Hegel recognizes bad states, but he deals with them very summarily. "The state (p. 339) is actual (wirklich) and its actuality consists in this, that the interest of the whole realizes itself in the particular aims.... In so far as this unity is absent, a thing is not actual, even if its existence might be assumed. A bad state is such a one as merely exists. A sick body also exists, but it is no true reality." Thus in place of asking to what extent it is really true that individual and universal interests coincide and what we are to do when they are palpably in conflict, how we are to cure the sick state and what is the duty of the individual when he finds himself unable to do so, we find the whole question waved aside by a radically unsound distinction between reality and existence. A sick body, as the sufferer has too much reason to know, is as hard a reality as a sound body, and if Hegel's criterion of reality were to be accepted, no state that is or has ever been is real. Regard the harmonic conception of society as an ideal and you give us something to work for, regard it as something actually realized and you confuse every issue of practical reform and theoretic right. In particular, in the notion that the state has the authority of a common self standing above the individual, we have a principle which may but too easily develop into a complete denial of the organic conception, because, instead of recognizing that the value of the state lies in its service to the harmonious development of all its component members, it subordinates that development in each and therefore in all to the fictitious whole which contains them but is not them.
Had Hegel carried through the organic conception of the state, he would have found room for the conception of liberty, equality and democracy; but his state system is a negation of all these. By an inconsistency which goes to the root of his whole metaphysical argument, he suddenly declares that the personality of the state is only real as a person, a monarch (p. 359). The monarch at one point appears as little more than the figure-head. If the constitution is fixed and formed, he has often nothing to do but to sign his name (p. 363). It is wrong to demand objective qualities of the monarch. He has only to say "yes" and to dot the i (p. 365). And so there is no objection to his being chosen in "a natural way" through natural birth (p. 364). An election of a ruler by popular choice will be something dependent on the opinions and expressions of the many and is generally opposed to the idea of "Sittlichkeit" (p. 367). Yet this monarch, who is only to dot the i and requires no objective qualities, may in short be a fool or a brute, is to have the choice of counsellors responsible for the government, in his unlimited caprice (Willkür, p. 370).
To ask for consistency in these deliverances would no doubt be censured by Hegel as a demand of reflective reasoning. But if the king may be a fool, whose caprice may yet determine the government of the state, the opinion of the people is allowed no such latitude. The people, without the monarch and the articulation of the whole into ranks, classes, corporations and so forth, is the formless mass which is no longer a state (p. 360). That the organization of the people as a voting power might be a necessary corrective of the social divisions incident to a large and developed society, does not seem to have suggested itself to Hegel. The people, as far as that word expresses a special portion of the members of the state, is that portion which does not know what it wants (p. 386). Special interests should be represented, but to let the many elect representatives is to give hostages to accident (p. 398). Goethe is quoted with approval as saying that "the masses can fight. There they are respectable. Their judgment is miserable," or, as the modern German phrase puts it, they are "cannon fodder." Public opinion always contains an underlying truth, but is always false in its expression. It must be as much despised as respected (p. 403). It contains all error and truth, and to find the truth in it is the work of the great man (p. 404). We must not ask the people themselves what they think apparently, but we must tell them what they think. The principal guarantee of the freedom of the press is the guarantee of contempt. The claim to say and write what one will is parallel to the freedom to do what one will (p. 404). The landowning class is alone suited for participation in political power on account of its property, which secures it both against the government and against the uncertainty of trade (pp. 391-2).
From all this we can see how much participation in the general will means for the ordinary individual in the Hegelian scheme. Those who have taken the Hegelian conception as a stable framework for democracy on the ground that simple membership of the community involves a share in the common self, would be condemned by Hegel himself for adherence to an abstract conception; even the rational, thinking element within the common man is to be elicited for him by the great man, the ruler or the law. He is to be told what he thinks. It may be admitted that these are not necessary consequences of the doctrine of the common self; they are not even natural consequences. It would be more reasonable to expect of a thinker who started from the spiritual unity of society that he would, with Green, insist upon including the humblest along with the highest in the moral unity and would emphasize that which the common man has to contribute no less than that which he has merely to accept. He would, in the spirit of Green, lay bare the elements of a higher meaning, the filaments, however incompletely developed, that bind the humble man to the whole to which he belongs, the half-understood emotions and desires in which higher and wider purposes are implied. It would be unfair to deny that in Hegel himself there are hints of such a development of thought. That they are not carried out is a consequence traceable in the end to that conception of will as having its freedom in determination by a principle rather than in a harmony of impulses which we found to be the starting-point of the Hegelian conception of the state.
The state being the individual writ large, its own independence is the primary condition of its internal life and indeed of its freedom (p. 409). And for this reason it imposes an absolute sacrifice on the individual when it is necessary to maintain it. Hegel finds in this circumstance a contradiction of the view that the end of the state is the security of life and property of individuals, because he says this security would not be reached by the sacrifice of that which was to be secured (p. 410), as though the life of some might not willingly be offered up for the well-being of others. However, in the security of the state lies the "ethical moment" of war, which is to be regarded as not an absolute evil or as merely an external accident (p. 410). Its good side is that it compels us to risk life and property. We hear much in the pulpit of the insecurity, the vanity and instability of temporal things, but each of us thinks that he will still hold his own. If, however, the insecurity comes "in the form of hussars," this readiness to forsake all turns into curses on the conquerors. We are apparently to think it is positively good if not only our property but also the lives of those dearest to us should be destroyed from time to time by the god-state in order to teach us the vanity of earthly affections. This is one advantage of war. Another is that it inculcates discipline and moral soundness. People who will not endure sovereignty within are brought under the heel of others (pp. 411– 13). Kant's proposal of a League of Peace is specifically repudiated. Those know little of the spirit of the people who think that they can make a whole along with others (p. 409) (as e. g., the proud Scot has made with the Englishman), and even if a number of states can make themselves into a family, this union as an individuality would create an opposite and engender an enemy (p. 412). That in all this argument Hegel is in touch with some dismal realities must be admitted. War, like other public calamities, does teach sacrifice to some who did not know it before. It does impose discipline and make democracy difficult. Wider unions are hard to achieve and most easily consolidated by a common enemy. A great humanitarian thinker, like Kant, is not unaware of these grave disharmonies in human life and in the social order. The peculiar vice of Hegel is that to him they are part of the ideal and they receive a nonmoral justification from the inhuman conception of the state as a god with a life of its own, reckless of the fibres of human feeling that it rends and mangles to assist its vital processes, devouring its children. Yet the conception of the selfhood of the state is not even carried through with consistency. The state is a self-dependent totality (p. 417), and yet it cannot be an actual individual without relation to other states. The interstate relations are necessary, therefore, to the existence of each state. As these states are spiritual beings, one would suppose that their relations were of spiritual and, a fortiori, of moral and legal character. Not at all. When we consider their relations their dependence on one another vanishes, and they are put above the moral law. Their relation