, perhaps
also less important, than appears at first sight. If will
not force is the basis of the state, that is because
only that society is a state which is based not on force
but on will. It would be unfair, however, to reduce
Green's argument to a truism. We may fairly put his
conclusion in this form. In every organized society there
are other elements than force sustaining the general
conformity to law, and in the higher organization of society
conditions are realized in which force recedes further and
further into the background, goodwill at each step taking
its place. Only societies which have made some sensible
progress in this direction deserve the name of states.
This definition would seem to be justified by the compara-
tive study of political institutions.

Enough has perhaps been said to show that in Green's
hands the conception of the general will is not allowed to
overwhelm the individual, nor to override the moral law,
but that the state is thought of rather as a guarantor to
the individual of the conditions which enable him to fulfil
his functions as a moral being. It may be objected that
if we go behind Green's philosophy to his metaphysics,
we shall find ourselves involved in the old difficulties of
the universal and the particular and once more find person-
ality absorbed in the universal self. This may be true,
but it is a criticism of Green as a metaphysician rather
than of Green as a political thinker. His living interest
was in practical life, the strength of his grasp lay upon
the hard problems of social reform. He was at his best
in working through practical issues to the principles
guiding them. As he receded from these principles to the
ultimate theory of ethics and metaphysics, his grasp grew
weaker and his meaning is often lost in obscurity and con-
fusion. Descending again from this misty region to the

VARYING APPLICATIONS 123

living world, we find the man for whom principles at least
mean something which will affect the life of human beings,
which will guide them in wisdom or mislead them in folly,
will teach them to ensue the happiness of their kind or
justify them in their pride and ambition, which are the
cause of misery in society. In his political lectures Green
never forgets that theoretical principles are charged with
weighty meaning for the lives of men.

If we compare Green's account of the general will with
that of Bosanquet and others, we shall, I think, arrive
at the conclusion that several distinct conceptions are
covered by this term which must be held apart if any such
phrases are to be used at all without breeding confusion,
(i) In the first place there is a conception of the common
good, whether real or supposed. The common good is not
the same thing as the common will, though if there were
such a thing as a common will, it is presumably the common
good at which it would aim. The common good is the
well-being actually shared by the members of society,
or conceived as desirable for the members of society,
either, therefore, something actually existent or something
which may be brought about. It may be regarded as
realized or realizable in certain permanent institutions
and conditions of life. (2) We may distinguish such per-
manent conditions from a particular object which may be
conceived as a part of the common good for the time being,
e.g. victory in war. This we may call a common aim.

(3) Corresponding to the common good or the common aim
there may be a will to maintain the common good or to
achieve the common aim. This may be called the good
will.1 It may exist in any individual, but, as existing in a
single individual, it would not seem appropriate to speak
of it as a general will. It is just the will of a particular
man to secure a common good or a common purpose.

(4) But, further, such a will may be diffused more or less
widely in society. If the will of a society were so united
that every one of its members willed one and the same

1 Good at least from the point of view of the society. One
might call it the loyal will.

124 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

common object, as e.g. if the whole society is bent upon
victory in a war, there would be something which we could
appropriately and unambiguously describe as a general will,
that is to say, a will active in all the members of a society
as individuals to achieve an object by their organized
efforts for their society as a whole. (5) If, further, we
suppose all the members of a society to understand and
appreciate the permanent good of the society as a whole
and to will the necessary means for securing it, there would
similarly be a general will to promote the common good.
We may allow a little further latitude, and if such a will
is shared, not by the whole of society but by a majority,
we may still call it a general will, but for this particular
case no special term really seems requisite. The general
will here is simply the will of the majority. (6) But this
is not the sense of the general will which seems really
to be intended by the phrase. To interpret Green's ex-
pressions we must think rather of a network of psycho-
logical forces making on the whole in a determinate
direction, generally speaking for the maintenance of a
certain social structure, and more specifically for the
attainment of certain definite objects. This network of
forces will in a free society obtain expression ultimately
in the will of the majority, but it is a good deal more
complex and subtle than the content of any majority
vote on a specific issue. What goes to make up the bent
of the public mind in this sense is not merely so many
definite acts of will in such and such a number of individuals.
It is the intense conviction in some, the relative feeble-
ness in others, the tacit acquiescence in one man, the
partisan feeling in another, the support of a certain section
on one particular part of the issue in spite of indifference
or hostility on other portions of the issue, a prejudice
which buttresses up the case on this side, a weakness
which paralyses opposition on another side — a miscel-
laneous congeries of impulses driven hither and thither,
out of all of which there will emerge through reams of
controversy some tangible result. Will, which means the
basis of clearly thought out action, is really a bad expression

VARYING APPLICATIONS 125

for this unorganized mass of psychological forces of every
sort and kind that actually go to the making up of great
political decisions. It will probably be true, with Green,
to hold that within this congeries there is a permanent
element partly above and partly below the level of con-
sciousness, guided directly or indirectly by considerations
bearing on the common good. There are, for example,
people who will not put themselves about much for justice
in general but will be shocked by some act of concrete
iniquity with which they come into personal contact.
Those who have not been troubled to oppose a bad law in
principle find themselves irked by one of its applications.
Conversely, the normal man who does not generalize about
the social good will deal with practical issues often enough
in the way which principle would require. (7) And
lastly, though we have taken exception to the description
of the social tradition as an embodiment of the objec-
tive reason, we have not of course denied that thought
and will have gone to the building up of institutions. It
is not, as we have repeatedly maintained, one thought
and one will, but the combination of many minds thinking
and willing, each by its own lights and each acting too
often in accordance with its selfish interests. None the
less there is a sense in which the institutions and traditions
of society imply a certain social mentality. The accept-
ance of such traditions, though generally unreflective,
cannot be wholly unconscious, and each individual as he
accepts them fits himself into a scheme of life, not as
voluntarily choosing that scheme as a whole, but as
accepting his part in it. This acceptance affects the
mind of each individual, calling forth one faculty and
repressing another, and so modifies the mental growth.
Thus the outer behaviour of society as seen in its manners
and customs must have an inner mentality to match.
So far as there is discrepancy a change will take place in
institutions. To express this aspect of social life, we might
speak of social mentality, provided we understand that
the kind of unity which the term expresses is not the
unity of a person or self but that of many centres of
thought and will in interaction.

126 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

One or another of these meanings seem to be in the
mind of those who use the term " general will " ; but the real
objection to the term is that in so far as it is will it is not
general, and in so far as it is general it is not will. The
common good is explicitly willed by a minority of thinking
and public-spirited individuals. What is general is more
undefined and perhaps indefinable, a participation in the
variegated mass of psychological forces out of which the
actions and development of the community emerge.

We may be asked in conclusion whether after all we
are to entirely deny any further meaning and reality to
the general will. Was it not admitted at the beginning
that there is a sense in which society is more than its
members, and is it not this sense which the general will
expresses ? We can understand the service of our country.
Can we in the same way appreciate the service to an
indefinite number of individuals like ourselves, and is that
what we rely upon in patriotism or in other forms of social
duty ? Is the collective life of society to go for nothing,
and can it all be resolved away into its constituent
atoms ?

