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Random documents with unrelated
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 {49} But this is not quite the case. Up to the present time these
two sciences continue to approach their object-matter, as it were,
from different ends, and whether the two views will ultimately
amalgamate is perhaps mainly a problem of the personal division of
labour. But a question of principle, with reference to the true nature
of psychology, is indirectly involved. Only there seems no reason
why two kinds of psychology should not exist.

Psychology, as at present conceived by its best working

representatives, is a positive, though not a physical science. “For
(the psychologist) the crude superstitions of Australian aborigines
have as much interest and value as the developed and accurate
knowledge of a Newton or a Faraday.” [1] Its aim is “the
establishment of continuity among observed facts, by interpolating
among them intermediate links which elude observation.” [2] If not a
“physical” science, then, it is, in a common sense of the term, a
“natural” science. It has the impartiality, and uses the watchwords—
law, process, genesis—which belong to a natural science. And like
every impartial science, to which process and genesis are
watchwords, it tends to explain the higher by the lower. This springs
from no malice aforethought, but from the conditions of the case.
The lower is simpler, and usually comes first in time. It is naturally
dwelt upon, as that into which it is hoped to resolve the more
complex, and the explanation which is more adequate for the
simple, is less adequate for the complex. No difference of higher
{50} and lower is recognised by the impartial science, and its ideal,
as a science, is inevitably the expression of the complex in terms of
the simple; while, as far as genesis in time is insisted on, the bias
towards temporal causation is pretty sure to operate by attaching a
quasi-causal significance to the earlier phases.
 [1] Stout, Analytic Psychology, Introduction.

[2] Ib. From a logical point of view this idea of explanation seems
seriously defective. See Bradley’s Principles of Logic, p. 491.

In all these characteristics psychology is at one with sociology.

And, therefore, though it is a gain that other points of view should
be resolved into the point of view of mind, yet the positive bias of
sociology is not transcended simply by this resolution.

Philosophy starts, we have said, as it were, from the other end. It

is critical throughout; it desires to establish degrees of value,
degrees of reality, degrees of completeness and coherence. Its
purpose might be termed “Ethical,” but for the extreme narrowness
of the meaning of that term. Society, for it, is an achievement or
utterance of human nature—of course not divorced from nature in
general—having a certain degree of solidity, so to speak; that is to
say, being able, up to a certain point, to endure the tests and
answer the questionings which are suggested by the scrutiny of
human life from the point of view of value and completeness. Is the
social life the best, or the only life for a human soul? In what way
through society, and in what characteristics of society, does the soul
lay hold upon its truest self, or become, in short, the most that it has
in it to be? How does the social life at its best compare with the life
of art, of knowledge, or of religion, and can the same principle be
shown to be active in all of them? And what have {51} they in
common, or peculiar to each, which has an imperative claim on the
mind of man?

Now it was hinted above that there might be two kinds of

psychology, or two tendencies within it. And if psychology were to be
impelled, as it has been more than once in the past, by the
recognition that where there is more of its object—of mind—its
interest is greater and the rank of its object-matter is higher, then
there would not be much to choose between the temper of
psychology and that of philosophy. And as sociology has found itself
driven forward into the territory of social “logic,” a name which at
once suggests a critical and philosophical science, it may well be that
sociological psychology will not remain wholly “positive” and
impartial, but will assume, as in the hands of Professor Giddings, for
example, it seems inclined to, at least a teleological attitude, testing
social phenomena by the quantity and quality of life which they
display.

But, at any rate, the points of view of sociology, and of social

philosophy as above described, will continue to supplement each
other. Philosophy gives a significance to sociology; sociology vitalises
philosophy. The idea of mind is deepened and extended by the unity
and continuity which sociological analysis, throughout all its many-
sided sources, vindicates for the principle of growth and order down
to the roots and in all the fibres of the world. Every natural resource
and condition must be thought of as drawing forth or constituting
some new element in the mind which is the universal focus; just as
every shape and colour of the trees in the landscape or every note
of a melody finds its {52} definite and individual response in the
contemplative consciousness. The error lies, not in identifying the
mind and the environment, but in first uncritically separating them,
and then substituting not merely the one for the other, but wretched
fragments of the one for the whole in which alone either can be
complete.

Philosophy, on the other hand, in treating of society, has to deal

with the problems which arise out of the nature of a whole and its
parts, the relation of the individual to the universal, and the
transformation by which the particular self is lost, to be found again
in a more individual, and yet more universal form. In all these
respects its view is what might be called teleological; that is to say, it
recognises a difference of level or of degree in the completeness and
reality of life, and endeavours to point out when and how, and how
far by social aid, the human soul attains the most and best that it
has in it to become. As long as these two points of view are clearly
recognised, it is a matter of the mere personal division of labour
whether they are brought to bear by the same thinkers and within
the same treatises.