is other than one of mere morality or private law. Private persons have a court over them. State relations should be of a legal kind (rechtlich), but, as there is no power above them to decide. what is right, we are here merely in the region of what should be. States may make a stipulation between one another, but at the same time stand above this stipulation, or, as the current phrase goes, their treaties are scraps of paper. As there are no judges, disputes must be decided by war, and the causes of war are quite indeterminate. The state must judge for itself what it will treat as a matter of honour, and is the more inclined to susceptibility (Reizbarkeit) in this respect, the more a strong individuality is driven, through a long internal peace, to seek and procure for itself some matter for activity beyond its bounds (p. 420). Thus there seems no moral limit to the restless ambition of this god. He should in some sense have regard to right in dealing with his fellow-gods, but he may be expected to disregard this recommendation when he is conscious of his own strength, and he need not even wait for any actual injury. The idea of a threatening danger is sufficient. Anticipatory wars are justified (p. 420). Nor is the state to be guided by any philanthropic conception in war. It is to think of its own well-being, the well-being of the state having a quite other justification than that of the individual. It is only the state's concrete existence, not any of the general conceptions that are thought of as moral commands, that can be taken as the principle of its action (p. 421). In only one respect has Hegel failed to anticipate the whole practice of modern Germany, and that is that he lays down that the relations of states remain in war and that in war the possibility of peace is preserved. It is not waged against inner institutions, family and private life. And this is why modern wars are humanely conducted. With this amiable inconsistency, in which Hegel seems to fail to interpret the spirit of his own teaching, we may take leave of the Hegelian state, having seen perhaps enough of it to recognize the germ of the colossal suffering of Europe and of the backward movement that went so far to arrest the civilizing tendencies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Dr Bosanquet follows Hegel in conceiving the state as necessary one unity among others, a conception which rules out the possibility of a world-state. "We have hitherto (p. 184) spoken of the state and society as almost convertible terms." Having said this, Bosanquet proceeds to a definition of the state. "By the state, then, we mean society as a unit recognized as rightly exercising control over its members through absolute physical power." Questions arise here as to the unit, as to the term "recognize" and as to the term "rightly."
First as to the unit. The limits of this Bosanquet admits "to be determined by what looks like historical accident." But he contends that there is "logic underneath the apparent accident." This so-called logic may be nothing but physical force. What logic incorporated Alsace-Lorraine with Germany? Bribery incorporated the Irish with the British Parliament. If it is untrue to say with Treitschke that force alone has built up states, it is equally false to shut our eyes to the fact that force has had a great deal to do with the building up of a great many states.
But there is perhaps a more fundamental point. Bosanquet regards the state as necessary a unit among others (p. 185). "A single independent corporation among other independent corporations." If it is of the essence of the state, as Hegel certainly thought and as Bosanquet seems to think, to be one among many, then society is always something wider than the state. Bosanquet thinks that the area of the state should be as great as is "compatible with the unity of experience which is demanded by effective self-government." In reality there is no such thing as a unity of experience as between the members of a state contrasted with the lack of unity as between members of different states. In the civilized world the ramifications of mutual influence are not bounded by a frontier, but the whole is potentially one society, and for many purposes the relations between corresponding classes of different states are closer than the relations between very different classes within the same state. Instead of defining the state, then, as society, we should speak of it as a society, and the difference is much greater than it appears. "A" society is simply a particular organization which may be of great value but which yet might be destroyed and leave society standing. The ultimate obligations of man as a social being are not to any particular society, but to society as such.
Next the state is recognized. We may well ask, By whom? Must it be recognized by all its members? If not recognized as rightly exercising control by some considerable section of its members, does it cease to be a state? And what are the limits, if any, of political obligation in this direction? The question seems unanswerable unless you refer politics back to ethics. A disobedient section will probably put forward certain claims of right which they say that the state that exercises authority over them ignores. If these claims of right are ethically well founded, then their denial of the right of the state to exercise control appears to be justified, and if not, not. So far then from the rights being derivable from the state, the moral authority of the state rests upon the validity of the rights which it asserts.
With this we pass to the third point, of the state as rightly exercising control over its members through absolute physical power. The state has absolute physical power in the sense that it can inflict imprisonment, torture or death if it has an army and a police force, but how far does it do so rightly? Here again we have a question that runs back to ethics. The states in the modern world which claim to be free owe much of their history to the protest of individuals, classes or churches against various applications of physical force which they have denied to be right applications. In a word, Dr Bosanquet's definition is an intermixture of moral considerations with questions of fact, just those questions which it is the business of philosophy to disentangle.
Dr Bosanquet goes on to say that every individual must belong to one state and one only because there must be some power which makes the ultimate adjustment of claims. What is the one state to which a Canadian belongs? Is it Canada or is it the British Empire? In all working relations of the Canadian's life it is Canada, and the Canadian law and Canadian custom with which he is in contact. To the non-British world he is simply a British subject and the relations of Canada as a whole are principally, though not wholly, adjusted by the British Empire. It may be said that the British Parliament delegated the bulk of its rights to the Dominion Parliament and can resume them. As a fact it can certainly do nothing of the kind, and the realities of the situation are only expressed by admitting a dual state, a dual loyalty, which under certain circumstances might give rise to sharp conflict. All this is very intelligible if we simply understand the state as an organization coming into being for certain purposes and capable of being adapted, expanded, changed, and even abolished, as may suit those particular purposes. In modern political structure the interweaving of such organizations is playing a growing part. And it is of practical as well as theoretical importance that this growth should not be checked by overdrawn distinctions between what is a state and what is not a state.
The limits of the state which can achieve the kind of individuality required appear to Dr Bosanquet to admit of simple statement. "The nation-state is the widest organization which has a common experience necessary to found a common life." We have already criticized Dr Bosanquet's conception of the limitation of common experience to the boundaries of any state short of humanity as a whole. That any philosopher should suggest that the nation-state is the last word in political development is surprising.
In the first place the identity of the nation with the state is perhaps not perfectly realized in any single known political community, while the divergencies in many political communities constitute one of the acute standing problems of most modern states. The only value of the term "nation-state" is that it serves as a mark of distinction on the one hand from the city-state of antiquity and on the other hand of the purely non-national empire, while it further indicates the kind of ideal to which the more fortunate political societies approximate and to which closer approximation is requisite if the problems referred to above are to be solved. These problems, however, are insoluble if the state is the unity on which Bosanquet insists. They are soluble only by recognizing detached allegiances within the state. Austria, for example, solved one of her difficulties fifty years ago by dualism. She may solve her present difficulties by trialism or possibly quadruplism. If her statesmen begin by saying that there must be one Austro-Hungarian state, to which Czech, Slovene, Croat and Serb owe unqualified allegiance, then the future for Austria holds no prospect but the continued menace of warfare.
