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THE METAPHYSICAL 
 THEORY of the STATE 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT: 
 ITS NATURE AND CON- 
 DITIONS 
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD: 
 A STUDY IN THE LOGIC 
 OF PRACTICE 
 
 ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL 
 JUSTICE 
 
 BY J. A. HOBSON AND MORRIS GINSBERG 
 
 L. T. HOBHOUSE : HIS LIFE 
 AND WORK 
 
THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY 
 OF THE STATE 
 
 A Criticism 
 
 By 
 
 L. T. HOBHOUSE 
 
 London 
 
 GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD 
 
 Ruskin House Museum Street 
 
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1918 
 SECOND IMPRESSION IQZZ 
 
 THIRD IMPRESSION 1 926 
 FOURTH IMPRESSION 1938 
 
 FIFTH IMPRESSION I951 
 
 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention 
 
 No portion may be reproduced by any process without 
 
 written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to 
 
 the publishers 
 
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 BY PHOTOTYPE LTD. LONDON 
 
DEDICATION 
 TO LIEUTENANT R. O. HOBHOUSE, R.A.F 
 
 My Dear Oliver, 
 
 If you can carry your memory across the abyss 
 which separates us all from July 1914, you will remember 
 some hours which we spent reading Kant together in 
 a cool Highgate garden in those summer days of peace. 
 I think by way of relaxation we sometimes laid aside 
 Kant, took up Herodotus, and felt ourselves for a moment 
 in the morning of the world. But it is of Kant that 
 I remind you, because three years later I was reading his 
 great successor in the same garden in the same summer 
 weather, but not with you-. One morning as I sat there 
 annotating Hegel's theory of freedom, jarring sounds 
 broke in upon the summer stillness. We were well 
 accustomed to the noises of our strange new world that 
 summer. Daily if the air was still we heard, as some one 
 said, the thud of guns across the northern sea, and mur- 
 mur of innumerable 'planes. But this morning it was soon 
 clear that something more was on foot. Gunfire, at first 
 distant, grew rapidly nearer, and soon broke out from 
 the northern heights hard by. The famiUar drone of the 
 British aeroplanes was pierced by the whining of the 
 Gothas. High, above, machine guns barked in sharp 
 staccato an(f distant thuds announced the fall of bombs. 
 
6 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Presently three white specks could be seen dimly through 
 the light haze overhead, and we watched their course 
 from the field. The raid was soon over. The three 
 specks drifted away towards the east, the gunfire died 
 down, the whining faded away, and below the hill the 
 great city picked up its dead. The familiar sounds 
 resumed their sway, the small birds chirruped from the 
 shrubs, and the distant murmur of the traffic told of a 
 world going steadily on its accustomed course. 
 
 As I went back to my Hegel my first mood was one of 
 -self-satire. Was this a time for theorizing or destroying 
 theories, when the world was tumbUng about our ears ? 
 My second thoughts ran otherwise. To each man the 
 tools and weapons that he can best use. In the bombing 
 of London I had just witnessed the visible and tangible 
 outcome of a false and wicked doctrine, the foundations 
 of which lay, as I believe, in the book before me. To 
 combat this doctrine effectively is to take such part in 
 the fight as the physical disabilities of middle age allow. 
 Hegel himself carried the proof-sheets of his first work to 
 the printer through streets crowded with fugitives from the 
 field of Jena. With that work began the most penetrating 
 and subtle of all the intellectual influences which have 
 sapped the rational humanitarianism of the eighteenth 
 and nineteenth centuries, and in the Hegehan theory of 
 the god-state all that I had witnessed lay implicit. You 
 may meet his Gothas in mid air, and may the full power of 
 a just cause be with you. I must be content with more 
 pedestrian methods. But " to make the world a safe 
 place for democracy," the weapons of the spirit are as 
 necessary as those of the flesh. You have described to 
 me times when your lofty world is peaceable enough — 
 above the Canal in the dawn, when all the desert 
 lies gray and still before the first sunbeam sets the air 
 moving, or alone in the blueness, cut off by a bank of 
 
DEDICATION 7 
 
 cloud from earth. When at such times the mind works 
 freely and you think over the meaning of the great 
 contest, I should like to think that you carried with you 
 some ideas from this volume to your heights. At any 
 rate you will bear with you the sense thit we are 
 together as of old, in that in our different ways we are 
 both fighters in one great cause. 
 
 Your affectionate father, 
 
 L. T. HOBHOUSE. 
 
NOTE 
 
 The substance of this volume was given in a course 
 of lectures at the London School of Economics in the 
 autumn of 1917. 
 
 I have to thank my colleague Dr. A. Wolf for reading 
 the MS. and making several useful emendations of detail. 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 page s 
 
 I. 
 
 The Objects of Social Investigation 
 
 II 
 
 II. 
 
 Freedom and Law 
 
 26 
 
 III. 
 
 The Real Will 
 
 44 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Will of the State 
 
 71 
 
 V. 
 
 Varying Applications of the 
 
 
 
 Metaphysical Theory 
 
 96 
 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 134 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 I. Hegel's Theory of the Will 138 
 
 II. The Theory of the Absolute 150 
 
 Index 155 
 
THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY 
 OF THE STATE 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 
 
 People naturally begin to think about social questions 
 wh«n they find that there is something going wrong in 
 social life. Just as in the physical body it is the ailment 
 that interests us, while the healthy processes go on without 
 our being aware of them, so a society in which ever5rthing 
 is working smoothly and in accordance with the accepted 
 opinion of what is right and proper raises no question 
 for its own members. We are first conscious of diges- 
 tion when we are aware of indigestion, and we begin to 
 think about law and government when we feel law to be 
 oppressive or see that government is making mistakes. 
 Thus the starting-point of social inquiry is the point at 
 which we are moved by a wrong which we desire to set 
 right, or, perhaps at a slightly higher remove, by a lack 
 which we wish to make good. But from this starting- 
 point reflection advances to a fuller and more general 
 conceptidn of society. If we begin by criticizing some 
 particular injustice, we are led on to discuss what justice 
 is. Beginning with some special social disorder, we are 
 forced to examine the nature of social order and the 
 purposes for which society exists. The social theory 
 which we reach on these lines is a theory of ends, values, 
 purposes, which leads us up to Ethics or Moral Philosophy, 
 to questions of the rights and duties of man, and the 
 means by which institutions of society may be made to 
 
12 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 conform thereto. The principles of Ethics are supreme, 
 or, as they have been called, architectonic. They apply 
 to man in all relations and to life on aU sides. They 
 guide, or are meant to guide, the personal life of man 
 no less than his collective and political activities. They 
 provide the standard by which all human rfelations are 
 to be judged. When, therefore, we study social and 
 political institutions with a view to ascertaining their 
 value or justification, our inquiry is in reality a branch 
 of Ethics. Our results rest in the end on the application 
 of principles of well-being to the social organization of 
 man. This is one perfectly legitimate method of social 
 inquiry, and as involving an analysis of common experi- 
 ence, leading up to or down from a theory of ends or 
 values, it is appropriately called Social PhUosophyi 
 
 Legitimate as it is, this method of investigating society 
 ( has its special danger. In pursuing the ideal it some- 
 times loses hold of the actual. In analysing the meaning 
 of institutions it may overlook their actual working, and 
 if we follow it too blindly we may end either in abstract 
 propositions which have little relation to practical 
 possibility and serve only to breed fanatics ; or in 
 abandoning the interest in actual society altogether and 
 amusing ourselves with the construction of Utopias. 
 In reaction from this tendency many students would 
 say that the primary business of social theory is to inves- 
 tigate the facts of social life as they are, the historical 
 development of society and its several institutions, the 
 statistical description of any given society as it is, the 
 endeavour to ascertain the laws of cause and effect which, 
 it is held, must permeate social life as they permeate every 
 other sphere of reality. In place of a social philosophy, 
 then, we have a social science, and it is held that by a 
 social science we can ascertain, measure and predict, just 
 as we can ascertain, measure and predict the behaviour 
 of any system of physical bodies. 
 
 Without touching here on the question whether in 
 social science prediction is possible or not, it is suffi- 
 cient to say that the scientific study of social life or the 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 13 
 
 endeavour to ascertain the relations of cause and effect 
 is not only a legitimate object but one which has in 
 point of fact yielded good results. Few would now deny 
 that the strictly scientific method has its place in social 
 inquiry. But objection may stUl be taken to the dis- 
 tinction between ideals and facts. To begin with, it 
 may be urged that the social inquirer could not if he 
 would lay aside his ideals. Whenever we are dealing 
 with social life we are dealing with a matter of profound 
 interest to ourselves. When the chemist wishes to 
 ascertain the temperature at which a soHd Uquefies, or 
 a liquid boils, he has in the end to read off a certain obser- 
 vation, and it is not a matter of profound human interest 
 whether the figure that he reads is 150° or 160° ; but 
 when a social student inquires how an institution is 
 working, whether a new law is attaining its object, 
 whether Trade Union activity is or is not succeeding in 
 raising wages, shortening hours or otherwise improving 
 the condition of the operatives, the answer to his question 
 is not only in reality much more dif&cult to ascertain 
 but is also one which stirs prejudices, confirms or refutes 
 presuppositions, is certain to be challenged by lively 
 interests. The diflftculty is not pecuUar to the study 
 of contemporary fact. History, even ancient history, 
 is written in a certain spirit and a certain temper de- 
 pendent on the personal presuppositions of the writer. 
 Human affairs are so complex and the interweaving of 
 cause and effect so subtle that in the presentation of an 
 historical development there will always be an element 
 dependent on the point of view of the writer and on the 
 selection and emphasis which may honestly seem the 
 fairest selection and the natural emphasis to the par- 
 ticular writer, but which may seem quite other to a 
 different investigator approaching the same object with 
 a different background of thought. 
 
 Nor is this all. Putting aside aU that may be said 
 as to the bias of investigators, it may be urged that the 
 subject of investigation itself is charged throughout with 
 the ideals, emotions, interests of men and women, both 
 
14 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE ^ 
 
 as individuals and as corporate bodies ; and, moreover, 
 the logic of those ideals, the very thing which social 
 philosophy investigates, the degree, that is, of their 
 mutual consistency or inconsistency, is a matter of pro- 
 found importance to their actual working. If two ideals 
 penetrate the same nation or the same class and those 
 two ideals are at bottom in conflict, the results must 
 show themselves in the tangle of history. They must 
 manifest themselves in divided aims and ultimately in 
 failure. If, on the other hand, they are coherent and 
 harmonious, then once more that result must appear in 
 the greatness of the success attending their historical 
 development. Thus, if we start with the most rigid 
 determination to adhere to facts, we shall find that ideals 
 are a part of the facts, and if we say that nevertheless 
 we will treat them as facts without examining their truth, 
 we shall find it hard to adhere to that position because 
 their consistency and coherence, which are intimately 
 relevant to their truth, deeply affect their practical 
 efficiency. 
 
 It may be granted that it is easier to distinguish the 
 philosophical and the scientific treatment of society in 
 principle than to keep them apart in practice. In prin- 
 ciple we call the philosophical inquiry that which deals 
 with the aim of life, with the standard of conduct, with 
 all that ought to be, no matter whether it is or is not. 
 The scientific method we call that which investigates 
 facts, endeavours to trace cause and effect, aims at the 
 establishment of general truths which hold good whether 
 they are desirable or not. The distinction of principle 
 is clear, but in point of fact the inquiry into ideals can 
 never desert the world of experience without danger of 
 losing itself in unreality and becoming that which the 
 poet of idealism was unfairly called, " a beautiful, ineffec- 
 tual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in 
 vain." The ideal, though it has never been realized 
 and perhaps may never be realized, must grow out of 
 reality. It must be that which we can become, not that 
 which is utterly removed from the emotions and aspi- 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 15 
 
 rations which have grown up within us in the actual 
 evolution of mind. The ethically right, Professor 
 Hoffding has said, must be sociologically possible. Thus, 
 even as pure theory, the philosophical view cannot afford 
 to disregard the facts. Still less can it do so if it passes 
 over, as philosophy should, into the constructive attempt 
 to reorganize life in accordance with its ideals. If the 
 principles which it discovers are to be realized in this 
 workaday world, this can only be by intimate knowledge 
 of the details of this world, by the control of events 
 through their causes, for the discovery of which we must 
 go to pure science. Social Science, on the other hand, 
 as we have seen, cannot ignore the elements of idealism 
 as a working factor, as one of the forces, if you will, 
 among the other forces, which it studies ; nor can it dis- 
 regard the logical consistency or inconsistency of ideas, 
 upon which their working force depends. Thus the 
 philosophical, the scientific, and the practical interest, 
 however distinct in theory, tend in their actual operation 
 to be intermingled, and it must be admitted that we 
 cannot carry one through without reference to the other. 
 Nevertheless, to keep the issues distinct at every point 
 is the first necessity of sound reasoning upon social affairs. 
 What is essential for social investigation, whether it starts 
 with the philosophic or scientific interest, is that in 
 putting any question it should know precisely what that 
 question is ; specifically, whether it is a question of what 
 is desirable, of what ought to be ; or a question of what 
 has been, is, or probably will be. These two questions, 
 though necessarily related, are no less necessarily distinct, 
 and to confuse them is the standing temptation of the 
 social inquirer. If the social philosopher has sometimes 
 thought to legislate for society without first informing 
 himself of the facts as to what is possible and what is 
 not, the scientific sociologist on his side is not innocent 
 of all encroachments. It is a standing temptation to 
 overbear questions of right and wrong by confident pre- 
 dictions, which in reality rest more on the prepossessions 
 of the prophet than on his insight into cause and effect. 
 
i6 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 It is the weakness of human nature that it likes to be 
 on the winning side, and just as in an election the argu- 
 ment most effective in catching votes is the demonstra- 
 tion that we are winning already — a demonstration which 
 might seem to make effort on that side superfluous — so 
 in the study of social and economic development it is 
 rhetorically effective to demonstrate that a particular 
 social change is at hand, that it is an inevitable conse- 
 quence of a concatenation of events that is bringing it 
 about whether we will or not ; and this demonstration 
 exercises, and is intended to exercise, a kind of coercion 
 upon our minds whereby we resign ourselves to accept 
 the change as desirable on the strength of arguments 
 which have never touched its desirability at aU, but have 
 proved, if they have proved anything, nothing more than 
 the probable effect of certain operative causes. Intel- 
 lectually, this method is one of confusion ; morally, it 
 js paralysing to the will. If there were nothing for us 
 but to accept the trend of events as we find it, then our 
 science would relapse into fatalism, and, as members of 
 the society which we study, we should be in the position 
 simply of knowing the course of the stream which carries 
 us along without any increase in the power to guide it, 
 whether it happen to be taking us into the haven or 
 over Niagara. 
 
 When we allow Social Science thus to persuade us of 
 the inevitableness of things, we are reversing the normal 
 course of science. For, whatever else may be said of 
 science, one of its functions is to increase human power, 
 and this applies to sciences which deal with human life 
 as well as to sciences which deal with inanimate objects. 
 When we know the etiology of a disease we acquire for 
 the first time a real prospect of controlling it. So it 
 should be in social affairs, but so it can only be if we 
 hold firmly to the distinction between the desirable and 
 the actual, if we grasp clearly the principles which should 
 regulate social life, and do not allow ourselves to be 
 shaken in our hold of them by any knowledge of the 
 changes which are actually going on among us. The 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 17 
 
 foundation^ therefore, of true social method is to hold 
 the ideal and the actual distinct and use our knowledge 
 of the one as a means to realizing the other. We may 
 pursue the two investigations, if we will, side by side, 
 for we have seen how very closely they are interwoven. 
 But every question that we ask and every statement that 
 we make ought to be quite clearly a statement as to fact 
 or an assertion of what ought to be, and never a hybrid 
 of the two. 
 
 This distinction would, I think, be accepted both by 
 the bulk of ethical thinkers and of scientific students of 
 society, but there exists a form of social theory which 
 repudiates it in principle. The foundation of this theory 
 is the beUef that the ideal is realized in the actual world, 
 and in particular in the world of organized society, not 
 in the sense already noted above that there are ideals 
 operating as psychological forces in human beings, but 
 in the sense that the world at large, and in particular 
 the social world, is, if properly understood, an incarnation 
 or expression of the ideal ; that, as one thinker would 
 put it, the Absolute is perfection ; or, as Hegel, who may 
 be considered as the father of this school, laid down, 
 " the insight to which . . . philosophy is to lead us is 
 that the real world is as it ought to be." ^ The theory 
 of society on this view is not to be detached from general 
 metaphysics ; it is an integral part of the philosophy of 
 things. Just as in a simple form of religion, the powers 
 that be are ordained pf God, so with the metaphysician 
 who starts from the belief that things are what they should 
 be, the fabric of human life, and in particular the state 
 system, is a part of an order which is inherently rational 
 and good, an order to which the lives of individuals are 
 altogether subordinate. The problem of social theory 
 upon this view will not consist in the formulation of 
 ideals as distinct from anything actual, yet capable of 
 becoming actual if once human beings grasp them with 
 a very firm determination to reahze them ; still less 
 can it consist in investigating facts in distinction from 
 • Philosophy of History, p. 38. 
 2 
 
i8 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 ideals, for the very foundation of society as a part of 
 the fabric of things is the ideal which it enshrines. 
 The problem will be neither ethical nor scientific. It 
 will start by a repudiation of the distinction upon which 
 we have been insisting, and its task will be to state the 
 nature of society in terms revealing the ideal elements 
 which mere facts have a tendency to veil from our 
 human eyes. 
 
 This, then, is the metaphysical theory of the state. 
 It is the endeavour to exhibit the fabric of society in a 
 light in which we shall see ic, in or through its actual 
 condition, as the incarnation of something very great 
 and glorious indeed, as one expression of that supreme 
 being which some of these thinkers call the Spirit and 
 others the Absolute. There is no question here of 
 realizing an ideal by human effort. We are already living 
 in the ideal. It does not much matter whether we are 
 rich or poor, healthy or enfeebled, personally aware of 
 happiness or misery ; nay, it does not seem to matter 
 very much whether we are just or unjust, virtuous or 
 depraved, for we all are integral parts in something much 
 wider and nobler than the individual life, something to 
 which mere human good and evil, happiness or misery, 
 are small matters, mere constituent .elements that, what- 
 ever they may be for each one of us, play their part right 
 well in the magnificent whole. Evil is indeed necessary 
 to good. It is a part of the Perfection of the Absolute, 
 and anything which would point to its extirpation as an 
 ideal is condemned as an offshoot of popular notions of 
 progress or ridiculed as a piece of humanitarian enthusiasm. 
 
 Such, then, is the spirit of the metaphysical theory 
 of society which I propose to examine in the shape given 
 to it by its founder, Hegel, and his most modem and most 
 faithful exponent. Dr. Bosanquet. This theory is com- 
 monly spoken of as idealism, but it is in point of fact 
 a much more subtle and dangerous enemy to the ideal 
 than any brute denial of ideahsm emanating from a one- 
 sided science. Against every attempt to construe the 
 world as mere fact which we cannot modify, there will 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 19 
 
 always spring up the reaction of human hope, of human 
 endeavour, of the deep-seated indignation at injustice, 
 the " rebel passion " of pity. If the scientific man 
 insists that as this world rose out of the whirl of atoms, 
 agitated by mechanical forces, so it will ultimately dis- 
 appear in the cold and darkness, none the less men will 
 say " Here are we, conscious living beings palpitating 
 with emotion, with feeling, products it may be of your 
 whirl of atoms, yet allowed meanwhile some latitude to 
 shape our lives, to avoid the worst evils and to cultivate 
 some fleeting happiness ; let us at least stand together 
 against this unkindly fate and make the best of life while 
 we can, not only for our short-lived selves, but for our 
 feeble race." Thus mechanical science stimulates at 
 least the etliics of revolt. But when we are taught to 
 think of the world which we know as a good world, to 
 think of its injustices, wrongs and miseries as necessary 
 elements in a pjerfect ideal, then, if we accept these argu- 
 ments, our power of revolt is atrophied, our reason is 
 hypnotized, our efforts to improve life and remedy wrong 
 fade away into a passive acquiescence in things as they 
 are ; or, still worse, into a slavish adulation of the Abso- 
 lute in whose hands we are mere pawns. These, it may 
 be said, are questions of general rather than social 
 philosophy, but the point is that to the idealistic school, 
 social philosophy is an application of the theory of the 
 Absolute to human affairs. As Dr. Bosanquet tells us,' 
 " the treatment of the state in this discussion is natu- 
 rally analogous to the treatment of the universe." The 
 happiness of the state is not to be judged by the happiness 
 of the individual ; the happiness of the individual must 
 be judged by the goodness of the state. It is to be 
 valued by the perfection of the whole to which he belongs. 
 In the conception, therefore, of the state as a totality, 
 which is an end in itself, an end to which the lives of 
 men and women are mere means, we have the working 
 model of an Absolute. For the thoroughgoing ideaUst, 
 all the conscious beings that live under the shadow of 
 ' The Prittciple of Individuality and Value, p. 3ii« 
 
20 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 the Absolute seem to have just as much or as little 
 title to independent consideration as the cells of fhe 
 human body. Now, for Hegel, the state is a form of 
 the absolute spirit, which is the essence of aU things. 
 " The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth." ' 
 For " all the worth which the human being possesses — 
 all spiritual reality he possesses only through the state." » 
 " The state is the spirit which stands in the world and 
 realizes itself therein consciously. . . . The existence of 
 the state is God's movement in the world." 3 " The 
 state is the divine will as the present spirit unfolding itself 
 to the actual shape and organization of a world " {Ph. d. R. 
 p. 327). " It is the absolute power upon earth " (p. 417). 
 "It is its own end (Selbst-zweck). It is the ultimate end 
 which has the highest right against the individual, whose 
 highest duty is to be a member of the state " (p. 306). 
 The method followed by this theory is not ethical 
 because it does not seek to find reasons for human con- 
 duct in any ultimate goal of human endeavour or in any 
 rational principle of human duty. It does not seek 
 these because it denies that the reflective reason of the 
 individual is the method by which truth about ideals 
 is to be ascertained. All true ideals are actual ; they 
 belong to what is called the objective mind ; they are 
 incarnated in the laws, traditions, customs of the society 
 to which we belong. Nor, again, is the method scientific. 
 It is neither historical nor statistical. It does not con- 
 cern itself with the varying forms of social institutions, 
 nor with the correlations of co-existence or succession. 
 It assumes certain abstract conceptions 4 and expounds 
 them dogmatically in general terms, putting aside the 
 appeal to experience. If actual societies differ from 
 the idealistic conception of them, so much the worse for 
 
 « Philosophy of History, E. T., p. 41. 
 
 » Ibid. p. 1.0 f. 
 
 3 Philosophie des Rechis, pp. 312-13. 
 
 < Not that they are admitted to be abstract. They are believed 
 by the idealist to be the very soul of reality (see, e.g., Phil, des 
 Rechts, p. 58). 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 21 
 
 those societies. Thus the centre of discussion is "the 
 state," as though there were precisely one and only one 
 type of social organization to which the name applies 
 and which can be described without reference to experi- 
 ence in universal terms. Dr. Bosanquet in his latest 
 restatement justifies this procedure. " The state," he 
 tells us, " is a brief expression for states qua states." ' 
 Now it may be perfectly true that there are propositions 
 which hold of states as such, distinguishable from propo- 
 sitions which hold of some states and not of others ; but 
 the urgent question for any science is how such general 
 truths are arrived at. Is it by induction — a comparison 
 of states, from which the points of agreement and differ- 
 ence may emerge ? No such inductive process is to 
 be found in the metaphysical theory. Is it by self- 
 evidence ? Is it, for example, self-evident " that states 
 represent differentiations of a single human spirit . . . 
 whose extent and intensity determine and are determined 
 by territorial limits " ? » Is this a proposition which 
 commands acceptance by intuition like a mathematical 
 axiom ? If not, on what evidence is it based ? When 
 Hegel asserts that the state must have a monarch to 
 complete its personaUty and that the monarch must be 
 determined by a natural method, and this is primo- 
 geniture, are these self-evident propositions ? Do they 
 rest on intrinsic necessities revealed to Hegel's intuition 
 or do they really do no more than clothe the practice 
 of the Prussian state in sounding generalities ? The 
 truth is that in social investigation large and unproven 
 principles are apt to be either mere generalizations of 
 customs or institutions which happen to be famihar to 
 the writer, or expressions of his ideals, or very possibly 
 a fusion of the two. Dr. Bosanquet thinks that his 
 critics, dealing unguardedly " with states " (positively 
 wandering off into the region of fact), " attribute to states 
 that which qua states they are not, namely, defects 
 which the state organization exists to remove." For 
 him the state is the power which, as the organization 
 • Social and International Ideals (1917), p. 274. ' Ibid., p. 275. 
 
22 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 of the community, " has the function of maintaining the 
 external conditions necessary to the best Ufe." If one 
 objects that many states maintain conditions that are 
 quite adverse to the best life, Dr. Bosanquet retorts that 
 we must distinguish a function from its derangement. 
 States qua states do not maintain bad conditions. It 
 results that the state is not the actual organized commu- 
 nity, but only so much of the organized community as 
 makes for good. This is to define the state by an ideal. 
 But elsewhere ' Dr. Bosanquet defines the state as that 
 society " which is habitually recognized as a unit lawfully 
 exercising force," a definition which would apply to the 
 rule of the Czar or Sultan. The second definition is 
 much nearer to common usage, which certainly thinks 
 of the state as an organization which may serve good 
 or bad ends, maintain good or bad conditions, but is a 
 state as long as it holds together and maintains law and 
 government. It is a violent departure from usage, 
 which at best would only lead to constant misunder- 
 standing, to restrict the term to the good elements of 
 any such organization. But things are still worse if 
 the state means at one time that which is actually common 
 to stable political organizations and at another the ideal 
 functions of a possible political organization.' Such 
 methods of definition are equally fatal to science and 
 
 ' The Philosophical Theory of the Slate, p. 186. 
 
 » It may be permissible to define a structure by its function, 
 provided the definition be unambiguous. For this purpose the 
 structure must only have one function, and we must know what 
 it is, and that it is invariably performed. If every government 
 performed the function of promoting the common good and no 
 other, there would be no harm in defining the state as that which 
 exists for the common good, but if, e.g., the state is in the hands 
 of a governing class which governs for selfish ends, it does not 
 perform this function. Do we then mean by the state the organ- 
 ization which sustains government or the organization which 
 sustains a peculiar kind of government aiming at a particular 
 kind of purpose ? If the latter, we must get another name instead 
 of the state for every actual organization in so far as it deflects 
 from our ideal, otherwise we shall never know whether we are 
 talking about the ideal world or the real world. 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 23 
 
 philosophy, and our general charge against the method 
 of idealism must be that it starts with and never corrects 
 the fundamental confusion of the ideal and the actual.' 
 In older days we passed by the Hegelian exaltation 
 of the state as the rhapsodical utterances of a meta- 
 physical dreamer. It was a mistake. The whole con- 
 ception is deeply interwoven with the most sinister 
 developments in the history of Europe. It is fashionable 
 to conceive German militarism as a product of the reaction 
 against a beautiful sentimental idealism that reigned in 
 the pre-Bismarckian era. Nothing could be more false. 
 The political reaction began with Hegel, whose school 
 has from first to last provided by far the most serious 
 opposition to the democratic and humanitarian con- 
 ceptions emanating from eighteenth-century France, 
 sixteenth-century Holland and seventeenth-century Eng- 
 land. . It was the Hegelian conception of the state which 
 was designed to turn the edge of the principle of freedom 
 
 ' The truth seems to be that idealists suppose actual states to 
 I be so good that the error is insignificant. Thus, Hegel interrupts 
 one of his rhapsodies (Phil, des Rechts, p. 313) with the caution, 
 " In the idea of the state one must not have particular states before 
 one's eyes nor particular institutions. One must rather treat the 
 idea of this actual god on its own account {fur sich)." For the moment 
 the reader thinks that after all Hegel has only been romancing 
 harmlessly about an ideal world. But he goes on, " Every state, 
 though one may recognize this or that fault in it, has always, 
 especially when it belongs to the developed states of our own time, 
 the essential moments of its existence in itself." The god, it seems, 
 is actually incarnated in actual states, though it seems to have 
 some little trouble in the flesh. 
 
 There is a case for restricting the use of the term " state " to those 
 political organizations which recognize the rule of law and some 
 measure of self-government. The present writer has himself used 
 the term in this sense (Morals in Evolution, ch. ii); but this still 
 defines the state by actual and assignable features of its organ- 
 ization, not by the way in which that organization performs its 
 functions ; and the term " state " is in practice used by many writers 
 in a much wider sense, as applicable to all communities that 
 possess an organized government. In the Hegelian state in par- 
 ticular, though the reign of law is certainly postulated, there is 
 no notion of self-government. 
 
24 THE. METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 by identifying freedom with law; of equality, by substi- 
 tuting the conception of discipline; of personality itself, 
 by merging the individual in the state ; of humanity, by 
 erecting the state as the supreme and final form of human 
 association.' 
 
 The direct connection between Bismarckian ethics and 
 Hegelian teaching was ably worked out many years ago 
 by a close student of the relations of ideas and facts in 
 the political sphere, Mr. William Clark, but it is not in 
 Germany alone that the Hegehan influence has pro- 
 foundly affected the course of thought in one form or 
 another. It has permeated the British world, dis- 
 crediting the principles upon which liberal progress has 
 been founded and in particular depreciating all that 
 British and French thinkers have contributed. Perhaps 
 it has been none the less dangerous because it has capti- 
 vated men of real humanity, genuinely interested in 
 liberal progress, so much so that in the hands of T. H. 
 Green the Hegelian theory was for a time transmuted 
 into a philosophy of social ideaUsm, a variant which has 
 a value of its own and does not lack distinguished living 
 disciples. But as a fashionable academic philosophy 
 genuine Hegelianism has revived, and the doctrine of 
 the state as an incarnation of the Absolute, a super- 
 personality which absorbs the real living personality of 
 men and women, has in many quarters achieved the 
 position of an academic orthodoxy. For academic 
 purposes, indeed, it is a convenient doctrine ; its bed-rock 
 conservatism is proof against all criticisms of the existing 
 order. It combats the spirit of freedom in the most 
 effective method possible, by adopting its banner and 
 waving it from the serried battaUons of a disciplined 
 army. It justifies that negation of the individual which 
 
 ' Above the state stands the Spirit which realizes itself in world 
 history and is the absolute judge of the state. There is here a 
 hint of a wider view which perhaps explains how it was that Karl 
 Marx could reach internationalism from a Hegelian basis. But 
 for Hegel combinations of states are only relative and limited {Phil, 
 des Rechts, p. 314). 
 