{53}

CHAPTER III.

THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION: SELF-GOVERNMENT.

1. To every-day common sense there is something paradoxical in

the phenomena of political obligation; however it may acquiesce in
what, although not satisfactorily explicable, is plainly seen to be
necessary. Where, indeed, we meet with any form of absolutely
despotic government, we have not so much a paradox as a defect;
for, although government may exist in such a shape, it is open to
question how far true political obligation can be said to arise under
such a system. In as far as it does so, we shall find that the fact is
due to unacknowledged conditions and relations, which we shall
more easily analyse as they appear in free or constitutional states. It
would then be easy to show, if we were interested in doing so, that
the principles which will have been recognised as operative in the
freest states known to history, are and have been, in various
degrees, at the root of the common life of every state or community
which has held together effectively enough to be treated as in any
sense a political whole. But this would be a historical investigation,
unnecessary for the purpose of pure {54} social theory. In this we
may fairly start from the highest form of political experience, in
which, as we shall see, the mere defects of political immaturity being
outgrown, the paradox of political obligation emerges with
intensified emphasis.

Let us take as our starting point, then, the conception of “self-

government,” to which, it will be admitted on all hands, the thought
and feeling of mature communities has clung both in ancient and
modern times, as in some way containing the true root and ground
of political obligation. We shall find in it a striking illustration of the
strength and weakness of wide-spread popular notions. A universal
popular notion cannot but have a hold of some essential truth,
otherwise it could not survive and spread, and form a working
theory for an immense area of experience. On the other hand, a
popular notion, as such, cannot be critical of itself and aware of its
own foundations; and so in defending and applying itself it is pretty
sure to plunge deep into fallacy. “Self-government” is an idea which
will be found, as has been said, to contain the true ground and
nature of political obligation. But the rough and ready application of
it which, for example, represents the individual as simply one with
the community, and the community therefore as infallible in its
action affecting him, is a pure example of fallacy, and may be justly
characterised as a confusion pretending to be a synthesis. Of this
idea as of so many we must say that those who have pronounced it
to be self-contradictory have understood it much better than most of
those who accept it as self-evident.

In the conception of self-government then we {55} have the

paradox of obligation in its purest form. As applied to the individual
himself, it gives the paradox of Ethical Obligation. As applied to the
individuals who compose a society, it gives the paradox of Political
Obligation. This must be the preliminary distinction by which we
approach the subject; but we shall find that the two problems and
the two cases cannot be ultimately separated, although they are to
be distinguished in a certain respect.

The paradox of Ethical Obligation starts from what is accepted as

a “self,” and asks how it can exercise authority or coercion over
itself; how, in short, a metaphor drawn from the relations of some
persons to others can find application within what we take to be the
limits of an individual mind. [1]

[1] On this problem, see below, p. 139.

The paradox of Political Obligation starts from what is accepted as

authority or social coercion, and asks in what way the term “self,”
derived from the “individual” mind, can be applicable at once to the
agent and patient in such coercion, exercised prima facie by some
persons over others. Both relations and their connection have been
pointed out by Plato. [1]

[1] Republic, 430, 431.

Our object in the present chapter is to enforce the reality of the

difficulties which attach to the idea of political self-government, so
long as current assumptions as to the union of individuals in society
are maintained. And for this purpose we are to examine the views of
some very distinguished philosophers to whom the paradox has
appeared irreconcilable, and law or government has seemed {56}
essentially antagonistic to the self or true individuality of man; while
the term self, if applied to the collective group by or within which
government is undoubtedly exercised, appears to them an empty
and misleading expression. The curious and significant point, to
which we shall call attention, is, in brief, that while maintaining law
and government to be in their nature antagonistic to the self of man
—whether as pain to pleasure or as fetters to individuality—they
nevertheless admit with one voice that a certain minimum of this
antagonistic element is necessary to the development of the sentient
or rational self. We have here a dualism which challenges
examination.

2. The attitude towards law and government which Bentham

adopted (1748-1832) was in a great degree that of the philanthropic
reformer. His principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest
number is said [1] to have been derived from Beccaria, whose work
on “Crimes and Penalties” had great influence throughout Europe.
And Howard, “the philanthropist,” who was just twenty-two years
Bentham’s senior (1726-1790), represented a revolt against the
abuses of the treatment of criminals at that time, by which Bentham,
who eulogised him as “a martyr and apostle,” was strongly affected.
The movement which Bentham led was, in short, markedly hostile to
the existing system of law, and to the reasonings of its advocates.
And substantial as his knowledge and constructive genius proved to
be, it never lost the character which the direction of his approach to
the subject had marked upon it, a character of suspicion and
antagonism, which is {57} expressed in his description of law as a
necessary evil, and government as a choice of evils. [2]
 [1] Professor Holland in Encycl. Brit., art.; Bentham.”

