What is the explanation of this paradox? How does Bosanquet arrive at it? (1) 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 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 unsatisfactory. 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 citation of his will. The illusoriness of the will is precisely 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 citations 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 implications 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 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 unreasonable; 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 substituted 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 Bosanquet'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 process 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, however, 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 reformation. 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 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 superficial 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 sometimes 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 deep-rooted obligations of family and friendship. If the real self means that which goes deep, we cannot deny that it contains possibilities 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 conceivable a system of wills so harmonizing with themselves 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 something 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 inharmonious 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 important, 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 confused 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?
(b) The General Will. If for the "real" we write the 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
"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."3
And again in the following chapter:4
"Individuals are limited and isolated in many ways, but their true individuality does not lie in their isolation but in that distinctive act or service by which they pass into unique contributions to the universal."
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 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, feeing, 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 considerable differences of mood, slackening and tensioning of interest and so on. The answer is that there is something 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 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 incommunicably 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. 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 something 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 identification 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 universal in the true sense of a class of individual beings resembling one another or possessing identities of character.5
The privacy of enjoyed experience, and in particular of feeling, has an important bearing on the doctrine of force 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 "as 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,6 but the denial of individuality leads Bosanquet to repudiate the view that force, or generally speaking state interference, 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 that 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 absolutely 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 communicate 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 distinction 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 himself 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 arbitrary attached ab extra to the act, but of something following from it as an inherent consequence. Obviously, too, it is not something 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 relation 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 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."7 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 (1) 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 enjoyment of a common liberty from possible oppression by 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 association as a common possession by restricting those developments, 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.8
(2) In a second and more specific sense, political freedom 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 decision 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 particular 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, sometimes 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 institutions, and as such passes through generations, conserving 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 understood by the plain man, and as more fully understandable 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 individual. 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?9 Like other things in his dialectic it can only be understood by surmounting 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 particular 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, 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 difficulty 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 of tint and are common to colours of many different tints. The conclusion of this argument is that the universal 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 understand 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 differences 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 everywhere under all sorts of changing conditions. There is among them nothing at all resembling the continuity and selfsameness 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 maintained 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 distinguishable 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 particular 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 refers 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 involved in the famous Hegelian doctrine of the concrete 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.10 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 fundamental 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 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 environment 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 continuity. 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 constitute members of a class, they may nevertheless be so united as to form a totality which has a certain substantive 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 individuals 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.
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 existence. 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 independence 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 individual, 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 particular, 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 on membership of some organized whole, then that universality 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 conception after all of a super-state, at any rate of something 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 conformity to universal law.11