The broad answer to this question can, I think, only be
found in the qualifications which we introduced to the
statement that the life of a whole is more than that of
its parts. The proposition is true, as we saw, only in this
sense : that the life of the whole is more or other than that
of the parts as they exist or would exist outside the whole.
The body is something other than the cells which compose
it, for this simple reason among others, that the cells die
when separated from the body and therefore rapidly cease
to be that which they at present are. But that the body
is other than the totality of the cells composing it as they
exist within the body, as they function in unison with
one another, is a different and, as I think, an untrue
proposition. We move in this region between two poles
of fallacy. Wherever we have a whole consisting of parts,
we are tempted to say that the whole is something other
than the sum of its parts, whereby our view of the parts
is distorted and the effect of their interactions ignored.

VARYING APPLICATIONS 127

Or, in reaction from this view, we are tempted to say the
parts alone are real and that the whole is only a way of
regarding them or at best a superficial consequence of
their juxtaposition in certain relations to one another.
Both these theories are untrue. The first theory always
and the second of those wholes which have any distinctive
character of their own.

If I cast my eye idly over the leaves strewn on the lawn,
I may count them and discover that there are thirty-seven,
and treat the thirty-seven as forming a whole. This
numerical whole is nothing to the actual leaves. As I
count, three of the thirty-seven have run away with the
wind and instead of thirty-seven I have thirty-four, which
not having been moved are just what they were before.
Such a numerical whole is the limiting case in which the
parts are unaffected by the totality. It is just their
arithmetical sum, no more and no less. If I gather the
leaves into a heap, they are at least an aggregate that can
be picked up and carried away. But still the aggregate
has no permanence and its effect upon the parts is very
small and very casual. Unless they happen to be somewhat
crushed out of shape by pressure, the leaves will experience
no change in passing into the whole and out of it again.
If, on the other hand, I consider the leaf itself, even the
dead leaf, it is something more than an aggregate. It
consists of parts no doubt, but the parts are connected
by definite ties. The leaf acts as a whole. If the wind
catches a part of it, that part carries the rest along with it.
Such a whole of parts in a determinate arrangement
which for some purpose act together, is a structure
which is in every respect as real and significant as the
elements which compose it. What we call the onesided
analytic tendency is the tendency to deny this, to think
the cells something more real than the leaf, which is thus
conceived only as a certain arrangement of cells, and the
molecules of protoplasm more real than the cells and
the atoms more real than the molecule. We get rid of
a bunch of fallacies incidental to this line of argument
when we refuse to speak of more or less real altogether.

128 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Atoms, molecules, protoplasm, cells, leaf, all are just
real or unreal. What we can say is that in many cases
the elements are more permanent than the whole which
they constitute. Certain physical molecules, for example,
remain, I suppose, when the dead leaf begins to decompose,
and it is this permanence, or supposed permanence, of
the simple elements underlying complex structures, which
has given the illusion of their greater reality. Conversely,
in many cases the whole is more permanent than the parts.
E.g. the living organism is always absorbing and excreting !
material elements. It remains while its components change.
The components do not indeed pass out of existence
when they leave the whole, but in proportion as the struc-
ture is organic they are profoundly modified. The cell
does not survive the leaf, nor does the protoplasm, as
protoplasm, the cell. Of any organic structure this
principle will hold true. The parts will not survive the
structure unaltered. Something in each may survive, but
it will not be exactly that which existed within the whole.
Now in human society, as in the material world, there
are many fortuitous aggregations, producing slight con-
tact between individuals. The people who happen to be
walking along a street at a particular time may be numeri-
cally conceived of as a whole, though they are barely
modified by any contact with one another. A crowd is
more united than this, though it has no structure, but for
the time being people are affected by close contact with
one another, and to that extent even a crowd is a unity
and a reality, though not one with endurance. Passing
on, we find all sorts of associations into which men
can enter, affecting their lives in very varying degrees.
When the effect is slight, we may well say that it is the
individuals that are permanent, and if the society is broken
up, it is just resolved into its component individuals, who
remain very much what they were before. When we come
to the deeper and more stable associations, this would no
longer be true. The life of the family is an integral part
of the men and women that compose it. When it breaks
up the lives of those that remain may be tragically altered ;

VARYING APPLICATIONS 129

certainly they are very different from what they would
have been if they had never known a family life. The same
thing would be true of a religious body, or of a state, or of
any great movement, intellectual, social or political, into
which a man throws himself. All these deeper associa-
tions are of the organic type. They express important
elements, perhaps fundamental elements, in the lives
which compose them, so that without them those indi-
viduals would be essentially other than they are.

If thus for a moment we think of the life or value of
such an association in terms of individuals, we must in
turn think of the individuals as contributing and con-
sciously contributing to the life of the whole. If the
soldier is told that to die for England means to die for
English men and women, he might say that that was good
enough for him, but he might also go on to say that it is
not merely for men and women as men and women, but
for men and women as continuing to lead a certain life,
as maintaining and developing the tradition which is
essentially England. This tradition lives in nothing but
individuals ; all of it that is incorporated in material, even
the land itself, however much that is the object of affec-
tion, vanishes into insignificance apart from the humanity
which it subserves. The tradition, on the other hand,
might flourish as well on foreign soil, as colonization
proves, and as was understood by William the Silent
when he thought of transporting the entire population of
Holland and Zeeland to a part of the world where they
could maintain their life free from the empire-state
which was crushing it.

Thus the character of a social whole is as much in danger
of being misunderstood when it is resolved into its com-
ponent individuals as it is when conceived as separate
from them, as though it were not made by them. The
true organic theory is that the whole is just what is con-
stituted by the co-operation of the parts, neither more
nor less, not more real nor less real, not of higher nor of
inferior value. In saying this we must take time into
account. All the parts strictly means all that have been

9

130 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

or will be while the whole endures. When this succession
of members is taken into account, it is true to equate
the perfectly organic whole with the sum of its parts in
their co-operative activity. But there is a sense in which
a whole may be less, and a sense in which it may be more
than its existing parts, (i) Wholes in general, even
relatively organic wholes, may engage only a portion of
the activity or capacity of their members. This is emi-
nently true of human associations, none of which embrace
the entire life of man. In such a case it is only the portion
incurred in the whole that can be said to live or die with
the whole, and only so far as that portion is concerned
that there is anything of the nature of an organic union.
One of the fallacies of the metaphysical theory is to identify
the individual with one particular association, and to
speak of his obligations to that association in terms only
applicable to the sum of his duties and interests in all the
relations of his life. (2) While some wholes are less, others,
and particularly those which engage the deeper nature of
men, are more permanent than their members. When
we go, for example, below the state to the nation and
beyond the nation to the great movements of civilization,
we come to things in which the whole truly is something
far greater than any of the parts that constitute it at any
one moment. What concerns humanity is that such
wholes should be maintained in so far as they serve its
abiding interest. But this again is not, if we think it
out, to erect the whole into an object distinct and opposed
to those who have been, are or will be its members. It
is merely to grasp its far-reaching extension, its deeply
rooted continuity. The nation is all the generations which
compose it as long as they maintain a certain unity and
as long as the thread of causation remains uncut. More
than this it is not.1

1 When taken as more it will be found to be really less. If the
good of the state is opposed to that of its component members,
it is because its good is being found in ends which do not make
life really better, for example, glory, wealth, expansion and power.
Such ends the masses may serve in their capacity of " cannon-