[2] Bentham, Principles of Legislation, p. 48.

Pain being the ultimate evil, it is clear why, on Bentham’s

principles, every law is an evil. For every law, for him, is contrary to
liberty; and every infraction of liberty is followed by a natural
sentiment of pain. [1] Against those who would deny the proposition
that every law is contrary to liberty he brings a charge of perversion
of language, in that they restrict liberty to the right of doing what is
not injurious to others. They give the term, that is to say, a partly
positive implication. For him then liberty has the simplest and
apparently widest meaning, [2] which includes liberty to do evil, and
is defined, we must suppose, purely as the absence of restraint. And
he therefore has no doubt whatever that the citizen can acquire
rights only by sacrificing part of his liberty. And in this there is an
appearance of truth, if we forget that in saying that a part of one’s
liberty is sacrificed it is implied that one had, to begin with, a certain
area of liberty, of which a portion is abandoned to save the rest. But
the idea of any such antecedent liberty is just such a fiction as
Bentham himself delighted to expose. It is true, however, that some
degree of restraint on what we can now easily imagine ourselves
free to do, is involved in political society. The point on which we
have to fix our attention, for the purposes of social theory, is the
remarkable representation of this state of things under the figure, as
it were, of an amount of general liberty, {58} which is increased by
subtraction, or which can only attain its maximum by the conversion
of a certain edge or border of it, so to speak, into constraint. This
border of constraint is implied to be capable of a minimum, such as
to condition a maximum of liberty, or possible individual initiative; a
relation which, being at first sight contradictory, demands further
analysis. For it would appear that if the sacrifice of some liberty is to
be instrumental to the increase of the whole amount, that whole can
hardly be a homogeneous given quantity, like, for instance, a piece
of land; for such a one must surely be diminished by the subtraction
of any part of it. It must, one would infer, be something which has a
complex nature like that of a living plant, such that certain
restrictions or negations which are essential to its prosperity are
dictated by its individual characteristics (which must be positive),
and express the same principle with them; and therefore are wholly
relative to the positive type and phase of the plant to be cultivated.
Only in some such sense can it be intelligible how constraint is
instrumental to effective self-assertion.

[1] Bentham, Principles of Legislation, p. 94.

[2] It is not really the widest, as will appear in the sequel.

But if this is so, the restrictive influences of law and government,

which are the measure of the constraint imposed, cannot be alien to
the human nature which they restrict, and ought not to be set down
as in their own nature antagonistic to liberty or to the making the
most of the human self. The root of the difficulty obviously lies in
assuming that the pressure of the claims of “others” in society is a
mere general curtailment of the liberty of the “one,” while
acknowledging, not {59} contrary to fact, but contrary to the
hypothesis of that curtailment, that the one, so far from
surrendering some of his capacity for life through his fellowship with
others, acquires and extends that capacity wholly in and through
such fellowship. On the above assumption the terms of the paradox
of self-government become irreconcilable, and government is made
an evil of which it is impossible to explain how it ministers to the self
which stands for the good. So long as to every individual, taken as
the true self, the restraint enforced by the impact of others is alien
and a diminution of the self, this result is inevitable.

It is instructive, therefore, to note Bentham’s uncompromising

hostility to all the theories of philosophical jurists. The common point
of all their theories, from Hobbes and Grotius to Montesquieu and
Rousseau, not to mention Kant and his successors, has lain in the
fact that their authors divined under the forms of power and
command, exercised by some over others, a substantive and general
element of positive human nature, which they attempted to drag to
light by one analogy after another. But neither Montesquieu’s
“eternal relations,” nor the “Social Contract,” nor “General Will,” nor
“Natural Rights” of other thinkers find favour in Bentham’s eyes. One
and all they are to him fiction and fallacy. He can understand
nothing in law but the character of a command; he can see no
positive relation of it to human nature beyond the degree in which it
dispenses with the pain of restraint while increasing the pleasure of
liberty.

To describe the magnificent success which {60} attended the use

of this rule of thumb in the practical work of reform does not fall
within our immediate subject. Our purpose was merely to illustrate
the paradox implied in the conception of self-government, by
pointing out how fundamentally hostile to one another Bentham took
its constituent elements to be.