THE OBJECTS OF SOCIAL INVESTIGATION 25 
 
 the modem practice of government is daily emphasizing. 
 It sets the state above moral criticism, constitutes war 
 a necessary incident in its existence, contemns humanity, 
 and repudiates a Federation or League of Nations. In 
 short, we see in it a theory admirably suited to the period 
 of militancy and regimentation in which we find ourselves. 
 The truth or falsity of such a theory is a matter of no 
 small interest ; indeed, it is not a question of theory 
 alone but of a doctrine whosQ historical importance is 
 written large in the events of the nineteenth and twentieth 
 centuries. I propose in the following lectures to set 
 out the fundamentals of this theory and endeavour to 
 discover the processes of thought by which, in the judg- 
 ment of so many able men, the state assumes in the 
 modem world a position which earlier ages might have 
 given to the church or to the Deity Himself. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 FREEDOM AND LAW 
 
 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries estab- 
 lished authority came under criticism from many points 
 of view. The authority of the church was challenged 
 by the claims of conscience ; the authority of law and 
 government was opposed by the natural right of the 
 individual. Presently the whole social structure, the 
 notions of political prosperity and national well-being 
 were scrutinized in. the interest of the happiness of 
 individual men and women. It is not my purpose here 
 to trace the movements of these theories, nor to show 
 how in some forms they were brought round to a justi- 
 fication of the social order, while in others they issued 
 in a more or less revolutionary ideal. I call attention 
 only to the tendency to judge the state, the fabric of 
 law and government, the structure of social institutions 
 in terms of and by reference to the conscience or the 
 rights or the happiness of individuals. This tendency 
 is not very happily or fairly described when it is called 
 a tendency to put the individual above society. This 
 suggests a kind of "egoism, as though one man counted 
 for more than millions. It is more fairly to be described 
 as an effort to go back from institutions, laws and forms, 
 to the real life that lay behind them, insisting that this 
 was a life of individual men and women with souls to be 
 saved, with personalities to be respected, or simply with 
 capacity for feeling anguish or enjoying their brief span 
 of life. The danger was that the emphasis on personality 
 might be exaggerated to the point of depreciating the 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 27 
 
 common life, that criticism might degenerate into 
 anarchy, and what was valuable in the social tradition 
 might be thrown away along with what was bad. The 
 natural man might be endowed with none of the vices and 
 all the virtues of his civilized counterpart, and it might 
 be supposed that, if left to himself, or enabled to start 
 afresh without the incubus of the established order upon 
 him, he would build up a new life incomparably more 
 free and beautiful. The exaggeration of revolution is 
 the opportunity of reaction, and in the new world of 
 theory, partly reflecting, partly anticipating the world of 
 action, exaggerated individualism paved the way for 
 reconstructions. Of these the most far-reaching and in 
 the end the most influential was the metaphysical theory 
 which challenged the whole assumption, tacit or avowed, 
 of the critical school in all its forms, by setting up the 
 state as a greater being, a spirit, a superpersonal entity, 
 in which individuals with their private consciences or 
 claims of right, their happiness or their misery, are merely 
 subordinate elements. 
 
 The starting-point of this theory, reduced to its lowest 
 terms, is the principle that organized society is some- 
 thing more than the individuals that compose it. This 
 principle cannot be as quickly disposed of as some indi- 
 vidualists think. Every association of men is legitimately 
 regarded as an entity possessing certain characteristics 
 of its own, characteristics which do not belong to the 
 individuals apart from their membership of that associa- 
 tion. In any human association it is true, in a sense, 
 that the whole is something more than a sum of its parts. 
 For example, the whole can do things which the parts 
 severally cannot. If two men in succession push a 
 heavy body, they may be wholly unable to move it. If 
 they work together, they bring it along. Mechanically 
 the simimed output of energy in the two cases is equal, 
 but in the one case it will be dissipated physically in heat, 
 morally in the sense of frustration and loss of temper. 
 In the othof case it will succeed in its object and shift 
 the resisting weight. The association of the two there- 
 
28 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 fore has palpable effects which without the association 
 could not be achieved. On the other hand, it is important 
 to remark that the result of the joint effort of the two 
 men working together is simply the sum of their efforts 
 as they work together, though it is something other than 
 the sum of those efforts when not co-ordinated. Any 
 association of people involves some modification, tem- 
 porary or permanent, superficial or fat-reaching, in 
 the people themselves. The work or the life of the 
 association is something different from the work which 
 could be achieved or the life lived by the same people 
 apart from that association. But it does not follow that 
 it is an57thing other than the sum, the expression or the 
 result of the work that is being done, or the life that is 
 being lived, by aU the members of the association as 
 members. When we are told, then, that the whole is 
 more than the sum of its parts, we must reply that this 
 depends on the sense in which the " parts " are taken. 
 Further, we must observe that the statement, so far as 
 it is true, is true generally ; it holds of all associations, 
 not only of that particular association which we call the 
 state. Family hfe, for example, necessarily exercises 
 a profound indQuence upon its members. The family is 
 a whole which co-operates for certain purposes and in 
 which the various members lead lives quite other than 
 that they would do if the family were scattered. On 
 the other hand, the fanuly as it stands at any given 
 moment is sin^ply the co-ordinated or associated whole 
 of its members as they stand at the same moment. It 
 is an expression of their lives so far as lived in common 
 or in close association with one another. The family 
 in particular has no well-being, no happiness, no good 
 or evil fortune, which is not the well-being, the happiness, 
 good or evil fortune of its members one or more. In an 
 organized body, a profession, for example, a Trade Union, 
 a business, a factory, there is again a whole nimibering 
 so many scores, hundreds, thousands of individuals as 
 its members. In every case the members are in greater 
 or lesser degree modified by the association into whiqh 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 29 
 
 they enter. Of the Trade Union, of the profession or 
 business, certain things will hold true, which would not 
 hold true of the individuals who belong to any of those 
 associations if they did not belong to them. But again 
 in the whole there is nothing but the co-ordinated or 
 associated activity of the individuals which constitute 
 it. This remains true though the organization may be 
 permanent and the individuals changing. A college may 
 have for hundreds of years a certain peculiar character 
 and stamp of its own. The number of individuals pass- 
 ing through it and affected by it is quite indefinite. It 
 is not constituted solely by the number present within 
 its walls at any given time ; nor can we enumerate those 
 who may have come within its influence during the whole 
 period of its estabUshment. Nevertheless its tradition, 
 its spirit which seems to be lodged in no single individual, 
 is maintained by individuals, propagated ;from generation 
 to generation, sometimes perhaps broken by the influx 
 of a new type of character which fails to assimilate the 
 tradition which it encounters. 
 
 Thus, in discussing society, we are Uable to two fallacies. 
 On the one hand we may be tempted to deny the reality 
 of the socieil group, refusing to conceive it as a distinct 
 entity, insisting on resolving it into its component indi- 
 viduals as though these individuals were unaffected by 
 the fact of association. On the other side, in reaction 
 from this exaggerated individualism, we are apt to regard 
 society as an entity distinct from the individuals, not 
 merely in the sense that it is an aggregate of individuals 
 viewed in some special relation, but in the sense that 
 it is a whole which in some way stands outside them, 
 or in which they are merged to the prejudice of their 
 individual identity. Further, having reached the con- 
 ception of a superpersonal entity in which individuals 
 are submerged, we are inclined to look f6r this entity, 
 not in all the varied forms of associated Mfe which inter- 
 sect and cut across one another, but in some particular 
 form of association which seems to include the rest and 
 so to preseht itself as a whole to which the individual 
 
30 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 must belong as an element. This entity, idealist writers 
 have found in the state. There are thus two points 
 which we have to consider, first the general notion of a 
 superpersonal entity and, secondly, the identification of 
 this entity with the state. 
 
 We have seen that the notion of a superpersonal entity 
 appears at first sight to express a very obvious fact. It 
 may also appear to formulate a clear principle of ethics. 
 The conception of duty, it may be said, teaches us that 
 the individual lives not for himself but for a greater 
 whole to which his own claims must be subordinated. 
 An abstract individualism might regard the individual 
 as possessed of certain rights, but rights are a function 
 of the social group, since rights involve demands made 
 upon others either for positive services or for negative 
 forbearances. The rights of A impose obligations on B 
 and C. They are obligations incident to" and arising out 
 of social relations, and can only be justified if their fulfil- 
 ment is held to be for the good of the society — ^temporary 
 or permanent^ — for which they are prescribed. Thus the 
 individualistic conception defeats itself and leads us back 
 to the whole and the duties rendered to the whole by 
 each of its members. Now, in maintaining the superiority 
 of the whole to any of its parts, the idealist, it may be 
 thought, is merely asserting the superior claims of society 
 to any one of its members. But here again there is 
 an element of danger in the contrast between society and 
 the individual. Any one individual is but an insignifi- 
 cant element in the great society, and may justly feel 
 that his small interests must be subordinated to those 
 of the greater body. But we cannot thus contrast a 
 society with all the individuals which belong to it. 
 Ethically there would be no sense in the demand for the 
 sacrifice of all the individuals who belong or may belong 
 to a society to the interests of that society. The million 
 is more than the one, the interests of the miUion greater 
 than the interests of the one. The question is whether 
 the society of the miUion has any interests other than the 
 conjoint interests of the million belonging to it. If the 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 31 
 
 socielty is something other than the individuals, such a 
 position is arguable, and we shall have to consider it as 
 we proceed. What has to he said here is that it by no 
 means follows from the ethical claim that the interests 
 of the individual must give way to those of the whole 
 to which he belongs. That claim is satisfied by the 
 conception of the whole as the organized body of living 
 men and women. We are not speaking here of associa- 
 tions that exist to promote objects beyond themselves — 
 a conspiracy, for example, aiming at a political revo- 
 lution. Here the whole society of conspirators might 
 rightly judge that it were better for them all as individuals 
 to- perish than that the movement should be lost. " Que 
 mon nom soit fl^tri, que la France soit libre." This, 
 indeed, might be the motto not only of the individual 
 but of the association too. We are speaking of a society 
 regarded as an end in itself. If we ask what good is 
 actually reaUzed in a society other than the good of its 
 members, we certainly get no answer from the ethical 
 consciousness which bids us do our duty to others and 
 love our neighbours as ourselves. These requirements 
 are amply recognized by the conception of ourselves as 
 human beings placed among other human beings, whose 
 happiness and misery our actions sensibly affect. 
 
 The method by which the ideaUst turns the flank of 
 these arguments is to contend in substance that the 
 individual possesses no independent value, ultimately we 
 may say no independent life of his own. He is absorbed 
 in the organized political society, the state of which he 
 is a member. He claims freedom. The claim is ad- 
 mitted. E(J&€aiQm.Js.JJia.-stattiHg-p€>iBt of .the,.-.Hfig,eUan 
 philosophy of the state, but freedom in Hegel's sense 
 turns but to be conforroty with, the law „a,u.d custom as 
 iirtfeTpreted by .the.„!Eit]3i£aJ. spirit ^qf the particular society 
 to"'which the individual belongs. He claims the right of 
 judgment, he aims at anilional order of ethics. The 
 claim is admitted but the rational order is that of the 
 objective mind, and this on analysis turns out to be 
 the system of institutions and customs which the state has 
 
32 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 engendered and maintains. Finally he claims to be at 
 least himself, an independent centre of thought and 
 feeling, palpitating with its own emotions, subject to its 
 own joys and sorrows, but not even selfhood is left to 
 him, for his self is realizable only in the organized whole 
 in which he is a kind of transitory phase. Thus the 
 edge of the revolutionary weapon is turned, or rather 
 the hat is grasped and the point directed towards the 
 revolutionary himself. The freedom which the revolu- 
 tionary, the hberal, or for that matter the plain man of 
 the modem world, asserts is accepted and transmuted 
 into obedience to law. His demand for rationality in 
 society is granted, but granted in order to be attributed 
 to the existing social order. The very sense of person- 
 ality, instead of being checked and chastened by the 
 stem assertion of duty, is gently and subtly resolved into 
 a phase or expression of the general will. There can be 
 no finer example of the supreme maxim of dialectical 
 art, that the admission of an opponent's contentions is 
 the deadliest method of refutation. 
 
 It will be convenient to set out in briefest possible 
 terms the central points in the conception of society with 
 which we have to deal. The point of departure in Hegel 
 is his doctrine of freedom. Freedom is, in his view, 
 falsely conceived in ordinary thought as equivalent to 
 absence of constraint. That is a negative and, in the 
 end, Hegel argues, a self-contradictory idea. True free- 
 dom is something positive. I^: is self- determination. 
 The free will is the will which determines itself. The 
 sense in which the will can determine itself is this, that 
 it forms a rational whole or system of conduct, in which 
 any particular act or deliverance of the will performs a 
 certain necessary function. Such a system of conduct 
 is not achieved by the individual on his own account 
 but is incorporated in the law and custom of society. 
 Law alone is merely the external side of this system, 
 but law, developed by the moral consciousness of man 
 and worked out into the detail of custom that regulates 
 daily life and society, constitutes the actual fabric that 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 33 
 
 we reqmre and is the objective expression of freedom. 
 That which sustains this fabric of a rational life is the 
 state, which is therefore the realization of the moral 
 idea. The state is its owrL end^ a^nd Jtl^Jiigh^t^u±;^ of 
 ^J^^jn^ddvidual is to be a rnember of .Ihs^statc^Bfiyond 
 ' -the state there is no higher association and state^ 
 lB5ve noT duties^ tojone another or to humanity^ Butjhar^ 
 rise~and fall is the process of universal history, which 
 is the ultimate court of judgment before whose bar 
 they come. 
 
 In order to examine this very summary account, we 
 see we have (i) to consider the meaning of freedom. We 
 have to understand the process of argument by which 
 freedom is defined as self-determination and self-deter- 
 mination as the subordination of action to an articulate 
 system ; (2) we have to inquire into the identification 
 of this system with law and custom, and that will bring 
 us (3) to the conception of the state and the reasons 
 why it is regarded not only as an end in itself but as the 
 supreme and the highest form of human association. 
 
 In his theory of the freedom of the will lies the key 
 to the Hegelian theory of the state, of morality and of 
 law. This theory consists in essentials of three posi- 
 tions.' (i) The underl5H[ng principle is that freedom consists 
 not in the negative condition of absence of constraint 
 but in the positive fact of self-determination. Will is 
 freedom because it is self-determination. What then 
 does self-determination mean ? This will bring us to 
 the second position. The will is determined by its 
 purposes or objects, and we are apt to think of the object 
 as something external, puUing at it, so to say. So to 
 think is to abandon self-determination, and in reaction 
 from this view we think of the will as exerting free choice 
 as between its objects. But again freedom, so con- 
 ceived, is an uncharted, motiveless freedom, for if I 
 choose one thing rather than another, there must surely 
 
 ' I confine myself here to the essentials of the argument as I 
 understand it. A somewhat expanded statement of Hegel's view 
 will be found in Appendix I. 
 
 3 
 
34 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 be something in the thing which moves me or my choice 
 appears groundless and irrational. Here arises a 
 form of the familiar controversy between determinism 
 and free will which Hegel holds to be insoluble on this 
 plane of thought. The position {2) reached then is that 
 the will must be determined by its object, but that if 
 this object is independent of the will, an insoluble 
 dilemma ensues. This brings us to the third position, 
 namely, (3) that the object of the will is determined by the 
 will itself. Before asking how this could be, let us note 
 the reasoning. Freedom is understood to be self-deter- 
 mination. The will is determined by its object, but the 
 object is determined by the will. Ultimately, therefore, 
 the will is self-determined and free. 
 
 But in this reasoning there appears to be a circle. 
 How can the will be determined by its object and yet 
 determine the object ? To escape the circle we must 
 realize that the object of the will is not outside the will 
 at all, it is the will itself. At first sight thi^' seems peri- 
 lously near to sheer nonsense. How can the wiU will 
 itself ? The line of answer seems to be that the will at 
 any given moment and in any given relation may have 
 the whole nature of the will as its object. Thus, to 
 suggest an example, we might think of the consistent 
 Christian who directs his action from hour to hour by 
 the light of a principle running right through his life. 
 This principle he has adopted for good and all. It has 
 become the comprehensive expression of his will. So 
 in each act of his will it is his own will that is its object. 
 If then the will is determined by its object, it is here 
 determined by itself, that is, it is free. 
 
 Two lines of criticism suggest themselves. First, the 
 Christian himself would probably say that it is not his 
 own will but the will of God which he seeks to obey, 
 and whatever illustration we might take, the answer 
 would in essentials be the same. I must will something 
 that is not yet realized, otherwise I achieve nothing. 
 Even if I will to reform myself, the one case in which 
 I do seem to have my own will for an object, this means 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 35 
 
 that I, as I am now, set a different self before myself 
 as something to be achieved. And if I could attain 
 perfect consistency of action, this would mean that I 
 should consistently serve some comprehensive end beyond 
 myself and only to be realized by my action. The end 
 or object then is always other than the will as it is 
 when acting for the end. Will, like other acts of mind, 
 has relation to an object, and things that are related 
 are not the same. The identification of subject and 
 object fails here as elsewhere and with it the whole scheme 
 of self-determination breaks down. 
 
 The second criticism has a special bearing on the use 
 which Hegel makes of his definition of freedom. Grant, 
 for the sake of argument, that self-determination is some- 
 thing more than absence of constraint. But it is not 
 less than absence of constraint. Where and in so far 
 as an act of will is constrained, it is not free. What is 
 absolutely free is absolutely unconstrained. What is 
 relatively free is relatively unconstrained. Freedom in 
 one thing may indeed imply restraint on something else 
 — if I am secure in freedom to go about my business, 
 this implies that others ar6 prevented from hindering me 
 in doing so — but the thing which is free is not in the 
 respect in which it is free also restrained. To be free 
 in one part or in one relation it will have to be restrained 
 in another part or relation, but in that in which it is 
 restrained it is not also free. 
 
 Now in adopting a principle of conduct we may be 
 acting on our own motion in response to an internal 
 conviction. So far we are free. But the principle may 
 be such as to put heavy constraint on a part of our 
 nature, and if so, that part of our nature is not free. We 
 may be slaves to our principles, as well as to our impulses, 
 and in fact common experience tells us that there are 
 those who would be better men without their principles, 
 if they would only give their natural emotions free play. 
 But a life of uncharted impulses cannot be free, because 
 unregulated impulses not only restrain but utterly frus- 
 trate and destroy one another. But neither is a life 
 
36 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 of narrow principle free, because such a principle at best 
 holds a great part of us subdued, perhaps sullen and 
 unsatisfied.' In a word freedom for one element in 
 our nature, be it an impulse or a conviction, may mean 
 the subjection of the rest of our nature. If there be 
 such a thing as freedom for our personality as a whole, 
 its parts must have as much scope as is compatible with 
 their union. This cannot mean absolute freedom for 
 each part, for no one must override the remainder. It 
 means freedom limited by the conditions of develop- 
 ment in harmony, and by nothing else. If we suppose 
 a whole of many parts capable of a harmonious develop- 
 ment, and if we suppose this whole to be subject to no 
 restraints except those which it itself imposes on its parts 
 to secure the common development, then we have an 
 intelligible sense in which the whole may be termed free. 
 Now the self is a whole capable of a harmonious develop- 
 ment, and it may be termed free when it orders its life 
 accordingly. The principle of freedom then springs from 
 the nature of the self as a coherent whole. It is to be 
 distinguished from a principle cramping harmony of 
 development, even if accepted by our own consent. 
 Still more is it to be distinguished from one imposed 
 from without by suggestion, authority and perhaps 
 some mingling of compulsion. Now Hegel does not 
 draw these distinctions. Discarding absence of con- 
 straint from the idea of freedom, and concentrating 
 attention on the element of unity which the will un- 
 doubtedly introduces into action, he tends to identify 
 freedom with mere acceptance of a principle of conduct 
 and thus paves the way for its further identification 
 with law. He saw that freedom involved restraint on 
 something but did not see that it was restraint on some- 
 thing else, that which is free being in the respect in which 
 it is free necessarily unconstrained. 
 
 ' It may be said that it is the function of will to subdue nature, 
 but this is precisely to give it the freedom of a despot, and leave 
 the personality unfree. To do Hegel justice, no such antithesis 
 seems contemplated in his argumentt 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 37 
 
 Hegel's first position is now before us. / Freedom fori 
 him rests not on absence of constraint but on the accept- 
 ance of a principle expressing the true nature of rational 
 will running through and unif57ing all the diverse pur- 
 poses of men.^ The embodiment of such a principle 
 and therefore of freedom Hegel finds in the system of 
 right and law. Two terms here require some consider- 
 ation before the meaning of this principle can be under- 
 stood. By the term " embodiment " I have rendered the 
 word Daseyn. Daseyn in the Hegelian philosophy is 
 a term used in contradistinction to what we ordinarily 
 call a mere idea or bare thought of a thing, for example, 
 or to its mere potentiahty. We must not, however, 
 translate the word Daseyn by "reality" or even by "exist- 
 ence," as both of these terms are assigned to distinct 
 phases in the Hegelian dialectical development. We 
 may, however, think of the embodiment of a political 
 idea in an Act of Parliament or of a political principle 
 in an institution or a constitution, as giving what Hegel 
 would call Daseyn to that idea or that principle. 
 That being understood, we see in general the meaning 
 of the phrase that freedom is embodied in right. But 
 the term " right " or law also requires comment. Hegel's 
 term is Recht, and it would seem better to use the 
 German term whenever ambiguity is to be feared. Ac- 
 cording to Dr. Bosanquet it is the advantage of the 
 German term that it maintains in itself the intimate 
 relation between right and law. It may be urged on 
 the contrary that the very fact that German writers 
 use one term for these two related but quite distinct 
 notions is an obstacle to clear thinking in their Juris- 
 prudence and Ethics in general, and in the Hegelian 
 philosophy in particular. The consequence of its use 
 is that we begin and go on with the confusion of two 
 issues, which it is the particular purpose of social philo- 
 sophy to hold distinct. The one issue is the nature 
 of right, the foundation of moral obhgation, the meaning, 
 value and authority of a moral system ; and the other 
 the meaning, value and authority of law; and the final 
 
38 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 question of political philosophy consists of the relation 
 between these two distinct things. That relation can 
 never be clearly set forth if we use terms which imply 
 a~.confusion between the terms related. 
 ' But in what sense is Recht the embodiment of free- 
 dom ? ' Let us first, for the sake of accuracy, supply 
 a correction, without which we should do injustice to 
 Hegel, though the correction does not touch the essence 
 of the question. Mere law is only an external embodi- 
 ment of freedom, Hegel fully admits. Law is abstract, 
 general, and regards primarily the externals of behaviour ; 
 to complete it we want something which is on the one 
 hand more concrete, more closely adapted to the require- 
 ments of individual life, and, on the other hand, some- 
 thing expressing the inner acceptance of the rule of 
 society as well as its external observance. This con- 
 ception we find in the word Sittlichkeit, a term which 
 can hardly be rendered in English by a single word. We 
 cannot translate it " morality," because Hegel uses the 
 word Moralitat as something which is purely inward and 
 subjective, whereas Sittlichkeit is objective as well. Dr. 
 Bosanquet translates it by the phrase " ethical use and 
 wont," and we may understand it as the whole system 
 of customs and traditions as accepted by the normal 
 member of a society, as forming the fabric within which 
 he has to live. This system is, in Hegel's phrase, the 
 conception of freedom come to self-consciousness in the 
 world in which we hve.» (Restating our question there- 
 fore we have to ask, in what ^ense is the social tradition 
 an embodiment of freedom ? ) The examination of this 
 question takes us into the heart of the Hegelian concep- 
 tion of the relation of the individual man to society, 
 and this again will be found to be a particular case of 
 the relation of the individual to the universal, which 
 is the central point of the Hegelian metaphysics.N 
 
 It will have been noticed in discussing the Hegelian 
 theory of the will we have always to speak of the will. 
 We have not spoken of the wills of different men and 
 ? Phil, des Rechts, p. 205. 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW ,39 
 
 their relations to xme another. We have never used 
 the plural term. ( We have always spoken of the will 
 as though it were one subsitantive reality ; and this is 
 in fact the Hegelian viewA But in society there are 
 many wills and in obedience to law we conform, as we 
 suppose, to the will of another. How then can we talk 
 of the will as if there were only one ? The question 
 will lead us ultimately into the metaphysical problem 
 of the one and the many, for the Hegelian theory of the 
 universal underhes the whole issue. But let us first 
 set out the problem with more fullness and consider the 
 solution proffered by Hegel's most recent and most 
 faithful exponent. 
 
 At the first blush it must be owned it is difficult to 
 attach any clear meaning to the statement that the social 
 tradition is the actual or concrete realization of freedom. 
 Freedom, as we have been told, means self-determination. 
 Self-determination, we were further told, imphes deter- 
 mination by a principle as against mere impulse. But 
 even if we waive for the moment all controversies on 
 these points, it remains that if there is self-determination, 
 the determining principle must be a principle of our* own 
 choosing, an expression of our own character, the real 
 bent of our own selves. The established ethical tradition 
 may of course fall in with our desires, and if so, we 
 are aware of no constraint in accepting it, but socially 
 and ethically the question of freedom only arises where 
 there is a clash of wills. Suppose then that our will 
 happens to be in conflict at one point with the social 
 tradition, what are we to understand ? To say that 
 in such a case we ought to yield up our judgment and 
 conform is at least an inteUigible, though sometimes a 
 disputable proposition ; but that is not what is said 
 or intended. The proposition before us is that in con- 
 forming to the social tradition and only in conforming 
 to it we are free. It does not appear to matter whether 
 we ourselves fi!nd the rule which it propounds contrary 
 to our happiness or opposed to our conscience. Our 
 freedom liesj, it would seem, in the surrender of our own 
 
40 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 happiness, even in the stifling of our own conscience, 
 for we are free only as we conform to the moral tradition 
 embodied in and supported by the state. Freedom is 
 self-determination, yet freedom is realized only in the 
 submission of self to something which may at any time 
 conflict with all that is strongest and all that is deepest 
 in ourselves. The use and wont of the organized political 
 society to which we belong may, for example, at certain 
 points conflict with the teaching of the religious body 
 to which we belong, or it may involve injustices and 
 oppressions against which our conscience comes to revolt. 
 Now it is not merely contended that in such a conflict 
 we ought to surrender our judgment. That is at least 
 arguable. It is contended that in submitting ourselves, 
 and in this alone, we are actually free. We seem faced 
 with something like a contradiction. And, however 
 we define the state, this particular contradiction does 
 not seem to be resolved. For we may think of it as 
 essentially an organization of persons Uke ourselves. In 
 that case, in obeying it against our own will we are 
 simply under the constraint of others ; or we may think 
 of it as something impersonal, superpersonal, or, as 
 Hegel calls it, divine, and in that case we are obeying 
 an impersonal or divine authority. Even if we are free 
 in shielding to it, that would seem to be the last act of 
 our freedom. It is an abdication, a final discharge of 
 our authority over ourselves. 
 
 Now something like this conception of the relation 
 of freedom to the general will goes back to Rousseau. 
 Dr. Bosanquet ' quotes Rousseau as sa3dng " that who- 
 ever shall refuse to obey the general wiU shall be con- 
 strained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing 
 else than that he will be forced to be free." He goes 
 on to say, " In this passage Rousseau lays bare the very 
 heart of what some would call poUtical faith and others 
 political superstition. This lies in the conviction that 
 the ' moral person which constitutes the state ' is a 
 reality." If we follow the development of this con- 
 ' The Philosophical Theory of (he State, pp. 95, 96. 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 41 
 
 ception, we shall find the key to the difficulty before 
 us. Reviewing his examination of Rousseau, the details 
 of which we need not follow. Dr. Bosanquct writes : 
 " (a) The negative relation of the self to other selves begins 
 to dissolve away before the conception of the common 
 self and (b) the negative relation of the self to law and 
 government begins to disappear in the idea of a law 
 which expresses our real will as opposed to our trivial 
 and rebellious moods. The whole notion of man as 
 one among others tends to break down and we begin 
 to see something in the one which actually identifies 
 him with the others and at the same time tends to make 
 him what he admits he ought to be." This passage 
 really seems to contain the sum and substance of Idealistic 
 Social Philosophy. There is a common self, and this 
 is no metaphor. It does not mean a community among 
 selves because " the whole notion of man as one 
 among many tends to break down." It is a self 
 which is a higher unity than the legal or moral 
 person, and this self seems to be identified with the 
 real will, which is also, it seems, the self that one ought 
 to be. 
 
 We now begin to see why that which appears to us a 
 stark contradiction is seen in quite a different light by 
 the idealist. Our difficulty was that self-determination 
 cannot be the same thing as determination by other 
 selves, or by an impersonal state. The answer is that the 
 division between self and others dissolves away into the 
 conception of a common self and the division between 
 the individual and the state disappears in the conception 
 of a law expressing our own real will ; so that in con- 
 forming to law, we are submitting ourselves neither to 
 other persons nor to something impersonal. We are 
 conforming to our own real will. But if in point of 
 fact we happen to will just the opposite to that which 
 the law ordains, how can this be ? The answer lies in 
 the distinction between the actual and the real will. 
 We must give Dr. Bosanquet's statement of this dis- 
 tinction with some fullness. 
 
42 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 " It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him 
 in his notion of the General Will might be described as the ' Will 
 in itself,' or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a con- 
 trast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem 
 to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one's 
 Will ? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully 
 aware of, or which I am even averse to ? This question will be 
 treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter. 
 For the present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact 
 that often when people do not know what they mean, they yet 
 mean something of very great importance ; or that, as has com- 
 monly been said, ' what people demand is seldom what would 
 satisfy them if they got it.' We may recall the instances in which 
 even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to infer, from the inherent 
 nature of the will, that people do not really ' will ' something 
 which they desire to do at a given moment. . . . Now the con- 
 tradiction, which here appears in an ultimate form, pervades the 
 ' actual ' will, which we exert from moment to moment as conscious 
 individuals, through and through. A comparison of our acts of 
 will through a month or a year is enough to show that no one 
 object of action, as we conceive it when acting, exhausts all that 
 our will demands. Even the life which we wish to live, and which 
 on the average we do live, is never before us as a whole in the 
 motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a full state- 
 ment of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least 
 be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments ; 
 and this cannot be done without also correcting and amending 
 it so as to harmonize it with what others want, which involves 
 an application of the same process to them. But when any con- 
 siderable degree of such correction, and amendment had been gone 
 through, our own will would return to us in a shape in which we 
 should not know it again, although every detail would be a neces- 
 sary inference from the whole of wishes and resolutions which 
 we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented and 
 readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole 
 we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction, 
 it would appear to us quite remote from anythinp which we know." 
 