VARYING APPLICATIONS 131

In what terms we are to describe the reality of the social
wholes is a standing difficulty of sociology. They are, as
we have seen, of organic character, yet, if we speak of
them as organisms, we are liable to confound them with
animals or plants, which they are not. Essentially they
are unities of mind. Their component elements are minds
and the relations into which these elements enter are
determined by mental operations. Yet if we speak of them
as personalities, we are liable to the fallacy of the common
self. Social inquiry suffers from nothing so much as a
lack of technical terms or of suitable metaphor to supply
the place of technical terms. It has to use words derived
from other orders of experience and conceptions elaborated
in other sciences. What we must most eschew is any terra
suggesting a form of unity realized in some other whole
than the particular social whole which we are consider-

f odder," but then they are not parts of the state but mere living
tools, the effective organization consisting of the rulers and generals
who want the glory. At bottom, when any organized human
society is alleged to have a good other than that of its members,
it means a good, at least a supposed good, of some of its members
without regard to the remainder. It may be said that these unhappy
ones acquiesce, e.g. when the multitude lets itself be dominated
by its chiefs and led by them to the slaughter in the desire to
share even in a subordinate capacity in the glory of reducing other
people to a still more abject subjection. This is the solution
suggested in a peculiarly sinister passage in Nietzsche. If so, the
people constitute themselves partners of a common good of a
false and inhuman sort. So far as the illusion of service to a
state standing above its members encourages such false values,
it is practically mischievous as well as theoretically false. Where
an organized society has a " good " opposed to the summed up
gain and loss of its component members, it is either that some of
those alleged members are treated merely as instruments external
to the body they share or that the good is a false good, cheating
even those that partake of it.

When we speak of a good we mean a good supposed to be realized
in the life of society itself. So far as any society subserves ends
beyond its own limits, as, e.g. a state may be said to owe, and even
to perform, a service to civilization, different principles of course
apply. It may be right and good for a state like Belgium to risk
all in such a case, but even here there is no final distinction between
the duty or well-being of Belgium and of the Belgians as Belgians.

132 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

ing. Such a term is " a common self " or " the general
will," suggested by a particular unity which connects
the parts of a personality and which is precisely the
form of unity that different persons do not achieve
and into which they cannot enter. Such a term as
"mind," "soul" or "spirit," though not satisfactory,
is more appropriate, if so used as to suggest a collec-
tive character rather than a substantial unity. We
can speak of the soul of a people, meaning thereby
certain fundamental characteristics of their psychology
which we believe to be widespread and important
in the shaping of their social behaviour. We speak of
the spirit of the times not inappropriately as a summary
name for certain moral and intellectual tendencies, and
generally the term " spirit " is appropriate for the relations
of finite centres of intelligence each thinking, feeling
and acting with reference to one another, and so linked
together by mental and moral causation, just as physical
structures are united by mechanical forces. But whatever
terms we use, the rule of logic is simple. Our reasonings
must always stand the test of substituting the thing
denned for the definition. We must avoid importing
into our defining term the associations which belong to
it in another capacity. If we keep this rule before us,
the terms which we use to describe society will have a
less disturbing effect upon the progress of sociology. Thus,
if we speak of a society as organic, we must not think of
it as a great Leviathan, a whole related to individuals as
a body to its cells. We must regard the organic as a
genus into which animals and plants fall as species and
society as another species. So considered, an organism
is a whole constituted by the interconnection of parts
which are themselves maintained each by its intercon-
nection with the remainder. Its mutual determination
is the organic character which any given structure may
share in greater or less degree, a structure being organic
in so far as this character prevails and otherwise inorganic.
In its completeness the organic is an ideal. But actual
societies have a touch of the organic character, some

VARYING APPLICATIONS 133

more and some less. It is on this character that social
ethics depends. It is through this character that societies,
like biological organisms, maintain their plastic adapta-
bility, their power of adjustment to new circumstances,
of repairing injuries, of resilience to strokes of fortune.
It is by reference to this character that their development
is to be measured. This principle is set at nought when
society is so resolved into individuals that the character
of the life which they share is left out of account. It is
equally set at nought when its life is regarded as other
than that which its members live in their dealings with
one another. The happiness and misery of society is the
happiness and misery of human beings heightened or
deepened by its sense of common possession. Its will is
their wills in the conjoint result. Its conscience is an
expression of what is noble or ignoble in them when the
balance is struck. If we may judge each man by the
contribution he makes to the community, we are equally
right to ask of the community what it is doing for this
man. The greatest happiness will not be realized by the
greatest or any great number unless in a form in which
all can share, in which indeed the sharing is for each an
essential ingredient. But there is no happiness at all
except that experienced by individual men and women,
and there is no common self submerging the soul of men.
There are societies in which their distinct and separate
personalities may develop in harmony and contribute to
a collective achievement.

CONCLUSION

THE best and the worst things that men do they do in
the name of a religion. Some have supposed that only
supernatural religion could mislead. The history of our
time shows that if men no longer believe in God they
will make themselves gods of Power, of Evolution, of
the Race, the Nation, or the State. In the name of
such gods will they drench a continent with blood, and
the youth will offer themselves up as willing martyrs.
There is no double dose of original sin which established
this worship in Germany. It is the product of a combina-
tion of historic causes — the long division of the people,
their geographical situation, the national reaction against
Napoleon, the achievement of union by military means,
the fear of the Czardom, causing the acquiescence of
the more pacific elements in militarism, the loss by
emigration of those who would not tolerate the governing
system. The idealized exaltation of the state supervened
to reconcile the thinking classes and give them a creed
justifying their dislike of humanitarianism. In Hegel's
hands this creed had, as we have seen, its idealistic side,
and events had to move before this could be shed, and the
naked doctrine of Power be proclaimed by Treitschke.
But the elevation of the state above men means at bottom
the supremacy of Power. It is the natural creed of an
aristocracy or a bureaucracy, as insistence on Personality
is the natural creed of the people. Theories of politics
or of conduct that live long and retain influence have
something more than theory behind them. They appeal

to powerful instincts and interests, and the Hegelian

134

CONCLUSION 135

philosophy is no exception. It appeals to the instincts
and interests of counsellors and kings, of privileged
classes, of Property and Order. It plays on the fear of
fundamental criticism, of the razor-edge of thought, of
the claim of conscience to scrutinize institutions and
ordinances. It appeals to the slavishness which accepts
a master if he will give the slave a share of tyranny over
others more deeply enslaved. It satisfies national egoism
and class ascendancy.