3. The same point may be further insisted on by examining the

main ideas of Mill’s “Liberty,” without by any means professing to
give a full account of Mill’s opinions on the relation of individuals to
society. What indeed is instructive in his position, for our immediate
purpose, is that, having so deep a sense, as he has, of social
solidarity, he nevertheless treats the central life of the individual as
something to be carefully fenced round against the impact of social
forces.

i. Mill’s idea of Individuality is plainly biassed by the Benthamite

tradition that law is an evil. It is to be remembered that Anarchism
of a speculative kind, the inevitable complement of a hide-bound
Conservatism, was current in the beginning of this century, as in
Godwin and Shelley. Thus we find concentrated in a few pages of
the “Liberty” [1] all those ideas on the nature of Individuality,
Originality, and Eccentricity, which are most opposed to the teaching
derived by later generations in England from the revival of
philosophy and criticism. It is worth while, after reading Mill’s
observations upon the relation of individuality to the Calvinistic
theory of life, [2] to turn to the estimate expressed by Mark Pattison
[3] of the force of individual character generated by {61} the rule of
Calvin at Geneva. That the individuality, or genius, the fulness of life
and completeness of development which Mill so justly appreciates, is
not nourished and evoked by the varied play of relations and
obligations in society, but lies in a sort of inner self, to be cherished
by enclosing it, as it were, in an impervious globe, is a notion which
neither modern logic [4] nor modern art criticism will admit. In the
same way, the connection of originality and eccentricity, on which
Mill insists, appears to us to-day to be a fallacious track of thought;
and in general, in all these matters, we tend to accept the principle
that, in order to go beyond a point of progress, it is necessary to
have reached it; and in order to destroy a law, it is necessary to
have fulfilled it. Here, however, is the heart of the point on which we
are insisting. If individuality and originality mean or depend upon the
absence of law and of obligation; if eccentricity is the type of the
fully developed self, and if the community, penetrated by a sense of
universal relations, is therefore a prey to monotony and uniformity,
then it needs no further words to show that law is a curtailment of
human nature, the necessity of which remains inexplicable, so that
self-government is a contradiction in terms.

[1] pp. 35-9.

[2] Ib., p. 35.

[3] Essays, vol. I., “Calvin.”

[4] See below, p. 79.

ii. How then does Mill bring the two terms into relation? How does
he represent the phenomenon that, in the life of every society, the
factors of self and of government have to be reconciled, or at
anyrate to coexist?

To find the answer to this question, the whole {62} of the chapter,
“Of the limits of the authority of society over the individual,” [1]
should be carefully studied. A few characteristic sentences may be
quoted here.

[1] On Liberty, ch. iv.

“What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the

individual over himself? Where does the authority of society
begin? How much of human life should be assigned to
individuality, and how much to society?

“Each will receives its proper share, if each has that which more
particularly concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of
 life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society,
the part which chiefly interests society.”

Every one who lives in society, he continues in effect, is bound not

to interfere with certain interests of others (explicitly or implicitly
constituted as “rights”), and is bound to take his fair share of the
sacrifices incurred for the defence of society and its members. These
conditions society may enforce, at all costs to recalcitrants. Further,
it may punish by opinion, though not by law, acts hurtful to others,
but not going so far as to violate their rights. But acts which affect
only the agent, or need not affect others unless they like, may be
punished, we are given to understand, neither by law nor by
opinion. Mill expects his conclusions to be disputed, and the
following is the conclusion of the passage in which he explains and
re-affirms it:

“… when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-

regarding, from the performance of some definite duty
incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social {63}
offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being
drunk; but a soldier or policeman should be punished for being
drunk on duty. Wherever, in short, there is a definite damage,
or a definite risk of damage either to an individual or to the
public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and
placed in that of morality or law.” [1]

[1] Italics are mine.

It will probably occur at once to the reader that, considered as a

practical rule, the view here maintained would by no means curtail
unduly the province of social interference. We should rather
anticipate that it would leave an easy opening for a transition from
administrative nihilism to administrative absolutism; and some such
transition seems to have taken place in Mill’s later views. This
tendency to a complete bouleversement is the characteristic of all
conceptions which proceed by assigning different areas to the
several factors of an inseparable whole, which then reasserts itself in
its wholeness within the area of either factor to which we may
happen to attend. Indeed, even in the passage before us, the
defence of individuality has already well-nigh turned round into its
annihilation. Every act that carries a definite damage to any other
person belongs to the sphere of law, and every act that can be
supposed likely to cause such a damage, to that of morality; and
individuality has what is left. The extraordinary demarcation between
the sphere of morality and that of liberty is to be accounted for, no
doubt, by the Benthamite tradition which identified the moral and
social sanctions; so that in this usage the sphere of morality means
much the same as what, {64} in the first passage referred to, was
indicated as the sphere of opinion.

Now, it is obvious that the distinction which Mill is attempting to

describe and explain is one practically recognised by every society.
The question is whether it can be rightly described and explained by
a demarcation which, if strictly pressed, excludes individuality from
every act of life that has an important social bearing; while, owing to
the two-sided nature of all action, it becomes perfectly arbitrary in
its practical working as a criterion. For every act of mine affects both
myself and others; and it is a matter of mood and momentary
urgency which aspect may be pronounced characteristic and
essential. It may safely be said that no demarcation between self-
regarding and other-regarding action can possibly hold good. What
may hold good, and what Mill’s examples show to be present to his
mind, is a distinction between the moral and the “external” aspects
of action, on the ground of their respective accessibility to the
means of coercion which are at the disposal of society. The peculiar
sense in which the term “external” is here employed will explain
itself below. [1]

[1] See ch. viii. below.