 Postponing for a moment any critical examination 
 of this conception, let us take stock of our position. 
 According to Dr. Bosanquet, then, there is underl3dng 
 the actual will, of which we are aware, a deeper real 
 will, which is the actual will reorganized and made 
 completely consistent or coherent. It is in fact that 
 organized system of purposes which we found in the 
 
FREEDOM AND LAW 43 
 
 Hegelian will, and in a later passage Dr. Bosanquet 
 adopts the Hegelian phrase—" the will that wills itself." 
 
 But now, if we grant for the moment this underlying 
 will and suppose ourselves to be free only when we con- 
 form to it, we still have not reached the connection 
 between the real self and the common self, which is the 
 state, in which the distinction between self and others 
 is absorbed and whose will is expressed in the social 
 tradition. The connection is explained by Dr. Bosanquet 
 (p. 123), where we are told,(" The habits and institutions 
 of any community are, so to speak, the standing inter- 
 pretation of all the private wills which compose it." 
 And this seems to be taken as the content both of the 
 general and the real will. It is an imperfect represen- 
 tation of the real will because " every set of institutions 
 is an incomplete embodiment of life." On the other 
 hand " the complex of social institutions " is " very 
 much more complete than the explicit ideas which at 
 any given instant move any individual mind in volition." 
 
 The essence of the position is now before us. Moral 
 freedom — we shall see later that Dr. Bosanquet candidly 
 recognizes the distinction between moral and legal liberty 
 — lies in conformity to the real will. The real will is 
 the general will and is expressed in the social fabric. 
 The expression is not perfect and admits of progressive 
 development, but it is in the main what we require. 
 Social tradition, if not the complete expression of our- 
 selves, is the fullest available to us at any given time. 
 The vehicle of social tradition, or rather the organizing 
 principle which gives it vitality, meaning and coherence, 
 is the state. The state, therefore, is the true self in 
 which the mere individual is absorbed. This is the 
 comer stone of moral and political obligation. Briefly, 
 we are morally free when our actions conform to our 
 ^MLHivill, our real will is the general will^ and.the^ general 
 will is most fully embodied in the state. These are the 
 governing positions of the metaphysical theory which 
 we have to examine. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE REAL WILL 
 
 (a) The steps by which the conception of the real will is 
 reached by Dr. Bosanquet are contained in the passage 
 quoted in the last lecture, and may be summ.arized 
 thus. ( What we will from moment to moment is called 
 our actual jpvill. This actual will is always incomplete 
 and dfteiT contradictory and inharmonious. To get at 
 a full statement of what we will it would have to be 
 corrected by (a) what we want at all other moments, and 
 (6) by what others want. If this correction were carried 
 far enough, our " own will would return to us in a shape 
 in which we should not know it again." Yet the whole 
 process would only have been a logical series of inferences 
 from the whole of the wishes and resolutions which we 
 actually cherish. And if, going further than this, we 
 suppose criticism carried to a point at which it would 
 achieve a life ideally without contradiction, then the 
 will to such a life " would appear to us quite remote 
 from anything which we know." Remote as it is, this 
 is what Dr. Bosanquet seems to mean by the real will. 
 We are then left with the paradox that our real will may 
 be something which we never really will because we do 
 not even know it and could not recognize it if it were 
 set before us. 
 
 What is the explanation of this paradox ? How does 
 Bosanquet arrive at it ? (i) The justification appears 
 to be that the objects which we set before us, at 
 which we consciously aim, are not always what we 
 really want. They do not really satisfy us. This is a 
 
THE REAL WILL 45 
 
 form of words expressing of course a perfectly well-known 
 truth. A man's nature is constantly driving him on to 
 ends which he imperfectly appreciates and the concrete 
 shapes which these ends take are often quite unsatis- 
 factory. They give illusions of desirabiUty which cheat 
 him on attaining them. None the less, so far as he really 
 chooses them that choice is for the time being his real 
 will, in the true sense of real as that which is not merely 
 supposed to be but is. Moreover, the fact that he so 
 chooses them and makes a mistake in doing so is a real 
 limitation of his will. The illusoriness of the will is pre- 
 cisely as hard a fact, as stubborn a reality, as the persistent 
 background of want and unrest, which is the other side 
 of the matter. The man's will is in short just what it 
 is with all its limitations and not what it might be if 
 these limitations were removed. It may be suggested, 
 and this is what Bosanquet seems to mean, that logically 
 a man must be taken to will all that his actual will impUes. 
 But this is quite fallacious. On the contrary, show me a 
 consequence following from an act of my will, which I 
 have not yet seen, and it is quite possible that I may 
 recoil from it. In any case the act seen with fresh impli- 
 cations is a different act, the will which chooses it a 
 different will. We may reasonably say that the man 
 who has gone through the long process of criticism 
 and judgment described by Bosanquet in the evolution 
 of the real will has become in that process a very 
 different man. 
 
 But there is a more fundamental objection to the term 
 "real will." Strictly there is no part in me which is more 
 real than any other part. There are elements in me 
 which are more permanent, and if the self is permanent, 
 there are, let us say, moods or actions which really 
 belong to myself more than others do, but one mood 
 is not more real a mood or one act more real an act than 
 another. The term " Real "is in fact in such passages as 
 these used rhetorically, that is, in a way which does not 
 distinguish between its adjectival meaning, connecting a 
 particular phase of myself with myself as a whole, and 
 
46 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 its substantival meaning, in which the term " Reality " is 
 something which must either be simply asserted or simply 
 denied, and there is no more or less. A particular emotion 
 is either something which I have and then it is real, 
 whether permanent or transitory, reasonable or un- 
 reasonable ; or it is something which, say, you falsely 
 attribute to me and then it is unreal. For the contrast 
 between the real and the unreal then should be substi- 
 tuted the contrast between the self as it is permanently 
 constituted and the self as it acts in some transitory 
 excitement. 
 
 (2) The real will then, if it means anything, means 
 the permanent underlying nature of any one of us, but 
 this again does not mean our nature as it might be if 
 we were spiritually born again, transformed by no matter 
 what process of rational reflection, hortatory suggestion 
 or moral and emotional re-orientation. This has a most 
 important bearing on our second position. (i)r. Bosan- 
 quet's assumption is that the real -will is in fact 
 identical with the general will. The supposed ground is 
 that the real will must be one which would be perfectly 
 harmonious with itself. This is assumed to involve a 
 harmony with other wills. The assumption begs the 
 principal question of Ethics, but let it pass for the moment. 
 Let us agree that the perfectly rationalized will involves 
 a harmony of self and others. What ground is there 
 for assuming that this harmony would express the true 
 permanent nature of John Jones ? John Jones, if you 
 unrolled before him the life which you expected him to 
 lead as a rational being, might repel it with scorn. Ho 
 might say, if articulate enough, that it makes no room 
 for certain elements which he finds very real in him, 
 his passions, his physical appetites, his desires to get the 
 better of others. How arc you to prove to him that 
 these are not i-eal parts of himself ? The answer seems, 
 to be that if you carry John Jones through the pro- 
 cess of rational criticism, he will discover elements of 
 contradiction in these warring desires. As long as you 
 present this to him as an intellectual proposition, how- 
 
THE REAL WILL 47 
 
 ever, John Jones will reply, " Consistency be hanged ! 
 I will have my life in parts, each as good as I can make 
 it. It is these that are the true John Jones." To this 
 again the only reply available seems to be that the process 
 of revealing the true rational harmony to John Jones 
 cannot be an intellectual process merely, it must be one 
 which touches his emotions, his will itself. But what 
 is this but to admit that the true John Jones must 
 undergo a change ? If he is to be formed into a rational 
 will, he must be transformed. I would be far from 
 densdng that every human being is capable of such refor- 
 mation. I insist only that it is a reformation which is 
 a transformation and that the will, which Bosanquet 
 calls real and which I would call rational, harmonious 
 or simply good, is not real in the average man, nor even 
 in its completeness in the best of men.* Bosanquet's 
 
 ' In the discussion of the criminal (pp. 226, etc.) there are some 
 instructive remarks, illustrating the nature of the real will. 
 Bosanquet says justly that if an uneducated man were told that 
 " in being punished for an assault he was realizing his own will, 
 he would think it cruel nonsense." Some who are not the criminal 
 might also think it nonsense ; and the only reason why they should 
 not think it assigned by Bosanquet is (a) that the criminal would 
 quite well understand that he was being served, as he would say, 
 in the same way as somebody else would be served who had dqne 
 the same thing. (6) That the punishment is the reaction on the 
 criminal of a system of rights to which he is a party. As to (a) 
 the essential difference between the criminal and the good will 
 is that while the criminal may be prepared to judge others, he 
 makes exceptions in favour of himself. Very often he cannot 
 see the identity of his act with another which he condemns and 
 even if he can see it, so far as he is criminal, his attitude is " I 
 don't care." If an acute dialectician were to argue with him, 
 he would no doubt entangle him in inconsistencies and show that 
 if he were a reasonable man, and if he admitted universal rules 
 applying to himself and others, he would not be a criminal. But 
 if this argument is to have effect, it must not only convince the 
 man's intelligence but convert his will. In order genuinely to 
 condemn himself, the criminal must therefore become another 
 man than that which he in fact is. And we see very clearly from 
 this instance that the good, rational or social will imputed to the 
 criminal as his real will is precisely the will that the criminal, as 
 criminal, really does not possess. The fallacy consists in describ- 
 
48 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 own description of course shows he is perfectly aware 
 of this, yet he confuses the whole issue by the use of the 
 adjeqtive "real." It is misleading to contrast real with 
 transitory, trivial aims. It is not merely one's super- 
 ficial or casual interests that clash with others and exhibit 
 contradiction with one another so that they interfere 
 with the best life, it is also the deepest passions and some- 
 times the most fervid conscience. A man may feel, and 
 the feeling may be no illusion, that a personal passion 
 goes to the very foundation of his being, and yet the 
 passion may be lawless or it may collide with the entire 
 bent of his life in other directions, his devotion to public 
 duty, for example, or perhaps deeprooted obligations of 
 family and friendship. If the real self means that 
 which goes deep, we cannot deny that it contains possi- 
 biUties of contradiction far more serious than the colHsion 
 between permanent interest and passing desire. 
 
 There is conceivable a will which is perfectly rational 
 and harmonious in all its deliverances. There is con- 
 ceivable a system of wills so harmonizing with themselves 
 
 ing as a real will 'sometliing which a logician regards as being 
 implied in the actual will of the criminal. This implication rests 
 on some principle of impartiality which the logician may have 
 very good grounds for maintaining ; but this is precisely the 
 principle which the criminal, as criminal, either ignores or 
 definitely rejects. As to (6), at bottom the same analysis apphes. 
 The criminal acquiesces in the system as far as he chooses, as far 
 as he finds it suits him, or perhaps as far as he is unable to resist 
 it, but, qua criminal, does not in the least care for the incon- 
 sistency, as a rational man would judge it to be, involved in his 
 departure from the system where that departure suits him better. 
 In brief, the murderer does not really want himself to be hanged 
 unless he has repented and ceased to be the man that he was when 
 he committed the murder. 
 
 It must be added here that the conception of punishment as 
 expressing the will of the offender has a sinister application to 
 the rebel. It may be said that the rebel has accepted the social 
 system and thereby the punishment which will follow upon him 
 when he comes to challenge it. From the rebel's point of view 
 the answer may be that he never willingly accepted the social 
 system as a whole but found himself involved in it and could 
 not react against it until the moment for rebellion had arrived. 
 
THE REAL WILL 49 
 
 and with one another ; such a perfect harmony we may 
 legitimately speak of as the ideally rational life and the 
 ideally good life and, as such, may contrast it with any 
 actual life which is imperfect in these respects. Again, 
 we may grant that there is something real within us 
 which answers to the conception of such a life, and some- 
 thing real within any society of human beings which, 
 in a sense, moves us towards such a life. At any rate, 
 from the nature of the case contradiction tends to defeat 
 itself and harmony to fructify. Thus by continual trial 
 and error society moves on. Unfortunately the inhar- 
 monious elements are equally real and the disharmonies 
 are not merely trivial, transitory, superficial, but rooted 
 in the structure of the self and^what is almost as im- 
 portant, in the social structure. / Every group of human 
 beings acquires a corporate life and with it only too 
 probably a collective selfishness, which over long periods 
 may hold the development of other groups in arrest. The 
 contrast is between the rational harmonious good and the 
 irrational conflicting bad. When this contrast is con- 
 fused with the contrast between the real and the unreal 
 the problem is stated in wrong terms and does not admit 
 of solution.^ The peculiar vice of this statement is that, 
 in laying down a certain kind of life as expressing the 
 real will of the individual, the ground is prepared for the 
 argument that in the compulsion of the individual to 
 lead such a hfe there is no interference with his real will. 
 He^is supposed to be merely unable to judge for himself. 
 Thiis, in principle, there is no limitation to restraints 
 upon the individual, no core of freedom which collective 
 action should not touch. And yet it must be plain that 
 no actual human being, or association of human beings, 
 knows what the real will is, for it is admitted that the 
 process of eliciting it is so roundabout and involved that 
 a man would not recognize his real will if it was put before 
 him. Why not then admit that it is not real but ideal — 
 an ideal which is beyond human nature though it may 
 be a legitimate object of human endeavour ? 
 
 (b) The General Will. If for the " real " we write the 
 
 4 
 
50 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 ideal or rational will, we have next to ask whether this 
 would be a general will. We may grant that if the will 
 in you or me were made completely rational, it would 
 accept principles upon which we should agree. Thus, 
 in all rational wills there would be a qualitative identity. 
 We should so far be like one another in our fundamental 
 attitude towards life and conduct. But when we pass 
 from the conception of like persons or like selves to a 
 corporate person or a common self, there is an inevitable 
 transition from qualitative sameness to the sameness of 
 continuity and numerical unity. The assumptions are 
 (i) There is in me a real self, my real will, which is opposed 
 to what I very often am. (2) This real will is what I 
 ought to be as opposed to what I very often am. (3) There 
 is in you a real will and in every other member of society 
 a real will. All these real wills are what you and every 
 other member of society ought to be. In quality and 
 character these real wills are indistinguishable. They are 
 therefore the same. (4) This sameness constitutes of all 
 the real wills together one self. But the kind of unity 
 involved in what is called qualitative identity or sameness 
 of character is quite a different unity from that involved 
 in the self or from that involved in the state. The self 
 is a continuous identity united by strands of private 
 memory and expectation, comprising elements of feeling, 
 emotion and bodily sensation, which are its absolute 
 exclusive property. No such continuity unites distinct 
 selves, however alike, or however united in their objects. 
 So at least it seems to those whom Dr. Bosanquet dis- 
 misses with contempt as " theorists of the first look." 
 For them human individuality is and remains some- 
 thing ultimate. To Dr. Bosanquet on the other hand ' 
 individuality is only a particular case of the distinct 
 contribution offered by parts within a system which he 
 calls the universal. The differences within the self are 
 for him in their essential nature identical with the differ- 
 ences between selves. I am of course in a sense one, but 
 I am in a sense many. I am a centre of many experiences, 
 ' The Philosophical Theory of the State, ch. vii. 
 
THE REAL WILL 51 
 
 and even of many groups of experiences, each of which 
 has its own controlling principle. This makes me, as 
 popular metaphor has always recognized, a kind of 
 miniature state ; and for Bosanquet this metaphor ex- 
 presses the real truth. Two passages may be taken as 
 summing up his discussion. 
 
 " If we consider my unity with myself at different times as the 
 limiting case, we shall find it very hard to establish a difference 
 between the unity of what we call one ' mind ' and that of all the 
 ' minds ' which enter into a single social experience." ' 
 
 And again in the following chapter : « 
 
 " Individuals are limited and isolated in many ways, but their 
 true individuaUty does not lie in their isolation but in that dis- 
 tinctive act or service by which they pass into unique contributions 
 to the universal." 
 
 Common sense confronted by these statements has a 
 feeling of outrage which makes it disinclined to argue. 
 It is inclined to say that the difference between self and 
 another is as plain as the difference between black and 
 white, and that if a man does not see it, there is nothing 
 plainer to appeal to. It is inclined to add that, if certain 
 views of the state are reduced to justifying themselves 
 by such confusion as this, that is their sufficient refutation. 
 
 But it is not quite satisfactory to leave the argument 
 at this point. We must trace the roots of the fallacy. 
 Let us first ask in what sense it is true that individuals 
 have a common life or a common experience. To begin 
 with they Uve in the same world. A and B may be said 
 to have a common experience when they both perceive 
 the same object. For example, both are reading the 
 same book, studying the same subject, have before 
 their eyes the same rose, are partners in one enterprise, 
 members of one society. Here is a real unity, a numerical 
 unity, but this unity is in the outer world, the world 
 with which both minds are in contact. It may be in 
 the actual existing world, as in the case of the rose which 
 « P. 178. « P. 183. 
 
52 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 both see and both smell, or it may be in the processes 
 of the world and the changes to which both contribute, 
 the purpose which both desire to realize, but in any case 
 it is external to both. The unity is in the object — a 
 term here which may be conveniently used in its popular 
 ambiguity as meaning sometimes a real thing, sometimes 
 a purpose. The individuals are subjects, distinct centres 
 of sensation, perception, thought, feeUng, active will, 
 standing in relation to that object. They are two, while 
 the object is one. But, secondly, even between A and 
 B, as two, there is a kind of unity. They are, or may 
 be, similarly affected by or to the object. The rose 
 smells sweet to both. The success of the business is an 
 object of eager interest to both- The relation here is 
 one which some would call resemblance, others identity 
 of character. When spoken of as identity of character 
 it is easily merged in thought with the numerical identity 
 belonging to the object. Nevertheless it is a distinct 
 relation. These then are the two foundations of identity 
 as between individuals, the relationship to an identical 
 world and the partial identity of character in themselves. 
 How do these relations differ fundamentally from the 
 relations between parts of my experience to one another ? 
 For example, I may smell the same rose twice and pursue 
 the same object through successive days and with con- 
 siderable differences of mood, slackening and tensioning 
 of interest and so on. The answer is that there is some- 
 thing common in me to all my acts and experiences which 
 is never common to you and me. I am aware in myself 
 not only of the object that I experience but of the act 
 of experiencing it, but I am never aware of your act of 
 experiencing any object. Certainly I believe that you 
 experience objects but I believe it on inference, you 
 being a person hke myself and acting in ways sufficiently 
 similar to mine to enable me to interpret th^. When 
 it is said that our experience is common there is an 
 ambiguity in the term " experience " which is overlooked. 
 There is a sense in which you share my experience. There 
 is also a sense in which your experience is absolutely 
 
THE REAL WILL 53 
 
 and for ever private to you, and mine absolutely and for 
 
 ever private to me. Experience may mean a series of 
 
 objects that is before the mind, and in that sense it may 
 
 be common, or it may mean what Professor Alexander 
 
 calls enjoyment, or what might with more propriety be 
 
 called suffering. Mind is always dealing with objects, 
 
 apprehending them, thinking about them, operating upon 
 
 them and so on. The dealing, the thinking is not the 
 
 object dealt with, the object thought about, it is the 
 
 act or state that is enjoyed or suffered. True it becomes 
 
 known and is in that sense an object, but it is an object 
 
 of a distinct class, the character of which class is that 
 
 everything in it is known as the subject of some other 
 
 object. The entire system of these subjective acts or 
 
 states forms a continuum, constituting what I know within 
 
 me as my individuality or myself. My consciousness of 
 
 myself rests upon a distinction between this thread of 
 
 enjoyment and suffering and the entire system of the 
 
 objects to which it relates, and my sense of personal 
 
 identity is my recognition of the continuity of this thread. 
 
 This is the element of isolation which, in contradiction 
 
 to Bosanquet's dictum, is the true core of individuality. 
 
 This isolation is not merely physical. My body is a part 
 
 of the objective world to me. I know it by the senses 
 
 as I know the rose, but the experience, as suffering, is 
 
 always located in the body, felt within the body, and the 
 
 physical separateness of my body from another, though 
 
 not the ground of my isolation, is inseparably connected 
 
 with it. What in practical philosophy is even more 
 
 important is that the whole series of my feelings belongs 
 
 to the thread of suffering. True, I am aware of my 
 
 feelings and can name and classify them and to that 
 
 extent they are objects to me, but I always know them 
 
 as feelings of my own, which I enjoy or suffer as being 
 
 attributes or states of the subjective continuum that is 
 
 distinct from the outer world as being in me incom- 
 
 municably private. When I am said to share another's 
 
 feeling, that is confused metaphor. The sight of another's 
 
 pain may arouse pain in me but it is another pain. 
 
54 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Normally, it is not even qualitatively the same pain. I 
 do not feel toothache when my child is suffering from 
 toothache but pity or anxiety, an emotion not a sensation. 
 There are cases of what is sometimes conceived to be 
 sympathy in the strictest sense in which the sight or 
 description of physical torture seems to stimulate some- 
 thing of the same anguish in myself, but even here it is 
 a qualitative and not a numerical identity that is in 
 question. And it is fortunate that it is so, for if I felt 
 all the real anguish of the sufferer, I should hardly be 
 in a position to come to his relief. 
 
 We trace the foundations of Dr. Bosanquet's identi- 
 fication of individuals then to a confusion in the use of 
 the term "experience." Experience as meaning a world 
 of objects may be common to many selves. Experience 
 as that which each self enjoys or Suffers is absolutely 
 private. In the former sense different minds can enter 
 into a single experience ; in the latter sense never, though 
 they may know about one another's experience. In the 
 former sense experience is not as such a universal but 
 rather one comprehensive world of objects to which all 
 individuals are related. In the latter sense it is a uni- 
 versal in the true sense of a class of individual beings 
 resembling one another or possessing identities of 
 character. I 
 
 ' It would be unfair to Dr. Bo-sanquet to suggest that he ignores 
 the exclusiveness of consciousness. In the present work he tells 
 us, for example (p. 183), " In a sense it is true that no one con- 
 sciousness can partake of or can actually enter into another." 
 And similarly in his Principle of Individuality and Value he writes 
 (P- 47) • " No one would attempt to overthrow what we have 
 called the formal distinctness of selves or self. This consists in the 
 impossibility that one finite centre of experience should possess 
 as its own immediate experience the immediate experience of 
 another." But he seems to regard what we have called enjoy- 
 ment as a kind of form, to which the object of experience gives 
 content. So in the same work a little earlier (p. 38) we read : 
 " The pure privacy and incommunicability of feeling as such is 
 superseded in all possible degrees by the solf-transcendence and 
 universahty of the contents with which it is unified ; and as these 
 contents are constituents of our individuality, the conception that 
 
THE REAL WILL 55 
 
 The privacy of enjoyed experiencr , and in particular of 
 feeling, has an important bearing on the doctrine of force 
 
 individuality or personality has its Centre in the exclusiveness 
 of feeling, neglects the essential feature of individuality or person- 
 ality itself. It has an aspect of distinct unshareable immediacy ; 
 but in substance and stufi and content, it is universal, communi- 
 cable, expansive." And so we learn a little later (p. 48) that the 
 inevitable distinctness of any immediate experience, which is said 
 to contain the essence of individuality, is a very different thing 
 from the inexplicable and fundamental foreignness commonly 
 postulated as between different persons. " It merely comes to 
 this, that they are organizations of content, which a difference of 
 quality, generally thoiigh not strictly dependent on belonging to 
 different bodies, prevents from being wholly blended." There 
 must, it would seem, be some characteristic differences between 
 you and me, just as there are characteristic differences between 
 any two parts of the same thing, but not such as to interfere with 
 our fundamental sameness, not radically distinct from the differ- 
 ences which may be discerned within myself at different times 
 or in different relations. This position is developed on p. 58. 
 " With the one exception, of the thread of coenassthesia, com- 
 patible with any degree of hostility and foreignness, there is no 
 ground of unity with our past and future selves which would not 
 equally carry us to unity and fellowship with others and with the 
 world. Our certainty of their existence is in both cases inferential, 
 and on the same line of inference, both are cemented to it by the 
 same stuff and material of unity, language, ideas, purposes, contents 
 of communicable feeling ; and, as we have seen, the other may 
 in these ways be far more closely knit with me than is my 
 previous self." Hence we are not surprised to learn in the same 
 book (p. 62) that " Separateness is not an ultimate character of 
 the individual, but is a phase of being akin to externality, and 
 tending to disappear in so far as true individuality prevails." 
 It appears from these passages that in spite of admissions as to 
 the exclusiveness of finite centres of experience, the radical dis- 
 tinction between the. subject and the object, between enjoyment 
 and things experienced, escapes Dr. Bosanquet. His whole 
 world is, as it were, on one plane. It is all experience more or 
 less articulate and complete, more or less partial and confused. 
 Individuality means a relatively high level of articulateness, and 
 for that reason all individualities, in proportion as they develop, 
 approximate to one and the same limit, the single experience which 
 is wholly articulate. This conception of the entire fabric leading 
 up to it and down from it falls to the ground as soon as subject 
 and object are distinguished. 
 
56 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 and freedom. When Bosanquet comes in chapter viii 
 to deal with the limits of state action he finds the 
 difficulty to lie in the antithesis between force and the 
 spiritual character of the real will. The state has to 
 rely on rewards and punishments (p. 190) that destroy 
 the value of an action " as. an element in the best life." 
 " An action performed in this sense under compulsion 
 is not a true part of the will." This, so far as it goes,_ 
 is very sound and undoubtedly touches one of the true 
 motives for restricting the operations of the state/ but 
 
 ' It is only fair to Dr. Bosanquet to say that he recognizes the 
 character of moral liberty more fully than some other writers 
 and in particular than Hegel. His general conception of Uberty, 
 as explained in The Philosophical Theory of the State, is that the self 
 is free when it is master of its passions, or, more precisely, when 
 the real will is the master of the false will. But it is recognized 
 by a piece of candour, w^hich should be acknowledged, that this 
 is not the literal or elementary sense of liberty. That Uteral sense 
 means the absence of constraint exercised by one upon others, 
 and in going beyond that we are more or less making use of a 
 metaphor (p. 137). It is, however, maintained that we may 
 acquiesce as " rational beings in a law and order, which on the 
 whole makes for the possibility of asserting our true or universal 
 selves, at the very moment when this law and order is constraining 
 our particular private wills in a way which we resent or even con- 
 demn." The term " condemn " here is odd. Does it mean we 
 condemn the law judicially, that is rationally ? If so, there would 
 seem to be a contradiction. What Bosanquet must mean is that 
 we recognize law to be necessary, or rather perhaps recognize law- 
 abidingness to be necessary even if a particular law is bad. But 
 the real question lies beyond this. In what sense is law as such 
 an instrument of moral liberty ? The suggestion is apparently that 
 the coercive repression of warring impulses in me sets my real, 
 that is rational, will free. Thus, there would be no objection in 
 theory to the plan of making men good by legislation. But this 
 hardly seems to express Bosanquet's own meaning because at a 
 later stage he frankly recognizes the limits of coercion, and 
 fundamentally the whole idea is untrue. If my rational will has 
 conquered the erring impulse, then it has estabhshed its own 
 mastery, and may be called free in the moral sense. But, if and in 
 so far as the erring impulse is overcome by an external restraint, 
 my will is not only not free but not even efiective. The best that 
 can be said for making men good by coercion is that coercive 
 restraints at a given moment may prevent an irreparable error 
 
THE REAL WILL 57 
 
 the denial of individuality leads Bosanquet to repudiate 
 the view that force, or generally speaking state inter- 
 ference, lies in the intrusion of others upon the self (see 
 p. 183). To him in principle there are no others. I 
 should be inclined to subjoin that, if that is so, there is 
 no force. What is at the back of force and what does it 
 rest upon ? The isolation of the individual. When we 
 speak of forcing a man to do a certain kind of action, 
 we do not mean that we take hold of his hands and make 
 him do it. A nurse may do that with a small child but 
 it is not what is intended or practical in adult life. What 
 we mean is that pains and penalties are imposed, that 
 there is an appeal to fear of future suffering or to the 
 hope of future reward. Now whin A puts forth force 
 on B, what is the situation ? B, let us suppose, is the 
 subject of a certain impulse, craving or feeUng which is 
 absolutely private to him, not shared and not necessarily 
 in the least understood by A. B, if he yields to this 
 impulse, is under the fiat of A to suffer a penalty. Once 
 more the feeling of pain, grief, perhaps agony, is abso- 
 lutely private to him, unshared and perhaps Uttle 
 appreciated by A. The danger is that A may be indifferent 
 to B's feelings. There is nothing necessarily to com- 
 municate to A the experience either of the craving or of 
 the penalty by which he represses it. Now if A literally 
 shared all B's experiences, there would not be this danger. 
 In prescribing for B, A would have to go through the same 
 thing himself and would have to take his own prescription. 
 If there were always this community of experience in 
 the sense of a community of suffering, there would be no 
 special practical danger in the use of force, and in a 
 democratic and uniform society we do in fact expect 
 to find greater mildness in the use of penalties to which 
 all are equally exposed. But in so far as there is a dis- 
 
 and so make it possible for me to recover my genuine self-control 
 later on ; just as, if I am prevented from suicide, I have at least 
 the opportunity of living to do better another day. But if I am 
 permanently in tutelage, I am permanently unfree and without 
 means of freedom. 
 
58 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 tinction between the governors and the governed, the 
 use of force is subject to great abuse, which consists 
 precisely in the fact that it is an intrusion on one set 
 of people by others who are in a large measure immune 
 from the practical working consequences. 
 
 We may carry the theoretical point a little further, 
 and we may ask if a man could ever put force upon him- 
 self in the sense in which he could put force upon another. 
 We have seen that when he puts force upon another 
 there is the threat of pain, not necessarily following from 
 the action and not a pain which he will feel himself. 
 Neither of these conditions is realized when a man puts 
 force on himself. When a man puts force upon himself 
 he conquers an impulse, that is to say, he brings the 
 whole force of his nature to bear, or more accurately, 
 the organized system of convictions, principles, interests, 
 which is his personality, and does not in tnith so much 
 conquer himself as win a victory for himself. He does 
 not threaten himself with a penalty which he will not 
 share. He does not, strictly speaking, threaten himself 
 at all. It is true he may fear a penalty, rernorse it may 
 be, or a headache it may be, and he may say to himseliE 
 that this will follow as surely as day follows night. This, 
 however, is not a threat but an anticipation, and it is an 
 anticipation, not of something arbitrarily attached ab 
 extra to the act, but of something following from it as an 
 inherent consequence. Obviously, too, it is not some- 
 thing from which the author of the supposed menace 
 is to be immune. The only sense in which a man can 
 be said to threaten himself would be under some artificial 
 form of self-reformation in which a man undertakes a 
 vow to himself to undergo a specific penance for a specific 
 trespass. Such a case, if we may regard it as real, would 
 be an analogical transfer t-o the sphere of self of the re- 
 lation of self and others, and can only belong to the sphere 
 of play-acting with our moral nature. 
 