In the introduction to his second edition Dr Bosanquet seems to have modified his view of the limitation of the state to the boundaries of the nation. "How far even the absolute power of any one group in relation to individuals within it may be interfered with by constitutional tradition or by a conflict of authorities... or by international courts or leagues, is a question of degree and detail.... There is therefore no technical difficulty in the modification of the nation-state towards larger forms of authoritative co-operation so long as it is made clear to what system of authorities every separate human being is subject in respect to the ultimate adjustment of claims upon him."
Finally, in his recent book Social and International Ideals, he carries the subject further by a discussion of the idea of the League of Nations, which has now become a matter of practical politics. Each state, we are now told, is "a member of an ethical family of nations, so far at least as the European world is concerned"— we can hardly suppose Dr Bosanquet intends to exclude America and other civilized nations -- and Mazzini's doctrine is accepted that each state has its individual mission, furnishing its specific contribution to human life. Fundamentally this mission is discharged by the right performance on the part of each state of its internal function, the maintenance of the conditions of a good life, and an entire chapter is given to the development of the thesis that, if each state would look at home and reform itself, there would be no conflict of states and no wars. As a remedy for war, this is a little like the proposal that each man should reform himself as a remedy for social injustice. It is quite true that, if every one would reform himself, injustices would disappear, and similarly, if every state would reform itself, conflicts of states would disappear, but what is to happen if one or two or three states cultivate their own gardens, while other states cast covetous eyes on these gardens? That is the question which exercises the supporters of the League of Nations, who find in the requirement for internal reform nothing but a pious platitude as long as security against external disturbance is not guaranteed.
Dr Bosanquet contends that beyond the state "there is no organized moral world," and that an organized moral world involves a unity which must grow out of a pervading will.2 The advocate of the League of Nations will reply that he is seeking to establish an organized moral world, such as may give expression to the pervading desire for peace. Dr Bosanquet answers3 that "though you may find several communities desiring peace and though they make a league to enforce it, their general wills taken together are not one will; that is, they have not in common the same object or views of life." It will be found that the real bond in a league of communities will be the bond of force, There will be a solid foundation for international unity only if there is a prevailing general will. This cannot be effected by setting up a machinery. The machinery must be a consequence, not the cause. Whether a true general will can in fact be realized in an area "exceeding what has generally been called the territories of a nation" is a problem for the future. The essential thing for the present is to insist that "the foundation of all sound political thinking is the supremacy of absolute values in the self-moulded life of the community."
The entire argument rests at bottom on an assertion of distinction in kind where there is only distinction of degree. The unity of the will in the state, except as an expression of a partial agreement for certain purposes, is, as we have seen, a fiction. The state itself frequently transcends what has been usually called the territories of a nation. The British Empire consists of many nations and many dependencies, but it has been shown to act together for certain purposes with great effect. Should it seek to unify itself for other purposes, it would be wrecked. Why cannot all civilized humanity then unite itself for some purposes and not others? Such a union, for Dr Bosanquet, is mere machinery. We may agree that without a will to back it, the machinery would be unavailing. But Dr Bosanquet himself admits the converse proposition that the will would be unavailing without the machinery. What are those to do who have the will and desire to cultivate it? What can they do but endeavour to persuade others to agree with them in setting up the institutions required to express that will? If they get their way, the will has won its first victory. It has so far established itself, and that is the first step to consolidation. The machinery, Dr Bosanquet objects, involves force, but the state itself involves force. In the procedure of the state we do not wait until every one agrees. We win enough agreement to make possible the application of force to the remainder who differ.
Dr Bosanquet's discussion brings out the contrast between the metaphysical way of regarding social problems and the way which is at once ethical and scientific, or, in a word, practical. The metaphysical method says that in the state there is a real self and beyond it there are only external and mechanical relations. The practical spirit says men are involved in innumerable relations with their fellows, which require organization because, if unorganized, they are left to anarchy and disaster. All sorts of different organizations are required to deal with the different relations of men. They must be united for some purposes and left free for others. One sphere of life may be controlled by one organization and another by another, and both organizations may in turn be brought as parts within some common organization for certain purposes. Where there is to be unity and where there is to be freedom, what purposes are to be assigned to one organization and what to another, these are questions to be determined with such wisdom and foresight as we can win from experience in practical affairs. The utmost plasticity is required in adapting the form of organization to the multiplicity of human requirements. What ruins everything is the conception of an absolute sovereignty that admits no independent rights, an absolute unity that leaves no room for divergence, an absolute demarcation between a state which claims the entire devotion of its citizens and all other political or social organizations which are conceived as mechanical, arbitrary and insignificant.
At the conclusion of his earlier work.4 Dr Bosanquet passes to the question of the morality of state action. The discussion is inconclusive and so involved that it is difficult to grasp the real upshot. He seems to have great difficulty in admitting that the state can act immorally, but not wholly to repudiate its possibility. When he draws a distinction between the state and its agents, he seems to open the door to very Jesuitical interpretations. First he asks the question, When an act is immoral, can the state as such really have willed it? He waives this, however, as a mere refinement, so that one does not like to press the point against him personally. But it must be remarked that for the state as one organization of human beings to will something unjust to another organization of human beings seems no more difficult than for a family to act under an impulse of collective selfishness for its own good against the rights of another family, or for a Trade Union to inflict unjustifiable injury on another Trade Union. It is merely the confusion of the state as an organization with the rational will which causes any difficulty in the matter.
Bosanquet finds it hard to see how the state can commit theft or murder. History has not found it difficult to conceive governments and statesmen committing theft of other people's territories, and when Bosanquet denies (on p. 338) that a country is guilty of murder when it carries on war, he overlooks the justice or injustice of that war. Is it not in all seriousness collective murder on a large scale to carry war into the bounds of another country without a justification which must not only satisfy the state that plans the war but an impartial tribunal? Between an unjustifiable war and an act of brigandage there is no moral difference. The difficulty is to fix the guilt of individuals, but this is because the responsibility is diffused. It would generally speaking be harsh to charge the citizen soldier, acting partly under compulsion, partly from a sense of loyalty, with bloodguiltiness; and yet the finer minds would, and do, refuse to fight in a quarrel which they are convinced is unjust. The Biglow Papers contain a sounder morality than Bosanquet's —
"Ef you take a sword an' dror it.
Go an' stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you,"
But the responsibility of statesmen is surely much more direct, and those who are actively responsible for bringing on a war cannot as individuals shift the moral burden from their own consciences. If a higher international morality is to be achieved, it is precisely by reversing the argument of the idealist. The individual must not be able to shelter himself from moral responsibility behind the state. But the actions of the state being judged on the same principle as those of individuals, every individual supporting the state in its action must be rightly regarded as assuming a personal responsibility in so doing. As to the state itself, it may be said that an intangible thing like an organization cannot be the subject of moral guilt. Nevertheless that organization may be condemned as a bad organization and it may justly suffer punishments in the infliction of losses or penalties.