For our present purpose, however, what we have to observe is

merely that the demarcation between individuality and society,
contrived in defence of the former, has pretty nearly annihilated it.
And thus we see once more how overwhelming is the prima facie
appearance that, in the idea of self-government, the factors of self
and government are alien and opposed; and yet how hopeless it
remains {65} to explain the part played by these factors in actual
society, so long as we aim at a demarcation between them as
opposites, rather than at a relative distinction between them as
manifestations of the same principle in different media.

iii. A few words may here be said on the applications by which Mill
illustrates his doctrine, in order to point out what confusion results
from relying on a demarcation which cannot strictly be made.

It will be noted in the first place that he objects altogether to the

attempt to prevent by punishment either immorality or irreligion as
such. [1] This objection a sound social theory must uphold. But if we
look at Mill’s reason for it, we find it simply to be that such an
attempt infringes liberty, by interfering with action which is purely
self-regarding. Without entering further upon the endless argument
whether this or any action is indeed purely self-regarding, we may
observe that by taking such ground, Mill causes the above objection,
which is substantially sound, to appear as on all fours with others
which are at any rate very much more doubtful. Such is the
objection on principle to all restrictions imposed upon trade with a
distinct view to protecting the consumer, not from fraud, but from
opportunities of consumption injurious to himself. The regulation or
prohibition of the traffic in alcoholic liquors is of course the main
question here at issue; and it may be admitted that Mill’s discussion,
with the many distinctions which he lays down, is full of shrewdness
and suggestiveness. But the ultimate ground which he takes, as
above stated, is quite different from the genuine reasons which exist
{66} against attempting to enforce morality by law and penalty, and
introduces confusion into the whole question of State interference by
ranking the two objections together. Closely analogous are his
objections to the statutes respecting unlawful games, [2] which,
whether wise or unwise, are quite a different thing from an attempt
to punish personal immorality as such. And lastly, the same principle
is illustrated by his whole attitude to the strong feeling and the
various legal obligations which determine and support the
monogamous family. In maintaining the general indissolubility of
marriage, and supporting the parental power, the State is interfering,
for him, with the freedom of parties to a contract, and conferring
power over individuals, the children, who have a right to be
separately considered. Such interference is for him ipso facto of a
suspected nature. It is an interference hostile to liberty; and whether
it is or is not an external condition of good life, which the State is
able effectively to maintain, is a question which he does not discuss.
Throughout all these objections to authoritative interference we
trace the peculiar prejudice that the criterion of its justifiability lies in
the boundary line between self and others, rather than in the nature
of what coercive authority is and is not able to do towards the
promotion of good life. On many points indeed, when the simple
protection of “others” is concerned, Mill’s doctrine leads to sound
conclusions. Such, for example, is the problem of legislation after
the pattern of the Factory Acts.

[1] Pp. 48 and 50.

[2] P. 59.

But yet a strange nemesis attaches to grounds {67} alleged with

insufficient discrimination. Just as, by ranking inner morality and
outer action alike under the name of freedom, Mill is led to object to
interference which may be perfectly justified and effectual; so by the
same confusion he is led to advocate coercive treatment in
impossibly stringent forms, and in cases where it runs extreme risk
of thwarting a true moral development. We are amazed when he
strongly implies, in respect to the education of children and the
prospect of supporting a family, that moral obligations [1] ought to
be enforced by law. The proposal of universal State-enacted
examinations by way of enforcing the parental duty of educating
children, to the exclusion of the task of providing education by public
authority, in which Mill sees danger to individuality, opens a prospect
of a Chinese type of society, from which, happily, the good sense of
Englishmen has recoiled. And just the reverse of his proposal has
come to pass under the influence of the logic of experience. The
State has taken care that the external conditions of an elementary
education are provided, and, while doing this, has no doubt
exercised compulsion in order that these conditions may be a reality.
But the individual inquisition by examination is tending to drop out
of the system; and the practical working of the public education is
more and more coming to be that the State sees to it that certain
conditions are maintained, of which the parents’ interest and public
spirit leads them to take advantage. Sheer compulsion is not the way
to enforce a moral obligation.

[1] Pp. 62 and 64.