 I conclude, therefore, that the use of force is essentially 
 what Bosanquet denies it to be. It is an imposition on 
 the individual by others, and its practical dangers lie 
 
THE REAL WILL 59 
 
 precisely in that isolation of the individual feelings through 
 which force acts, which Dr. Bosanquet dismisses as of 
 secondary importance. 
 
 We cannot, therefore, accept the definition of freedom 
 suggested by Dr. Bosanquet in his new volume. To the 
 question how self-government is possible, he replies that 
 the answer is drawn " from the conception of the general 
 will which involves the existence of an actual community 
 of shch a nature as to share an identical mind and feeling. 
 There is no other way of explaining how a free man can 
 put up with compulsion and even welcome it." ' On the 
 surface this theory is attractive. In an ordered society 
 I am free, though under compulsion, because the will of 
 society is my own will, and the compulsion is exercised 
 by myself upon myself. But these are mere words. 
 The will of society may be radically opposed to my own, 
 and yet I must obey. It may even be my duty to obey, 
 and normally it is so, even though I think the law wrong, 
 because society must be kept together ; and if its deUberate 
 decision is to carry no weight with its dissentient members, 
 profound disorganization must ensue. The evil of one 
 bad law is not, unless in a very extreme case, to be weighed 
 against the evil of diminishing the authority of all law. 
 
 The only sense, therefore,' in which I am conforming 
 to my own will, in obedience, is that of two evils I prefer 
 the lesser. If in this I am free, it is not because I am a 
 member of a society like-minded with myself, but simply 
 because I am master of my own actions and can choose, 
 if I will, to abide by the penalties which disobedience 
 wni entail. If freedom depended upon identity of will, 
 there would not be much of it in a complex world. In 
 general freedom depends (i) on the defined and restricted 
 use of compulsion. If the state prevents another man 
 from coercing or oppressing me by force or the use of 
 superior economic power, it augments my freedom ; and 
 the uniform compulsion of law is in fact the only known 
 method by which individuals can be assured in the enjoy- 
 ment of a common liberty from possible oppression by 
 ' Social and International Ideals, p. 271. 
 
6o THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 one another. If, on the other hand, the law prevents me 
 froip drinking or compels me to serve in the army, it is 
 ab?urd to maintain that it is in these very respects 
 augmenting my freedom. It may be justified in either 
 of these actions by other considerations — even by the 
 consideration of other kinds of freedom — ^if, for example, 
 it has been right in judging that compulsory service is 
 necessary to national freedom. That does not alter the 
 fact that freedom is impaired at one point even if it is 
 gained at another, and the man who is compelled against 
 his will to give up his drink or to join the army is mocked 
 if you tell him that in doing that which he most resents 
 his will is free because the decision of society is his own. 
 Essentially political freedom does not consist in like- 
 mindedness, but in the toleration of differences ; or, 
 positively, in the acceptance of differences as contributing 
 to richer life than uniformity. Freedom, as something 
 shareable by all members of a community, involves 
 restraint upon that which prevents such sharing. A 
 society is on the whole free not because there is in it 
 little law or much law, but because the law is such as to 
 secure scope for personal development and free associ- 
 ation as a common possession by restricting those develop- 
 ments, and those only, in which the fulfilment of one is 
 the frustration of another. It is free, not where a common 
 mind shapes the individual, but where all minds have 
 that fullness of scope which can only be obtjiined if certain 
 fundamental conditions of their mutual intercourse are 
 maintained by orgariized effort.' 
 
 ' Properly interprete<J, the- dictpm of Lycophron the Sophist, 
 that the law is a guarantee of mutual justice, is nearer the truth 
 than the contrary proposition of Aristotle, that it is such as to 
 make the citizens good and just (Aristotle, Politics, Book III, 
 ch. ix, § 8). It is not the business of compulsion to make men good 
 and just, but the guarantee of protection for him who acts justly 
 is a condition under which men may make themselves good and 
 just. The state can, hqwever, without serious increase of coercion 
 apply the resources of organization to secure more positive condi- 
 tions of development than the mere restraint of injustice, and in 
 particular it is only the state which can accumulate for social ends 
 
THE REAL WILL 6i 
 
 (2) In a second and more specific sense, political free- 
 dom implies active citizenship. The claim of the free 
 individual is not the impossible one that the common 
 decision should coincide with his own, but that his de- 
 cision should be heard and taken into account. He 
 claims his part in the common councils ; he takes his 
 share of responsibility. In so far as he makes this claim 
 effective he contributes to the common decision even 
 though in a particular case it goes dead against him. He 
 is free, not because the social will is his own, but because 
 he has as much scope for expression as any one man can 
 have if all are to have it and yet live and act together. 
 More than this is the beginning of tyranny, less is the 
 beginning of slavery. 
 
 We cannot, however, do justice to the argument from 
 the likeness between individuals to a common self which 
 actually unites them without reference to the ultimate 
 metaphysical theory of which this transition is a par- 
 ticular case. Let us restate our position as we have 
 maintained it against Dr. Bosanquet's attacks. For us 
 the system of law, the social tradition, is clearly not 
 the product of one will, unless in the imaginary case 
 of an omnipotent despot who imposes a complete system 
 of laws on a subject people. It is rather the product of 
 innumerable wills, acting sometimes in concert, seme- 
 times in opposition to one another, and through their 
 conflicts and combinations issuing in a more or less orderly 
 system, part of which gets itself inscribed on the statute 
 book, while part is incorporated in customs and insti- 
 tutions, and as such passes through generations, con- 
 serving its main outlines through long periods, but also 
 subject to expansion, growth and decay. Such is the 
 system of Recht, partly moral, partly legal, as under- 
 stood by the plain man, and as more fully understandable 
 
 that large element of wealth which does not depend on the energy 
 of living individuals. It should be remarked in this connection 
 that to restrict the functions of the state is by no means to place 
 a limit on the value of voluntary co-operation, but rather the 
 reverse. 
 
62 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 by comparative and historical investigation. If we call 
 it an expression or embodiment of the will, we do not 
 mean by that term a single continuous entity but a 
 universal, that is, something which in reality consists 
 of thousands and millions of wills, all distinct in their 
 existence, though acting on and acted on by one another. 
 But to the Hegelian this statement implies a false view 
 of the universal. We are contending for individuality, 
 for the irreducible distinction between self and others, 
 and we have met some of the arguments directed 
 against that distinction. But now we have admitted a 
 " universal " running through thousands and millions of 
 selves. This admission, according to the idealist, will 
 be fatal to the separateness which we have maintained. 
 The universal for him unites the instances which fall 
 under it just in the manner which we dispute. We have 
 maintained a radical distinction between the identity of 
 character found in different individuals and the identity 
 of continuous existence which constitutes each indi- 
 vidual. But the idealist will deny the radical character 
 of this distinction. For him identity is universality, and 
 the two cases of identity that we distinguish are mere 
 specific forms of the universal. We come, therefore, to that 
 theory of the universal which, as we said above, underlies 
 the whole question. This theory is due to Hegel. 
 
 What then for Hegel is the universal ? » Like other 
 things in his dialectic it can only be understood by sur- 
 mounting certain false and partial views. Firstly, then, 
 for him the universal is apprehended in contrast with 
 the particular cases in which it is manifested. Thus the 
 colour red is a universal, but it is not the red rose, nor 
 the red cloth, nor the red blood. The red rose is a par- 
 ticular instance of the universal, the red blood is another. 
 Redness, the universal, here is something distinct from, 
 and in a manner opposed to, the cloth and the rose which 
 are red. This is the abstract universal, the universal 
 arrived at by taking away all the particulars in which 
 it appears. But if we take away all the particulars, 
 • See especially Wissenschaft der Logik, II, Werke, vol. v. pp. 36-63. 
 
THE REAL WILL 63 
 
 what remains ? If it is neither the red rose, nor the 
 red cloth, nor the red blood nor red anjrthing else, there 
 is no red, nothing appears to remain for the abstract 
 universal, and we seem forced to say that only particulars 
 exist. To escape this difficulty we might perhaps say 
 that red means the common element in the flower, the 
 cloth and the blood. It is the character in which all 
 agree and in which they all share as distinct, from the 
 characters in which they differ. But here another diffi- 
 culty arises. The character of redness is not exactly 
 identical in the different cases. The rose is of one tint 
 or shade, the cloth of another, the blood of a third. The 
 red that is common to all becomes something thinner 
 and more attenuated, of which we can no longer form 
 even a perfectly clear and unambiguous image. If we 
 try to picture the red that is all these things, we stumble, 
 as Hume says, in our minds not upon red in general but 
 some particular shade of red. The difficulty becomes 
 greater the higher we go in the region of abstraction. 
 Red, blue and green are all colours, for example, but 
 what precisely is the colour that is above all, which is 
 not red, nor blue, nor green, nor of any other particular 
 tint ? If we try to think upon these lines, we get into 
 the way of constructing our conception into a kind of 
 mosaic. If colour is an element which is common to two 
 coloured objects, then let us say redness is another element 
 common to one set of coloured objects and distinct from 
 others, and crimson a third element, and luminosity, 
 transparence, opaqueness again further elements, and in 
 this red rose before me several of these particular elements 
 must coexist. Here then in another sense the universal 
 has passed into the particular — the common element, 
 colour, being just one of the constituent parts of the 
 actual colour which is before me. On the other hand, 
 it may be said each of these particulars is also universal, 
 since the colour is common to the entire class of objects, 
 the redness is common to a section of that class, and 
 the particular tint to a smaller section, while certain 
 characteristics like luminosity cut across the distinctions 
 
64 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 of tint and are common to colours of many different 
 tints. The conclusion of this argument is that the uni- 
 versal as placed in opposition to the particulars, and the 
 particulars placed in opposition to the universal, both 
 involve contradictions. They pass into one another. 
 
 What is the truth then ? The truth may be seen in 
 this way. Colour is not a distinguishable element common 
 to red, blue, green, etc. It is rather that which is now 
 red, now blue, now green, and so all of them, though 
 it is not all of them at one and the same time and place. 
 Nor is it the sum or totality of them all. This would 
 ultimately be only the collection of all the individual 
 things that are coloured. It is rather the principle that 
 permeates them and that develops itself into the one or 
 the other, and the thought appears to be that, if we had 
 insight into the nature of the universal, we should under- 
 stand that all these differences arise out of it, as the 
 different organs of the body come from the development 
 of a germ. Hegel expresses this by sajdng that the true 
 or concrete universal is the individual. By this he does 
 not mean, as he explicitly says, the individual object 
 that our senses appreciate, e.g. the red rose. He means 
 an individuality which permeates or runs through differ- 
 ences of development or expression, so that the differences 
 are related to the universal as are the attributes of an 
 individual thing to the thing itself, or the phases or 
 activities of life to the living being. This distinction is 
 much more plausible as applied to a concept than to the 
 reality to which a concept refers. If one thinks of colour, 
 for example, as an attribute of the material world, to 
 describe it as an individual becomes paradoxical in the 
 highest degree. Colours appear here, there and every- 
 where under all sorts of changing conditions. There is 
 among them nothing at all resembling the continuity 
 and selfsameness of an individual object. On the other 
 hand, if we think of the concept colour in our mind, we 
 can with more reason regard it as a kind of scheme, which 
 to be realized at all must be filled in in some definite way, 
 but which as a scheme is a permanent unity, and is main- 
 
THE REAL WILL 65 
 
 tained without changing its character through all its 
 differences of fulfilment. We can then understand that 
 to say of a thing that it has a particular colour is to place 
 it in th^ scope of this scheme, so that we escape from 
 the difficulty of trying to assign to the term " colour " a 
 meaning which gives it some definite quahty distinguish- 
 able from other definite qualities, an attempt which Hegel 
 rightly says leads us further and further into meaningless 
 abstraction. 
 
 Let us agree then that when we predicate a universal, 
 e.g. colour, we bring an object into relation with a certain 
 system which is operative in our minds, and that generally 
 speaking it is true to say that our concepts are systems of 
 this kind and systems of such systems. The fallacy in 
 the Hegelian theory consists in identifying the system of 
 our thought with the reality to which it refers. The 
 system of our thought is not identical with the system 
 of reality, except in the sense that our thought itself 
 is an event, but has reference to that reality, and reality 
 itself is not finally intelligible until we take the relation 
 between it and thought into account by a further and 
 more comprehensive thought. For example, in the par- 
 ticular case before us we have to recognize that while 
 in classifying things we form certain systems of universals 
 and particulars, and while these systems describe things 
 accurately in one aspect, they do not describe them 
 imder other aspects. If we ask how a thing grows, comes 
 to be, disappears, for example, we do not get the answer 
 by exhibiting its place in a classification, but by tracing 
 its relation to its antecedents, concomitants, consequents 
 The classificatory system, being all held together in our 
 thought, has within our thought a unity, even if you 
 will an individuality. The thinking of it is an individual 
 act. But the objects to which this unified thought refers 
 the objects to which the system applies, may be in any 
 degree scattered through the universe, and devoid of all 
 the interconnecting threads that make an individual 
 whole. This then in the last analysis is the fallacy in- 
 volved in the famous Hegelian doctrine of the concrete 
 
 5 
 
66 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 universal. It attributes the unity which belongs to the 
 concept as contained in the act of thinking to the mass 
 of objects to which the concept refers.' The reality 
 which the universal describes consists of indefinite numbers 
 of individuals related by identities and differences of 
 character, i.e. by more or less exact resemblance, and 
 not by any substantive or causal continuity such as 
 constitutes the individual. 
 
 The confusion of the individual with the universal, 
 however, would never have commanded any acceptance 
 if it had not some plausible basis in fact. What is this' 
 plausible basis ? It is that if you consider the individual 
 under a certain partial aspect, and allowing one funda- 
 mental point to drop, its resemblance to the universal 
 leaps to -the eyes. Consider the living being, for example, 
 a man. He is in a sense one and the same thing from 
 birth to death, but he is also different from babyhood 
 to youth and youth to manhood ; in a lesser degree, 
 from moment to moment. You have in him a sameness 
 running through difference, which is just what you have 
 in the colour that is common to red, blue and green. 
 He is, moreover, many things in one. He is a thinking, 
 willing being, a spiritual being and a physical being, and 
 his unity pervades all these just as the redness pervades 
 all its tints. Here, too, the question arises whether he 
 is distinct from all the different things that he is, or 
 whether he is all these things regarded as a whole, or 
 whether he is something that is now one and now the 
 other, something which must be the one or the other 
 and which finally manifests itself completely only in the 
 whole series. In all these ways the self-identity of the 
 individual resembles the universal. The fundamental 
 difference is that the individual is continuous throughout 
 his existence. The man's life is not broken, he is always 
 
 ' It may be said that every time we make use of the same concept 
 we refer to the same mass of facts. There is thus an identity of 
 reference as well as identity in the thought which makes the 
 reference. But this is not to say that the mass of facts so 
 identified constitute in their internal relations an individual. 
 
THE REAL WILL 67 
 
 there at a given spot at any particular time, and never 
 breaking the continuity of his temporal existence. In 
 speaking of him as an individual we affirm or imply a 
 belief in a substantial continuity. We beheve, that is, 
 that what he is at one moment is the basis of what he 
 is at the next, that he has become whatever we find him 
 to be by a process of self-determination. That self- 
 determination is certainly not absolute, for his environ- 
 ment affects him, but there is always an element of self- 
 determination which makes up the continuous thread of 
 his identity. Now as between individuals of the same 
 class, there is no necessary continuity of this kind. Two 
 men may come into relation with one another or they 
 may not. They are nevertheless both members of the 
 same universal and they share a common character which 
 has nothing whatever to do with any substantive con- 
 tinuity. On the other hand — and here is a further source 
 of confusion — as between different individuals there may 
 also be in certain relations iirrportant inter-connections, 
 so that while each is an individual and while they con- 
 stitute members of a class, they may nevertheless be so 
 united as to form a totality which has a certain substan- 
 tive continuity of its own. Now this is precisely the 
 case with any society. Take a family, for example. 
 All the members are individuals, that is, each has his 
 own substantive continuity. But the family is also a 
 close union of these individuals who in certain relations 
 very intimately affect one another, and so build up a 
 common life. Thus the family is both the class of indi- 
 viduals which compose it, say, all the Thomas Browns — 
 the members of the family Thomas Brown — and also a 
 true individual of a higher order, the family of the Thomas 
 Browns possessing a certain hfe and unity of its own 
 which makes it behave for many purposes as a single 
 self-contained entity. So regarded, however, the family 
 is not a universal but an individual, though of a different 
 order from the physical individual. It is the confusion 
 of these two aspects of the community which dominates 
 the whole theory of the general will. 
 
68 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Let us see how the logic of it works. In the first place, 
 the particular, as such, is unreal. Every particular must 
 be a case of the universal, a manifestation of the universal. 
 Thus the particular man, as particular; has no real exis- 
 tence. He is only a phase in some universal. Where 
 then are we to look for the universal ? Not in his identity 
 of character with other men. That is the false or abstract 
 universal. We should look for it in something which is 
 to be called an individual, that must be in some systematic 
 totality, some fabric or union of human beings, self- 
 sustaining, self-determining, a sort of system of wiUs. 
 Now there are several such systems, but in the Hegehan 
 view that which includes them aU is the state, and thus 
 the state is the highest universal to which a particular 
 man belongs as a case or a manifestation, and the will 
 of the state is the real will, the universal wiU of which 
 particular wills are only incidents or phases. TAccordingly 
 the Hegelian logic abolishes on the one side the inde- 
 pendence of the individual living human being, and on 
 the other side the universal ties of identity of character 
 which relate the individual to the human species as a 
 whole, and substitutes for it as the reality the organized 
 body of human beings, which in its highest manifestation 
 is the state. How far there is an error in fact here, that 
 is, how far it is true that the state is the highest human 
 organization, we need not for the moment inquire. The 
 point is that by identifsdng the universal with the indi- 
 vidual, Hegel has destroyed the universality of character 
 on which all the highest ethics and the highest religions 
 are founded. They mean nothing to him because they 
 are mere abstract universals. At the same stroke he 
 has destroyed the self-dependence of the individual 
 which is the root of freedom, and we can understand why 
 for him all that unsophisticated men call freedom is an 
 irrational and unmeaning caprice, a caprice of the par- 
 ticular, imagining itself to be a substantive reality instead 
 of a mere fold in the garment of the all-covering universal. 
 And yet Hegel's doctrine may be said to have contradicted 
 itself, for if it is true that universality of character rests 
 
THE REAL WILL 69 
 
 on membership of some organized whole, then that uni- 
 versality of character, which we do as a matter of fact 
 find in human beings, must imply that humanity is in 
 some sense an organic whole, and the mere fact that we 
 speak of the state as a generic term and recognize that 
 there are many states must imply a universal element 
 conne(5ting them, and therefore must lead to the con- 
 ception after all of a super-state, at any rate of some- 
 thing that is above all states, comprehending them all 
 and forming an organic unity among them. It is just 
 this organic unity which Hegel denies, recognizing above 
 the state only a spirit of world history which is essentially 
 a process and a process in which states contend and destroy 
 one another, not a unity inspiring them with a single 
 spirit and finding for them also a true freedom in con- 
 formity to universal law.^ 
 
 ' Dr. Bosanquet in his Principle of Individuality and Value 
 (Lecture II) recognizes the distinction between generality and 
 what he calls the individuality. He takes the line of depreciating 
 generality, e.g. p. 34, " the most general knowledge . . . must 
 obviously be the least instructive and must have its climax in 
 complete emptiness." To this it may be replied that the law of 
 gravitation is neither uninstructive nor empty, because it apphes 
 to all bodies. On the contrary, it was precisely the discovery 
 that it did apply to all bodies, and not only the earth and the 
 objects on its surface, that enabled Newton to draw inferences 
 of extraordinary range and interest. He goes on to argue that 
 " you cannot explain a human body or a steam-engine by classi- 
 fying the parts in each under their resemblances to one another." 
 This is of course one part of the truth, though not the whole 
 truth. We should not understand the operation of any part of the 
 steam-engine if we could not regard it as an instance of a general 
 law of the operation of bodies precisely similar to that part. 
 
 For the rest, Bosanquet's contention only goes to illustrate the 
 difference between th? general and the individual, and does not 
 justify the use of the term " universal " derived from generality 
 to characterize the individual. Bosanquet justly finds a certain 
 correspondence, the correspondence noted above, between the 
 individual and the general. " The ultimate principle we may 
 say is sameness in the other. Generality is sameness in spite of 
 the other. Universality is sameness by means of the other " 
 (p. 37). We should say rather generality implies a plurality of 
 objects similar, but not necessarily connected in any other way. 
 
^o THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Individuality is a connection, psychical, physical, or whatever 
 it may be, running through many parts and constituting of them 
 one whole. Being unable to deny the distinctness of what we 
 call generality, Bosanquet seems to set himself to minimize its 
 value. He almost seems to scold its obstinacy in remaining a 
 part of the universe. Exclusiveness, we are told, is a kind of minor 
 mark of the individual. It is misleading if too strongly insisted 
 on. It is admitted (p. 104) that a potential generality or repe- 
 tition is a corollary of the universal infinite experience, " but it 
 is a character of imperfection in such experience and not of per- 
 fection . . . why should any being express a second time what 
 has been adequately expressed before?" So, again, on p. 116, 
 " repetition suggests failure." Is it not rather that the admis- 
 sion of repetition suggests the failure of the theory which 
 identifies the universal with the individual? A true proposition 
 is not refuted by belittling its significance. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE WILL OF THE STATE 
 
 So far we have dealt with two of the three main propo- 
 sitions of the metaphysical theory of the state. Of these 
 three the first is that true individuahty or freedom lies 
 in conformity to our real will. The second is that our 
 real will is identical with the general wUl, 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 possibihties 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 bom 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. 
 
72 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 These are the two leading fallacies in the metaphysical 
 theory of society, but there is a third fallacy emerging 
 from them which is no less important in its practical 
 applications. That is that the common self or the general 
 will is to be identified with the state. It might be thought 
 that, if we altogether repudiate the conception of a 
 common self, the appUcation falls to the ground along 
 with the principle. None the less the argument needs 
 examination both because it brings out certain elements 
 of fallacy in the central conception and because it bears 
 upon the whole question of the relations of the state 
 to the social life of man. 
 
 Waiving all our criticism of the metaphysical identi- 
 fication of the real and the general will, we can understand 
 what is meant by the contention that the full expression 
 of a man's nature is social, that his interests, in the fullest 
 sense of that term, are bound up with those of others 
 and extend in endless ramifications into the texture of 
 the social fabric. But why are they in particular bound 
 up with the state ? Is the state then another name 
 for the entire social fabric, for the family, for the mass 
 of one's social interests, for science, art, literature and 
 religion ? To the modem mind, at any rate to the non- 
 German mind, the question answers itself in the negative, 
 and outside the metaphysical school inost thinkers would 
 regard this as one of the points on which the modem 
 outlook differs essentially from the Greek. To the Greeks * 
 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-sufiiciency 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 reUgioii, 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 
 
 » I.e. the Greeks of the orthodox tradition. The Cynics and, 
 following them, the Stoics, laid the foundation of the larger view. 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 73 
 
 might hold that the happiness of his guardians was not 
 to be considered apart from the well-being of the state, 
 to which it was their prime function to contribute, but 
 none the less it is clear that for him the real desires of a 
 trained philosopher are to graze apart in the Elysian 
 Fields of contemplation, and that to recall him to the 
 service of the state is to bring him back into the cave 
 from which he had escaped into the upper air. We do 
 him no wrong, he contends, in demanding this service 
 of the philosopher, for we are merely expecting him to 
 repay what the state has given him in education. None 
 the less it is clear that the philosophic life, which is for 
 Plato the spiritual life, has begun to develop an interest 
 of its own. And so in Aristotle philosophic wisdom is 
 the mistress, not the servant, of the practical wisdom 
 of the statesman, and the theoretic life is primarily con- 
 cerned with things much higher than man. In the 
 modem 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 
 modem 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 foun- 
 dation of our individuality to the state as the supreme 
 object of our allegiance. This transition is introduced 
 by a passage which runs : " The imperative claim of 
 the will that wills itself is our own inmost nature and we 
 cannot throw it off. This is the ultimate root of pohtical 
 obligation." Should we not rather say, a rational harmony 
 of life has an imperative claim on us, and this claim is what 
 we call moral obligation ? Such a proposition would 
 harmonize better with the sentence preceding our quota- 
 tion, in which rebellion is recognized as a possible duty 
 on the ground that the particular system which claims 
 
74 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 our obedience may be irreconcilable with the conditions 
 essential to a rational will. If this is understood, it is 
 clear that there is no political obligation that is not sub- 
 ordinate to moral obligation and politics are subordinate 
 to ethics. Thus, the main question of political or social 
 philosophy has to be answered in a manner adverse to 
 those who, like Bosanquet, are seeking to make political 
 philosophy an independent discipline. 
 
 None the less Bosanquet goes on to say ' 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 Ufe is 
 determined, including e.g. the family, trade, the church, 
 the university. It is the structure which gives life and 
 meaning to them all." It is " the operative criticism 
 of all institutions." A perfect conception of the end 
 of the state would mean " a complete idea of the realiza- 
 tion of all human capacity." At the same time the state 
 is necessarily force. Force is inherent in the state, being 
 exercised not only in the " restraint of disorderly persons 
 but in the form of instruction and authoritative suggestion 
 to the ordinary law-abiding citizen." It forms a kind 
 of automatism, which underlies our more conscious and 
 inteUigent 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 individuaUty 
 opposed to the state, but because the element of force is 
 antagonistic to the best life. It is "a dangerous drug" 
 ' See The Philosophical Theory of the Stale, p. 149, etc. 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 75 
 
 which must be administered " as a counter-poison to 
 tendencies which would otherwise give no chance to the 
 logical will." The consequence is that the state, as 
 exercising force, must be rigidly limited in its functions. 
 It must not seek the direct promotion of the good 
 life. " What it can effect is to remove obstacles, to 
 destroy conditions hostile to the realization of the 
 end." Its business is to " hinder hindrances " to the 
 best hfe. 
 
 We have thus a definition of the state, consisting of 
 two clauses, which we must examine separately. As to 
 the first, which identifies the state with the entire social 
 fabric. Dr. Bosanquet seems partly aware that here the 
 state is used in an unusual sense. By the state we 
 ordinarily mean either the government or, perhaps a 
 Uttle more accurately, the organization which is at the 
 back of law and government. The state is the organi- 
 zation of society for the control of its common interests, 
 an organization of which the various departments of 
 law and government are the particular organs. This is 
 something less than the entire fabric. Dr. Bosanquet 
 might argue that there must be organization in order 
 to support the fabric. In advanced societies this is 
 probably true, but (a) many simple societies enjoy a 
 fairly well-ordered fabric of social life without any govern- 
 mental organization, and others have the very rudest 
 forms of governmental organization. (6) 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 
 obUgation and social obUgation, true to maintain that 
 the best life can only be realized in society, it would be 
 untrue to identify that best life with the state. Under- 
 lying Bosanquet's account, in fact, there is a serious 
 
76 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 confusion between the state and society. ' 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 tnie of other higher religions 
 and of higher ethics and the entire republic of letters, 
 science, philosophy and art. The same is true in another 
 relation of the economic market, which is a world market, 
 and even of economic ideas and to some extent of economic 
 organizations, such as the Socialist International. In a 
 
 • In the Introduoiion to his second edition (p. xxix) Dr. 
 Bosanquet seems to recognize some of the diihculties of his position, 
 and speaks of a social co-operation which does not belong strictly 
 either to the state or to the private person. If this admission is 
 pressed, it will be found fatal to his first definition of the state 
 as the entirety of the social fabric. 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 77 
 
 word, the state, as an organization, is a mere means to 
 an end. It is one of the ways in which human beings 
 are grouped. In its present form it is the product of 
 certain modern conditions not of very long standing 
 and probably not destined to very long endurance. To 
 confuse the state with society and political with moral 
 obligation is the central fallacy of the metaphysical 
 theory of .the state. 
 
 The truth is that Bosanquet's double definition of the 
 state, on the one hand as the operative criticism of insti- 
 tutions and on the other hand as force, is an abortive 
 union of two radically opposed conceptions. Criticism 
 is the very opposite of force. It is something essentially 
 spiritual. It belongs to the mind, it demands the maxi- 
 mum of freedom.. It lives in discussion unconstrained. 
 It is no respecter of persons. It fills up no forms. It 
 is bound by no traditions. It is free as air. Force, on 
 the other hand, moves on the solid ground. As law, 
 its principles must be defined and established, executed 
 by authority, regardless of finer meanings and subtle 
 differences. It closes its ear to discussion, which is taken 
 to be complete at the moment when force is decided upon. 
 Human society has not often found it possible to dispense 
 with force because, though mind is free as air, the body 
 to which mind is attached must have the solid rock to 
 stand on, and men have judged an imperfect order better 
 than no order at all. The modern mind, aware of this 
 contrast, of the necessity of force and of the threat which 
 it contains to the life of the spirit, has sought unceasingly 
 for some theory of the limits of force, has asked itself 
 anxiously how much and how little is the state bound 
 to exact from its members. But the idealistic theory, 
 far from illuminating, serves to confuse the entire issue. 
 In Dr. Bosanquet's presentation in particular we get a 
 most confusing oscillation between the two principles 
 conveyed by his definition. If we ask about the duties 
 of the individual to the state, we find him leaning on the 
 state as operative criticism. The duty of the individual 
 appears to be absolute, his very personality is merged 
 
78 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 in the state, and for the same reason, as we shall see 
 presently, the state has no authority over it, but is the 
 final form of human association. If, on the other hand, 
 we ask about the duties of the state to the individual, 
 what it can do for the promotion of the well-being of its 
 members, we find that the state is only force and all its 
 action is limited by the clumsiness and externality of 
 compulsion. It cannot directly promote freedom, but 
 only hinder hindrances. ' By pla3dng between these two 
 meanings, we get the worst of both worlds ; on the one 
 side a state which absorbs and cancels individual per- 
 sonality and knows little or no morality in its external 
 relations ; and on the other side the social morals of the 
 Charity Organization Society, a state which cannot 
 actively promote the well-being of its members, but can 
 only remove obstructions and leave to them a fair field 
 in which to run the race. The truth is that the state 
 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 
 
 ' The hindrance of hindrances is indeed so vague an expression 
 that ahnost anything can be extracted out of it, e.g. we sxe told 
 (p. 172) that the state hinders ilhteracy by compeUing education. 
 When formulae are so stretched it is a sign of something wrong in 
 the theory underlying them. In public education two functions 
 of the state are involved, (i) Compulsion, which is necessary to 
 secure the right of the child against a neglectful parent, a right 
 which, Uke all rights, is a condition of social welfare, and (2) the 
 organization of public resources for a pubUc object. We too often 
 tend to think of such organization in terms of compulsion because 
 it involves taxation. But taxation is not adequately conceived when 
 thought of as the compulsory taking from individuals of property 
 which is absolutely theirs. There are social factors in production, 
 and therefore elements due to society rather than tp the individual, 
 which can only be secured for the community by the mechanism 
 of the state. Taxation is a very rough, and in practice not always 
 an equitable, method of securing these elements of collective 
 wealth, but to secure them for common objects and organize their 
 application is one of the functions of the state which is entirely 
 missed by Dr. Bosaaquet's account. 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 79 
 
 permanence, but constantly threatened with more or 
 less revolutionary changes. In this order there is nothing 
 sacrosanct. On the contrary, government, law and the 
 institutions lying behind and supporting them are far 
 from being the most successful of the experiments of 
 mankind. They call aloud for radical criticism, and to 
 deify them is to establish false gods, gods who at the present 
 time figure as veritable Molochs before whom our sons 
 are made to pass in millions through the fire. 
 