By a curiously involved argument the private honour of the agents of the state is distinguished from the good faith of the state itself. Dr Bosanquet argues, so far justly, that the state is not to be blamed for the ill-faith or other misdeed of its agents. That is of course true on condition that the state does not consciously benefit by this misdeed. So much Bosanquet seems to admit, but he goes on to say that the agent is likely to go wrong if he mixes up the obligations of the state with his private honour. Precisely the contrary view must be maintained. If the agent of the state enters into an undertaking which, as an honourable man, he would not do on his own account, he is doing wrong and no reason of state justifies him. So low is the reputation of states that, for example, it was palpable that the personal respect for Sir Edward Grey's character was a greater asset to British diplomacy in the years before the war and in the events leading up to it than any word of any government as government. The private standard is above the public standard, and therefore it is by insisting rather that statesmen are bound to act as honourable men than that honourable men should act as servants of the state that we can best hope to raise the moral level of the state.
The cause of all the hesitancy with which Bosanquet deals with this question is to be found in a paragraph on pp. 324-5. The state, we learn here, "has no determinate function in a larger community, but is itself the supreme community; the guardian of a whole world, but not a factor within an organized moral world. The moral relations presuppose an organized life; but such a life is only within the state and not in the relations between the state and other communities." The smaller part of the profound error found in this passage is the mistake as to fact. Organized relations of many kinds do exist at present outside the boundaries of the state, commercial relations, religious relations, the more ideal relations of community of thought, literature, art and the rest. But the fundamental fallacy is the conception that morality depends upon the legal organization which is the distinctive mark of the state. Moral relations exist as between all human beings, if not between all living beings, that come into any sort of contact with one another. For their full and adequate expression these relations no doubt require an organized expression. If, where they are close and frequent, they fail to obtain such organized expression, there is danger of moral anarchy. This is exactly the position which has arisen among nations of the present day. Here we have relations becoming ever closer and more vital, but a failure in the attempt to build up institutions to express, to shield and to develop the moral requirements which those relations impose. The vice of the idealist theory of the state is that it denies the need and even the possibility of such transcendence of state limits. This theory, true to its fundamental misconception that the ideal is inherent in the nature of the existing order, proceeds to justify and apply the fallacy. There is no more glaring instance of that fallacy of philosophic idealism which has been expressed by saying that instead of seeking to realize the ideal it idealizes the real.
In his new volume Dr Bosanquet discusses the question anew and repudiates with some warmth the accusation of denying the moral responsibility of the state. One is glad to think this was never his intention, but in view of the character noted above of his earlier discussion, it is not surprising if he laid himself open to some misunderstanding. He now asks his critics:5 "Is our fault in saying that the community, which asserts itself through the state, is a moral being and has a conscience, or is not a moral being and has not a conscience? They seem to me in effect to say both at once, but only one can be true." The reply to this is that Dr Bosanquet has appeared to his critics to say both at once, that he has greatly exaggerated the moral character of the state in certain relations and appeared to depreciate it as unduly in others. This double and opposite exaggeration still, I feel, subsists in his new statement. The moral character of the state is exaggerated to the point of caricature when it is spoken of as "sole organizer of rights and as guardian of moral values."6 On the other hand, it is depreciated unduly in its external relations. Dr Bosanquet repeats the allegation that there exists no organized moral world, prescribing the course of duty to the state. It is not the mere absence of sanction that makes the difference between the state and the individual; it is more -- " the absence of a recognized moral order such as to guide the conscience itself."
On this I have two comments to make. In the first place, if the state is the conscience of mankind, the sole guardian of rights and duties, the moral individual in a much more real sense than the simple man or woman, how comes it that it has built up no moral order in its external relations? Here are states (Dr Bosanquet must in this relation admit the plural) in constant intercourse with each other. Each of them is a moral being with a conscience much more highly developed than that of any individual, yet on his showing these gifted beings have built up no recognized order to guide their consciences. They are left to anarchy and to do what is right in their own eyes, for this is what it comes to when it is said that the state must see in the moral world of which it is the guardian, the only definite guide in any difficult problem of its relations to others. It is a paradox that verges on contradiction that highly moral beings in close relations to one another should evolve no moral order and no common understanding.
Secondly, Dr Bosanquet depreciates unduly the partial moral order which has actually been established. I do not recollect to have come across the phrase "international law" in the course of his discussion, nor in fact do I see it in the index. There is a law as between states and there has been "Sittlichkeit" between them, very imperfect no doubt, yet not without its value. What has paralysed the development of international law and morality is, on the side of theory, just that doctrine of state absolutism of which the idealistic theory of the state is the most subtle justification. Every organization of men tends to become conscienceless because it forms an internal public opinion wherein men back one another in the pursuit of everything that tends to the interest or feeds the pride in which, as members of the organization, they share. But in so great an organization as the state the impartial opinion of outsiders scarcely makes itself heard and every plea for right or reasonableness is denounced as treacherous. It is the high duty of philosophy to look beyond this narrow standpoint and seek the universal view. When philosophy deserts its duty, who will fulfil it? International anarchy is not due to philosophy but to the passions of men, but the restraint which humanitarian philosophy has sought to impose has been fatally loosened by the sophistications of idealism.
Developing his position in his recent volume, Dr Bosanquet finds a double difficulty in the conception of "an organism of humanity" which he admits to be the natural extension of the idea of the social organism. The difficulty is (a) that humanity in fact possesses no communal consciousness whatever. Neither did England under the Heptarchy, nor France under the Merovingians. A common consciousness is a thing which grows, and Dr Bosanquet admits that the defect might be overcome. The idea of humanity is due in part to the Stoic philosophy and in part to the great world religions, and if it has never fully matured, neither has it ever perished. It has never lost its appeal to the greater and deeper thinkers and teachers and it has continually inspired the missionary effort of the church. The conditions of an effective unity of mankind today are at least as matured as the conditions of an effective German unity in the eighteenth century, or an effective French unity during the Hundred Years' War. And just as a farsighted and wide-minded Frenchman or German was he who realized the unity underlying differences and prepared the way for its growth, so the farsighted man of today is he who holds to the unity of human nature and the common interests of mankind and places them above all causes of quarrel. But (b) Dr Bosanquet finds no adequate expression of the higher human qualities in the aggregate of human beings. The valuable things are the possessions of particular communities and, "to put it bluntly, a duty to realize the best life cannot be shown to coincide with the duty to the masses of mankind." We do not need to be told that the achievements of ancient Athens and modern France are not shared by Hottentots and Kaffirs. But it does not follow that Hottentots and Kaffirs are outside the pale of rights and duties, and I do not suppose Dr Bosanquet would contend that they are. But to say this is to admit the fundamental principle of universalism, that all human beings, as human, are within the scope of the fundamental moral law. Special obligations arise in distinct communities, but these are developments of common obligations which man owes to man. To make them override these fundamentals, to push devotion to a group to the point at which it breaks with the common rule, is the sin of all group morality, of which the Machiavellian doctrine of the state is the standing example.