{68} Still more startling is the suggestion that it might be just to

interdict marriage to those unable to show the means of supporting
a family, on the ground of possible evil both to the children
themselves through poverty, and to others through over-population.
This is a case in which authoritative interference (except on account
of very definite physical or mental defects) must inevitably defeat its
object. No foresight of others can gauge the latent powers to meet
and deal with a future indefinite responsibility; and the result of
scrupulous timidity, in view of such responsibilities, is seen in the
tendency to depopulation which affects that very country from which
Mill probably drew his argument. To leave the responsibility as fully
as possible where it has been assumed is the best that law can do,
and appeals to a spring of energy deeper than compulsion can
reach.

Thus we have seen that by discriminating the spheres of non-

interference and interference, according to a supposed demarcation
between the sphere of “self” and of “others,” a hopelessly confused
classification has been introduced. Sometimes the maintenance of
external conditions of good life, well within the power of the State, is
forbidden on the same grounds as the direct promotion of morality,
which is impossible to it. In other cases the enforcement of moral
obligations is taken to lie within the functions of the State, although
not only is the enforcement of moral obligations per se a
contradiction in terms, but almost always, as in the cases in
question, the attempt to effect it is sure to frustrate itself, by
destroying the springs on which moral action depends.

{69} It is worth noticing, in conclusion, that in two examples, [1]

the one trivial, the other that of slavery, both theoretically and
practically very important, Mill recognises a principle wholly at
variance with his own. Here he is aware that it may be right,
according to the principle of liberty, to restrain a man, for reasons
affecting himself alone, from doing what at the moment he proposes
to do. For we are entitled to argue from the essential nature of
freedom to what freedom really demands, as opposed to what the
man momentarily seems to wish. “It is not freedom to be allowed to
alienate his freedom,” as it is not freedom to be allowed to walk over
a bridge which is certain to break down and cause his death. Here
we have in germ the doctrine of the “real” will, and a conception
analogous to that of Rousseau when he speaks of a man “being
forced to be free.”

[1] Pp. 57 and 61.

4. Before referring to Mill’s explicit utterances on the problem of

self-government, which are of the same general character as those
of Mr. Herbert Spencer, it will be well to note some instructive points
in the views of the latter thinker. The study of Mr. Spencer’s writings,
and more especially of those which appear most directly opposed to
the popular conceptions of the day, cannot be too strongly urged
upon the sociological student. And this for two reasons. In the first
place, no other writer has exhibited with equal vividness the fatal
possibilities of a collective governmental stupidity. That in practice
these possibilities are continually tending to become facts, just as in
theory they are {70} represented by recurrent fallacies, [1] is a
proof of the extreme arduousness of the demands made by the task
of self-government upon the people which undertakes it. And no
theorist is fitted to discuss the problem of social unity who has not
realised the arduousness of these demands in all its intensity. And, in
the second place, the student will observe an instructive meeting of
extremes between elements of Mr. Spencer’s ideas and popular
social theories of an opposite cast. The revival of doctrines of the
natural rights of man on a biological foundation [2] is a case in
point. An uncriticised individualism is always in danger of
transformation into an uncritical collectivism. The basis of the two is
in fact the same.

[1] As, for example, in Rousseau’s attempts to explain the action

of a collective mind, in which he constantly falls into the advocacy of
a soulless régime of mass-meetings.

[2] Man v. State, p. 95.

i. A comparison of the conception of “right” as entertained by

Bentham and by Herbert Spencer forms a striking commentary on
ideas in which “government” is antagonistic to “self.” Bentham,
seeing clearly that the claims of the actual individual, taken as he
happens to be, are casual and unregulated, fulminates against the
idea of natural right as representing those claims. Right is for him a
creation of the State, and there can be no right which is not
constituted by law. And the truth of the contention seems obvious.
How, in fact, could individual claims or wishes constitute a right,
except as in some way ratified by a more general recognition?

But to Mr. Herbert Spencer the contrary proposition is absolutely

convincing, and, indeed, on {71} their common premises, with equal
reason. [1] It is ridiculous, he points out, to think of a people as
creating rights, which it had not before, by the process of creating a
government in order to create them. It is absurd to treat an
individual as having a share of rights qua member of the people,
while in his private capacity he has no rights at all.

[1] Ib., p. 88.

We need not labour this point further. It is obvious that Mr.

Herbert Spencer is simply preferring the opposite extreme, in the
antithesis of “self” and “government,” to that which commended
itself to Bentham. If it is a plain fact that “a right” can only be
recognised by a society, it is no less plain that it can only be real in
an individual. If individual claims, apart from social adjustment, are
arbitrary, yet social recognitions, apart from individual qualities and
relations, are meaningless. As long as the self and the law are alien
and hostile, it is hopeless to do more than choose at random in
which of the two we are to locate the essence of right.