 But there is a further point. Let us for the moment 
 take the state in the extended sense which the Hegelians 
 assign to it. Let us regard it as the entire fabric of exist- 
 ing society. What then is the nature of our obligations 
 to this fabric ? What is its authority and its claim upon 
 our reason and conscience ? 
 
 The ideaUst maintains that the customs, traditions and 
 institutions of society are the expression of an objective 
 mind or spirit. These are contrasted by Hegel with the 
 abstractions which the subjective reason evolves, and he 
 speaks of the French Revolution as a monstrous display 
 of the result of overthrowing the given and existing con- 
 stitution of a great actual state, and endeavouring to 
 make the mere supposedly rational the basis of a consti- 
 tution in place of the historic reaUty. " Against the 
 principle of the individual wUl we are to remind our- 
 selves of the fundamental conception that the objective 
 will is rational in its concept, whether it is recognized 
 by individuals and willed with pleasure or not." ' In 
 the same way 2 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, 
 wc have in an external and factual form the body and substance 
 of thinking will itself. Here is its concrete and actual content, 
 what it finds to affirm in its volition from moment to moment, 
 what forms the steps and systematic connections by which its 
 
 ' Phil, dcs Rechts, p. 308. 
 
 ' Principle of Individuality, p. 112. 
 
8o THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 self-expression from day to day is linked with — enters into — 
 the total world of its satisfaction in a law which is at once its own 
 nature and a high expression of the absolute. What a contrast 
 with the abstract formulas of Hedonist or intuitionist axioms ! " 
 
 It comes then to this. The attempts of thinking men 
 to conceive and estabhsh a rational order of society are 
 mere fantasies of the subjective reason. The actual 
 institutions of a given society are the objective reason. 
 Society, any society it would seem that ever has been, 
 is a higher embodiment of reason than any of the conscious 
 reflections of the philosopher or statesman. When we 
 think of the actual inconsistencies of traditional social 
 morality, the blindness and crudity of law, the elements 
 of class-selfishness and oppression that have coloured it, 
 the mechanical dullness of state institutions even at 
 their best, the massive misery that has lain at the foun- 
 dation of all historic civilizations, we are inclined to say 
 that no mere philosopher, but only the social satirist, 
 could treat this conception as it deserves. 
 
 But we must endeavour to understand the conception 
 on which it rests and the reason why it is wrong. For 
 this purpose we may start from the passage in which 
 Dr. Bosanquet sums up the theory of state action in the 
 Rousseauite formula " sovereignty is the exercise of the 
 general will." He justifies this by saying that all state 
 action is general ; that is, it consists in customs, laws 
 and institutions of general application. And, secondly, 
 by saying that " all state action is at bottom the exercise 
 of the will," and this is " the real will." To say that 
 state action is general and that it is willed, is not, how- 
 ever, the same thing as to say that it is the exercise of 
 a general will. The distinction seems dialectical, but it 
 touches the substance of the question. It is true that 
 laws and customs are general, but, as general, how far are 
 they wiUed ? How far, that is, are they the products of 
 an intelligence that has clearly foreseen all their bearings ? 
 How far are they the products of a unitary will that has 
 taken all social life into its account as a single coherent 
 system and thought out the bearings of one part upon 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 8i 
 
 another ? The answer to this question is, not very far, 
 hardly at all. The life of society is not the product of 
 coherent thinking by a single mind. On the contrary, 
 many customs and institutions, which make up social 
 life, have grown up in a detached, sporadic, unconscious, 
 often unreasonable fashion, and even the more conscious 
 and deliberate ones are rather efforts to correct some 
 particular mischief, amend some particular anomaly, than 
 clearsighted applications of a governing principle to 
 social life as a whole. And so, secondly, when Dr. 
 Bosanqutt says that society rests on will, the answer 
 is rather that it rests on wills. We seldom find in a great 
 society, as a whole, a will comparalale 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 parlia- 
 mentary majorities, which may and should represent 
 the majority of the nation, but any one who considers 
 the actual process of legislation, the steps by which a 
 bill reaches the form in which it is ultimately inscribed 
 in the statute book, to say nothing of the form in which 
 it is really applied by the courts, must recognize that 
 
 6 
 
82 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 it is a process made up of innumerable conflicts of in- 
 numerable wills, in which there is every sort of give and 
 take, compromise and adjustment, contrasting very 
 clearly with the simple and crisp decisions of an individual 
 mind. It is true that with political education and the 
 development of effective democracy the sphere of intelli- 
 gent social control is extended, and it would be a sound 
 statement of the democratic ideal to say that it con- 
 ceives a possible society regulating its common life by 
 common consent, in which a larger and larger proportion 
 of its members actively participate until a position be 
 reached in which society would control itself as simply 
 and effectively as the individual controls himself. This is 
 an ideal, and not one very near to realization. Of the 
 social structure of any state that exists it is generally 
 imtrue 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.' 
 
 Too often it is not the state as a whole which sets definite 
 ends before itself. In the normal development of peace- 
 time, and for that matter even in the concentrated purpose 
 of war-time, there are many sections within the state 
 which have each for itself a general will, far more properly 
 so called because much more clearly conscious and united 
 than any will which permeates the state as a whole. The 
 actual institutions of society have been in large measure 
 determined by class conflicts, struggles of churches, racial 
 wars, and everywhere ■'here 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 
 
 I It is remarkable that in another connectioii Dr. Bosanquet 
 writes, " Nothing is properly due to finite mind, as such, which 
 never was a plan before any finite mind." — Principle of IndividMolity, 
 p. 152. 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 83 
 
 over others. Green, who, whatever the idealistic basis 
 of his theory, retained his fundamental humanity, saw 
 that there were instances in which it was a mere mockery 
 to describe the institutions of a state as the realization 
 of freedom for all its members, and contended forcibly 
 that the requirements of the state have " largely arisen 
 out of force directed by selfish motives." It is inter- 
 esting to see how Dr. Bosanquet deals with these uncom- 
 fortable criticisms. He partly admits their truth, but 
 turns the edge of them by insisting on a rational element 
 running through the selfishness and shortsightedness of 
 the particular wills that have gone to make up the social 
 order, dwelling at the same time on the potential and 
 implied recognition of the interests of society in the minds 
 of its selfish members. If state organization were radically 
 and fundamentally well-meaning, and marred only by 
 imperfection of insight and inadequacy of means to an 
 end, this answer might be sufficient, but in so far as 
 civilized society throughout its history has in very large 
 measure consisted in the imposition upon the many of 
 an order of Hfe wherein the essential benefits are rea.ped 
 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 practicallly considerable, but I shall attempt 
 to make it appear in the course of the present chapter 
 to be a difference of progress and not of direction." The 
 comment to be made on this is that the difference is so 
 fundamental that it cannot be neglected even for a moment 
 without risk of the most serious fallacy. So far as the 
 metaphorical expression " mind of society " can be 
 
84 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 justified at all, it must be said that it is mind at a very 
 low stage of its development. In other words, social 
 institutions may be regarded as outcomes of a mentality 
 of a kind, but that mentality, when viewed in relation 
 to the objects which it has to subserve, is of a low type 
 compared, let us say, to the mentality of a mother con- 
 sidering the welfare of her child. A good mother \rl\ 
 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 reaUzed somewhere on the far horizon of human pro- 
 gress, but one of the surest ways of arresting that progress 
 is to speak as though that horizon had already been 
 reached. 
 
 We have quoted above the passage in which Dr. 
 Bosanquet speaks of the habits and institutions of any 
 community as "so to speak the standing interpretation 
 of all the private wills which compose it." Though an 
 imperfect representation of the real will " because every 
 set of institutions is an incomplete embodiment of Ufe," 
 they are " very much more complete than the explicit 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 85 
 
 ideas which at any given instant move any individual mind 
 in voUtion." 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 exphcit 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 
 
86 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 expression of what they really wished, they would have 
 revolted and prevented it. The actual institutions of a 
 society are not the imperfect expression o1 a real will, 
 which is essentially good and harmonious, but the result 
 into which the never-ceasing clash of wills has settled 
 down with some degree of permanency, and that result 
 may embody much less of justice, morality and ration- 
 ality than the explicit ideas of many an individual mind. 
 As to the problems of social philosophy. Dr. Bosanquet 
 has a very easy solution. " The end of the state, as of 
 the individual, is the realization of the best life." As to 
 this we may all agree, but Dr. Bosanquet proceeds, " The 
 difficrdty 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 reaUzing a good Ufe, 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 underljring 
 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 outhnes. 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 i? precisely not the outcome 
 of one real will but of millions and millions of wills 
 through the generations. In these millions and millions 
 of wills there is a social element working. There are 
 elements of idealism, sparks of justice, uniting threads 
 of human kindness, and there are also selfishness and vanity 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 87 
 
 and pride and hardness, corporate and collective as well 
 as individual, and these elements acting upon one another 
 make up the piebald pattern of human society. 
 
 To sum up. The conception of social institutions as 
 objective reason annuls the function of reason in human 
 society. It teaches the man who would think about 
 social order, who would try to work back from it to 
 some set of ethical principles commending themselves to 
 rational reflection, that in seeking to reason he is sinning 
 against reason. He is to reaUze 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, ^ but 
 to think how wonderfully good and rational is the social 
 Ufe that he knows, with its Pharisees and publicans, its 
 gin-palaces, its millions of young men led out to the 
 slaughter, and he is to give thanks daily that he is a 
 rational being and not merely as the brutes that perish. 
 And, having so given thanks, he is to do his duty in that 
 state of life to which it has pleased the state-god to call 
 him. The root of this conception is the common self. 
 It is the notion that one mind, one will vastly greater 
 than yours or mine, constitutes the life and directs the 
 course of each organized society. Against this concep- 
 tion both philosophy and science may protest, philo- 
 sophy claiming the ultimate right of reason, the conscious 
 reason which each individual may and must acquire 
 for himself, to criticize the established fact and to form 
 its own ideal for the best, life that is within its power ; 
 science on the ground that human society, as it has grown 
 up, is the product of unnumbered wills, of their clash as 
 well as their harmony. We may say truly that ethical 
 philosophy cannot construct the state without reference 
 to the established fact. We must start from the place 
 in which we find ourselves. We must understand society, 
 know how it works, before we can improve it. Science 
 must be added to philosophy before we can have a social 
 
 • For Hegel philosophy comes after reality, and has merely to 
 interpret it. — Phil, des Rechts, p. 20. 
 
88 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 art ; and if this had been their line of criticism, much 
 of what the idealists from Hegel onwards have had to 
 say about the shortsighted revolutionaries might have 
 been justified. But this is not their point of view. They 
 use the failures, the wrongs, and the wilful dogmatism 
 of some social philosophers to discredit philosophy itself, 
 and with it all genuine reason. 
 
 But now, it may be asked, if we deny the ultimate 
 authority of law, custom and tradition, what do we set 
 in its place ? We make political obligation subordinate 
 to moral obligation. But what is moral obligation ? 
 The details of political obligation are written down in 
 a code of law or incorporated in judicial decisions, or 
 more vaguely, but still with sufficient precision, in the 
 customs and understandings of society. This is the 
 concrete rule of life which Hegel calls SittUchkcit. 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 sociaty and the individual, but between 
 one organized society and another ; and historically men 
 have attempted to solve the difficulties which have 
 arisen on one of three possible lines, by making the church 
 subordinate to the state, by making the state subordinate 
 to the church, or by an attempt to delimit the affairs 
 of the church and the state, a compromise which has on 
 the whole been accepted in the modern world, which in 
 the main has found the means of compelling the citizen 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 89 
 
 to render unto Caesar the thiqgs that are Caesar's, while 
 allowing him to render \into God the things which he 
 helieves 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 js 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 uuman 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 govtm- 
 ment and citizenship in a free society on the basis of a 
 common acknowledgment of certain dogmas of religion. 
 Thus the maintenance of certain common requisites of 
 social life has either been kept out or has passed out of 
 the hands of the church. With regard to these common 
 requisites, the state will exert an authority against or 
 over the authority of any church to which its members 
 may happen to belong. Hence the necessity of defining 
 as closely as possible the common requisites for the sake 
 of which the state must exercise compulsion even in 
 defiance of spiritual authority, (i) The state, as the 
 organized power of the community, is the guarantor of 
 the rights of all its members and will not allow a wrong 
 to be done to any one of them in the name of any other 
 authority. The state is fallible and may err in its 
 definition of rights as in other things, but it is its business 
 to form the best judgment in this matter according to 
 its lights, and, having formed it, to enforce it. (2) The 
 state operates through universal laws, and it may find 
 that objects essential to the common welfare, even to 
 the common existence, cannot be secured if exceptions 
 
go THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 are admitted in such cases. Again, as a guardian of the 
 common existence, the state is within its right in exact- 
 ing conformity. The other side of this principle, perhaps 
 more readily forgotten, is that it is only whtn universal 
 conformity is provedly necessary that compulsion is 
 justified in overriding rehgious 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 possi- 
 biUty 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 faUible human 
 beings against another. Each owes a certain consider- 
 ation to the other. The state is bound to respect rehgious 
 conviction, the church to have regard for the value of 
 law and order in society. But when the last word has 
 been said and those responsible for the state can see. no 
 other way to the preservation of social order or national 
 existence but the enforcement of a given law upon all 
 citizens regardless of creed, then those responsible for 
 the state, and all citizens as owing allegiance to the state, 
 are bound to act in accordance with their final judgment, 
 fallible as it may be, of what is necessary to social pre- 
 servation. And similarly, the churchman, when he has 
 taken the state's point of view fully into account and 
 w;eighed it in the scale against his own law, if he can find 
 no way of escaping from the spiritual duty incumbent 
 upon him, seems bound to take the risks, moral as well 
 as legal, of disobedience 
 
 There is indeed a court of appeal. There is an objective 
 moral order underlying all disputes, an order which if 
 once apprehended would settle all controversies. But, 
 unless and until this objective order is apprehended 
 and agreed upon by men, moral conflicts will not cease. 
 Appeal indeed is always open until agreement is reached. 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 91 
 
 New facts and new arguments are never barred, and no 
 opinion is to be silenced ; but if no clear verdict is col- 
 lected and both parties remain firm in their conviction, 
 there is nothing for it but that the case should go to 
 the ordeal, the barbaric ordeal of endurance. That this 
 is a satisfactory solution no one would contend, but it 
 is better to recognize frankly that in the region of ultimate 
 moral conflict each party is bound by its own conviction 
 than to obscure the issue by such subterfuges as the con- 
 tention that true freedom Tyould consist in subordination. 
 What has been said of the possible conflict between 
 church and state, which now has for the most part only 
 a historic interest, is also applicable in principle to con- 
 flicts between the state and the individual which have 
 a present, and, it is to be feared, a future significance of 
 a tragic kind. The difference is that where the church- 
 man pleads the recognized law of an organized body, the 
 individual pleads his conscience. We are thus brought 
 to the question of the rights of conscience, their reaUty 
 and their Hmitations. 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 deUver- 
 ances may be fortified by an appeal to the written word 
 of God without. So conceived, conscience is as much 
 above state law in authority as it is below it in power ; 
 but in a sceptical age men reajize more fully that there 
 is a subjective element in conscience. Consciences differ, 
 and the word of God, even if we take it to be an inspired 
 document, is manifestly liable to the greatest diversities 
 of interpretation. What I call my conscience is my final 
 judgment, when all things bearing on the situation have 
 been summed up, of my right and my duty. This judg- 
 ment, common experience and psychological analysis 
 will alike show, is in part dependent on idiosyncrasies 
 of my own, on special experiences that have impressed 
 me, on emotional tendencies that make me attach more 
 weight to one thing and less to another, on partial appli- 
 cation of principles, on obscurity of ideas. Conscience, 
 then, would seem to have but little final authority. It 
 
92 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 falls short of the objectivity attached to law and the 
 social tradition. How can it be set up as a standard 
 of nonconformity in some vital matter ? The answer 
 of the individual in the first place is that conscience may 
 be a poor thing, but it is his own ; and the answer of the 
 moral law must be that, though there may be many 
 errors incident to the principle that men should do 
 ultimately what is right in their own eyes, yet, if they do 
 anything else than what is right in their own eyes, there 
 is no moral law at all. Moral action is action in con- 
 formity with an inward principle, an action that the 
 agent considers to be right and performs because he 
 believes it to be right. If people are required to give 
 up what they consider to be right, morality is annulled. 
 May a man act, then, without regard to law or the 
 judgment of others ? On the contrary, what experience 
 in practical matters will often teach him is that others 
 are wiser than he, what morality will teach him is that 
 the law which is right for him must in principle be a law 
 of universal application, holding for all men similarly 
 situated. What duty and practical sense will combine 
 to show him is that he is a man among many, a member 
 of an organized society, and if morality teaches him that 
 he must do what he thinks good, it inculcates at the same 
 time that what is good for him must be a common good. 
 Nevertheless, he is in the end to stand by his judgment 
 of the nature of the common good and the means by 
 which it is to be realized. Once given, as in the case of 
 the churchman, that he has well and truly weighed all 
 that law and society have to say, that he has taken into 
 account the limitations of his own experience and the 
 fallibility of his own judgment as one weak individual 
 opposed perhaps to the millions of all organized society ; 
 when he has then asked himself frankly if it is not his 
 final duty to waive his first judgment, to stifle the inward 
 prompting from respect for an outward order built up by 
 the organized efforts of men, valuable in itself and en- 
 dangered if any one rebels against it ; when, having duly 
 tested the case in a spirit of humility, he has nevertheless 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 93 
 
 come finally to the conclusion that, all said and done, 
 the obUgation 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 disentan,gle them, let 
 us for a moment put ourselves on the side of the state. 
 Let us suppose the state is justified in its behest, that 
 if we were gods knowing good and evil, we should give 
 our verdict on the side of the state, then in that sense 
 and from that point of view, the nonconformist is clearly 
 wrong just as, if the verdict were given the other way, 
 he would be clearly right. But even in the case where 
 he is wrong in one sense he is also right in another. It 
 is right that he should do what he thinks right although, 
 as it happens, he thinks wrong ; the ultimate reason of 
 this is that, though by so acting he is wrong on occasion, 
 if he acted otherwise as a matter of principle he would 
 never do right at all, and if every one so acted, right and 
 wrong as moral terms would disappear. And by the 
 same reasoning, the state, in so far as it holds itself trustee 
 for the final good of society, will recognize that it is better 
 for its members to be free men who will from time to 
 time give trouble by mistakes of judgment, than con- 
 forming persons with whom everything is smooth because 
 they never think at all. For this reason the state will 
 avoid coercion of conscience up to the last resort, but 
 once again, as in the case of the church, we have to admit 
 as correlative to the ultimate right of conscience, an 
 ultimate right of coercion. The state, a fallible organi- 
 zation of fallible men, has nevertheless to act according 
 to its lights for the safety of the whole. Where it can 
 see no escape from a universal rule, where this rule would 
 be frustrated by individual acts of disobedience, where 
 by disobeying A would in its judgment do a wrong to B, 
 there in the end it has to exercise constraint, and there 
 seems to be no appeal. The judgment of mankind may 
 ultimately say that the state was wrong, but even so 
 it will have to extend to the state the same charity which 
 
94 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE. 
 
 is due to the nonconforming individual. If the state 
 acted bona fide by its best lights, it could do no better. 
 What the state has no right to do is to exercise craelty 
 or insult. It has no right to place the conscientious 
 objector on a level with the felon or to use the weapon 
 of derision, cpntumely and degradation.' 
 
 It may be asked finally whether the duty which we 
 have recognized in a subordinate place of surrendering 
 our judgment to that of others and in particular to the 
 organized will of society, is not of a more authoritative 
 character. If conscience is not the voice of God, why 
 should we attach so much importance to what one or 
 two individuals happen to think ? Does not the wisdom 
 of our ancestors, enshrined in institutions, supply a better 
 test of truth ? What social value attaches to individ- 
 uality ? The answer is that the individual, fallible and 
 weak as he may be in his isolatipn, is stiU 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 
 
 » In the actual controversy with the conscientioas objectors to 
 military service the state has definitely put itself in the wrong. 
 For a mechanism was devised for exempting the small number 
 of men whose principles were perfectly well known and who could 
 not be expected to change them on demand without incurring 
 personal dishonour. This mechanism was such as to leave the 
 general obUgation to service untouched, and the refusal of the hand- 
 ful of objectors in no way obstructed the organization of the 
 man-power of the country as a whole. But the machinery was 
 not consistently applied, with the result that some conscientious 
 objectors were left unmolested and others sentenced to long and 
 repeated terms of rigorous imprisonment. This is state action 
 at its worst, arbitrary, inconsistent and vindictive, and persistent 
 in its wickedness. I rejoice to read in Dr. Bosanquet's new volume 
 that " the conscientious objector will follow his conscience to the 
 end, and if we beUeve him to be sincere we all respect him for it." 
 I rejoice^ but with some bewilderment, for I cannot fuse the spirit 
 of this remark (and of some others in Social and International I deak) 
 with the general spirit of The Philosophical Theory of the State, 
 
THE WILL OF THE STATE 95 
 
 speech and custom. If we do not any longer think of 
 him as directly in converse with God, we can think of 
 him as a part of nature, the product physically and 
 spiritually of a long ancestral line of development, sus- 
 ceptible to emotional and ideal suggestions from all 
 manner of experience. If it is through all these that 
 error comes, it is always through one individual that 
 each new truth first comes, and it is better for society 
 in the end to be exposed to many errors than to run the 
 risk of losing one truth. Given freedom of discussion 
 and even of experiment in living, errors will reveal them- 
 selves for what they are, and sometimes, the husk being 
 stripped off, the kernel of truth wiU 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 Umit is not over- 
 stepped. In the latter the recalcitrance of one man might 
 wreck the purpose, perhaps endanger the safety of a 
 community. The community has a right through the 
 state to protect itself against such injury. Where both 
 these grounds fail the state has no right to put compul- 
 sion upon conscience. Where there is no question of 
 conscience the limits of state activity are matters of 
 convenience, good organization and the relative merits 
 of individual spontaneity and collective regulation 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 VARYING APPLICATIONS OF THE METAPHYSICAL 
 THEORY 
 
 The idealistic conception of the state has sometimes 
 figured as an organic theory of society. In the form given 
 to it by Green this description is not imjust, for to Green, 
 the ethical basis of the state is a common good, which 
 at the same time is the good of each individual citizen. 
 The state rests, for Green, on a mutual recognition of 
 rights, rights being for each the conditions under which 
 he can hve the best Ufe. We have here beyond doubt 
 the elements of an organic theory, or, if the term be pre- 
 ferred, of a harmony between the state and the individual. 
 Now such a harmony, it is only fair to say, is contemplated 
 by Hegel himself as the true relation between the state 
 and the individuals which conjtpose it. The individual, he 
 says,' '* must, in the fulfilment of his duties, in some way 
 or other at the same time find his own interest, his satisfac- 
 tion, and from his relations il the state a right must accrue 
 to him whereby the universal interest {Sache) is his own 
 particular interest. The particular interest shoidd not 
 actually be set aside or altogether suppressed, but put 
 into agreement with the universal, whereby both it and the 
 universal are sustained." And again, " All turns on the 
 unity of the universal and particular in the state " ; and 
 in this the modem state is distinguished from the ancient. 
 This points t6 the true ideal, but unfortunately there 
 is nowhere in Hegel a clear distinction between the 
 ideal and the actual. The idealistic habit of talking 
 of " the state " as though there were only one type that 
 
 ' Phil, des Rechts, p. 317. 
 96 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 97 
 
 is real, while all existing instances may be regarded as 
 merely casual and secondary aberrations, bars the way 
 to a frank exposition of the contrast of which in experience 
 we are painfully aware between that which might be and 
 that which is. 
 
 Hegel recognizes bad states, but he deals with them 
 very summarily. "The state (p. 339) is actual (wirklich) 
 and its actuality consists in this, that the interest of the 
 whole realizes itself in the particular aims. ... In so far 
 as this unity is absent, a thing is not actual, even if its 
 existence might be assumed. A bad state is such a one 
 as merely exists. A sick body also exists, but it is no true 
 reality." Thus in place of asking to what extent it is really 
 true that individual and universal interests coincide and 
 what we are to do when they are palpably in conflict, 
 how we are to cure the sick state and what is the duty of 
 the i&dividual 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 somethihg to work for, regard it as 
 something actually realized and you confuse every issue 
 of practical reform and theoretic right. In particular, 
 in the notion that the state has the authority of a common 
 self standing above the individual, we have a principle 
 which may but too easily develop into a complete denial 
 of the organic conception, because, instead of recognizing 
 that the value of the state lies in its service to the har- 
 Bwnious development of all its component members, 
 it subordinates that development in each and therefore 
 in all to the fictitious whole which contains them but is 
 not them. 
 
 Had Hegel carried through the organic conception 
 of the state, he would have found room for the conception 
 of liberty, equality and democracy ; but his state system 
 is a negation of all these. By an inconsistency which goes 
 
 7 
 
98 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 to the root of his whole metaphysical argum«nt, 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 t (p. 365). And so 
 there is no objection to his being chosen in "a natural 
 way " through natural birth (p. 364). An election of 
 a ruler by popular choice will be something dependent 
 on the opinions and expressions of the many and is gener- 
 ally opposed to the idea of " Sitttichkeit " (p. 367). Yet 
 this monarch, who is only to dot the i and requires no 
 objective qualities, may in short be a fool or a brute, is 
 to have the choice of counsellors responsible for the govern- 
 ment, in his unlimited caprice {Willkur, p. 370). 
 
 To ask for consistency in these deliverances would 
 no doubt be censured by Hegel as a demand of reflective 
 reasoning. But if the king may be a fool, whose caprice 
 may yet determine the government of the state, the 
 opinion of the people is allowed no such latitude. The 
 people, without the monarch and the articulation of 
 the whole into ranks, classes, corporations and so forth, 
 is the formless mass which is no longer a state (p. 360), 
 That the organization of the people as a voting power 
 might be a necessary corrective of the social divisions 
 incident to a large and developed society, does not seem 
 to have suggested itself to Hegel. The people, as far as 
 that word expresses a special portion of the members of 
 the state, is that portion which does not know what it 
 wants (p. 386). Special interests should be represented, 
 but to let the many elect representatives is to give hostages 
 to accident (p. 398). Goethe is quoted with approval 
 as saying that " the masses can fight. There they are 
 respectable. Their judgment i^ miserable," or, as the 
 modem German phrase puts it, they are " cannon fodder." 
 Public opinion always contains an underlying truth, 
 but is always false in its expression. It must be as much 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 99 
 
 despised as respected (p. 403). It contains all error and 
 truth, and to find the truth in it is the work of the great 
 man (p. 404). We must not ask the people themselves 
 what they think apparently, but we must tell them what 
 they think. The principal guarantee of the freedom 
 of the press is the guarantee of contempt. The claim to 
 say and write what one wiU 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 tp 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 foimd to 
 
100 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 be the starting-point of the Hegelian conception of the 
 state. 
 
