Lecture IV: The Will of the State

So far we have dealt with two of the three main propositions 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 the 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.

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 identification 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 hound 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 Greeks1 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 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 concerned 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 state 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 foundation 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 quotation, in which rebellion is recognized as a possible duty on the ground that the particular system which claims 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 subordinate 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 say2 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 realization 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" 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 ordinary 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 organization 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 governmental 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. Underlying Bosanquet's account, in fact, there is a serious confusion between the state and society.3 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 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 institutions 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 maximum 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 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.4 By playing between these two meanings, we get the worst of both worlds; on the one side a state which absorbs and cancels individual personality 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 is 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 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 existing 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 constitution of a great actual state, and endeavouring to make the mere supposedly rational the basis of a constitution in place of the historic reality. "Against the principle of the individual will we are to remind ourselves 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."5 In the same way6 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 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 foundation 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, however, 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, how 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 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 clear-sighted applications of a governing principle to social life as a whole. And so, secondly, when Dr Bosanquet says that society rests on will, the answer is rather that it rests on wills. We seldom find in a great 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 such external pressure exists, it is rare to find decisions clearly taken by the people as a whole. True, in a democratic nation laws are in the end passed by parliamentary 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 it is a process made up of innumerable conflicts of innumerable 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 intelligent social control is extended, and it would be a sound statement of the democratic ideal to say that it conceives 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.7

Too often it is not the state as a whole which sets definite ends before itself. In the normal development of peacetime, 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 there 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 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 interesting to see how Dr Bosanquet deals with these uncomfortable 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 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 considering 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 progress, 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 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 rationality 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 defining 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. The reason for this blend goes right back to the roots of social and mental evolution; it rests on the fact that society is 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 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,8 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 conception both philosophy and science may protest, philosophy 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 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 no 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 society 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 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 government 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. (1) 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 are admitted in such cases. Again, as a guardian of the common existence, the state is within its right in exacting conformity. The other side of this principle, perhaps more readily forgotten, is that it is only when universal conformity is provedly necessary that compulsion is justified in overriding religious conviction.

But let us assume 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 possibility 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 consideration 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 preservation. 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. New facts and new arguments are never barred, and no opinion is to be silenced; but if no clear verdict is collected 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 contention 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 conflicts 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 churchman 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 realty 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 deliverances 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 judgment, 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 application of principles, on obscurity of ideas. Conscience, then, would seem to have but little final authority. It 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 conformity 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 inward prompting from respect for an outward order built up by the organized efforts of men, valuable in itself and endangered if any one rebels against it; when, having duly tested the case in a spirit of humility, he has nevertheless 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 be 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 conforming 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 organization 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 is due to the non-conforming 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.9

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 individuality? 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 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, susceptible 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 themselves 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 overstepped. 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 compulsion 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.