Finally, Dr Bosanquet imputes to the Comtists the mistake of identifying humanity as a real corporate being with the aggregate of human beings. That this is a complete misapprehension will be shown by the following passage by a distinguished Comtist:
"No one thinks that when he mentions the word England or France or Germany, he is talking of a ghost or a phantom. Nor does he mean a vast collection of so many millions of men in the abstract; so many million ghosts. Man in the abstract is of all abstractions the most unreal. By England we mean the prejudices, customs, traditions, history, peculiar to Englishmen, summed up in the present generation, in the living representatives of the past history. So with Humanity.... Is such a religion self-worship?... What explains the error is the belief that by Humanity we mean the same thing as the human race. We mean something widely different. Of each man's life, one part has been personal, the other social: one part consists in actions for the common good, the other part in actions of pure self-indulgence, and even of active hostility to the common welfare. Such actions retard the progress of Humanity, though they cannot arrest it: they disappear, perish, and are finally forgotten. There are lives wholly made up of actions such as these. They form no part of Humanity. Humanity consists only of such lives, and only of those parts of each man's life, which are impersonal, which are social, which have converged to the common good."7
The "Comtist" Humanity is mankind in so far as it forms a spiritual unity. To this unity individuals, races, communities contribute, Some more and some less, some perhaps not at all; and the contribution may be conscious or unconscious. Dr Bosanquet should find no difficulty here. The state is for him a real corporate being which has an aggregate of citizens for its members, some of whom contribute to its unity much, some little, and others, as individuals, perhaps not at all, while the contribution may in any case be conscious or unconscious. There are difficulties in the Comtist conception, but it is both more spiritual and truer to fact than the idealistic conception. More spiritual because it goes below the externals of unity and relies on the permanence and penetrativeness of the inward forces which, uniting man to man, have built up the fabric of collective achievement. It is, so to say, a unity of the church rather than of the state. More true to fact because it recognizes that the higher values, on which Dr Bosanquet insists, are not the achievements of one state or one nation, but of many, that the history of thought, ethics, religion or art, is not a history of separate communities but a world history. The cooperation, conscious or unconscious, which has wrought the best things in civilized life, is one to which races and peoples have contributed unequally, and some have not contributed at all, but it is one which far transcends the limit of any people or nation, not to speak of any state.
But below the idea of humanity, which he deems merely a confusion, Dr Bosanquet detects a darker and more dangerous aspiration. He "suspects" current ideas of the international future to be seriously affected by popular notions of progress and an evanescence of evil, which should "compensate for the wrongs and sufferings of the past." To the idealist this is sheer blasphemy against the Absolute Dr Bosanquet tells us that he personally believes in a nobler future, but since the Absolute is perfection and since evil exists, evil is necessary to perfection and its evanescence seems "altogether contradictory." Its disappearance is certainly a remote danger. The world need not be under the apprehension of a premature drying up of the springs of misery and wrong. In the meanwhile it is instructive to find that in the last resort the gospel of state absolutism and opposition to the League of Nations rests on the necessity of evil as a part of the permanent scheme of things. Dr Bosanquet may say that at any rate future good is no compensation for past wrong. In a sense, we must all agree, wrong done cannot be undone. Blighted and ruined lives cannot be lived anew. Yet, if it is a question of the depth and genuineness of the feeling that a better future for the world is worth the sacrifice of the present generation, the idealist may bethink himself of many a young man, German as well as English, who has found in this thought an alleviation of the stark horrors of the trenches and the near approach of mutilation or death. It is not a question of compensation, but of the final meaning of the painful struggle of human life. If the world cannot be made incomparably better than it has hitherto been, then the struggle has no issue, and we had better strengthen the doctrine of the militant state and arm it with enough high explosive to bring life to an end. At any rate the final question is laid bare. There are those who believe life can be made good. There are those who believe it is good enough already. There are those who see life as an effort towards a harmony, of which as yet we see only the germs. They are well aware of all the tragedy that is involved in growth and do not delude themselves with any dream of personal reparation, but they recognize in the evolutionary process a principle which is neither the blind whirl of conflicting passions nor the clash of egoisms, but the emergence of a spirit of harmonious freedom, and on this they rest, and with this they identify themselves. There are those again for whom the world as it is is the incarnation of the ideal, for whom change is secondary and of no vital significance. For them evil must be justified as essential to good, though a more self-contradictory conception than that of good maintaining evil for its own purposes cannot well be devised. To the former the turning-point in the development of harmony is the clear consciousness and the adequate expression of the unity of mankind. To the latter it is a source of apprehension because it would cut the taproot of those egoisms of state and nation, class and sex, colour and race, which engender the massive miseries of the world.
We have summed up the metaphysical theory in three propositions. (1) The individual attains his true self and freedom in conformity to his real will; (2) this real will is the general will; and (3) the general will is embodied in the state. We have seen reasons for denying all these propositions. We have maintained that there is no distinction between the real will and the actual will, that the will of the individual is not identical with the general will and that the rational order, which the general will is supposed to maintain, is not confined and may be opposed to the state organization. We have suggested that serious fallacies, as calamitous morally as they are logically vicious, are involved in the political philosophy which turns upon this conception. But it would be unfair to the metaphysical theory of the state to leave the impression that it has always received the kind of interpretation which we have here examined. In the hands of Green, for example, the notion of the general will is stated in terms which bring it into closer relation to the facts of experience, and the relation of the state to the individual is so defined as to approach far more closely to the organic conception of society. It is not my purpose here either to explain or criticize Green's Principles of Political Obligation, a work of great power and of some weaknesses, which could not be adequately examined in anything short of an independent treatise, but for the sake of fairness to Green and to living writers who have drawn their principal inspiration from him rather than Hegel, I would call attention to one or two points in which Green departs notably from the Hegelian model.