 The state being the individual writ large, its own inde- 
 pendence is the primary condition of its internal life and 
 indeed of its freedom (p. 409). And for this reason it 
 imposes an absolute sacrifice on the individual when it is 
 necessary to maintain it. Hegel finds in this circumstance 
 a contradiction of the view that the end of the state is 
 the security of life and property of individuals, because 
 he says this security would not be reached by the sacrifice 
 of that which was to be secured (p. 410), as though the 
 life of some might not willingly be offered up for the well- 
 being of othersj However, in the security of the state 
 lies the " ethical moment " of war, which is to be regarded 
 as not an absolute evil or as merely an external accident 
 (p. 410). Its good side is that it compels us to risk life 
 and property. We hear much in the pulpit of the 
 insecurity, the vanity and instability of temporal things, 
 but each of us thinks that he will still hold his own. If, 
 however, the insecurity comes "in the form of hussars," 
 this readiness to forsake all turns into curses on the con- 
 querors. We are apparently to think it is positively good 
 if not only our property but also the lives of those dearest 
 to us should be destroyed from time to time by the god- 
 state in order to teach us the vanity of earthly affections. 
 This is one advantage of war. Another is that it inculcates 
 discipline and moral soundness. People who will not 
 endure sovereignty within are brought under the heel of 
 others (pp. 411-13). Kant's proposal of a League of 
 Peace is specifically repudiated. TTiose know little of the 
 spirit of the people who think that they can make a 
 whole along with others (p. 409) (as e.g. the proud Scot 
 has made with the Englishman), and even if a number of 
 states can make themselves into a family, this union as 
 an individuality would create an opposite and engender 
 an enemy (p. 412). That in all this argument Hegel 
 is, in touch with some dismal realities must be admitted. 
 War, like other public calamities, does teach sacrifice 
 to some who did not know it before. It does impose 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS loi 
 
 discipline and make democracy difficult. Wider unions 
 are hard to achieve and most easily consolidated by a 
 common enemy. A great humanitarian thinker, like 
 Kant, is not unaware of these grave disharmonies in 
 human life and in the social order. The peculiar vice of 
 Hegel is that to him they are part of the ideal and they 
 receive a non-moral justification from the inhuman con- 
 ception of the state as a god with a life of its own, reckless 
 of the fibres of human feeling that it rends and mangles 
 to assist its vital processes, devouring its children. Yet 
 the conception of the selfhood of the state is not even 
 carried through with consistency. The state is a self- 
 dependent totality (p. 417), and yet it cannot be an actual 
 individual without relation to other states. The inter- 
 state relations kre necessar}^ therefore, to the existence of 
 each state. As these states are spiritual beings, one would 
 suppose that their relations were of spiritual and, a fortiori, 
 of moral and legal character. Not at all. When we 
 consider their relations their dependence on one another 
 vanishes, and they are put above the moral law. Their 
 relation is other than one of mere morality or private law. 
 Private persons have a court over them. State relations 
 should be of a legal kind (rcchtlich), but, as there is no 
 power above them to decide, what is right, we are here 
 merely in the region of what should be. States may make 
 a stipulation between one another, but at the same time 
 stand above this stipulation, or, as the current phrase 
 goes, their treaties are scraps of paper. As there are no 
 judges, disputes must be decided by war, and the causes 
 of war are quite indeterminate. The state must judge 
 for itself what it will treat as a matter of honour, and is 
 the more inclined to susceptibility {Reizbarkeit) in this 
 respect, the more a strong individuality is driven, through 
 a long internal pfeace, to seek and procure for itself some 
 matter for activity beyond its bounds (p. 420). Thus 
 there seems no moral limit to the restless ambition of 
 this god. He should in some sense have regard to right 
 in dealing with his fellow-gods, but he may be expected 
 to disregard this recommendation when he is conscious 
 
102 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 of his own strength, and he need not even wait for any 
 actual injury. The idea of a threatening danger is sufficient. 
 Anticipatory wars are justified (p. 420). Nor is the state 
 to be guided by any philanthropic conception in war. It 
 is to think of its own well-being, the well-being of the state 
 having a quite other justification than that of the individual. 
 It is only the state's concrete existence, not any of the 
 general conceptions that are thought of as moral com- 
 mands, that can be taken as the principle of its action 
 (p. 421). In only one respect has Hegel failed to anticipate 
 the whole practice of modern Germany, and that is that he 
 lays down that the relations of states remain in war and 
 that in war the possibility of peace is preserved. It is 
 not waged against inner institutions, family and private 
 life. And this is why modern wars are humanely con- 
 ducted. With this amiable inconsistency, in which Hegel 
 seems to fail to interpret the spirit of his own teaching, 
 we may take leave of the Hegelian state, having seen 
 perhaps enough of it to recognize the germ of the colossal 
 suffering of Europe and of the backward movement that 
 went so far to arrest the civilizing tendencies of the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet follows Hegel in conceiving the state as 
 necessarily one unity among others, a conception which 
 rules out the possibility of a world-state. " We have 
 hitherto (p. 184) spoken of the state and society as almost 
 convertible terms." Having said this, Bosanquet pro- 
 ceeds to a definition of the state. " By the state, then, 
 we mean society as a unit recognized as rightly exercising 
 control over its members through absolute physical 
 power." Questions arise here as to the unit, as to the term 
 " recognize " and as to the term " rightly." 
 
 First as to the unit. The limits of this Bosanquet admits 
 " to be determined by what looks like historical accident." 
 But he contends that there is " logic underneath the 
 apparent accident." This so-called logic may be nothing 
 but physical force. What logic incorporated Alsace- 
 Lorraine with Germany ? Bribery incorporated the 
 Irish with the British Parliament. If it is untrue to say 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 103 
 
 with Treitschke that force alone has built up states, it is 
 equally false to shut our eyes to the fact that force has 
 had a great deal to do with the building up of a great 
 many states. 
 
 But there is perhaps a more fundamental point. Bosan- 
 quet regards the state as necessarily a unit among others 
 (p. 185). " A single independent corporation among other 
 independent corporations." If it is of the essence of the 
 state, as Hegel certainly thought and as Bosanquet seems 
 to think, to be one among many, then society is always 
 something wider than the state. Bosanquet thinks that 
 the area of the state should be as great as is " compatible 
 with the unity of experience which is demanded by effective 
 self-government." In reality there is no such thing as 
 a unity of experience as between the members of a state 
 contrasted with the lack of unity as between members of 
 different states. In the civilized world the ramifications 
 of mutual influence are not bounded by a frontier, but the 
 whole is potentially one society, and for many purposes 
 the relations between corresponding classes of different 
 states are closer than the relations between very different 
 classes within the same state. Instead of 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 consider- 
 able section of its members, does it cease to be a state ? 
 And what are the limits, if any, of political obligation in 
 this direction ? The question seems unanswerable unless 
 you refer politics back to ethics. A disobedient sectioni 
 will probably put forward certain claims of right which 
 they say that the state that exercises authority over them 
 ignores. If these claims of right are ethically well founded, 
 
104 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 then their denial of the right of the state to exercise control 
 appears to be justified, and if not, not. So far then from 
 the rights being derivable from the state, the moral 
 authority of the state rests upon the validity of the rights 
 which it asserts. 
 
 With this we pass to the third point, of the state as 
 rightly exercising control over its members through 
 absolute physical power. The state has absolute physical 
 power in the sense that it can inflict imprisonment, torture 
 or death if it has an army and a police force, but how 
 far does it do so rightly ? Here again we have a question 
 that runs back to ethics. The states in the modern world 
 which claim to be free owe much of their history to the 
 protest of individuals, classes or churches against various 
 applications of physical force which they have denied 
 to be right applications. In a word. Dr. Bosanquet's 
 definition is an intermixture of moral considerations with 
 questions of fact, just those questions which it is the 
 business of philosophy to disentangle. 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet goes on to say that every individual 
 must belong to one state and one only because there must 
 be feome 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 bj^ the 
 British Empire. It may be said that the British Parlia- 
 ment delegated the bulk of its rights to the Dominion 
 Parliament and can resume them. As a fact it can 
 certainly do nothing of the kind, and the realities of the 
 situation are only expressed by admitting a dual state, 
 a dual loyalty, which under certain circumstances might 
 give rise to sharp conflict. All this is very intelligible 
 if we simply understand the state as an organization 
 coming into being for certain purposes and capable of 
 being adapted, expanded, changed, and even abolished, 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 105 
 
 as may suit those particular purposes. In modern 
 political structure the interweaving of such organizations 
 is playing a growing part. And it is of practical as well 
 as theoretical importance that this growth should not 
 be checked by overdrawn distinctions between what is a 
 state and what is not a state. 
 
 The limits of the state which can achieve the kind of 
 individuaUty 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 pohtical development is 
 surprising. 
 
 In the first place the identity of the nation with the 
 state is perhaps not perfectly realized in any single known 
 pohtical community, while the divergencies in many 
 political communities constitute one of the acute standing 
 problems of most modern states. The only value of the 
 term "nation-state " is that it serves as a mark of distinc- 
 tion on the one hand from the city-state of antiquity and 
 on the other hand of the purely non-national empire, while 
 it further indicates the kind of ideal to which the more 
 fortunate political societies approximate and to which 
 closer approximation is requisite if the problems referred 
 to above are to be solved. These problems, however, are 
 insoluble if the state is the unity on which Bosanquet 
 insists. They are soluble only by recognizing detached 
 allegiances within the state. Austria, for example, solved 
 one of her difficulties fifty years ago by dualism. She 
 may solve her present difficulties by trialism or possibly 
 quadrupUsm. 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 
 
io6 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 seems to have modified his view of the limitation of the 
 state to the boundaries of the nation. " How far even 
 the absolute power of any one group in relation to indi- 
 viduals within it may be interfered *vith by constitutional 
 tradition or by a conflict of authorities ... or by inter- 
 national courts or leagues, is a question of degree and 
 detail. . . . There is therefore no technical difficulty in 
 the modification of the nation-state towards larger forms 
 of authoritative co-operation so long as it is made clear 
 to what system of authorities every separate human being 
 is subject in respect to the ultimate adjustment of claims 
 upon him." 
 
 Finally, in his recent book Social and International 
 Ideals, he carries the subject further by a discussion of the 
 idea of the League of Nations, which has now become a 
 matter of practical politics. Each state, we are now told, 
 is " a member of an ethical family of nations, so far at 
 least as the European world is concerned " — ^we can hardly 
 suppose Dr. Bosanquet intends to exclude America and 
 other civilized nations — and Mazzini's doctrine is accepted 
 that each state has its individual mission, furnishing its 
 specific contribution to human life. Fundamentally this 
 mission is discharged by the right performance on the part 
 of each state of its internal function, the maintenance of 
 the conditions of a good life, and an entire chapter is given 
 to the development of the thesis that, if each state would 
 look at home and reform itself, there would be no conflict 
 of states and no wars. As a remedy for war, this is a little 
 like the proposal that each man should reform himself as 
 a remedy for social injustice. It is quite true that, if 
 every one would reform himself, injustices would disappear, 
 and similarly; if every state would reform itself, conflicts 
 of states would disappear, but what is to happen if one 
 or two or three states cultivate their own gardens, while 
 other states cast covetous eyes on these gardens ? That 
 is the question which exercises the supporters of the 
 League of Nations, who find in the requirement for internal 
 reform nothing but a pious platitude as long as security 
 against external disturbance is not guaranteed. 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 107 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet contends that beyond the state " there 
 is no organized moral world," and that an organized 
 moral world involves a unity which must grow out of a 
 pervading will.' The advocate of the League of Nations 
 will reply that he is seeking to establish an organized 
 moral world, such as may give expression to the pervading 
 desire for peace. Dr. Bosanquet answers ^ 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 
 ' P. 313. * P- 314- 
 
io8 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 converse proposition that the will would be unavailing 
 without the machinery. What are those to do who have 
 the will and. desire to cultivate it ? What can they do 
 but endeavour to persuade others to agree with them in 
 setting up the institutions required to express that will ? 
 If they get their way, the will has won its first victory. 
 It has so far established itself, and that is the first step 
 to consolidation. The machinery. Dr. Bosanquet objects, 
 involves force, but the state itself involves force. In 
 the procedure of the state we do not wait until every one 
 agrees. We win enough agreement to make possible the 
 application of force to the remainder who differ. 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet's discussion brings out the contrast 
 between the metaphysical way of regarding social problems 
 and the way which is at once ethical and scientific, or, in 
 a word, practical. The metaphysical method says that 
 in the state there is a real self and beyond it there are 
 only extenial 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. AU 
 sorts of different organizations are required to deal with 
 the different relations of men. They must be united for 
 some purposes and left free for others. One sphere of 
 life may be controlled by one organization and another 
 by another, and both organizations may in turn be brought 
 as parts within some common organization for certain 
 purposes. Where there is to be unity and where there 
 is to be freedom, what purposes are to be assigned to one 
 organization and what to another, these are questions 
 to be determined with such wisdom and foresight as 
 we can win from experience in practical affairs. The 
 utmost plasticity is required in adapting the form of 
 organization to the multiplicity of human requirements. 
 What ruins everything is the conception of an abso- 
 lute sovereignty that admits no independent rights, an 
 absolute unity that leaves no room for divergence, an 
 absolute demarcation between a state which claims the 
 entire devotion of its citizens and all other political or 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 109 
 
 social organizations which are conceived as mechanical, 
 arbitrary and insignificant. 
 
 At the conclusion of his earlier work,' 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 
 difficvilty 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 imjustifiable 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 responsibiUty 
 is diffused. It would generally speaking be harsh to 
 charge the citizen soldier, acting partly under compulsion, 
 
 ' P. 322. 
 
no THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 partly from a sense of loyalty, with bloodguiltiness ; and 
 yet the finer minds would, and do, refuse to fight in a 
 quarrel which they are convinced is unjust. The Biglow 
 Papers contain a sounder morality than Bosanquet's — 
 
 " Ef you take a sword an' dror it, 
 Go an' stick a feller thru, 
 Guv'ment aint to answer for it, 
 God '11 send the bill to you." 
 
 But the responsibility of statesmen is surely much more 
 direct, and those who are actively responsible for bringing 
 on a war cannot as individuals shift the moral burden 
 frorh 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 responsibihty in so doing. As to 
 the state itself, it may be said that an intangible thing like 
 an organization cannot be the subject of moral guilt. 
 Nevertheless that organization may be condemned as a 
 bad organization and it may justly suffer punishments in 
 the infliction of losses or penalties. 
 
 By a curiously involved argument the private honour 
 of the agents of the state is distinguished from the good 
 faith of the state itself. Dr. Bosanquet argues, so far 
 justly, that the state is not to be blamed for the ill-faith 
 or other misdeed of its agents. That is of course true on 
 condition that the state does not consciously benefit by 
 this misdeed. So much Bosanquet seems to admit, but 
 he goes on to say that the agent is likely to go wrong if 
 he mixes up the obligations of the state with his private 
 honour. Precisely the contrary view must be maintained. 
 If the agent of the state enters into an undertaking which, 
 as an honourable man, he would not do on his own account, 
 he is doing wrong and no reason of state justifies him. So 
 low is the reputation of states that, for example, it was 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS iii 
 
 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 Ufe 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 ide^l 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 ideaUst theory of the state is that it denies the need 
 and even the possibility of such transcendence of state 
 
112 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 limits. This theory, true to its fundamental misconcep- 
 tion that the ideal is inherent in the nature of the exist- 
 ing order, proceeds to justify and apply the fallacy. There 
 is no more glaring instance of that fallacy of philo- 
 sophic idealism which has been expressed by saying that 
 instead of seeking to realize the ideal it idealizes the real. 
 
 In his new volume Dr. Bosanquet discusses the question 
 anew and repudiates with some warmth the accusation 
 of denying the moral responsibility of the state. One is 
 glad to think this was never his intention, but in view 
 of the character noted above of his earlier discussion, it 
 is not surprising if he laid himself open to some mis- 
 understanding. He now asks his critics : » "Is our fault 
 in saying that the commimity. which asserts itself through 
 the state, is a moral being and has a conscience, or is not 
 a moral being and has not a conscience ? They seem to 
 me in effect to say both at once, but only one can be true." 
 The reply to this is that Dr. Bosanquet has appeared to 
 his critics to say both at once, that he has greatly exag- 
 gerated the moral character of the state in certain relations 
 and appeared to depreciate it as unduly in others. This 
 double and opposite exaggeration still, I fed, subsists in 
 his new statement. The moral character of the state is 
 exaggerated to the point of caricature when it is spoken 
 of as " sole organizer of rights and as guardian of moral 
 values." > On the other hand, it is depreciated undnly 
 in its external relations. Dr. Bosanquet rei>eats 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 individu^ ; it is more—" the 
 absence of a recognized moral order such as to guide the 
 conscience itself." 
 
 On this I have two comments to make. In the first 
 place, if the state is the conscience of mankind, the sole 
 guardian of rights and duties, the moral individual in a 
 much more real sense than the simple man or woman, 
 how comes it that it has built up no moral order in its 
 - P. 282. > p. 284. 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 113 
 
 external relations ? Here are states (Dr. Bosanquet 
 must in this relation admit the plural) in constant inter- 
 course with each other. Each of them is a moral being 
 with a conscience much more highly developed than 
 that of any individual, yet on his showing these gifted 
 beings have built up no recognized order to guide their 
 consciences. They are left to anarchy and to do what is 
 right in their own eyes, for this is what it comes to when 
 it is said that the state must see in the moral world of 
 which it is the guardian, the only definite guide in any 
 difficult problem of its relations to others. It is a paradox 
 that verges on contradiction that highly moral beings in 
 close relations to one another should evolve no moral 
 order and no common understanding. 
 
 Secondly, Dr. Bosanquet depreciates unduly the partial 
 moral order which has actually been established. I do 
 not recollect to have come across the phrase " international 
 law " in the course of his discussion, nor in fact do I see 
 it in the index. There is a law as between states and 
 there has been " Sittlichkeit " between them, very imperfect 
 no doubt, yet not without its value. What has paralysed 
 the development of international law and morality is, on 
 the side of theory, just that doctrine of state absolutism 
 of which the idealistic theory of the state is the most 
 subtle justification. Every organization of men tends ta 
 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 wiU fulfil it ? International anarchy 
 is not due to philosophy but to the passions of men, but 
 the restraint which humanitarian philosophy has sought 
 to im^se has been fatally loosened by the sophistications 
 of idealism. 
 
 8 
 
114 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Developing his position in his recent volume. Dr. 
 Bosanquet finds a double difficulty in the conception of 
 " an organism of humanity " which he admits to be the 
 natural extension of the idea of the social organism. The 
 difficulty is {a) that humanity in fact possesses no com- 
 munal consciousness whatever. Neither did England 
 under the Heptarchy, nor France under the Merovingians. 
 A common consciousness is a thing which grows, and 
 Dr. Bosanquet admits that the defect might be overcome. 
 The idea of humanity is due in part to the Stoic philosophy 
 and in part to the great world religions, and if it has never 
 fully matured, neither has it ever perished. It has never 
 lost its appeal to the greater and deeper thinkers and 
 teachers and it has continually inspired the missionary 
 effort of the church. The conditions of an effective unity 
 of mankind to-day are at least as matured as the conditions 
 of an effective German unity in the eighteenth century, or 
 an effective French unity during the Hundred Years' War. 
 And just as a farsighted and wide-minded Frenchman or 
 German was he who realized the unity underlying dif- 
 ferences and prepared the way for its growth, so the far- 
 sighted man of to-day is he who holds to the unity of human 
 nature and the common interests of mankind and places 
 them above all causes of quarrel. But (b) Dr. Bosanquet 
 finds no adequate expression of the higher human quaUties 
 in the aggregate of human beings. The valuable things 
 are the possessions of particular communities and. " to 
 put it bluntly, a duty to realize the best life cannot be 
 shown to coincide with the duty to the masses of mankind." 
 We do not need to be told that the achievements of ancient 
 Athens and modern France are not shared by Hottentots 
 and Kaffirs. But it does not follow that Hottentots and 
 Kaffirs are outside the pale of rights and duties, and I 
 do not suppose Dr. Bosanquet would contend that they 
 are. But to say this is to admit the fundamental principle 
 of universalism, that all human beings, as human, are 
 within the scope of the fundamental moral law. Special 
 obligations arise in distinct communities, but these are 
 developments of common obligations which man owes to 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 115 
 
 man. To make them override these fundamentals, to 
 push devotion to a group to the point at which it breaks 
 with the common rule, is the sin of all group morality, of 
 which the Machiavellian doctrine of the state is the standing 
 example. 
 
 Finally, Dr. Bosanquet imputes to the Comtists the 
 mistake of identifying humanity as a real corporate being 
 with the aggregate of human beings. That this is a com- 
 plete misapprehension will be shown by the following 
 passage by a distinguished Comtist : 
 
 " No one thinks that when he mentions the word England or 
 France or Germany, he is talking of a ghost or a phantom. Nor 
 does he mean a vast collection of so many millions of men in the 
 abstract ; so many million ghosts. Man in the abstract is of all 
 abstractions the most unreal. By England we mean the pre- 
 judices, customs, traditions, history, peculiar to EngUshmen, 
 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 behef 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 hves, and only of 
 those parts of each man's life, which are impersonal, which are 
 social, which have converged to the common good." ' 
 
 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 
 ' J. H. Bridges, Essays and Addresses, pp. 86-8. 
 
ii6 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 may in any case be conscious or unconscious. There are 
 difficulties in the Comtist conception, but it is both more 
 spiritual and truer to fact than the idealistic conception. 
 More spiritual because it goes below the externals of 
 unity and relies on the permanence and penetrativeness 
 of the inward forces which, uniting man to man, have built 
 up the fabric of collective achievement. It is, so to say, 
 a unity of the church rather than of the state. More 
 true to fact because it recognizes that the higher values, 
 on which Dr. Bosanquet insists, are not the achievements 
 of one state or one nation, but of many, that the history 
 of thought, ethics, religion or art, is not a history of separate 
 communities but a world history. The co-operation, 
 conscious or unconscious, which has wrought the best 
 things in civilized life, is one to which races and peoples 
 have contributed unequally, and some have not contributed 
 at all, but it is one which far transcends the limit of any 
 people or nation, not to speak of any state. 
 
 But bielow 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 gvtI, which 
 should " compensate for the wrongs and sufferings of the 
 past." To the idealist this is sheer blasphemy against 
 the Absolute Dr. Bosanquet tells us that he personally 
 believes in a nobler future, but since the Absolute is 
 perfection and since evil exists, evil is necessary to per- 
 fection and its evanescence seems " altogether contra- 
 dictory." Its disappearance is certainly a remote danger. 
 The world need not be under the apprehension of a pre- 
 mature drying up of the springs of misery and wrong. In 
 the meanwhile it is instructive to find that in the last 
 resort the gospel of state absolutism and opposition to the 
 League of Nations rests on the necessity of evil as a part 
 of the permanent scheme of things. Dr. Bosanquet may 
 say that at any rate future good is no compensation for 
 past wrong. In a sense, we must all agree, wrong done 
 cannot be undone. Blighted and ruined lives cannot 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 117 
 
 be lived anew. Yet, if it is a question of the depth and 
 genuineness of the feeling that a better future for the world 
 is worth the sacrifice of the present generation, the ideahst 
 may bethink himself of many a young man, German as 
 well as English, who has found in this thought an alleviation 
 of the stark horrors of the trenches and the near approach 
 of mutilation or death. It is not a question of compensa- 
 tion, but of the final meaning of the painful struggle of 
 human life. If the world cannot be made incomparably 
 better than it has hitherto been, then the struggle has no 
 issue, and we had better strengthen the doctrine of the 
 militant state and arm it with enough high explosive to 
 bring life to an end. At any rate the final question is 
 laid bare. There are those who believe life can be made 
 good. There are those who believe it is good enough 
 already. There are those who see life as an effort towards 
 a harmony, gf 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 bUnd whirl of conflicting 
 passions nor the clash of egoisms, but the emergence of 
 a spirit of harmonious freedom, and on this they rest, and 
 with this they identify themselves. There are those again 
 for whom the world as it is is the incarnation of the ideal, 
 for whom change is .secondary and of no vital significance. 
 For them evil must be justified as essential to good, though 
 a more self-contradictory conception than that of good 
 maintaining evil for its own purposes cannot well be devised. 
 To the former the turning-point in the development of 
 harmony is the clear consciousness and the adequate 
 expression of the unity of mankind. To the latter it is 
 a source of apprehension because it would cut the tap- 
 root of those egoisms of state and nation, class and sex, 
 colour and race, which engender the massive miseries of 
 the world. 
 
 We have summed up the metaphysical theory in three 
 propositions, (i) The individual attains his true self 
 
ii8 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 and freedom in conformity to his real will ; {2) this real 
 will is the general will ; and (3) the general will is embodied 
 in the state. We have seen reasons for denying all 
 these propositions. We have maintained that there is 
 no distinction between the real will and the actual will, 
 that the will of the individual is not identical with the 
 general will and that the rational order, which the general 
 will is supposed to maintain, is not confined and may be 
 opposed to the state organization. We have suggested 
 that serious fallacies, as calamitous morally as they are 
 logically vicious, are involved in the political philosophy 
 which turns upon this conception. But it would be unfair 
 to the metaphysical theory of the state to leave the im- 
 pression that it has always received the kind of interpreta- 
 tion which we have here examined. In the hands of 
 Green, for example, the notion of the general will is stated 
 in terms which bring it into closer relation to the facts of 
 experience, and the relation of the state to the individual 
 is so defined as to approach far more closely to the 
 organic conception of society. It is not my purpose 
 here either to explain or criticize Green's Principles 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 like- 
 wise has a claim upon society for the power to fulfil it. 
 (P. 347:) "The claim or right of the individual to have 
 certain powers secured to him bj' society, and the 
 counterclaim of society to exercise certain powers 
 over the individual, alike rest on the fact that these 
 powers are necessary to the fulfilment of man's 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 119 
 
 vocation as a moral being, to an effectual self-devotion 
 to the work of developing the perfect character in him- 
 self and others." The state does not absorb the indi- 
 vidual. It is (p. 443) "a 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 realiza- 
 tion of this power. That is, they realize it in the sense of 
 providing for its free exercise, of securing the treatment 
 of one man by another as equally free with himself ; but 
 they do not realize it positively, because their possession 
 does not imply that in any active way the individual 
 makes a common good of his own. The possession of 
 them, however, is the condition of this positive realization 
 of the moral capacity, and they ought to be possessed 
 because this end (in the sense explained) ought to be 
 attained." 
 
 Where Green is less happy, as I think, is in his discussion 
 of the rights which society ought to recognize but does not. 
 Thus he tells us on p. 416 " a right against society, in 
 distinction from a right to be treated as a member of 
 society, is a contradiction in terms." The truth which 
 this sentence contains is that a right is a social relation 
 just as much as a duty is a social relation, your riglit 
 being something which I or some one else or society at 
 large owes to you. But Green is apt to confuse the social 
 character of rights with the recognition of rights, even 
 going so far as to say (p. 446) " rights are made by recog- 
 nition. There is no right ' but thinking makes it so.' " 
 This is not consistent with his admission (p. 351) of " rights 
 which remain rights though any particular state or all 
 
120 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 states; refuse to recognize them " ; a sense in which he has 
 justly said a slave has natural rights. He gives the truth 
 in the following sentence (p. 450) : " They are ' natural ' 
 in the sense of being independent of, and in conflict with, 
 the laws of the state in which he lives, but they are not 
 independent of social relations." What is needed to make 
 these positions consistent is merely to observe that social 
 relations are not all conscious relations. The position is 
 well stated in an early lecture (p. 353) : " The capacity, 
 then, on the part of the individual of conceiving a good 
 as the same for himself and others, and of being determined 
 to action by that conceptioni is the foundation of rights ; 
 and rights are the condition of that capacity being reaUzed." 
 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.' 
 
 ' In liis new volume, Social and International Ideals, Dr. Bosanquet 
 advances a fresh definition of the state, which is more in hne with 
 Green's way of thinlcing. " I understand by the state the power 
 which, as an organ of the community, has the function of main- 
 taining the external conditions necessary to the best life. These 
 conditions are called rights. They are the claims recognized by 
 the whole of the community as the sine quA non of the highest 
 obtainable fulfilment of the capacities for the best life possessed 
 by its best members." This seems to carry a much fuller recognition 
 of the individual than is usual in Dr. Bosanquet's writings. If 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 121 
 
 Nor does the general will in Green figure as the common 
 self. It is rather an element in popular psychology, which 
 Green finds in experience. Thus he speaks (p. 404) of 
 " that impalpable congeries of the hopes and fears of a 
 people, bound together by common interests alid 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 ba said that they are vague, but Green might reply 
 that so also are the facts which he is describing. That is 
 to saj', the actual extent to which men arc swayed by com- 
 mon interests, the degree of their allegiance to the social 
 order, the strength of the emotion prompting to obedience 
 or warring against it are not rigidly determined, they 
 fluctuate from people to people, even from district to 
 district and from occasion to occasion. There is, he seems 
 to say, a common good, which to the reflective mind is 
 a definite conception and a clear ideal, but which is vaguely 
 and partially apprehended bj' the ordinary man, so that 
 it is rather the diffused sense of the common good than a 
 clear purpose of realizing it which operates as a force in 
 the ordinary life of society. These are propositions, I 
 would suggest, rather in social psychology than in meta- 
 physics. 
 
 When Green goes on to contend that will, in the sense 
 which he has described, and not force is the basis of the 
 state, it becomes clear that his conception of the state has 
 to be shaped to suit his definition. But of course he ad- 
 mits the element of force and shows how it is fused with 
 moral factors and in the end saves his general proposi- 
 tion by excluding political organizations based on power. 
 (P. 443:) "We only count Russia a state by a sort of 
 
 consistently pressed, it would, I think, lead to the reconstruction 
 of his entire theory, but the chapter from which it is taken is pro- 
 fessedly not a correction but a restatement of his theory of the 
 state, and the criticisms on this theory in general must therefore 
 stand unaffected. 
 
122 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 courtesy on the supposition that the power of the Czar, 
 though subject to no constitutional control, is so far exer- 
 cised in accordance with a recognized tradition of what 
 the public good requires as to be on the whole a suscainer 
 of rights." 
 
 Green's principle, therefore, is less paradoxical, perhaps 
 also less important, than appears at first sight. If will 
 not force is the basis of the state, that is because 
 only that society is a state which is based liot on force 
 but on will. It would be unfair, however, to reduce 
 Green's argument to a truism. We may fairly put his 
 conclusion in this form. In every organized society there 
 are other elements than force sustaining the general 
 conformity to law, and in the higher organization of society 
 conditions are realized in which force recedes further and 
 further into the background, goodwill at each step taking 
 its place. Only societies which have made some sensible 
 progress in this direction deserve the name of states. 
 This definition would seem to be justified by the compara- 
 tive study of political institutions. 
 
 Enough has perhaps been said to show that in Green's 
 hands the conception of the general will is not allowed to 
 overwhelm the individual, nor to override the moral law, 
 but that the state is thought of rather as a guarantor to 
 the individual of the conditions which enable him to fulfil 
 his functions as a moral being. It may be objected that 
 if we go behind Green's philosophy to his metaphysics, 
 we shall find ourselves involved in the old difficulties of 
 the universal and the particular and once more find person- 
 ality absorbed in the universal self. This may be true, 
 but it is a criticism of Green as a metaphysician rather 
 than of Green as a political thinker. His living interest 
 was in practical life, the strength of his grasp lay upon 
 the hard problems of social reform. He was at his best 
 in working through practical issues to the principles 
 guiding them. As he receded from these principles to the 
 ultimate theory of ethics and metaphysics, his grasp grew 
 weakef and his meaning is often lost in obscurity and con- 
 fusion. Descending again from this misty region to the 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 123 
 
 living world, we find the man for whom principles at least 
 mean something which will affect the life of human beings, 
 which will guide them in wisdom or mislead them in folly, 
 wiU teach them to ensue the happiness of their kind or 
 justify them in their pride and ambition, which are the 
 cause of misery in society. In his political lectures Green 
 never forgets that theoretical principles are charged with 
 weighty meaning for the lives of men. 
 