It was by no accident that the Greatest Happiness
Principle took root and flourished during and after the
last great war that devastated Europe. The spectacle of
the massive misery caused by Governments had its recoil.
Men began to test institutions and ideas of life by their
effect on the felt happiness and misery of millions, and they
found in the " happy fireside for weans and wife " a
truer measure of a nation's greatness than stricken fields
and extended territory. T^ tllfl* ^Q"r '" p^fiPrp wp arp;
returning to-day. Much has been learnt in the interval,
and a modern thinker could not regard happiness crudely
as a sum of pleasures, or divorce it from the mode of life
which is its substance, or judge the well-being of a whole
society by the contentment of a numerical majority.
But the desire to arrest the misery of mankind will
revive in double strength. Europe has undergone its
martyrdom, millions in the service of false gods, other
millions in resisting them. It will ask itself what is the
true God and where the true religion. The answer, what-
ever it be, must rest on this truth, that the higher ethics
and the deeper religion do not come to destroy the
simplest rights and duties of neighbour to neighbour,
but to fulfil and extend them. Great purposes, vast
schemes, haunt the imagination of man, and urge him
on to achievements without which life would be relatively
poor and stagnant. But too often such purposes are
built on foundations of human misery and wrong. It
is the rarer insight which sees in the great good the com-
prehensive unity of all the little things that make up
the life of the common man. The theory of the state

136 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

is a case in point. The state is a great organization.
Its well-being is something of larger and more permanent
import than that of any single citizen. Its scope is vast.
Its service calls for the extreme of loyalty and self-
sacrifice. All this is true. Yet when the state is set
up as an entity superior and indifferent to component
individuals it becomes a false god, and its worship the
abomination of desolation, as seen at Ypres or on
the Somme. When it is conceived as a means to the
extension of our duty towards our neighbour, a means
whereby we can apply effectively and on the large scale
what we know to be good in the simple personal relations
of life, no such discord arises. The purposes of political
action are no way narrowed, but purified and humanized.
We learn to think of our political conduct in terms of
the vast reverberation of consequences on thousands and
millions of lives, great and lowly, present and to come.
We cannot, indeed, ever adequately interpret great general
truths in terms of the particulars which they cover. To
give to vast social issues all their human meaning is beyond
the power of imagination — an imagination which recoils
even from the effort to appreciate the daily list of
casualties. But the true progress of political thought
lies in the cultivation of imaginative power. It insists
on going back from the large generality, the sounding
abstraction, the imposing institution, to the human factors
which it covers. Not that it wishes to dissolve the fabric.
Men must continue to build, and on deeper foundations
and with larger plans. But there must be no slave buried
alive beneath the corner stone. Or rather, the fabric is
no building, but a tissue of living, thinking, feeling beings,
of whom every one is " an end and not a means merely,"
and the value of the whole is marred if it requires the
suffering of any single element. There is no lack of vast-
ness in this design. It might rather be accused of vague-
ness, if it were not that it starts with the simple relations
of man and man and bids each of us seek to realize in
political conduct and through social institutions, on the
widest scale and in impersonal relations, what we well

CONCLUSION

137

understand in our private lives as " our duty towards
our neighbour."

Political morality is not super-morality, setting ordinary
obligations aside. It is morality extended and denned,
stripped of the limitations of class or national prejudice,
generalized for application in great impersonal organiza-
tions, the only thing that can save such organizations
from becoming inhuman. It may be said that institutions
and politics generally can do little to make individuals
happy. That may be true, but they can do a vast deal
to make individuals unhappy, and to cut off this great
source of woe is no unworthy aim. That is why a sound
political philosophy will always insist on the individual,
the freedom which is his basis of self-respect, the equality
which is his title to consideration, the happiness whereof
" the tiny bowl is so easily spilt." It is not that our
little lives are rounded in ourselves. On the contrary, if
we find happiness anywhere, it is only in merging our-
selves in some greater object. It is that if all objects
worthy of effort may be considered as contributing to
the advancement of mankind, this advancement, properly
understood, goes not over the bodies and souls of individuals
like a Juggernaut's car, but through their heightened
activities and larger lives like a quickening spirit. Here
precisely lies the issue between two views of the state.
In the democratic or humanitarian view it is a means.
In the metaphysical view it is an end. In the democratic
view it is the servant of humanity in the double sense
that it is to be judged by what it does for the lives of its
members and by the part that it plays in the society of
humankind. In the metaphysical view it is itself the sole
guardian of moral worth. In the democratic view the
sovereign state is already doomed, destined to subordina-
tion in a community of the world. In the metaphysical
view it is the supreme achievement of human organization.
For the truth let the present condition of Europe be
witness.

APPENDIXES

APPENDIX I
HEGEL'S THEORY OF THE WILL

IN Lecture II the attempt has been made to elicit and criticize
the main principles underlying Hegel's theory of freedom. A
somewhat fuller explanation is here subjoined.

Hegel approaches the subject by a somewhat unfortunate
analogy. The will is free in the same sense as matter is heavy.
Gravity, he thinks, constitutes bodies. This in itself seems to
be a mistake, partly of fact, but principally of definition. The
expression " body has gravity " is a way of putting the fact
that bodies, when otherwise unconstrained, move towards one
another with a certain assignable acceleration. This statement
by no means exhausts all that is known about bodies. If bodies
were not known independently, that is, had no other attributes,
we should not say that bodies had weight, but merely that
weight exists. Whether all bodies do behave in the way referred
to is a sheer question of empirical fact. But in any case gravity
is not body, but is an attribute of body or, if it is preferred, a
way in which bodies do behave. In the same way, if it is true
that the will is free, it is certainly not in the sense that freedom
is will or that will is freedom, but that freedom is a characteristic
of will or an expression of the way in which will behaves. But
will is not only freedom to Hegel, it is also thought. Will and
thought are not two special faculties, but will is a specific mode
of thought. It is thought as translating itself into existence,1

1 In thinking, according to Hegel, I turn an object into a
thought, stripping the sensible element from it and making it
essentially and immediately mine. Thought penetrates the object,
which no longer stands opposed to me because I have taken from
it what was peculiar to it, which it had over against me. Similarly,
in willing there appears at first an opposition between myself and
my object, and in making a choice I make a distinction between
a determinate end and my abstract potentialities. But this dis-

138

APPENDIXES 139

setting before itself an object with which it is in a manner identi-
fied. Ordinary language would recognize these expressions as
having a loose metaphorical justification, but to Hegel they are
the kernel of philosophy, and his conception of free will in
particular will be found to depend upon taking them seriously.
It is through his identification of the will with the system or
totality of its objects that Hegel is able to speak of the will as
determined only by itself, of the will as willing itself, and thus
free from any other determination.

The development of this conception follows the ordinary dia-
lectical process of Hegelian philosophy. We start with the
conception of a will that is free in the sense of being quite indeter-
minate, so that it can choose anything and everything. But
a will so indeterminate as this in fact chooses nothing and defeats
itself. Hegel likens it to the anarchical movements of politics
that want everything in general and nothing in particular.
To escape from this barrenness we take refuge in particular
objects or ends. But if the particular ends are isolated and
disconnected they just miss that unity of action which dis-
tinguishes will. The truth then must be that, while the will
sets a multitude of particular objects before itself, those objects
must be united by some underlying principle.

It is in this unity of principle that Hegel finds what he calls
freedom. The connection is by no means obvious,1 but the
drift of the argument may be gathered from the account of free-
dom as ordinarily, and in Hegel's view, falsely understood.3

tinction is after all my own, and the object, as I achieve it, belongs
to me. It is mine when accomplished. The object is what I
have done. There is a trace of my spirit in it.

1 The argument is that since all the objects of the will fall
under the same principle or have, as we might say, a function
in one and the same system, they do not really limit the will as
they seem to do, but express it in different forms. In seeming
to limit itself, the will is expressing itself. This, according to Hegel,
constitutes the freedom of the will, which is its substantive reality,
as gravity is the substantive reality of body.