First and above all, the right of the individual runs through Green's entire argument. For Green, each man has to attain his own good, realize his own perfection as an integral part of the common good. If society has a claim upon him for the performance of his duty, he likewise has a claim upon society for the power to fulfil it. (p. 347) "The claim or right of the individual to have certain powers secured to him by society, and the counterclaim of society to exercise certain powers over the individual, alike rest on the fact that these powers are necessary to the fulfilment of man's vocation as a moral being, to an effectual self-devotion to the work of developing the perfect character in himself and others." The state does not absorb the individual. It is (p. 443) "a body of persons, recognized by each other as having rights and possessing certain institutions for the maintenance of those rights." The reciprocal relations of state and society could not be put better in a single and succinct phrase. The rights of the individual certainly do not exist independently of society, but they are conditions of its own best life and therefore of the best life of the individuals which constitute it, which society is bound to recognize. (p. 351) "Only through the possession of rights can the power of the individual freely to make a common good his own have reality given to it. Rights are what may be called the negative realization of this power. That is, they realize it in the sense of providing for its free exercise, of securing the treatment of one man by another as equally free with himself; but they do not realize it positively, because their possession does not imply that in any active way the individual makes a common good of his own. The possession of them, however, is the condition of this positive realization of the moral capacity, and they ought to be possessed because this end (in the sense explained) ought to be attained."
Where Green is less happy, as I think, is in his discussion of the rights which Society ought to recognize but does not. Thus he tells us on p. 416 "a right against society, in distinction from a right to be treated as a member of society, is a contradiction in terms." The truth which this sentence contains is that a right is a social relation just as much as a duty is a social relation, your right being something which I or some one else or society at large owes to you. But Green is apt to confuse the social character of rights with the recognition of rights, even going so far as to say (p. 446) "rights are made by recognition. There is no right 'but thinking makes it so. '" This is not consistent with his admission (p. 351) of "rights which remain rights though any particular state or all states refuse to recognize them"; a sense in which he has justly said a slave has natural rights. He gives the truth in the following sentence (p. 450): "They are 'natural' in the sense of being independent of, and in conflict with, the laws of the state in which he lives, but they are not independent of social relations." What is needed to make these positions consistent is merely to observe that social relations are not all conscious relations. The position is well stated in an early lecture (p. 353): "The capacity, then, on the part of the individual of conceiving a good as the same for himself and others, and of being determined to action by that conception, is the foundation of rights; and rights are the condition of that capacity being realized." Such a condition is something objective, independent of recognition. If any one can prove that some specific condition is in fact requisite to the realization of a good life, then that condition is scientifically demonstrated to be a right, though it may never have been recognized from the beginning of time to the present day, and though society may refuse to recognize it now. It is in this sense that all true rights are natural rights.
In all this discussion Green is on the track of the truth, but is obstructed by his idealistic presupposition that what is real must somehow be in the minds of men. Enough, however, has been said to show that Green's conception of the common good, far from overriding the individual, assumes his participation as an individual, and, far from ignoring his rights, jealously preserves them as conditions under which he is a free and rational being to achieve a good which is his own as well as the good of society.8 Nor does the general will in Green figure as the common self. It is rather an element in popular psychology, which Green finds in experience. Thus he speaks (p. 404) of "that impalpable congeries of the hopes and fears of a people, bound together by common interests and sympathy, which we call the general will." For Green it is the common will and reason of men, that is "the will and reason of men as determined by social relations, as interested in each other, as acting together for common ends." In these expressions we are at any rate in contact with reality. It may be said that they are vague, but Green might reply that so also are the facts which he is describing. That is to say, the actual extent to which men are swayed by common interests, the degree of their allegiance to the social order, the strength of the emotion prompting to obedience or warring against it are not rigidly determined, they fluctuate from people to people, even from district to district and from occasion to occasion. There is, he seems to say, a common good, which to the reflective mind is a definite conception and a clear ideal, but which is vaguely and partially apprehended by the ordinary man, so that it is rather the diffused sense of the common good than a clear purpose of realizing it which operates as a force in the ordinary life of society. These are propositions, I would suggest, rather in social psychology than in metaphysics.
When Green goes on to contend that will, in the sense which he has described, and not force is the basis of the state, it becomes clear that his conception of the state has to be shaped to suit his definition. But of course he admits the element of force and shows how it is fused with moral factors and in the end saves his general proposition by excluding political organizations based on power. (p. 443) "We only count Russia a state by a sort of courtesy on the supposition that the power of the Czar, though subject to no constitutional control, is so far exercised in accordance with a recognized tradition of what the public good requires as to be on the whole a sustainer of rights." Green's principle, therefore, is less paradoxical, perhaps also less important, than appears at first sight. If will not force is the basis of the state, that is because only that society is a state which is based not on force but on will. It would be unfair, however, to reduce Green's argument to a truism. We may fairly put his conclusion in this form. In every organized society there are other elements than force sustaining the general conformity to law, and in the higher organization of society conditions are realized in which force recedes further and further into the background, goodwill at each step taking its place. Only societies which have made some sensible progress in this direction deserve the name of states. This definition would seem to be justified by the comparative study of political institutions.
Enough has perhaps been said to show that in Green's hands the conception of the general will is not allowed to overwhelm the individual, nor to override the moral law, but that the state is thought of rather as a guarantor to the individual of the conditions which enable him to fulfil his functions as a moral being. It may be objected that if we go behind Green's philosophy to his metaphysics, we shall find ourselves involved in the old difficulties of the universal and the particular and once more find personality absorbed in the universal self. This may be true, but it is a criticism of Green as a metaphysician rather than of Green as a political thinker. His living interest was in practical life, the strength of his grasp lay upon the hard problems of social reform. He was at his best in working through practical issues to the principles guiding them. As he receded from these principles to the ultimate theory of ethics and metaphysics, his grasp grew weaker and his meaning is often lost in obscurity and confusion. Descending again from this misty region to the living world, we find the man for whom principles at least mean something which will affect the life of human beings, which will guide them in wisdom or mislead them in folly, will teach them to ensue the happiness of their kind or justify them in their pride and ambition, which are the cause of misery in society. In his political lectures Green never forgets that theoretical principles are charged with weighty meaning for the lives of men.