 If we compare Green's account of the general will with 
 that of Bosanquet and others, we shall, I think, arrive 
 at the conclusion that several distinct conceptions are 
 covered by this term which must be held apart if any such 
 phrases are to be used at all without breeding confusion, 
 (i) In the first place there is a conception of the common 
 good, whether real or supposed. The common good is not 
 the same thing as the common will, though if there were 
 such a thing as a common will, it is presumably the common 
 good at which it would aim. The common good is the 
 well-being actually shared by .the members of society, 
 or conceived as desirable for the members of society, 
 either, therefore, something actually existent or something 
 which may be brought about. It may be regarded as 
 realized or realizable in certain permanent institutions 
 and conditions of life. (2) We may distinguish such per- 
 manent conditions from a particular object which may be 
 conceived as a part of the common good for the time being, 
 e.g. victory in war. This we may call a common aim. 
 
 (3) Corresponding to the common good or the common aim 
 there may be a will to maintain the common good or to 
 achieve the common aim. This may be called the good 
 will.i 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 
 
 I Good at least from the point of view of the society. One 
 might call it the loyal will. 
 
124 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 common object, as e.g. if the whole society is bent upon 
 victory in a war, there would be something which we could 
 appropriately and unambiguously describe as a general will, 
 that is to say, a will active in all the members ot a society 
 as individuals to achieve an object by their organized 
 efforts for their society as a whole. (5) If, further, we 
 suppose all the members of a society to understand and 
 appreciate the permanent good of the society as a whole 
 and to will the necessary means for securing it, there would 
 similarly be a general will to promote the common good. 
 We may allow a little further latitude, and if such a will 
 is shared, not by the whole of society but by a majority, 
 we may still call it a general will, but for this particular 
 case no special term really seems requisite. The general 
 will here is simply the will of the majority. (6) But this 
 is not the sense of the general will which seems really 
 to be intended by the phrase. To interpret Green's ex- 
 pressions we must think rather of a network of psycho- 
 logical forces making on the whole in a determinate 
 direction, generally speaking for the maintenance of a 
 certain social structure, and more specifically for the 
 attainment of certain definite objects. This network of 
 forces will in a free society obtain expression ultimately 
 in the will of the majority, but it is a good deal more 
 complex and subtle than the content of any majority 
 vote on a specific issue. What goes to make up the bent 
 of the public mind in this sense is not merely so many 
 definite acts of will in such and such a number of individuals. 
 It is the intense conviction in some, the relative feeble- 
 ness in others, the tacit acquiescence in one man, the 
 partisan feeling in another, the support of a certain section 
 on one particular part of the issue in spite of indifference 
 or hostility on other portions of the issue, a prejudice 
 which buttresses up the case on this side, a weakness 
 which paralyses opposition on another side — a miscel- 
 laneous congeries of impulses driven hither and thither, 
 out of all of which there will emerge through reams of 
 controversy some tangible result. Will, which means the 
 basis of clearly thought out action, is really a bad expression 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 125 
 
 for this unorganized mass of psychological forces of every 
 sort and kind that actually go to the making up of great 
 political decisions. It will probably be true, with Green, 
 to hold that within this congeries thei-e is a permanent 
 element partly above and partly below the level of con- 
 sciousness, guided directly or indirectly by considerations 
 bearing on the common good. There are, for example, 
 people who will not put themselves about much for justice 
 in general but will be shocked by some act of concrete 
 iniquity with which they come into personal contact. 
 Those who have not been troubled to oppose a bad law in 
 principle find themselves irked by one of its applications. 
 Conversely, the normal man who does not generalize about 
 the social good will deal with practical issues often enough 
 in the way which principle would require. (7) And 
 lastly, though we have taken exception to the description 
 of the social tradition as an embodiment of the objec- 
 tive reason, we have not of course denied that thought 
 and will have gone to the building up of institutions. It 
 is not, as we have repeatedly maintained, one thought 
 and one will, but the combination of many minds thinking 
 and wilUng, each by its own lights and each acting too 
 often in accordance with its selfish interests. None the 
 less there is a sense in which the institutions and traditions 
 of society imply a certain social mentality. The accept- 
 ance of such traditions, though generally unreflective, 
 cannot be wholly unconscious, and each individual as he 
 accepts them fits himself into a scheme of life, not as 
 volimtarily choosing that scheme as a whole, but as 
 accepting his part in it. This acceptance affects the 
 mind of each individual, calling forth one faculty and 
 repressing another, and so modifies the mental growth. 
 Thus the outer behaviour of society as seen in its manners 
 and customs must have an inner mentality to match. 
 So far as there is discrepancy a change will take place in 
 institutions. To express this aspect of social life, we might 
 speak of social mentality, provided we understand that 
 the kind of unity which the term expresses is not the 
 unity of a person or self but that of many centres of 
 thought and will in interaction. 
 
126 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 One or another of these meanings seem to be in the 
 mind of those who use the term "general will" ; but the real 
 objection to the term is that in so far as it is wiU 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 w^hich we introduced to the 
 statement that the life of a whole is more than that of 
 its parts. The proposition is true, as we saw, only in this 
 sense : that the life of the whole is more or other than that 
 of the parts as they exist or would exist outside the whole. 
 The body is something other than the cells which compose 
 it, for this simple reason among others, that the cells die 
 when separated from the body and therefore rapidly cease 
 to be that which they at present are. But that the body 
 is other than the totality of the cells composing it as they 
 exist within the body, as they function in unison with 
 one another, is a different and, as I think, an untrue 
 proposition. We move in this region between two poles 
 of fallacy. Wherever we have a whole consisting of parts, 
 we are tempted to say that the whole is something other 
 than the sum of its parts, whereby our view of the parts 
 is distorted and the effect of their interactions ignored. 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 127 
 
 Or, in reaction from this view, we are tempted to say the 
 parts alone are real and that the whole is only a way of 
 regarding them or at best a superficial consequence of 
 their juxtaposition in certain relations to one another. 
 Both these theories are untrue. The first theory always 
 and the second of those wholes which have any distinctive 
 character of their own. 
 
 If I cast my eye idly over the leaves strewn on the lawn, 
 I may count them and discover that there are thirty-seven, 
 and treat the thirty-seven as forming a whole. This 
 numerical whole is nothing to the actual leaves. As I 
 count, three of the thirty-seven have run away with the 
 wind and instead of thirty-seven I have thirty-four^ which 
 not having been moved are just what they were before. 
 Such a numerical whole is the limiting case in which the 
 parts are unaffected by the totality. It is just their 
 arithmetical sum, no more and no less. If I gather the 
 leaves into a heap, they are at least an aggregate that can 
 be picked up and carried away. But still the aggregate 
 has no permanence and its effect upon the parts is very 
 small and very casual. Unless they happen to be somewhat 
 crushed out of shape by pressure, the leaves will experience 
 no change in passing into the whole and out of it again. 
 If, on the other hand, I consider the leaf itself, even the 
 dead leaf, it is something more than an aggregate. It 
 consists of parts no doubt-, but the parts are connected 
 by definite ties. The leaf acts as a whole. If the wind 
 catches a part of it, that part carries the rest along with it. 
 Such a whole of parts in a determinate arrangement 
 which for some purpose act together, is a structure 
 which is in every respect as real and significant as the 
 elements which compose it. What we call the onesided 
 analytic tendency is the tendency to deny this, to think 
 the cells something more real than the leaf, which is thus 
 conceived only as a certain arrangement of cells, and the 
 molecules of protoplasm more real than the cells and 
 the atoms more real than the molecule. We get rid of 
 a bunch of fallacies incidental to this Une of argument 
 when we refuse to speak of more or less real altogether. 
 
128 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Atoms, molecules, protoplasm, cells, leaf, all are just 
 real or unreal. What we can say is that in many cases 
 the elements are more permanent than the whole which 
 they constitute. Certain physical molecules, for example, 
 remain, I suppose, when the dead leaf begins to decompose, 
 and it is this permanence, or supposed permanence, of 
 the simple elements underljdng complex structures, which 
 has given the illusion of their greater reality. Conversely, 
 in many cases the whole is more permanent than the parts. 
 E.g. the living organism is always absorbing and excreting 
 material elements. It remains while its components change. 
 The components do not indeed pass out of existence 
 when they leave the whole, but in proportion as the struc- 
 ture is organic they are profoundly modified. The cell 
 does not survive the leaf, nor does the protoplasm, as 
 protoplasm, the cell. Of any organic structure this 
 principle will hold true. The parts will not survive the 
 structure unaltered. Something in each may survive, but 
 it will not be exactly that which existed within the whole. 
 Now in human society, as in the material world, there 
 are many fortuitous aggregations, producing slight con- 
 tact between individuals. The people who happen to be 
 walking along a street at a particular time may be numeri- 
 cally conceived of as a whole, though they are barely 
 modified by any contact with one another. A crowd is 
 more united than this, though it has no structure, but for 
 the time being people are affected by close contact with 
 one another, and to that extent even a crowd is a unity 
 and a reality, though Hot 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, tliis would no 
 longer be true. The life of the family is an integral part 
 of the men and women that compose it. When it breaks 
 up the lives of those that remain may be tragically altered ; 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 129 
 
 certainly they are very different from what they would 
 have been if they had never known a family life. The same 
 thing would be true of a religious body, or of a state, or of 
 any great movement, intellectual, social or political, into 
 which a man throws himself. All these deeper associa- 
 tions are of the organic type. They express important 
 elements, perhaps fundamental elements, in the lives 
 which compose them, so that without them those indi- 
 viduals would be essentially other than they are. 
 
 If thus for a moment we think of the life or value of 
 such an association in terms of individuals, we must in 
 turn think of the individuals as contributing and con- 
 sciously contributing to the life of the whole. If the 
 soldier is told that to die for England means to die for 
 English men and women, he might say that that was good 
 enough for him, but he might also go on to say that it is 
 not merely for men and women as men and women, but 
 for men and women as continuing to lead a certain life, 
 as maintaining and developing the tradition which is 
 essentially England. This tradition lives in nothing but 
 individuals ;- all of it that is incorporated in material, even 
 the land itself, however much that is the object of affec- 
 tion, vanishes into insignificance apart from the humanity 
 which it subserves. The tradition, on the other hand, 
 might flourish as well on foreign soil, as colonization 
 proves, and as was understood by William the Silent 
 when he thought of transporting the entire population of 
 Holland and Zeeland to a part of the world where they 
 could maintain their life free from the empire-state 
 which was crushing it. 
 
 Thus the character of a social whole is as much in danger 
 of being misunderstood when it is resolved into its com- 
 ponent individuals as it is when conceived as separate 
 from them, as though it were not made by them. The 
 true organic theory is that the whole is just what is con- 
 stituted by the co-operation of the parts, neither more 
 nor less, not more real nor less real, not of higher nor of 
 inferior value. In saying this we must take time into 
 account. All the parts strictly means all that have been 
 
 9 
 
130 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 or will be while the whole endures. When this succession 
 of members is taken into account, it is true to equate 
 the perfectly organic whole with the sum of its parts in 
 their co-operative activity. But there is a sense in which 
 a whole may be less, and a sense in which it may be more 
 than its existing parts, (i) Wholes in general, even 
 relatively organic wholes, may engage only a portion of 
 the activity or capacity of their members. This is emi- 
 nently true of human associations, none of which embrace 
 the entire life of man. In such a case it is only the portion 
 incurred in the whole that can be said to hve or die with 
 the whole, and only so far as that portion is concerned 
 that there is an5i:hing 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 obUgations to that association in terms only 
 applicable to the sum of his duties and interests in all the 
 relations of his life. {2) While some wholes are less, others, 
 and particularly those which engage the deeper nature of 
 men, are more permanent than their members. When 
 we go, for example, below the state to the nation and 
 beyond the nation to the great movements of civilization, 
 we come to things in which the whole truly is something 
 far greater than any of the parts that constitute it at any 
 one moment. What concerns humanity is that such 
 wholes should be maintained in so far as they serve its 
 abiding interest. But this again is not, if we think it 
 out, to erect the whole into an object distinct and opposed 
 to those who have been, are or will be its members. It 
 is merely to grasp its far-reaching extension, its deeply 
 rooted continuity. The nation is aU the generations which 
 compose it as long as they maintain a certain imity and 
 as long as the thread of causation remains uncut. More 
 than this it is not.' 
 
 ' When taken as more it will be found to be really less. If the 
 good of the state is opposed to that of its component members, 
 it is because its good is being found in ends which do not make 
 life really better, for exa.mple, glory, wealth, expansion and power. 
 Such ends the masses may serve in their capacity of " cannon- 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 131 
 
 In what terms we are to describe the reality of the social 
 wholes is a standing difficulty of sociology. They are, as 
 we have seen, of organic character, yet, if we speak of 
 them as organisms, we are liable to confound them with 
 animals or plants, which they are not. Essentially they 
 are unities of mind. Their component elements are minds 
 and the relations into which these elements enter are 
 determined by mental operations. Yet if we speak of them 
 as personaUties, 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 reaUzed in some other whole 
 than the particular social whole which we are consider- 
 
 fodder," but then they are not parts of the state but mere hving 
 tools, the effective organization consisting of the rulers and generals 
 who want the glory. At bottom,, when any organized human 
 society is alleged to have a good other than that of its members, 
 it means a good, at least a supposed good, of some of its members 
 without regard to the remadnder. It may be said that these unhappy 
 ones acquiesce, e.g. when the multitude lets itself be dominated 
 by its chiefs and led by them to the slaughter in the desire to 
 share even in a subordinate capacity in the glory of reducing other 
 peopl6 to a still more abject subjection. This is the solution 
 suggested in a pecuUarly sinister passage in Nietzsche. If so, the 
 people constitute themselves partners of a common good of a 
 false and inhuman sort. So far as the illusion of service to a 
 state standing above its members encourages such false values, 
 it is practically mischievous as well as theoretically false. Where 
 an organized society has a " good " opposed to the summed up 
 gain and loss of its component members, it is either that some of 
 those alleged members are treated merely as instruments external 
 to the body they share or that the good is a false good, cheating 
 even those that partake of it. 
 
 When we speak of a good we mean a good supposed to be realized 
 in the life of society itself. So far as any society subserves ends 
 beyond its own limits, as, e.g. a state may be said to owe, and even 
 to perform, a service to civilization, different principles of course 
 apply. It may be right and good for a state hke Belgium to risk 
 all in such a case, but even here there is no final distinction between 
 the duty or well-being of Belgium and of the Belgians as Belgians. 
 
132 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 ing. Such a term is " a common self " or " the general 
 will," suggested by a particular unity which connects 
 the parts of a personality and which is precisely the 
 form of unity that different persons do not achieve 
 and into which they cannot enter. Such a term as 
 " mind," " soul " or " spirit," though not satisfactory, 
 is more appropriate, if so used as to suggest a collec- 
 tive character rather than a substantial unity. We 
 can speak of the soul of a people, meaning thereby 
 certain fundamental characteristics of their psychology 
 which we believe to be widespread and important 
 in the shaping of their social behaviour. We speak of 
 the spirit of the times not inappropriately as a summary 
 name for certain moral and intellectual tendencies, and 
 generally the term " spirit " is appropriate for the relations 
 of finite centres of intelligence each thinking, feeling 
 and acting with reference to one another, and so linked 
 together by mental and moral causation, just as physical 
 structures are united by mechanical forces. But whatever 
 terms we use, the rule of logic is simple. Our reasonings 
 must always stand the test of substituting the thing 
 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 another species. So considered, an organism 
 is a whole constituted by the interconnection of parts 
 which are themselves maintained each by its intercon- 
 nection with the remainder. Its mutual determination 
 is the organic character which any given structure may 
 share in greater or less degree, a structure being organic 
 in so far as this character prevails and otherwise inorganic. 
 In its completeness the organic is an ideal. But actual 
 societies have a touch of the organic character, some 
 
VARYING APPLICATIONS 133 
 
 more and some less. It is on this character that social 
 ethics depends. It is through this character that societies, 
 like biological organisms, maintain their plastic adapta- 
 bility, their power of adjustment to new circumstances, 
 of repairing injuries, of resilience to strokes of fortune. 
 It is by reference to this character that their development 
 is to be measured. This principle is set at nought when 
 society is so resolved into individuals that the character 
 of the life which they share is left out of account. It is 
 equally set at nought when its life is regarded as other 
 than that which its members live in their dealings with 
 one another. The happiness and misery of society is the 
 happiness and misery of human beings heightened or 
 deepened by its sense of common possession. Its will is 
 their wills in the conjoint result. Its conscience is an 
 expression of what is noble or ignoble in them when the 
 balance is struck. If we may judge each man by the 
 contribution he makes to the community, we are equally 
 right to ask of the community what it is doing for this 
 man. The greatest happiness will not be realized by the 
 greatest or any great number unless in a form in which 
 all can share, in which indeed the sharing is for each an 
 essential ingredient. But there is no happiness at all 
 except that experienced by individual men and women, 
 and there is no common self submerging the soul of men. 
 There are societies in which their distinct and separate 
 personalities may develop in harmony and contribute to 
 a collective achievement. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 The best and the worst things that men do they do in 
 the name of a religion. Some have supposed that only 
 supernatural religion could mislead. The history of our 
 time shows that if men no longer believe in God they 
 will make themselves gods of Power, of Evolution, of 
 the Race, the Nation, or the State. In the name of 
 such gods will they drench a continent with blood, and 
 the youth will offer themselves up as wiUing martyrs. 
 There is no double dose of original sin which estabhshed 
 this worship in Germany, It is the product of a combina- 
 tion of historic causes — the long division of the people, 
 their geographical situation, the national reaction agauist 
 Napoleon, the achievement of union by military means, 
 the fear of the Czardom, causing the acquiescence of 
 the more pacific elements in militarism, the loss by 
 emigration of those who would not tolerate the governing 
 system. The idealized exaltation of the state supervened 
 to reconcile the thinking classes and give them a creed 
 justifying their dislike of humanitarianism. In Hegel's 
 hands this creed had, as we have seen, its ideaUstic side, 
 and events had to move before this could be shed, and the 
 naked doctrine of Power be proclaimed by Treitschke. 
 But the elevation of the state above men means at bottom 
 the supremacy of Power. It is the natural creed of an 
 aristocracy or a bureaucracy, as insistence on PersonaUty 
 is the natural creed of the people. Theories of poUtics 
 or of conduct that live long and retain influence have 
 something more than theory behind them. They appeal 
 to powerful instincts and interests, and the Hegelian 
 
 »34 
 
CONCLUSION 135 
 
 philosophy is no exception. It appeals to the instincts 
 and interests of counsellors and kings, of privileged 
 classes, of Property and Order. It plays on the fear of 
 fundamental criticism, of the razor-edge of thought, of 
 the claim of conscience to scrutinize institutions and 
 ordinances. It appeals to the slavishness which accepts 
 a master if he will give the slave a share of tjnranny over 
 others more deeply enslaved. It satisfies national egoism 
 and tlass ascendancy. 
 
 It was by no accident that the Greatest Happiness 
 Principle took root and flourished during and after the 
 last great war that devastated Europe. The spectacle of 
 the massive misery caused by Governments had its recoil. 
 Men began to test institutions and ideas of life by their 
 effect on the felt happiness and misery of millions, and they 
 found in the " happy fireside for weans and wife " a 
 truer measure of a nation's greatness than stricken fields 
 and extended territory. To that view in essence we are 
 returning to-day. Much has been learnt in the interval, 
 and a modem thinker could not regard happiness crudely 
 as a sum of pleasures, or divorce it from the mode of Ufe 
 which is its substance, or judge the well-being of a whole 
 society by the contentment of a numerical majority. 
 But the desire to arrest the misery of mankind will 
 revive in double strength. Europe has undergone its 
 martyrdom, millions in the service of false gods, other 
 millions in resisting them. It will ask itself what is the 
 true God and where the true religion. The answer, what- 
 ever it be, must rest on this truth, that the higher ethics 
 and the deeper religion do not come to destroy the 
 simplest rights and duties of neighbour to neighbour, 
 but to fulfil and extend them. Great purposes, vast 
 schemes, haunt the imagination of man, and urge him 
 on to achievements without, which life would be relatively 
 poor and stagnant. But too often such purposes are 
 built on foundations of human misery and wrong. It 
 is the rarer insight which sees in the great good the com- 
 prehensive unity of all the Uttle things that make up 
 the life of the common man. The theory of the state 
 
136 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 is a case in point. The state is a great organization. 
 Its well-being is something of larger and more permanent 
 import than that of any single citizen. Its scope is vast. 
 Its service calls for the extreme of loyalty and self- 
 sacrifice. All this is true. Yet when the state is set 
 up as an entity superior and indifferent to component 
 individuals it becomes a false god, and its worship the 
 abomination of desolation, as seen at Ypres or on 
 the Somme. When it is conceived as a means to the 
 extension of our duty towards our neighbour, a means 
 whereby we can apply effectively and on the large scale 
 what we know to be good in the simple personal relations 
 of life, no such discord arises. The purposes of political 
 action are no way narrowed, but purified and humanized. 
 We leani to think of our political conduct in terms of 
 the vast reverberation of consequences on thousands and 
 millions of lives, great and lowly, present and to come. 
 We cannot, indeed, ever adequately interpret gr«at general 
 truths in terms of the particulars which they cover. To 
 give to vast social issues all their human meaning is beyond 
 the power of imagination — an imagination which recoils 
 even from the effort to appreciate the daUy list of 
 casualties. But the true progress of political thought 
 lies in the cultivation of imaginative power. It insists 
 on going back from the large generahty, the sounding 
 abstraction, the imposing institution, to the human factors 
 which it covers. Not that it wishes to dissolve the fabric. 
 Men must continue to build, and on deeper foundations 
 and with larger plans. But there must be no slave buried 
 alive beneath the corner stone. Or rather, the fabric is 
 no building, but a tissue of living, thinking, feeling beings, 
 of whom every one is " an end and not a means merely," 
 and the value of the whole is marred if it requires the 
 suffering of any single element. There is no lack of vast- 
 ness in this design. It might rather be accused of vague- 
 ness, if it were not tht^t it starts with the simple relations 
 of man and man and bids each of us seek to realize in 
 political conduct anji through social institutions, on the 
 widest scale and iti impersonal delations, what we well 
 
CONCLUSION 137 
 
 understand in our private lives as " our duty towards 
 our neighbour." 
 
 Political morality is not super-morality, setting ordinary 
 obligations aside. It is morality extended and defined, 
 stripped of the limitations of class or national prejudice, 
 generalized for application in great impersonal organiza- 
 tions, the only thing that can save such organizations 
 from becoming inhuman. It may be said that institutions 
 and politics generally can do little to make individuals 
 happy. That may be true, but they can do a vast deal 
 to make individuals unhappy, and to cut off this great 
 source of woe is no unworthy aim. That is why a sound 
 political philosophy will always insist on the individual, 
 the freedom which is his basis of self-respect, the equality 
 which is his title to consideration, the happiness whereof 
 " the tiny bowl is so easily spilt." It is not that our 
 little lives are rounded in ourselves. On the contrary, if 
 we find happiness an5nvhere, it is only in merging our- 
 selves in some greater object. It is that if all objects 
 worthy of effort may be considered as contributing to 
 the advancement of mankind, this advancement, properly 
 understood, goes not over the bodies and souls of individuals 
 like a Juggernaut's car, but through their heightened 
 activities and larger lives like a quickening spirit. Here 
 precisely lies the issue between two views of the state. 
 In the democratic or humanitarian view it is a means. 
 In the metaphysical view it is an end. In the democratic 
 view it is the servant of humanity in the double sense 
 that it is to be judged by what it does for the lives of its 
 members and by the part that it plays in the society of 
 humankind. In the metaphysical view it is itself the sole 
 guardian of moral worth. In the democratic view the 
 sovereign state is already doomed, destined to subordina- 
 tion in a community of the world. In the metaphysical 
 view it is the supreme achieveriient of human organization. 
 For the truth let the present condition of Europe be 
 witness. 
 
APPENDIXES 
 
 APPENDIX I 
 
 HEGEL'S THEORY OF THE WILL 
 
 In Lecture II the attempt has been made to elicit and criticize 
 the main principles underlying Hegel's theory of freedom. A 
 somewhat fuller explanation is here subjoined. 
 
 Hegel approaches the subject by a somewhat imfortunate 
 analogy. The will is free in the same sense as matter is heavy. 
 Gravity, he thinks, constitutes bodies. This in itself seems to 
 be a mistake, partly of fact, but principally of definition. The 
 expression " body has gravity " is a way of putting the fact 
 that bodies, when otherwise unconstrained, move towards one 
 another with a certain assignable acceleration. This statement 
 by no means exhausts all that is known about bodies. If bodies 
 were not known independently, that is, had no other attributes, 
 we should not say that bodies had weight, but merely that 
 weight exists. Whether aU bodies do behave in the way referred 
 to is a sheer question of empirical fact. But in any case gravity 
 is not body, but is an attribute of body or, if it is preferred, a 
 way in which bodies do behave. In the same way, if it is true 
 that the will is free, it is certainly not in the sense that freedom 
 is wUl or that wiU is freedom, but that freedom is a characteristic 
 of will or an expression of the way in which wUl behaves. But 
 will is not only freedom to Hegel, it is also thought. Will and 
 thought are not two special faculties, but will is a specific mode 
 of thought. It is thought as translating itself into existence,' 
 
 " In thinking, according to Hegel, I turn an object into a 
 thought, stripping the sensible element from it and making it 
 essentially and immediately mine. Thought penetrates the object, 
 which no longer stands opposed to me because I have taken from 
 it what was peculiar to it, which it had over against me. Similarly, 
 in willing there appears at first an opposition between myself and 
 my object, and in making a choice I make a distinction between 
 a determinate end and my abstract potentialities. But this dis- 
 
 J38 
 
APPENDIXES 139 
 
 setting before itself an object with which it is in a manner identi- 
 fied. Ordinary language would recognize these expressions as 
 having a loose metaphorical justification, but to Hegel they are 
 the kernel of philosophy, and his conception of free wiU in 
 particular will be found to depend upon taking them seriously. 
 It is through his identification of the will with the system or 
 totality of its objects that Hegel is able to speak of the will as 
 determined only by itself, oif the will as willing itself, and thus 
 free from any other determination. 
 
 The development of this conception follows the ordinary dia- 
 lectical process of Hegelian philosophy. We start with the 
 conception of a will that is free in the sense of being quite indeter- 
 minate, so that it can choose anything and everything. But 
 a will so indeterminate as this in fact chooses nothing and defeats 
 itself. Hegel likens it to the anarchical movements of politics 
 that want everything in general and nothing in particular. 
 To escape from this barrenness we take refuge in particular 
 objects or ends. But if the particular ends are isolated and 
 disconnected they just miss that unity of action which dis- 
 tinguishes will. The truth then must be that, while the will 
 sets a multitude of particular objects before itself, those objects 
 must be united by some underlying principle. 
 
 It is in this unity of principle that Hegel finds what he calls 
 freedom. The connection is by no means obvious,' but the 
 drift of the argument may be gathered from the account of free- 
 dom as ordinarily, and in Hegel's view, falsely understood.* 
 
 tinction is after all my own, and the object, as I achieve it, belongs 
 to me. It is mine when accomplished. The object is what I 
 have done. There is a trace of my spirit in it. 
 
 ' The argument is that since all the objects of the will fall 
 under the same principle or have, as we might say, a function 
 in one and the same system, they do not really limit the will as 
 they seem to do, but express it in different forms. In seeming 
 to limit itself, the will is expressing itself. This, according to Hegel, 
 constitutes the freedom of the will, which is its substantive reaUty, 
 as gravity is the substantive reality of body. 
 
 » It may be well to note the dialectical phases by which the 
 conception of spurious freedom is reached. First, in § 8 we have 
 what Hegel calls the formal opposition of the subjective to the 
 objective. The will is something within me, contrasted with the 
 outer world in which it seeks to realize its end. These particular 
 ends form the content of the will, but, in adopting such ends 
 (§ 10), the will does not fully attain its freedom. Its freedom is 
 
140 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 This false conception emerges when the will stands contrasted 
 as a distinct faculty or power of choice with the various impulses 
 which direct it towards particular objects, each of which counts 
 as distinct from and possibly opposed to others. The power 
 of the will to choose between them is the kind of freedom which 
 Hegel calls caprice {Willkiir). And according to him it is at this 
 point that the ordinary controversy as to freewill arises and on 
 this plane that it is conducted. As long as the will is regarded 
 as a bare potentiaUty, what Hegel calls something formal, standing 
 over against impiilses and promptings that proceed from else- 
 where, whether within our nature or without it, you can argue 
 with equal force either that it is determined or that it is undeter- 
 mined. You can argue that it is determined on the ground that 
 a mere potentiality, a bare form, has nothing within it to make 
 it decide one way rather than another, whence you conclude 
 that the propelling force must come from the impulse or from 
 the presented object. You can argue equally that the will is 
 undetermined because you can show that it can take up or drop 
 any one of these objects and that what it can take up it can 
 cancel, no matter what the strength of the impulse may be. In 
 reality, according to Hegel, both arguments fail because both 
 rest on a false conception of the relation of the will as a unity, or 
 what he would call the universal, to its particular acts and im- 
 pulses. The truth is that these particulars emanate from the 
 universal character of the will itself. The will, therefore, does 
 not stand over against the impulses which solicit it, but is itself 
 the source of each movement in which it accomplishes and fulfils 
 itself. The argument seems to ignore the distinction between 
 impulse and will,' but again let us suspend criticism and try to 
 follow the drift of the reasoning to the end. 
 
 implicit. It is in the will itself but it does not exist for, the will. 
 That it should exist in this fuller sense, the will must realize itself 
 as an object. There is a will operating whenever I adopt some 
 definite end, and since there is a will operating there is freedom, 
 but not, it would seem, the consciousness of freedom, not that 
 organic connection between a particular end and a permanent 
 underljring principle which constitutes self-determination. This 
 is the stage which Hegel calls the immediate or natural will with 
 its separate impulses and desires. The wUl stands above all these 
 particular objects and can freely compare and choose between 
 them. This brings us to the position examined in the text. 
 
 ' Impulses antagonize one another, and one may calculate which 
 impulse would bring the greatest satisfaction, but such calculation 
 
APPENDIXES 141 
 
 To do this we must think of the will as expressing itself com- 
 pletely in a system of purposes all related to one another. 
 