* It may be well to note the dialectical phases by which the
conception of spurious freedom is reached. First, in § 8 we have
what Hegel calls the formal opposition of the subjective to the
objective. The will is something within me, contrasted with the
outer world in which it seeks to realize its end. These particular
ends form the content of the will, but, in adopting such ends
(§ 10), the will does not fully attain its freedom. Its freedom is

140 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

This false conception emerges when the will stands contrasted
as a distinct faculty or power of choice with the various impulses
which direct it towards particular objects, each of which counts
as distinct from and possibly opposed to others. The power
of the will to choose between them is the kind of freedom which
Hegel calls caprice (Willkiir). And according to him it is at this
point that the ordinary controversy as to freewill arises and on
this plane that it is conducted. As long as the will is regarded
as a bare potentiality, what Hegel calls something formal, standing
over against impulses and promptings that proceed from else-
where, whether within our nature or without it, you can argue
with equal force either that it is determined or that it is undeter-
mined. You can argue that it is determined on the ground that
a mere potentiality, a bare form, has nothing within it to make
it decide one way rather than another, whence you conclude
that the propelling force must come from the impulse or from
the presented object. You can argue equally that the will is
undetermined because you can show that it can take up or drop
any one of these objects and that what it can take up it can
cancel, no matter what the strength of the impulse may be. In
reality, according to Hegel, both arguments fail because both
rest on a false conception of the relation of the will as a unity, or
what he would call the universal, to its particular acts and im-
pulses. The truth is that these particulars emanate from the
universal character of the will itself. The will, therefore, does
not stand over against the impulses which solicit it, but is itself
the source of each movement in which it accomplishes and fulfils
itself. The argument seems to ignore the distinction between
impulse and will,1 but again let us suspend criticism and try to
follow the drift of the reasoning to the end.

implicit. It is in the will itself but it does not exist for the will.
That it should exist in this fuller sense, the will must realize itself
as an object. There is a will operating whenever I adopt some
definite end, and since there is a will operating there is freedom,
but not, it would seem, the consciousness of freedom, not that
organic connection between a particular end and a permanent
underlying principle which constitutes self-determination. This
is the stage which Hegel calls the immediate or natural will with
its separate impulses and desires. The will stands above all these
particular objects and can freely compare and choose between
them. This brings us to the position examined in the text.

1 Impulses antagonize one another, and one may calculate which
impulse would bring the greatest satisfaction, but such calculation

APPENDIXES 141

To do this we must think of the will as expressing itself com-
pletely in a system of purposes all related to one another.

When it grasps this system as a whole it is said to exist for
itself and to be its own object.1 The meaning is that this system
completely expresses the nature of the will and therefore for
Hegel (here we get back to the ultimate identity of subject and
object) is the will. True, there is always a distinction between
subjective and objective, inner and outer aspects. Subjectively
the will is the rational self -consciousness, objectively it is the
rational system of ends. But to get the full " idea " of the will
these aspects must be held together. The will therefore in
willing its object is said to will itself. Thus for the will to be
determined by its objects as a whole is to be determined
by itself, and to be determined by itself is freedom. This is
the substance of the entire argument, which culminates in the
formula that the idea of the will is the free will which wills the
free will.

This peculiarly difficult phrase proceeds directly from Hegel's
identification of subject and object. Just as in the sphere of
knowledge the mind, taken in its full concrete reality, is the
system of the objective world which it knows, the knowledge
itself being an aspect of the system, so we are to understand

again is mere caprice. According to Hegel, any identification of
myself with some one impulse is a distinct limitation of the univer-
sality of the self, which is described in this section as the system
of all impulses. This conception gives rise to another dialectical
stage. The different impulses which issue immediately from the
will are held to be good. On the other hand, as natural impulses,
they are opposed to the conception of the spirit and have to be
eradicated as bad. The truth is that they must be purified by
being changed from their immediate or natural character and
restored to what he calls their substantive essence, that is to the
form in which they can play a part in the rational system which
is the will.

The conception of happiness, involving some correlation of the
different impulses, is a stage towards a rational life, but only a
stage, because happiness lies in the individual human being, that
is in his subjective feeling, so that what was to be universal turns
out to be particular, something realized in particular people that
is not an organic unity of all consciousness. The underlying truth
(§ 21) is the self-determining universal, and this is will and freedom.

1 And therefore infinite, for it turns back into itself like a circle,
which, for Hegel, is the true representative of infinitude.

142 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

that in action the will is the system of accomplished purposes,
the purposiveness of it being a part of that system. We are to
conceive a system of activity penetrated throughout by a single
principle or rather, we should say, engendered in all its variety
of detail by a single principle, which requires infinite variety of
forms in which to express itself, but a variety which by the
interconnection of all its parts makes up an organic whole.
This whole Hegel conceives as determined by nothing external
to itself ; any part of it may be regarded as determined by the
will, but is in fact equally a determinant of the will. Its nature
is to be a part of that will. So, in a sense, the will wills itself.
Wherever you start, pursue the track of determination and you
will come back to the point from which you started. This is
the circle in which Hegel finds the meaning of infinitude, and
that is why infinitude and self-determination are to him in the
end the same thing.

In seeking to render the meaning plain to ourselves, we are
constantly brought up against the initial difficulty of conceiving
a will which wills itself. Surely when we will we are making,
creating or bringing about something that does not exist ; some-
thing, whatever it may be, which is at any rate other than the
act of making it. To avoid this fundamental difficulty and to
discover, if we can, what substance underlies the Hegelian
argument, let us put it, in more modern phrase, that the will
and its object are conceived as an organic unity to be understood
by the contrast in which it stands to that mechanical relation-
ship which Hegel calls caprice. In this mechanical relationship
there are a number of distinct and separate impulses, and a
will apart from them all, moving above them and choosing now
one and now another. In the organic relationship the different
movements of the will, though distinct from one another, are
emanations from one and the same principle. They could
not exist without that principle, nor yet could the principle
exist without them, nor indeed without any one of them, for
each is an organic part of the whole.1 Each impulse is, as it

1 The only determinant of the will which Hegel contemplates
is the object. If then he can show that the object emanates from
the will, he proves on his presupposition that the will determines
itself. It is to this that his demonstration is addressed. He does
not consider the determinist point that the will with all its pur-
poses (to admit that these emanate from within) arises out of
antecedent conditions. But he is not really thinking of the will
of an individual, but rather of the world spirit.

APPENDIXES 143

were, a bit of the will. Each bit of the will is determined by
the will as a whole. Thus will is determined by will, that is
by itself. And if, again, the will be considered as a whole which
is determined by nothing external, but by its constituent parts,
then similarly the will as a whole is self-determined. All its
different objects are parts of a whole which hangs together
and in which it is always expressing itself. This organic
relationship is what Hegel understands by freedom, and so
understood we have in this conception a system of action, the
object of which is to maintain itself as a free system. This
is what is expressed in the phrase "the free will which wills
the free will."