ii. And how alien and hostile the self and the law may seem we
see even more crudely enunciated in Herbert Spencer than in
Bentham or Mill, as the fundamental principle of the tradition has
worked itself more definitely to the front. “The liberty [1] which a
citizen enjoys is to be {72} measured, not by the nature of the
governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or
other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.”
And so we are astounded to find it maintained that the positive and
active element in the right to carry on self-sustaining activities is of a
non-social character, depending only on the laws of life, [2] and if
the matter were pushed home, would have to be identified, one
must suppose, with the more strictly animal element of the mind;
while only the negative element arises from social aggregation, and
it is this negative element alone which gives ethical character to the
right to live. Though these distinctions apply primarily to the ground
of the right to live, yet it appears inevitable that they represent the
point of view from which the active self or individuality must be
regarded on the principle we are pursuing. The ground of the right
to live, as here stated, is simply the recognition that life is a good;
and if the positive element of this good is non-social and only the
negative is of social origin, and this alone is ethical, it seems clearly
to follow that the making the most of life—its positive expansion and
intensification—is excluded from the ethical aspects of individuality,
and, indeed, that individuality has no ethical aspect at all. Here is
the ultimate result of accepting as irreducible the distinction between
the self and government, or the negative relation of individuality and
law. Liberty and self are divorced from the moral end, a tendency
which we noted even in Mill. Selves in society are regarded as if they
{73} were bees building their cells, and their ethical character
becomes comparable to the absence of encroachment by which the
workers maintain the hexagonal outline due to their equal impact on
each other as they progress evenly from equidistant centres. The
self, which has ranked through out these views as the end, to whose
liberty all is to be sacrificed, turns out to be the non-ethical element
of life.

[1] Man v. State, p. 15. Cf. Seeley, Introd. to Political Science, p.

119: “Perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence of government.” I
have attempted to point out the fallacy of this in a way applying to
its practical and everyday meaning in my essay on “Liberty and
Legislation,” in the volume of essays called The Civilisation of
Christendom.

[2] Man v. State, p. 98.

 Thus, when Professor Huxley speaks of “self-restraint as the
essence of the ethical process,” [1] while “natural liberty” consists in
“the free play of self-assertion,” we see how the whole method of
approaching social and ethical phenomena is turned upside down
unless the paradox of self-government is conquered once for all. The
idea that assertion and maximisation of the self and of the
individuality first become possible and real in and through society,
and that affirmation and not negation is its main characteristic;
these fundamental conceptions of genuine social philosophy [2] can
only be reached through a destructive criticism of the assumptions
which erect that paradox into an insoluble contradiction.

[1] Evolution and Ethics; pp. 27 and 31.

[2] For the Greek, it is society which is natural, positive, and

promotive of man’s individuality. See ch. ii. above.

5. We may now restate the essence of the problem of self-

government as it presents itself to the thinkers whom we have been
reviewing. On the assumptions which they accept, the annihilating
criticism of self-government in the first chapter of Mill’s Liberty is
indeed irresistible. He begins by pointing out that in times of political
immaturity, {74} the conception of political liberty consisted in
setting limits to the power which the ruler, considered as an
independent force opposed in interest [1] to his subjects, should be
suffered to exercise over the community. But as it was found
possible, in a greater and greater degree, to make the ruling power
emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled,

“some persons began to think that too much importance had

been attached to the limitation of the power itself. That, it might
seem, was a resource against rulers whose interests were
 habitually opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted
was, that the rulers should be identified with the people; that
their interest and will should be the interest and will of the nation.
The nation did not need to be protected against its own will.
There was no fear of its tyrannising over itself.”

Rousseau in some moods is the victim of this fallacy, and it is

widely triumphant to-day.

[1] So early an analysis of government as that made by Plato in

the Republic shows indeed that this was never the sole theory, as it
is not the truest, of the cohesive forces of any community whatever.
But it has a certain validity, proportioned to the degree of political
imperfection.

But with the success of the democratic principle,

“elective and responsible government became subject to the

observations and criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact.
It was now observed that such phrases as ‘self-government’, and
‘the power of the people over themselves’, do not express the
true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are
not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised;
and the ’self-government’ spoken of is not the government of
each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The {75} will of the
people, moreover, practically means the will of the most
numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or
those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the
majority … and precautions are as much needed against this as
against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the
power of government loses none of its importance when the
holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that
 is, to the strongest party therein. … In political speculations, the
‘tyranny of the majority’ is now generally included among the evils
against which society requires to be on its guard.”