If we compare Green's account of the general will with that of Bosanquet and others, we shall, I think, arrive at the conclusion that several distinct conceptions are covered by this term which must be held apart if any such phrases are to be used at all without breeding confusion. (1) In the first place there is a conception of the common good, whether real or supposed. The common good is not the same thing as the common will, though if there were such a thing as a common will, it is presumably the common good at which it would aim. The common good is the well-being actually shared by the members of society, or conceived as desirable for the members of society, either, therefore, something actually existent or something which may be brought about. It may be regarded as realized or realizable in certain permanent institutions and conditions of life. (2) We may distinguish such permanent conditions from a particular object which may be conceived as a part of the common good for the time being, e. g., victory in war. This we may call a common aim. (3) Corresponding to the common good or the common aim there may be a will to maintain the common good or to achieve the common aim. This may be called the good will.9 It may exist in any individual, but, as existing in a single individual, it would not seem appropriate to speak of it as a general will. It is just the will of a particular man to secure a common good or a common purpose. (4) But, further, such a will may be diffused more or less widely in society. If the will of a society were so united that every one of its members willed one and the same common object, as e. g., if the whole society is bent upon victory in a war, there would be something which we could appropriately and unambiguously describe as a general will, that is to say, a will active in all the members of a society as individuals to achieve an object by their organized efforts for their society as a whole. (5) If, further, we suppose all the members of a society to understand and appreciate the permanent good of the society as a whole and to will the necessary means for securing it, there would similarly be a general will to promote the common good. We may allow a little further latitude, and if such a will is shared, not by the whole of society but by a majority, we may still call it a general will, but for this particular case no special term really seems requisite. The general will here is simply the will of the majority. (6) But this is not the sense of the general will which seems really to be intended by the phrase. To interpret Green's expressions we must think rather of a network of psychological forces making on the whole in a determinate direction, generally speaking for the maintenance of a certain social structure, and more specifically for the attainment of certain definite objects. This network of forces will in a free society obtain expression ultimately in the will of the majority, but it is a good deal more complex and subtle than the content of any majority vote on a specific issue. What goes to make up the bent of the public mind in this sense is not merely so many definite acts of will in such and such a number of individuals. It is the intense conviction in some, the relative feebleness in others, the tacit acquiescence in one man, the partisan feeling in another, the support of a certain section on one particular part of the issue in spite of indifference or hostility on other portions of the issue, a prejudice which buttresses up the case on this side, a weakness which paralyses opposition on another side -- a miscellaneous congeries of impulses driven hither and thither, out of all of which there will emerge through reams of controversy some tangible result. Will, which means the basis of clearly thought out action, is really a bad expression for this unorganized mass of psychological forces of every sort and kind that actually go to the making up of great political decisions. It will probably be true, with Green, to hold that within this congeries there is a permanent element partly above and partly below the level of consciousness, guided directly or indirectly by considerations bearing on the common good. There are, for example, people who will not put themselves about much for justice in general but will be shocked by some act of concrete iniquity with which they come into personal contact. Those who have not been troubled to oppose a bad law in principle find themselves irked by one of its applications. Conversely, the normal man who does not generalize about the social good will deal with practical issues often enough in the way which principle would require. (7) And lastly, though we have taken exception to the description of the social tradition as an embodiment of the objective reason, we have not of course denied that thought and will have gone to the building up of institutions. It is not, as we have repeatedly maintained, one thought and one will, but the combination of many minds thinking and willing, each by its own lights and each acting too often in accordance with its selfish interests. None the less there is a sense in which the institutions and traditions of society imply a certain social mentality. The acceptance of such traditions, though generally unreflective, cannot be wholly unconscious, and each individual as he accepts them fits himself into a scheme of life, not as voluntarily choosing that scheme as a whole, but as accepting his part in it. This acceptance affects the mind of each individual, calling forth one faculty and repressing another, and so modifies the mental growth. Thus the outer behaviour of society as seen in its manners and customs must have an inner mentality to match. So far as there is discrepancy a change will take place in institutions. To express this aspect of social life, we might speak of social mentality, provided we understand that the kind of unity which the term expresses is not the unity of a person or self but that of many centres of thought and will in interaction.
One or another of these meanings seem to be in the mind of those who use the term "general will"; but the real objection to the term is that in so far as it is will it is not general, and in so far as it is general it is not will. The common good is explicitly willed by a minority of thinking and public-spirited individuals. What is general is more undefined and perhaps indefinable, a participation in the variegated mass of psychological forces out of which the actions and development of the community emerge.
We may be asked in conclusion whether after all we are to entirely deny any further meaning and reality to the general will. Was it not admitted at the beginning that there is a sense in which society is more than its members, and is it not this sense which the general will expresses? We can understand the service of our country. Can we in the same way appreciate the service to an indefinite number of individuals like ourselves, and is that what we rely upon in patriotism or in other forms of social duty? Is the collective life of society to go for nothing, and can it all be resolved away into its constituent atoms?
The broad answer to this question can, I think, only be found in the qualifications which we introduced to the statement that the life of a whole is more than that of its parts. The proposition is true, as we saw, only in this sense: that the life of the whole is more or other than that of the parts as they exist or would exist outside the whole. The body is something other than the cells which compose it, for this simple reason among others, that the cells die when separated from the body and therefore rapidly cease to be that which they at present are. But that the body is other than the totality of the cells composing it as they exist within the body, as they function in unison with one another, is a different and, as I think, an untrue proposition. We move in this region between two poles of fallacy. Wherever we have a whole consisting of parts, we are tempted to say that the whole is something other than the sum of its parts, whereby our view of the parts is distorted and the effect of their interactions ignored. Or, in reaction from this view, we are tempted to say the parts alone are real and that the whole is only a way of regarding them or at best a superficial consequence of their juxtaposition in certain relations to one another. Both these theories are untrue. The first theory always and the second of those wholes which have any distinctive character of their own.
If I cast my eye idly over the leaves strewn on the lawn, I may count them and discover that there are thirty-seven, and treat the thirty-seven as forming a whole. This numerical whole is nothing to the actual leaves. As I count, three of the thirty-seven have run away with the wind and instead of thirty-seven I have thirty-four, which not having been moved are just what they were before. Such a numerical whole is the limiting case in which the parts are unaffected by the totality. It is just their arithmetical sum, no more and no less. If I gather the leaves into a heap, they are at least an aggregate that can be picked up and carried away. But still the aggregate has no permanence and its effect upon the parts is very small and very casual. Unless they happen to be somewhat crushed out of shape by pressure, the leaves will experience no change in passing into the whole and out of it again. If, on the other hand, I consider the leaf itself, even the dead leaf, it is something more than an aggregate. It consists of parts no doubt; but the parts are connected by definite ties. The leaf acts as a whole. If the wind catches a part of it, that part carries the rest along with it. Such a whole of parts in a determinate arrangement which for some purpose act together, is a structure which is in every respect as real and significant as the elements which compose it. What we call the one-sided analytic tendency is the tendency to deny this, to think the cells something more real than the leaf, which is thus contrived only as a certain arrangement of cells, and the molecules of protoplasm more real than the cells and the atoms more real than the molecule. We get rid of a bunch of fallacies incidental to this line of argument when we refuse to speak of more or less real altogether. Atoms, molecules, protoplasm, cells, leaf, all are just real or unreal. What we can say is that in many cases the elements are more permanent than the whole which they constitute. Certain physical molecules, for example, remain, I suppose, when the dead leaf begins to decompose, and it is this permanence, or supposed permanence, of the simple elements underlying complex structures, which has given the illusion of their greater reality. Conversely, in many cases the whole is more permanent than the parts. E. g., the living organism is always absorbing and excreting material elements. It remains while its components change. The components do not indeed pass out of existence when they leave the whole, but in proportion as the structure is organic they are profoundly modified. The cell does not survive the leaf, nor does the protoplasm, as protoplasm, the cell. Of any organic structure this principle will hold true. The parts will not survive the structure unaltered. Something in each may survive, but it will not be exactly that which existed within the whole.