Putting aside the phraseology, which depends on the impos-
sible identification of subject and object, we have before
us the conception of an organic or harmonious system of con-
duct. What precisely is a harmonious system ? It is one in
which there are many parts, but so related that they all main-
tain or support one another. If we think of some occupation or
some purpose which we deem desirable as a whole and which
interests us in all its successive details, we have the model
of a harmony of this kind. We take each step for its own sake
because it is inherently attractive, and we also take it as a step
in a journey, the end of which is equally attractive ; and thus
there is at every stage a double motive, the immediate object
for its own sake and also as contributory to the wider object
which is intrinsically desired. If all life could be like that,
it would be a perfect harmony and it would have nothing to do
but to maintain itself. It would in fact be a self-maintaining
system, such as Hegel contemplates, a system, that is, in which
each part in effecting itself helps to give effect to the whole.
Now the ideal to which moral purpose strives is a system
of this kind, a harmony within the individual, a harmony
as between all individuals — a unity, that is, in which
each individual playing his own part, living a life which is
desirable to him, is forwarding and consciously forwarding
the life that is desirable for all mankind. In such a harmony,
moreover, there would be perfect freedom, for the individual
would be expressing himself unconstrainedly, and yet in ex-
pressing himself and by expressing himself, would be serving
the requirements of the whole. But the freedom would be
possible only because there is harmony and it would be truer
to say that in such a system it is the will to maintain harmony

144 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

than that it is the will to maintain free will which is the vital
principle.

This leads us to inquire further into the relation between
freedom and harmony. What is really meant by freedom ?
Ordinary thought translates freedom as absence of constraint.
Hegel takes freedom as self-determination. In a world where
nothing stands alone, where every act or event is related to some-
thing from which it follows and which is said to determine it,
it is clear that ef the action of anything whatever that we can
regard as a continuous object, that we can identify through
successive moments, one of two things is true. Either that action
is an action of the object itself, proceeding from the nature of
the object, arising out of the state in which the object has been,
and consisting in a further state of activity which is just what the
object of itself becomes. In that case the object may be said to
determine its own action, or, regarding the object as one through
successive phases, that is, before the action and in it, we can speak
of the object, if we will, as self-determined in its activity. The
other alternative is that the object should be determined by some-
thing else acting upon it. Then we speak of it as constrained.
In the purely physical world, ordinary thought recognizes this
contrast between freedom and constraint. A lever may be said
to move freely about its fulcrum. The law of gravity expresses
the way in which two bodies move freely, the pendulum moves
freely about its support, all in contrast to the way in which
these objects would behave under the constraint of some external
force operating upon them. It may be objected that no one of
these bodies really moves of itself. The pendulum, for instance,
is part of a system of forces. There is its point of support, the
weight attached to the rod, the rod itself and the earth. Never-
theless the swing of the pendulum is the resultant of just this
particular system of forces acting without constraint by others,
and that absence of constraint is what is meant when it is said
that the pendulum swings freely. That particular system of
forces determines of itself, and without the impingement of any
other forces, just the particular set of motions which we discover.
On the other hand, if the pendulum is deflected by a magnet,
a push or a catch, a new force intervenes by which it is constrained.
The whole system, including this new force, again may be said
to act freely if no other intervenes. But in every case freedom
from some external constraint will mean determination by the
forces that are within the particular object or system of objects,
which is the subject of our discourse.

APPENDIXES 145

When we come to the action of living things, and in particular
to the will, we still mean by freedom primarily this same thing,
the determination of the act by the character of the living thing
itself, in particular of the will, as against determination by any-
thing other than itself. What I choose to do at this moment,
if I choose freely, expresses the character of my will at this
moment. True, some external thing may be the stimulus which
sets the will in motion, and it is because I see the rose perhaps
that I have the impulse to bend down and smell it or pick it.
But the rose does not constrain me, rather it suggests an experi-
ence, and the fact that I think of that experience as pleasing is a
circumstance of my inner nature and precisely the circumstance
which expresses itself in my impulse. In so far as any external
object does constrain me and in so far as it awakens in me that
which I cannot resist, I am deemed, and rightly deemed, not
to be free, to be a slave to the external thing. Or again, if this
craving is, as rightly regarded it should be regarded, rather
inner than outer, then I am a slave to one of my impulses and
my will is not free. If, on the other hand, knowing quite well
what I am about and what was coming from my act, I perform
that act with a view to that result, then that act is an expression
of my will. It is unconstrained by anything external, not
merely to myself, but to my will, and my will is free.

But there is a further sense in which the will is free which
does not apply to material things. Given the pendulum duly
attached to its support and raised from the vertical and then
set free, that is, released from all external constraint, the result
will be uniform and certain. The pendulum will swing to and
fro. Each swing is determined accurately by the past swing.
The movement of each moment is determined by the configura-
tion of the preceding moment. Thus the mechanical system,
though free from external restraints, is never free from its
own past.

The question of the freedom of the will morally considered has
been whether the will can ever be said to be free from its own
past. The answer to this must be in a sense negative and in a
sense affirmative. There is no reason to doubt that what my
will is now is something which has come out of all that it and
that I have been ; and there is no ground for assigning at any
point a breach of continuity. The difference between the will
and the mechanical system is this. The will looks towards
that which is coming out of it ; it is in a sense determined not

10

146 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

by the past but by the future ; and yet that future is something
which it itself creates. It creates the end by which it is itself
determined. The fact that the will creates this end is itself
the determining point of its activity. It is in this sense that the
will is self-determined in a way in which nothing that is mechanical
can be. The pendulum does not swing because it wants exercise
or because it wants to get to the other side. It swings as a result
of the forces that are working within the system to which it
belongs. The will, it may be said, also operates in accordance
with the forces working within it, but these forces are such as
to create a result which it foresees and it is because they create
this result that the will acts as it does. The consequence is
that there is no limit to the self-determination of the will. If
at any point in the course of its activity something indicating
a different result, previously unforeseen, emerges the will is able
to adapt itself to this new circumstance. There is no fact
bearing upon the issues of its action which the will is constrained
by its past to omit. The past has made it what it is, but what
it is is something looking to the future, determining its move-
ments by their relation to the future. Self-determination in
general then means the operation of an object in accordance
with its own character and the self-determination of the will
in particular, its operation in accordance with the character of
a creative impulse. Unconstraint and self-determination are
thus two expressions for the same thing, the one negative and
the other positive.

With this definition in mind, we can easily recognize that
the harmonious system of conduct, or let us say the harmonious
will, is also in its inward relations a free system and a free will.
Let us think of such a system as produced in each part by a
several and separate act of will. Each act expresses itself,
or rather in each act as it is at the time and in the relations
appropriate to the action, the will is expressing itself without
let or hindrance from other acts or relations of the will. Not
only without let or hindrance from them, but furthered, main-
tained and supported by them, while also yielding to them
furtherance and support. We think of the will in each act as
looking not only towards the act itself, but also towards the entire
system of willing of which it is a part, as expressing itself in
both relations and finding the two relations harmonious. In
such a harmony each deliverance of the will is free, that is it
is unconstrained by any other deliverance of the will. Now for

