NOTES
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 describing 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 (b), 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 inconsistency, 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.
2. The Philosophical Theory of the State, ch. vii.
5. 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 consciousness 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 enjoyment 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 individuality or personality has its centre in the exclusiveness of feeling, neglects the essential feature of individuality or personality itself. It has an aspect of distinct unshareable immediacy; but in substance and stuff and content, it is universal, communicable, 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 differences 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 coenaesthesia, compatible 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 distinction 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.
6. 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 condemn." 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 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.
7. Social and International Ideals, p. 271.
8. 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 conditions of development than the mere restraint of injustice, and in particular it is only the state which can accumulate for social ends 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 cooperation, but rather the reverse.
9. See especially Wissenshaft der Logik, II, Werke, vol. v. pp. 36– 63.
10. 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.
11. Dr Bosanquet in his Principle of Individuality and 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 classifying 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. 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 repetition is a corollary of the universal infinite experience, "but it is a character of imperfection in such experience and not of perfection... 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 admission 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.