 When it grasps this system as a whole it is said to exist for 
 itself and to be its own object.' The meaning is that this system 
 completely expresses the nature of the will and therefore for 
 Hegel (here we get back to the ultimate identity of subject and 
 object) is the will. True, there is always a distinction between 
 subjective and objective, inner and outer aspects. Subjectively 
 the will is the rational self -consciousness, objectively it is the 
 rational system of ends. But to get the full " idea " of the will 
 these aspects must be held together. The will therefore in 
 wUling its object is said to will itself. Thus for the will to be 
 determined by its objects as a whole is to be determined 
 by itself, and to be determined by itself is freedom. This is 
 the substance of the entire argument, which culminates in the 
 formula that the idea of the will is the free wiU which wills the 
 free will. 
 
 This peculiarly difi&cult phrase proceeds directly from Hegel's 
 identification of subject and object. Just as in the sphere of 
 knowledge the mind, taken in its full concrete reality, is the 
 system of the objective world which it knows, the knowledge 
 itself being an aspect of the system, so we are to understand 
 
 again is mere caprice. According to Hegel, any identification of 
 myself with some one impulse is a distinct limitation of the univer- 
 sality of the self, wliich is described in this section as the system 
 of all impulses. This conception gives rise to another dialectical 
 stage. The different impulses which issue immediately from the 
 will are held to be good. On the other hand, as natural impulses, 
 they are opposed to the conception of the spirit and have to be 
 eradicated as bad. The truth is that they must be purified by 
 being changed from their immediate or natural character and 
 restored to what he calls their substantive essence, that is to the 
 form in which they can play a part in the rational system which 
 is the will. 
 
 The conception of happiness, involving some correlation of the 
 different impulses, is a stage towards a rational life, but only a 
 stage, because happiness lies in the individual human being, that 
 is in his subjective feeUng, so that what was to be universal turns 
 out to-be particular, something realized in particular people that 
 is not an organic unity of all consciousness. The underlying truth 
 {§ 21) is the self-determining universal, and this is will and freedom. 
 
 I And therefore infinite, for it turns back into itself like a circle, 
 which, for Hegel, is the true representative of infinitude. 
 
142 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 that in action the will is the system of accomplished purposes, 
 the purposiveness of it being a part of that system. We are to 
 conceive a system of activity penetrated throughout by a single 
 principle or rather, we should say, engendered in all its variety 
 of detail by a single principle, which requires infinite variety of 
 forms in which to express itself, but a variety which by the 
 interconnection of all its parts makes up an organic whole. 
 This whole Hegel conceives as determined by nothing external 
 to itself ; any part of it may be regarded as detennined by the 
 will, but is in fact equally a determinant of the will. Its nature 
 is to be a part of that will. So, in a sense, the will wills itself. 
 Wherever you start, pursue the track of determination and you 
 will come back to the point from which you started. This is 
 the circle in which Hegel finds the meaning of infinitude, and 
 that is why infinitude and self-determination are to him in the 
 end the same thing. 
 
 In seeking to render the meaning plain to ourselves, we are 
 constantly brought up against the initial difficulty of conceiving 
 a will which wills itself. Surely when we will we are making, 
 creating or bringing about something that does not exist ; some- 
 thing, whatever it may be, which is at any rate other than the 
 act of making it. To avoid this fundamental difficulty and to 
 discover, if we can, what substance xmderlies the Hegelian 
 argument, let us put it, in more modem phrase, that the will 
 Mid its object are conceived as an organic unity to be understood 
 by the contrast in which it stands to that mechemical relation- 
 ship which Hegel calls caprice. In this mechanical relationship 
 there are a number of distinct and separate impulses, and a 
 will apart from them all, moving above them and choosing now 
 one and now another. In the organic relationship the different 
 movements of the will, though distinct from one another, are 
 emanations from one and the same principle. They could 
 not exist without that principle, nor yet could the principle 
 exist without them, nor indeed without any one of them, for 
 each is an organic part of the whole. ' Each impulse is, as it 
 
 ' The only determinant of the will which Hegel contemplates 
 is the object. If then he can show that the object emanates from 
 the will, he proves on his presupposition that the will determines 
 itself. It is to this that his demonstration is addressed. He does 
 not consider the determinist point that the will with all its pur- 
 poses (to admit that these emanate from within) arises out of 
 antecedent conditions. But he is not really thinking of the will 
 of an individual, but rather of the world spirit. 
 
APPENDIXES 143 
 
 were, a bit of the will. Each bit of the will is determined by 
 the will as a whole. Thus will is determined by will, that is 
 by itself. And if, again, the will be considered as a whole which 
 is determined by nothing external, but by its constituent parts, 
 then similarly the will as a whole is self-determined. All its 
 different objects are parts of a whole which hangs together 
 and in which it is always expressing itself. This organic 
 relationship is what Hegel understands by freedom, and so 
 understood we have in this conception a system of action, the 
 object of which is to maintain itself as a free system. This 
 is what is expressed in the phrase "the free will which wills 
 the free will." 
 
 Putting aside the phraseology, which depends on the impos- 
 sible identification of subject and object, we have before 
 us the conception of an organic or harmonious system of con- 
 duct. What precisely is a harmonious system ? It is one in 
 which there are many parts, but so related that they all main- 
 tain or support one another. If we think of some occupation or 
 some, purpose which we deem desirable as a whole and which 
 interests us in all its successive details, we have the model 
 of a harmony of this kind. We take each step for its own sake 
 because it is inherently attractive, and we also take it as a step 
 in a journey, the end of which is equally attractive ; and thus 
 there is at every stage a double motive, the immediate object 
 for its own sake and also as contributory to the wider object 
 which is intrinsically desired. If all Ufe could be like that, 
 it would be a perfect harmony and it would have nothing to do 
 but to maintain itself. It would in fact be a self-maintaining 
 system, such as Hegel contemplates, a system, that is, in which 
 each part in effecting itself helps to give effect to the whole. 
 Now the ideal to which moral purpose strives is a system 
 of this kind, a harmony within the individual, a harmony 
 as between all individuals — a unity, that is, in which 
 each individual playing his own part, hving a life which is 
 desirable to him, is forwarding and consciously forwarding 
 the life that is desirable for all mankind. In such a harmony, 
 moreover, there would be perfect freedom, for the individual 
 would be expressing himself imconstrainedly, and yet in ex- 
 pressing himself and by expressing himself, would be serving 
 the requirements of the whole. But the freedom would be 
 possible only because there is harmony and it would be truer 
 to say that in such a system it is the will to maintain harmony 
 
144 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 than that it is the will to maintain free will which is the vital 
 principle. 
 
 This leads us to inquire further into the relation between 
 freedom and harmony. What is really meant by freedom ? 
 Ordinary thought translates freedom as absence of constraint. 
 Hegel takes freedom as self-determination. In a world where 
 nothing stands alone, where every act or event is related to some- 
 thing from which it follows and which is said to determine it, 
 it is clear that of the action of anything whatever that we can 
 regard as a continuous object, that we can identify through 
 successive moments, one of two things is true. Either that action 
 is an action of the object itself, proceeding from the nature of 
 the object, arising out of the state in which the object has been, 
 and consisting in a further state of activity which is just what the 
 object of itself becomes. In that case the object may be said to 
 determine its own action, or, regarding the object as one through 
 successive phases, that is, before the action and in it, we can speak 
 of the object, if we wiU, as self-determined in its activity. The 
 other alternative is that the object should be determined by some- 
 thing else acting upon it. Then we speak of it as constrained. 
 In the purely physical world, ordinary thought recognizes this 
 contrast between freedom and constraint. A lever may be said 
 to move freely about its fulcrum. The law of gravity expresses 
 the way in which two bodies move freely, the pendulum moves 
 freely about its support, all in contrast to the way in which 
 these objects would behave under the constraint of some external 
 force operating upon them. It may be objected that no one of 
 these bodies really moves of itself. The pendulum, for instance, 
 is part of a system of forces. There is its point of support, the 
 weight attached to the rod, the rod itself and the earth. Never- 
 theless the swing of the pendulum is the resultant of just this 
 particular system of forces acting without constrcdnt by others, 
 and that absence of constraint is what is meant when it is said 
 that the pendulum swings freely. That particular system of 
 forces determines of itself, and without the impingement of any 
 other forces, just the particular set of motions which we discover. 
 On the other hand, if the pendulum is deflected by a magnet, 
 a push or a catch, a new force intervenes by which it is constrained. 
 The whole system, including this new force, again may be said 
 to act freely if no other intervenes. But in every case freedom 
 from some external constraint will mean determination by the 
 forces that are within the particular object or system of objects, 
 which is the subject of our discourse. 
 
APPENDIXES 14s 
 
 When we come to the action of Uving things, and in particular 
 to the will, we still mean by freedom primarily this same thing, 
 the determination of the act by the character of the living thing 
 itself, in particular of the will, as against determination by any- 
 thing other than itself. What I choose to do at this moment, 
 if I choose freely, expresses the character of my will at this 
 moment. True, some extemsd thing may be the stimulus which 
 sets the will in motion, and it is because I see the rose perhaps 
 that I have the impulse to bend down and smell it or pick it. 
 But the rose does not constrain me, rather it suggests an experi- 
 ence, and the fact that I think of that experience as pleasing is a 
 circumstance of my inner nature emd precisely the circumstance 
 which expresses itself in my impulse. In so far as any external 
 object does constrain me and in so far as it awakens in me that 
 which I cannot resist, I am deemed, and rightly deemed, not 
 to be free, to be a slave to the external thing. Or again, if this 
 craving is, as rightly regarded it should be regarded, rather 
 inner than outer, then I am a slave to one of my impulses and 
 my will is not free. If, on the other hand, knowing quite well 
 what I am about and what was coming from my act, I perform 
 that act with a view to that result, then that act is an expression 
 of my will. It is unconstrained by anything external, not 
 merely to myself, but to my will, and my will is free. 
 
 But there is a further sense in which the will is free which 
 does not apply to material things. Given the pendulum duly 
 attached to its support and raised from the vertical and then 
 set free, that is, released from all external constrdnt, the result 
 will be uniform and certain. The pendulum will swing to and 
 fro. Each swing is determined accurately by the past swing. 
 The movement of each moment is determined by the configura- 
 tion of the preceding moment. Thus the mechanical system, 
 though free from external restraints, is never free from its 
 own past. 
 
 The question of the freedom of the will morally considered has 
 been whether the will can ever be said to be free from its own 
 past. The answer to this must be in a sense' negative and in a 
 sense affirmative. There is no reason to doubt that what my 
 will is now is something which has come out of all that it and 
 that I have been ; and there is no ground for assigning at any 
 point a breach of continuity. The difference between the will 
 and the mechanical system is this. The will looks towards 
 that which is coming out of it ; it is in a sense determined not 
 
 10 
 
146 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 by the past but by the future ; and yet that future is something 
 which it itself creates. It creates the end by which it is itself 
 determined. The fact that the will creates this end is itself 
 the determining point of its activity. It is in this sense that the 
 will is self-determined in a way in which nothing that is mechanical 
 can be. The pendulum does not swing because it wants exercise 
 or because it wants to get to the other side. It swings as a result 
 of the forces that are working within the system to which it 
 belongs. The will, it may be said, also operates in accordance 
 with the forces working within it, but these forces are such afe 
 to create a result which it foresees and it is because they create 
 this result that the wiU acts as it does. The consequence is 
 that there is no limit to the self-determination of the will. If 
 at any point in the course of its activity something indicating 
 a different result, previously unforeseen, emerges the wiU is able 
 to adapt itself to this new circumstance. There is no fact 
 bearing upon the issues of its action which the will is constrained 
 by its pas"t to omit. The past has made it what it is, but what 
 it is is something looking to the future, determining its move- 
 ments by their relation to the future. Self-determination in 
 general then means the operation of an object in accordance 
 with its own character and the self-determination of the will 
 in particular, its operation in accordance with the character of 
 a creative impulse. Unconstraint and self-determination are 
 thus two expressions for the same thing, the one negative and 
 the other positive. 
 
 With this definition in mind, we can easily recognize that 
 the "harmonious system of conduct, or let us say the harmonious 
 will, is also in its inward relations a free system and a free will. 
 Let us think of such a system as produced in each pju-t by a 
 several and separate act of will. Each act expresses itself, 
 or rather in each act as it is at the time and in the relations 
 appropriate to the action, the will is expressing itself without 
 let or hindrance from other acts or relations of the will. Not 
 only without let or hindrance from them, but furthered, main- 
 tained and supported by them, while also yielding to them 
 furtherance and support. We think of the will in each act as 
 looking not only towards the act itself, but also towards the entire 
 system of willing of which it is a part, as expressing itself in 
 both relations and finding the two relations harmonious. In 
 such a harmony each deliverance of the will is free, that is it 
 is unconstrained by any othier deliverance of the will. Now for 
 
APPENDIXES 147 
 
 any single act of will there is just the same freedom if it is per- 
 formed without any consciousness of relation to the will as a 
 whole, for it is performed without constraint and it is therefore 
 self-determined. But the will as a whole can only have freedom 
 within if its purposes harmonize, otherwise there is constraint 
 of some of its deliverances by others and they cannot all be free. 
 In particular, if the permanent character of the will, its main 
 tendency or its general principle, is in conflict with and overbears 
 its own impulse in some particular case, the result in that case 
 is not freedom but constraint. Here it would seem that Hegel 
 would rejoin, " Yes, but the constraint that you speak of as 
 exercised by the will in one particular relation is a constraint 
 exercised by the will as a whole upon the will at a particular 
 moment, that is, a constraint exercised by the will upon itself. 
 Thus it is still self-determination and therefore it is freedom." 
 But if this argument is advanced, it must be rejoined that self- 
 determination so interpreted is by no means a satisfactory 
 definition of freedom. If there is self-determination without 
 harmony, what results is that the particular act or phase of will 
 may be to any degree constrained, deflected, inhibited in its 
 self-expression by the will as a whole, or, if the phrase be pre- 
 ferred, by the imifying principle of the will. Thus instead of 
 the freedom of each several act of will we may have an absolute 
 constraint exercised by the whole upon the parts. If it be said 
 that this at any rate leaves the general principle of the will 
 free to express itself, it must be replied that all we know of this 
 principle is that it consists in the complete domination of all 
 distinguishable phases or acts of will. The will is not willing 
 itself, but against itself. Thus, in place of the free will 
 that wills the free will, we have the conception of the will 
 that in its freedom wills the total subordination of will ; or, in 
 other words, freedom without harmony turns out to be con- 
 straint, the subordination of the particular to the universal. 
 On the other hand, the freedom which is found in harmony is 
 the expression of each particular phase of will in its own nature, 
 and it is only if order and harmony are assumed to be con- 
 vertible terms that it is possible to lay down a priori that a 
 system dependent on a single principle is at once self-main- 
 taining and free. The truth is that the Hegelian conception of 
 freedom really points towards an idea of harmony which Hegel 
 himself does not seem to have appreciated. 
 Freedom in the sense of absence of internal friction could be 
 
148 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 realized in a completely harmonious order of conduct but in 
 no other. But free will, as Hegel uses the expression, is simply 
 will which carries through a single principle, that is really a self- 
 disciplined will — disciplined in accordance with law and custom 
 — and wherever he uses the term " freedom," the term " self- 
 discipline " should be substituted to make sense of his argument. 
 In place of the will that wills the free will we should speak of 
 the disciplinarian will that wills the subordination of all those 
 partial impulses. In this conception there is, if you like, freedom 
 for the central principle of the will, but for that alone — a freedom 
 like that of James I's free monarchy, which meant that the 
 monarch was free to do what he wished with every one else. It 
 follows quite clearly from Hegel's view that the bad will is not 
 free, but on this point he must be charged with distinct incon- 
 sistency, for when he comes to deal with the responsibility for 
 wrong-doing (§ 139, p. 183) he explicitly maintains, as against 
 the view that evil is necessary, that " the man's decision is 
 his own act, the act of his freedom and his guilt." But it is 
 clear that in his usage of the terms this could only be true if 
 wrong-doing were the universal principle of the will. Hence 
 the man who acts wrongfully is not free ; he is expressing caprice 
 {WillkUr) and has no freedom. Hegel cannot have it both ways. 
 Either freedom means self-deteimination expressing itself in 
 the choice between good and bad, and therefore as distinctly 
 in the bad as in the good. In that case man as a moral agent 
 is free, but free to do both ill and well. Or, freedom means 
 subjection to the discipline of the goodwill. In that case man 
 is free when he does good, but is not free to choose between good 
 and evil. 
 
 To sum up, Hegel's conception of freedom depends upon a 
 confusion between two distinct conceptions. On the one hand 
 there is freedom in the sense of self-determination in any act 
 of the will which is carried through without restraint. Freedom 
 in this sense does not depend on any positive relation between 
 one purpose and another, but might be realized in an isolated 
 act without conscious relation to any other. On the other hand, 
 in the will as a system of purposes there is freedom from any 
 internal check or restraint only if all these purposes are in har- 
 mony. Hegel's account seems to fuse these conceptions, taking 
 control of the partial purpose by the whole to be self-determina- 
 tion and therefore freedom, without postulating harmony as 
 a condition. Now in the conception of a moral order which 
 
APPENDIXES 149 
 
 is a perfect harmony the freedom of the whole is the gathered 
 fruit of the freedom of each part. In self-determination without 
 harmony there is for the partial manifestations no freedom 
 but subjection, and for the governing will no ideal of freedom 
 but only of order. To speak of the latter conception in terms 
 only applicable to the former is the fallacy that nms through 
 all Hegel's theory of the law and the state. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 THE THEORY OF THE ABSOLUTE 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet's theory of the state is so intimately bound 
 up with his general, theory of Reality, that a discussion of his 
 social philosophy can hardly be complete without some reference 
 to his conception of the Absolute as contained in the two volumes 
 of his Gifford Lectures, to which reference has several times 
 been made in the preceding chapters. Indeed, for him the state 
 seems in a manner to be the medium, it is certainly one of the 
 media, by which the individual comes into contact with the 
 Absolute. The Absolute is sovereign Lord, but the state is 
 its vicegerent here and now. What then is the Absolute and 
 how is it related to our lives ? 
 
 The Absolute is that in which all contradictions are reconciled. 
 But this definition really includes two characteristics which are 
 perfectly distinct. By contradiction is meant, in the most 
 natural and straightforward sense of the term, logical contra- 
 diction. It is clearly true, but it is also a platitude, to say that 
 logical contradictions caimot exist in reahty. If the Absolute 
 then is an expression for reality as it is in its completeness, it is 
 certain that within it there can be no contradictions. Whether 
 we should say on this point that within it contradictions are 
 reconciled is not so certain. Contradictions really exist in the 
 world of partial knowledge, and it would be truer to say that 
 they must necessarily be reconcUed, that is, resolved away, 
 in complete knowledge, while in reahty they cannot really 
 exist. However, to let this verbal point pass, it is clear that 
 in the Absolute all elements of reality which as partially or 
 separately known to us are imperfectly understood, and thus 
 give rise to apparent contradictions, are so related by underlying 
 principles of connection as to constitute a consistent whole. 
 All this is httle more than platitude, put it as we may. 
 
 But there is a second meaning of contradiction — practical 
 
 J 50 
 
APPENDIXES 151 
 
 contradiction, conflict, opposition, under which, in general, 
 pain, misery, evil and destruction may be grouped. That 
 there exists any being, call it what we will, in which aU such 
 conflicts are reconciled, is a much more doubtful proposition. 
 It can by no means be regarded as a postulate of thought, as 
 the first proposition may be, and I suspect that its plausibility 
 depends upon an unconscious transition from the first meaning 
 to the second. That contradiction in this second sense may be 
 somehow reconciled in undoubtedly the aspiration of the reUgious 
 consciousness, but its realization is not a fundamental postulate 
 of philosophy. What has here to be asked, however, is whether 
 Bosanquet's Absolute does in fact provide any such reconcilia- 
 tion ; and if so, at what cost to our moral and reUgious ideas ? 
 Bosanquet's view is that the Absolute is perfection and that aJI 
 the content of our experience, whether we call it good, bad 
 or indifferent, would be found, if we had full knowledge, to play 
 its necessary part in this perfect scheme. What we have to 
 ask is in what way evil, pain and conflict and destruction can 
 have a part to play in a perfect scheme. One answer would be 
 that these things are necessary incidents of a process in which 
 some life is evolved or some plan being worked out so good and 
 glorious that if we could understand it all, we should deem it 
 worth the cost. This conclusion, however, is expressly barred 
 by Bosanquet, who refuses to conceive the Absolute as the 
 realization of a purpose. In point of fact, the conception 
 of purpose is only applicable if we think of it as operating upon 
 material which is given to it, or at least under conditions by 
 which it is so limited as to make the suffering and destruction 
 necessary to the completeness of its work. At bottom this is 
 why Bosanquet rejects the conception of purpose. It cannot 
 characterize the whole. But he does not seem to consider 
 the alternative that the whole might be something in which the 
 element of purpose is that which we really value, so that the 
 ultimate success of this purpose would reconcile us to the cost. 
 Rejecting purpose, we have to be satisfied with a world which 
 is not going to be any better than the world of our experience 
 but is of one tissue with it, only complete. We might perhaps 
 value such a world if we could think of it, for example, as a 
 kind of living organism, as an organic unity. But the charac- 
 teristic of an organic unity is that it maintains the parts by which 
 it is constituted. Thus, if there is destruction and pain within 
 the organism, it is either because the organism is acted upon 
 by foreign bodies or because it is in some way imperfect. The 
 
152 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 universe is not acted upon from without, and if organic at all, 
 must be imperfectly so. But the difBcuities that arise here 
 are not relevant, for Dr. Bosanquet's Absolute is the very 
 reverse of organic in its conception, being quite indifferent to 
 the permanent welfare of the units, spiritual beings, selves, 
 which go to make it up. The Ufe of any one of them may end 
 in disruption and despair, and yet reconciliation is supposed to 
 be found in the Absolute. The Absolute thus presented is 
 something utterly inhuman, without bowels of compassion. It 
 is below the moral categories, as everything that pretends to 
 be above them invariably is. 
 
 But if the Absolute is neither purpose nor an organism, what 
 is it ? Bosanquet answers that it is perfection. It is not good 
 and it is not evil strictly, for we judge things good or bad by 
 reference to the perfection of the whole. Can this perfection 
 give us any reconciliation ? The answer is that it may reconcile 
 logical contradictions, but for that we need no conception of 
 perfection but simply of reality, or, to phrase it better, of reality 
 thoroughly understood ; but that there is only one way in which 
 conflict, pain, evil and ills can be said to be reconciled either 
 with one another or with any scheme or order to which our 
 emotions and admiration and satisfaction can attach themselves, 
 and that is by showing that they are necessary steps in the 
 fulfilment of some purpose which we regard as fully adequate 
 to the heavy cost which they represent. If reconciliation means 
 anj^hing other than this, the meaning should be specified. There 
 is no suggestion that it means anjrthing else except the over- 
 coming of contradictions, which has been shown is a different 
 concept not to be surreptitiously identified with the ideal in 
 question. 
 
 Certain passages in Bosanquet suggest a possible line of 
 reply approaching more nearly to the ordinary ethical and 
 religious view of reconciliation. An evil, it may be said, is 
 transformed into something which is not evil and perhaps 
 even good by the way in which we take it, by our fortitude, by 
 our resignation, by our accepting it as the burden which we 
 must bear for others, and so on. Now, it is true that by our 
 attitude an evil may be modified and in some respect turned to 
 a good account ; but, though modified, the evil is not cancelled. 
 If the sufferer does not resent it for himself, we resent it and are 
 right to resent it for him. The finer his attitude, the stronger 
 should ]be its appeal to us onlookers as a flagrant wrong wbicb 
 
APPENDIXES 153 
 
 man, or nature, or an Absolute, if you will, has imposed on 
 a being who is showing himself worthy of better things. In 
 the individual sufferer who uses his suffering nobly there is 
 reconciliation, but it is precisely not in the Absolute that 
 this reconciliation is achieved. It is in reality as a whole 
 that the wrong remains, and so far as it is overcome it is the 
 work of the human spirit operating in reality. 
 
 Lastly, if we really need pain and evil as a substratum for 
 our good, then it may be true that the most we can do is to 
 maintain a life of struggle. This cannot be attributed to the 
 perfection of the Absolute, but to a deep-seated dissonance in 
 the structure of things, which not only is not, but on this principle 
 never could be reconciled. It must be added that if, as Bosanquet 
 appears to maintain, effort cannot ever fundamentally improve 
 this situation, then effort is fundamentally hopeless and discord 
 is absolute. If, on the other hand, effort can make an improve- 
 ment, then, though the discord is there, it is capable of mitigation 
 and it becomes conceivable that through effort, conscious and 
 active beings may achieve a hfe worth the pain and travail. 
 It is in the notion of such a life, either here or hereafter, either 
 for .others or for- ourselves, that every one who has not argued 
 about the issue, but felt it, looks for that which may repay the 
 terrible cost of human suffering. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolute, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 116 
 
 Theory of the, 150, 151, 152, 153 
 Alexander, Professor, 53 
 AiistotJe, 60, 73 
 
 Body, S3 
 
 Bosanqnet, Dr., 18, 19, 21, 22, 37, 38, 
 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, so, 
 SI. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60, 
 61, 69, 70, 73, 74, 7S, 76, 77. 78. 
 79. 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 94, 
 102, 103, 104, los, 106, 107, 108, 
 109, no. III, 112, 113, 114, IIS, 
 116, 120, 123, 150, 151, 152, IS3 
 
 Philosophical Theory of the State, 22, 
 40, so, 56, 74, 94 
 
 Principle of Individuality and Value, 
 19. 69, 79, 82 
 
 Social and International Ideals, 21, 
 59, 94, 106, 120 
 Bridges, J. H., IIS 
 
 Church, the, 88, 89, 90 
 Clark, Hr. WiXUam, 24 
 Common Aim, 123 
 Common Good, 123 
 Comtists, IIS, 11^ 
 Cynics, 72 
 
 Ethics, II, 46 
 
 Force, 74, 77, 122 
 
 Freedom, 26, 31, 32, 33, 34, 3s, 36, 
 
 37 .39. 40, 59. 60, 139, 141, 145, 
 
 147. 148 
 Moral, 43 
 
 Gravity, 138 
 
 Green, T. H., 24, 83, 96, 99, 118, 119 
 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 
 Principles of Political Obligations, 
 116 
 
 Goethe, 98 
 
 Harmony, 36, 46, 47. 143 
 Hegel, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 
 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39, 40, 56. 62, 
 64, 65, 68, 69, 79, 87, 88, 9S, 96. 
 97. 98, 99. 100, loi, 102, 103, 
 118, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 
 143, 144, 147. 148, 149 
 Philosophy of History, 17, 20 
 Philosophic des Rechts, 20, 23, 24, 
 
 38. 79. 87. 96 
 Hegel's Theory of the Will, 38, 138 
 Hbfiding, Professor, 15 
 Humanity, 115, 116 
 Hume, 63 
 
 Ideals and Facts, 14, 18 
 Idealistic Social Philosophy, 41 
 Individual, si, 66, 67 
 
 Kant, 100, loi 
 
 Law, 26, 32, 38, 92, 114, 149 
 League of Nations, The, 25, 106, 107, 
 
 116 
 liycopbron, 60 
 
 Marx, Earl, 24 
 Uazzlni, 106 
 
 Metaphysical Theory of the State, the, 
 18, 21, 73, 76, 117, 118, 122, 130 
 UiU, 42 
 
 ?55 
 
156 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 
 
 Mind, 53 
 
 Finite, 82 
 Moral Philosophy, 11 
 Aloraliliit, 38 
 Morals in Evolution, 23 
 
 Nietzsche, 131 
 Newton, 69 
 
 Organization, 75, 76, 78, 96, III, II2, 
 "3 
 
 Plato, 72, 73 
 Power, 134 
 
 Reality, Theory of, 150 
 
 Recht, 38, 6r 
 
 RouBseau, 40, 41, 42, 74, 80 
 
 Self, 41 
 
 Common, 13, 41,43, 97, 99> 132. I33 
 
 Determination, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 
 41, 146, 147, 148, 149 
 
 the Real, 43, 48 
 Sittlichkeit, 38, 88, 98, 113 
 Social Investigation, 1 1 
 
 Philosophy, 12 
 
 Science, 12, 15, 16 
 
 Theory, 12, 17 
 Society, 76, 81, 82, 83, 102, 103, 118 
 Spirit, the, 18, 24 
 
 SUte, the, 18, 21, 33, 43, 56, 59, 60, 
 71, 72. 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 
 
 82, 86, 88, 8g, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 
 97, 100, loi, 102, 103, 104, 105, 
 106, 107, 108, 109, no, III, 112, 
 113, IIS, 118, T19, 120, 121, 122, 
 130, 131, 134, 136, 149, ijo 
 Stoics, 72, 114 
 
 Theory of the State, the, 135 
 Treitschke, 103, 134 
 
 Universal, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 
 76, 96, 122, 141 
 
 Will, 32, 33, 34,35, 42, 47, 79, 81, 108, 
 124, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 
 14s, 146, 147, 148 
 
 Actual, 42, 44, 118 
 
 Common, 123 
 
 Free, 32, 139, 143, 144, 146, I47, 148 
 
 General, 32, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 
 59, 71, 80, 82, 85, 99, 107, n8, 
 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132 
 
 Hegelian Theory of, 42, 46, 49, 50, 
 59, 71, 80, 82, 85, 99, 107, "8, 
 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132 
 
 Individual, 79 
 
 Particular, 139 
 
 Real, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 
 SO, 56, 68, 71, 80, 84, 85, 86, 118 
 
 of the State, the, 71 
 
 Universal, 68 
 
 Willkiir, 98, 140, 148 
 
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 THE SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES 
 
 Titles recently reprinted: 
 
 Rousseau: THE SOCIAL CONTRACT OR 
 PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT 
 
 Translated with Introductions and Notes by HENRY J. 
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HAROLD J. LASKI 
 
 TRADE UNIONS IN THE NEW 
 SOCIETY 
 
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 Harold J. Laski was one of the most important political philosophers 
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 Politics to his great work on the American way of life, The American 
 Democracy, have had a profound influence on Socialist thinking. 
 All his life he was a close observer of the growing power and place 
 of organized labour. In this book he examines the changes that 
 have occurred in the status of trade lAions and the place they 
 occupy in the present democratic world. He contrasts their function 
 in a capitalist or socialist country with what it has become under 
 Russian totalitarianism. 
 
 THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 
 
 Royal 8110. 2SS. net 
 
 'A profound analysis of the American scene. With his usual aplomb 
 Professor Laski tackles nearly all the main facets of American life- 
 politics, the commercial world, the professional and labouring 
 classes, religion, education, culture, press, films and the radio.' 
 News Chronicle 
 
 LIBERTY IN THE MODERN STATE 
 
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 present world situation. 
 
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