APPENDIXES 147

any single act of will there is just the same freedom if it is per-
formed without any consciousness of relation to the will as a
whole, for it is performed without constraint and it is therefore
self-determined. But the will as a whole can only have freedom
within if its purposes harmonize, otherwise there is constraint
of some of its deliverances by others and they cannot all be free.
In particular, if the permanent character of the will, its main
tendency or its general principle, is in conflict with and overbears
its own impulse in some particular case, the result in that case
is not freedom but constraint. Here it would seem that Hegel
would rejoin, " Yes, but the constraint that you speak of as
exercised by the will in one particular relation is a constraint
exercised by the will as a whole upon the will at a particular
moment, that is, a constraint exercised by the will upon itself.
Thus it is still self-determination and therefore it is freedom."
But if this argument is advanced, it must be rejoined that self-
determination so interpreted is by no means a satisfactory
definition of freedom. If there is self-determination without
harmony, what results is that the particular act or phase of will
may be to any degree constrained, deflected, inhibited in its
self-expression by the will as a whole, or, if the phrase be pre-
ferred, by the unifying principle of the will. Thus instead of
the freedom of each several act of will we may have an absolute
constraint exercised by the whole upon the parts. If it be said
that this at any rate leaves the general principle of the will
free to express itself, it must be replied that all we know of this
principle is that it consists in the complete domination of all
distinguishable phases or acts of will. The will is not willing
itself, but against itself. Thus, in place of the free will
that wills the free will, we have the conception of the will
that in its freedom wills the total subordination of will ; or, in
other words, freedom without harmony turns out to be con-
straint, the subordination of the particular to the universal.
On the other hand, the freedom which is found in harmony is
the expression of each particular phase of will in its own nature,
and it is only if order and harmony are assumed to be con-
vertible terms that it is possible to lay down a priori that a
system dependent on a single principle is at once self-main-
taining and free. The truth is that the Hegelian conception of
freedom really points towards an idea of harmony which Hegel
himself does not seem to have appreciated.

Freedom in the sense of absence of internal friction could be

148 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

realized in a completely harmonious order of conduct but in
no other. But free will, as Hegel uses the expression, is simply
will which carries through a single principle, that is really a self-
disciplined will — disciplined in accordance with law and custom
— and wherever he uses the term " freedom," the term " self-
discipline " should be substituted to make sense of his argument.
In place of the will that wills the free will we should speak of
the disciplinarian will that wills the subordination of all those
partial impulses. In this conception there is, if you like, freedom
for the central principle of the will, but for that alone — a freedom
like that of James Fs free monarchy, which meant that the
monarch was free to do what he wished with every one else. It
follows quite clearly from Hegel's view that the bad will is not
free, but on this point he must be charged with distinct incon-
sistency, for when he comes to deal with the responsibility for
wrong-doing (§ 139, p. 183) he explicitly maintains, as against
the view that evil is necessary, that " the man's decision is
his own act, the act of his freedom and his guilt." But it is
clear that in his usage of the terms this could only be true if
wrong-doing were the universal principle of the will. Hence
the man who acts wrongfully is not free ; he is expressing caprice
(Willkur) and has no freedom. Hegel cannot have it both ways.
Either freedom means self-determination expressing itself in
the choice between good and bad, and therefore as distinctly
in the bad as in the good. In that case man as a moral agent
is free, but free to do both ill and well. Or, freedom means
subjection to the discipline of the goodwill. In that case man
is free when he does good, but is not free to choose between good
and evil.

To sum up, Hegel's conception of freedom depends upon a
confusion between two distinct conceptions. On the one hand
there is freedom in the sense of self-determination in any act
of the will which is carried through without restraint. Freedom
in this sense does not depend on any positive relation between
one purpose and another, but might be realized in an isolated
act without conscious relation to any other. On the other hand,
in the will as a system of purposes there is fre'edom from any
internal check or restraint only if all these purposes are in har-
mony. Hegel's account seems to fuse these conceptions, taking
control of the partial purpose by the whole to be self-determina-
tion and therefore freedom, without postulating harmony as
a condition. Now in the conception of a moral order which

APPENDIXES 149

is a perfect harmony the freedom of the whole is the gathered
fruit of the freedom of each part. In self-determination without
harmony there is for the partial manifestations no freedom
but subjection, and for the governing will no ideal of freedom
but only of order. To speak of the latter conception in terms
only applicable to the former is the fallacy that runs through
all Hegel's theory of the law and the state.

APPENDIX II

THE THEORY OF THE ABSOLUTE

DR. BOSANQUET'S theory of the state is so intimately bound
up with his general theory of Reality, that a discussion of his
social philosophy can hardly be complete without some reference
to his conception of the Absolute as contained in the two volumes
of his Gifford Lectures, to which reference has several times
been made in the preceding chapters. Indeed, for him the state
seems in a manner to be the medium, it is certainly one of the
media, by which the individual comes into contact with the
Absolute. The Absolute is sovereign Lord, but the state is
its vicegerent here and now. What then is the Absolute and
how is it related to our lives ?

The Absolute is that in which all contradictions are reconciled.
But this definition really includes two characteristics which are
perfectly distinct. By contradiction is meant, in the most
natural and straightforward sense of the term, logical contra-
diction. It is clearly true, but it is also a platitude, to say that
logical contradictions cannot exist in reality. If the Absolute
then is an expression for reality as it is in its completeness, it is
certain that within it there can be no contradictions. Whether
we should say on this point that within it contradictions are
reconciled is not so certain. Contradictions really exist in the
world of partial knowledge, and it would be truer to say that
they must necessarily be reconciled, that is, resolved away,
in complete knowledge, while in reality they cannot really
exist. However, to let this verbal point pass, it is clear that
in the Absolute all elements of reality which as partially or
separately known to us are imperfectly understood, and thus
give rise to apparent contradictions, are so related by underlying
principles of connection as to constitute a consistent whole.
All this is little more than platitude, put it as we may.

But there is a second meaning of contradiction — practical

APPENDIXES 151

contradiction, conflict, opposition, under which, in general,
pain, misery, evil and destruction may be grouped. That
there exists any being, call it what we will, in which all such
conflicts are reconciled, is a much more doubtful proposition.
It can by no means be regarded as a postulate of thought, as
the first proposition may be, and I suspect that its plausibility
depends upon an unconscious transition from the first meaning
to the second. That contradiction in this second sense may be
somehow reconciled in undoubtedly the aspiration of the religious
consciousness, but its realization is not a fundamental postulate
of philosophy. What has here to be asked, however, is whether
Bosanquet's Absolute does in fact provide any such reconcilia-
tion ; and if so, at what cost to our moral and religious ideas ?
Bosanquet's view is that the Absolute is perfection and that all
the content of our experience, whether we call it good, bad
or indifferent, would be found, if we had full knowledge, to play
its necessary part in this perfect scheme. What we have to
ask is hi what way evil, pain and conflict and destruction can
have a part to play in a perfect scheme. One answer would be
that these things are necessary incidents of a process in which
some life is evolved or some plan being worked out so good and
glorious that if we could understand it all, we should deem it
worth the cost. This conclusion, however, is expressly barred
by Bosanquet, who refuses to conceive the Absolute as the
realization of a purpose. In point of fact, the conception
of purpose is only applicable if we think of it as operating upon
material which is given to it, or at least under conditions by
which it is so limited as to make the suffering and destruction
necessary to the completeness of its work. At bottom this is
why Bosanquet rejects the conception of purpose. It cannot
characterize the whole. But he does not seem to consider
the alternative that the whole might be something in which the
element of purpose is that which we really value, so that the
ultimate success of this purpose would reconcile us to the cost.
Rejecting purpose, we have to be satisfied with a world which
is not going to be any better than the world of our experience
but is of one tissue with it, only complete. We might perhaps
value such a world if we could think of it, for example, as a
kind of living organism, as an organic unity. But the charac-
teristic of an organic unity is that it maintains the parts by which
it is constituted. Thus, if there is destruction and pain within
the organism, it is either because the organism is acted upon
by foreign bodies or because it is in some way imperfect. The

152 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

universe is not acted upon from without, and if organic at all,
must be imperfectly so. But the difficulties that arise here
are not relevant, for Dr. Bosanquet's Absolute is the very
reverse of organic in its conception, being quite indifferent to
the permanent welfare of the units, spiritual beings, selves,
which go to make it up. The life of any one of them may end
in disruption and despair, and yet reconciliation is supposed to
be found in the Absolute. The Absolute thus presented is
something utterly inhuman, without bowels of compassion. It
is below the moral categories, as everything that pretends to
be above them invariably is.