Now in human society, as in the material world, there are many fortuitous aggregations, producing slight contact between individuals. The people who happen to be walking along a street at a particular time may be numerically conceived of as a whole, though they are barely modified by any contact with one another. A crowd is more united than this, though it has no structure, but for the time being people are affected by close contact with one another, and to that extent even a crowd is a unity and a reality, though not one with endurance. Passing on, we find all sorts of associations into which men can enter, affecting their lives in very varying degrees. When the effect is slight, we may well say that it is the individuals that are permanent, and if the society is broken up, it is just resolved into its component individuals, who remain very much what they were before. When we come to the deeper and more stable associations, this would no longer be true. The life of the family is an integral part of the men and women that compose it. When it breaks up the lives of those that remain may be tragically altered; certainly they are very different from what they would have been if they had never known a family life. The same thing would be true of a religious body, or of a state, or of any great movement, intellectual, social or political, into which a man throws himself. All these deeper associations are of the organic type. They express important elements, perhaps fundamental elements, in the lives which compose them, so that without them those individuals would be essentially other than they are.
If thus for a moment we think of the life or value of such an association in terms of individuals, we must in turn think of the individuals as contributing and consciously contributing to the life of the whole. If the soldier is told that to die for England means to die for English men and women, he might say that that was good enough for him, but he might also go on to say that it is not merely for men and women as men and women, but for men and women as continuing to lead a certain life, as maintaining and developing the tradition which is essentially England. This tradition lives in nothing but individuals; all of it that is incorporated in material, even the land itself, however much that is the object of affection, vanishes into insignificance apart from the humanity which it subserves. The tradition, on the other hand, might flourish as well on foreign soil, as colonization proves, and as was understood by William the Silent when he thought of transporting the entire population of Holland and Zeeland to a part of the world where they could maintain their life free from the empire-state which was crushing it.
Thus the character of a social whole is as much in danger of being misunderstood when it is resolved into its component individuals as it is when conceived as separate from them, as though it were not made by them. The true organic theory is that the whole is just what is constituted by the cooperation of the parts, neither more nor less, not more real nor less real, not of higher nor of inferior value. In saying this we must take time into account. All the parts strictly means all that have been or will be while the whole endures. When this succession of members is taken into account, it is true to equate the perfectly organic whole with the sum of its parts in their cooperative activity. But there is a sense in which a whole may be less, and a sense in which it may be more than its existing parts. (1) Wholes in general, even relatively organic wholes, may engage only a portion of the activity or capacity of their members. This is eminently true of human associations, none of which embrace the entire life of man. In such a case it is only the portion incurred in the whole that can be said to live or die with the whole, and only so far as that portion is concerned that there is anything of the nature of an organic union. One of the fallacies of the metaphysical theory is to identify the individual with one particular association, and to speak of his obligations to that association in terms only applicable to the sum of his duties and interests in all the relations of his life. (2) While some wholes are less, others, and particularly those which engage the deeper nature of men, are more permanent than their members. When we go, for example, below the state to the nation and beyond the nation to the great movements of civilization, we come to things in which the whole truly is something far greater than any of the parts that constitute it at any one moment. What concerns humanity is that such wholes should be maintained in so far as they serve its abiding interest. But this again is not, if we think it out, to erect the whole into an object district and opposed to those who have been, are or will be its members. It is merely to grasp its far-reaching extension, its deeply rooted continuity. The nation is all the generations which compose it as long as they maintain a certain unity and as long as the thread of causation remains uncut. More than this it is not.10
In what terms we are to describe the reality of the social wholes is a standing difficulty of sociology. They are, as we have seen, of organic character, yet, if we speak of them as organisms, we are liable to confound them with animals or plants, which they are not. Essentially they are unities of mind. Their component elements are minds and the relations into which these elements enter are determined by mental operations. Yet if we speak of them as personalities, we are liable to the fallacy of the common self. Social inquiry suffers from nothing so much as a lack of technical terms or of suitable metaphor to supply the place of technical terms. It has to use words derived from other orders of experience and conceptions elaborated in other sciences. What we must most eschew is any term suggesting a form of unity realized in some other whole than the particular social whole which we are considering. Such a term is "a common self" or "the general will," suggested by a particular unity which connects the parts of a personality and which is precisely the form of unity that different persons do not achieve and into which they cannot enter. Such a term as "mind," "soul" or "spirit," though not satisfactory, is more appropriate, if so used as to suggest a collective character rather than a substantial unity. We can speak of the soul of a people, meaning thereby certain fundamental characteristics of their psychology which we believe to be widespread and important in the shaping of their social behaviour. We speak of the spirit of the times not inappropriately as a summary name for certain moral and intellectual tendencies, and generally the term "spirit" is appropriate for the relations of finite centres of intelligence each thinking, feeling and acting with reference to one another, and so linked together by mental and moral causation, just as physical structures are united by mechanical forces. But whatever terms we use, the rule of logic is simple. Our reasonings must always stand the test of substituting the thing defined for the definition. We must avoid importing into our defining term the associations which belong to it in another capacity. If we keep this rule before us, the terms which we use to describe society will have a less disturbing effect upon the progress of sociology. Thus, if we speak of a society as organic, we must not think of it as a great Leviathan, a whole related to individuals as a body to its cells. We must regard the organic as a genus into which animals and plants fall as species and society as mother species. So considered, an organism is a whole constituted by the interconnection of parts which are themselves maintained each by its interconnection with the remainder. Its mutual determination is the organic character which any given structure may share in greater or less degree, a structure being organic in so far as this character prevails and otherwise inorganic. In its completeness the organic is an ideal. But actual societies have a touch of the organic character, some more and some less. It is on this character that social ethics depends. It is through this character that societies, like biological organisms, maintain their plastic adaptability, their power of adjustment to new circumstances, of repairing injuries, of resilience to strokes of fortune. It is by reference to this character that their development is to be measured. This principle is set at nought when society is so resolved into individuals that the character of the life which they share is left out of account. It is equally set at nought when its life is regarded as other than that which its members live in their dealings with one another. The happiness and misery of society is the happiness and misery of human beings heightened or deepened by its sense of common possession. Its will is their wills in the conjoint result. Its conscience is an expression of what is noble or ignoble in them when the balance is struck. If we may judge each man by the contribution he makes to the community, we are equally right to ask of the community what it is doing for this man. The greatest happiness will not be realized by the greatest or any great number unless in a form in which all can share, in which indeed the sharing is for each an essential ingredient. But there is no happiness at all except that experienced by individual men and women, and there is no common self submerging the soul of men. There are societies in which their distinct and separate personalities may develop in harmony and contribute to a collective achievement.