But if the Absolute is neither purpose nor an organism, what
is it ? Bosanquet answers that it is perfection. It is not good
and it is not evil strictly, for we judge things good or bad by
reference to the perfection of the whole. Can this perfection
give us any reconciliation ? The answer is that it may reconcile
logical contradictions, but for that we need no conception of
perfection but simply of reality, or, to phrase it better, of reality
thoroughly understood ; but that there is only one way in which
conflict, pain, evil and ills can be said to be reconciled either
with one another or with any scheme or order to which our
emotions and admiration and satisfaction can attach themselves,
and that is by showing that they are necessary steps in the
fulfilment of some purpose which we regard as fully adequate
to the heavy cost which they represent. If reconciliation means
anything other than this, the meaning should be specified. There
is, no suggestion that it means anything else except the over-
coming of contradictions, which has been shown is a different
concept not to be surreptitiously identified with the ideal in
question.

Certain passages in Bosanquet suggest a possible line of
reply approaching more nearly to the ordinary ethical and
religious view of reconciliation. An evil, it may be said, is
transformed into something which is not evil and perhaps
even good by the way in which we take it, by our fortitude, by
our resignation, by our accepting it as the burden which we
must bear for others, and so on. Now, it is true that by our
attitude. an evil may be modified and in some respect turned to
a good account ; but, though modified, the evil is not cancelled.
If the sufferer does not resent it for himself, we resent it and are
right to resent it for him. The finer his attitude, the stronger
ghpuld be its appeal to us onlookers as a flagrant wrong which

APPENDIXES 153

man, or nature, or an Absolute, if you will, has imposed on
a being who is showing himself worthy of better things. In
the individual sufferer who uses his suffering nobly there is
reconciliation, but it is precisely not in the Absolute that
this reconciliation is achieved. It is in reality is a whole
that the wrong remains, and so far as it is overcome it is the
work of the human spirit operating in reality.

Lastly, if we really need pain and evil as a substratum for
our good, then it may be true that the most we can do is to
maintain a life of struggle. This cannot be attributed to the
perfection of the Absolute, but to a deep-seated dissonance in
the structure of things, which not only is not, but on this principle
never could be reconciled. It must be added that if, as Bosanquet
appears to maintain, effort cannot ever fundamentally improve
this situation, then effort is fundamentally hopeless and discord
is absolute. If, on the other hand, effort can make an improve-
ment, then, though the discord is there, it is capable of mitigation
and it becomes conceivable that through effort, conscious and
active beings may achieve a life worth the pain and travail.
It is in the notion of such a life, either here or hereafter, either
for others or for ourselves, that every one who has not argued
about the issue, but felt it, looks for that which may repay the
terrible cost of human suffering.

INDEX

Absolute, 17, 1 8, 19, 20, 24, 116

Theory of the, 150, 151, 152, 153
Alexander, Professor, 53
Aristotle, 60, 73

Body, 53

Bosanquet, Dr., 18, 19, 21, 22, 37, 38,
40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50,
Si. 53. 54, 55, 56, 57. 58, 59- 60,
61, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,
79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94,
102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108,
109, no, in, 112, 113, 114, 115,
116, 120, 123, 150, 151, 152, 153

Philosophical Theory of the State, 22,
40, 5°, 56, 74, 94

Principle of Individuality and Value,
19, 69, 79, 82

Social and International Ideals, 21,

59, 94, 106, 120
Bridges, J. H., 115

Church, the, 88, 89, 90
Clark, Mr. William, 24
Common Aim, 123
Common Good, 123
Comtists, 115, 116
Cynics, 72

Ethics, II, 46

Force, 74, 77, 122

Freedom, 26, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
37 ,39, 40, 59, 60, 139, 141, 145,
147, 148
Moral, 43

Gravity, 138

Green, T. H., 24, 83, 96, 99, n8, 119

120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125
Principles of Political Obligations,
116

Goethe, 98

Harmony, 36, 46, 47, 143
Hegel, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 56, 62,
64, 65, 68, 69, 79, 87, 88, 95, 96,
97, 98, 99, ioo, 101, 102, 103,
118, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142,
143, 144, 147, 148, 149
Philosophy of History, 17, 20
Philosophic des Rechts, 20, 23, 24,

38, 79, 87, 96

Hegel's Theory of the Will, 38, 138
Hoflding, Professor, 15
Humanity, 115, 116
Hume, 63

Ideals and Facts, 14, 18
Idealistic Social Philosophy, 41
Individual, 51, 66, 67

Kant, ioo, 101

Law, 26, 32, 38, 92, 114, 149
League of Nations, The, 25, 106, 107,

116
Lycophron, 60

Marx, Karl, 24

Mazzini, 106

Metaphysical Theory of the State, the,
18, 21, 73, 76, 117, 118, 122, 130
Mill, 42

156 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE

Mind, 53

Finite, 82

Moral Philosophy, II
Moralitdt, 38
Morals in Evolution, 23

Nietzsche, 131
Newton, 69

i

Organization, 75, 76, 78, 96, III, 112,
"3

Plato, 72, 73
Power, 134

Reality, Theory of, 150

Rccht, 38, 6 1

Rousseau, 40, 41, 42, 74, 80

Self, 41

Common, 13, 41,43. 97. 99. 132, 133

Determination, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40,
41, 146, 147, 148, 149

the Real, 43, 48
Sittlichkeit, 38, 88, 98, 113
Social Investigation, n

Philosophy, 12

Science, 12, 15, 16

Theory, 12, 17

Society, 76, 81, 82, 83, 102, 103, 118
Spirit, the, 18, 24

State, the, 18, 21, 33, 43, 56, 59, 60,
7i, 72, 73. 74. 75. 76, 77, 78, 79.

82, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96,
97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105,
106, 107, 108, 109, no, in, 112,

113, IIS, Il8, 119, 120, 121, 122,
130. 131, 134, 136, 149. ISO

Stoics, 72, 114

Theory of the State, the, 135
Treitschke, 103, 134

Universal, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69,
76, 96, 122, 141

Will, 32, 33, 34,35, 42, 47, 79, 81, 108,
124, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144,
145, 146, 147, 148

Actual, 42, 44, 118

Common, 123

Free, 32, 139, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148

General, 32, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50,
59, 71, 80, 82, 85, 99, 107, 118,

121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132

Hegelian Theory of, 42, 46, 49, 50,
59, 71, 80, 82, 85, 99, 107, 118,
121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132

Individual, 79

Particular, 139

Real, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,
50,56,68,71,80,84,85,86, u8

of the State, the, 71

Universal, 68

Willkiir, 98, 140, 148

Printed in Great Britain by
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Monographs on Sociology.

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Series of Bibliographies by Students of the School.

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The metaphysical theory
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