The paradox of self-government then, so far from being

theoretically solved by the development of political institutions to
their highest known maturity, is simply intensified by this
development. When the arbitrary and irrational powers of classes or
of individuals have been swept away, we are left face to face, it
would seem, with the coercion of some by others as a necessity in
the nature of things. And, indeed, however perfectly “self-
government” has been substituted for despotism, it is flying in the
face of experience to suggest that the average individual self, as he
exists in you or me, is ipso facto satisfied, and at home, in all the
acts of the public power which is supposed to represent him. If he
were so, the paradox of self-government would be resolved by the
annihilation of one of its factors. The self would remain, but
“government” would be superfluous; or else “government” would be
everything, and the self annihilated. If, on the other hand, we
understand the “self” in “self-government” to stand for the whole
sovereign group or {76} community, which is usually called a “self-
governing,” as opposed to a subject, state, then we have before us
the task of showing that this self is a reality in any sense which
justifies the acceptance of what is done by the public power as an
act of the whole community. But on the ground where we stand in
the theories reviewed in the present chapter, no such self can be
shown. Government, in fact and in principle, reveals itself as
coercion exercised by “the others” over “the one.” And so long as
this is the case, and as the government is alien to the self, not only
do the rights of majorities remain without explanation, but no less is
it impossible to say on what rational ground an entire community
can apply coercion to a single recalcitrant member. We have seen
that Mill would solve the problem by a demarcation, according to
which the aim and ground of government is to protect the self from
the impact of others, and leave it in its isolated purity. Herbert
Spencer, it may be noted, [1] has recourse to one of those
hypotheses of tacit consent which would reduce a community to the
level of a joint-stock company, [2] minus a written instrument of
association; which in the case of the State has to be replaced by Mr.
Spencer’s estimate of purposes, which would probably be accepted
with unanimity if the question were asked! Bentham alone, founding
{77} himself on the actual nature of social life, genially overrides the
whole question of individual right, and while maintaining law to be a
necessary evil, and pouring scorn on all attempts to exhibit a
positive unity throughout the selves which compose a society, makes
the promotion of a free and happy life the sole criterion of
governmental interference.

[1] Man v. State, p. 83 sq.

[2] It is a remarkable testimony to the inherent vitality of

associations of human beings that even a joint-stock company often
finds its work and aims so developing on its hands that it has to
obtain additional powers from Parliament. It transcends, therefore,
the limits of the shareholders original contract, and Herbert
Spencer’s loud complaints of this procedure show how little he
recognises the nature of social necessity.

On the basis of every-day reflection, then, we are brought to an

absolute deadlock in the theory of political obligation. If, as popular
instinct maintains, and as common sense seems somehow to insist,
there is a theory and a justification of social coercion latent in the
term “self-government,” we cannot find a clue to it in the reasoning
of our most recent and popular political thinkers. Nor should we find
a comprehensive theory, though we might find suggestions towards
one, if we recurred to our more philosophical teachers, such as
Hobbes and Locke, who are further from popular modes of thought.
If there is anything satisfactory in the conception of self-
government, every interpretation of it is at once condemned which
does not give the fullest force to both terms of the paradox, at the
same time that it exhibits their reconciliation. What this fullest force
is, and the antagonism which it involves, we have seen in the
present chapter. We must start from an actual self, which is capable
of rebelling against law and government; and from an actual
“government,” which is capable of tyrannising over the individual
self. We must not treat the self as ipso facto annihilated by
government; nor must we treat government as a pale reflection,
pliable to all the vagaries of the actual self. Nor, again, must we
divide the inseparable {78} content of life, and endeavour to assign
part to the assertion of the individual as belonging to self, and part
to his impact on others, as belonging to government. We must take
the two factors of the working idea of self-government in their full
antagonism, and exhibit, through and because of this, the
fundamental unity at their root, and the necessity and conditions of
their coherence. We must show, in short, how man, the actual man
of flesh and blood, demands to be governed; and how a
government, which puts real force upon him, is essential, as he is
aware, to his becoming what he has it in him to be. And if we fail to
destroy the assumptions which hinder us from doing this, we shall
have to admit that the maturity of democratic institutions has only
liberated us from arbitrary despotism to subject us to necessary
tyranny; and though, in spite of such a failure, we might still
acquiesce in “counting heads to save breaking them,” we should
have to agree that this may indeed be the shrewdest device of
political expediency, but that the difference between the two
processes corresponds to no real capacity of the human individual
for partaking, by the exercise of will and intelligence, in a peacefully
organised and yet effectually governed whole. We shall then, in
short, be compelled to agree with Bentham and Mill and Spencer
that “self-government” and “the general will” are meaningless
phantoms, combinations of hostile factors, incapable of being united
in a real experience.

{79}

CHAPTER IV.

THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED.

1. The reader will no doubt have observed that the theory dealt
with in the last chapter belongs to the general type of what is
currently known as Individualism. For several reasons I have
preferred not to make use of this hackneyed word. In the first place,
it is very hackneyed; and the employment of such terms takes all life
and expressiveness out of philosophy. And, in the next place,
Individualism may mean many things, and in its fullest, which is
surely, for the student of philosophy, its truest meaning, it is far too
good for the theories under discussion. An “Individual” may be
“individual” or indivisible because he has so little in him, that you
cannot imagine it possible to break him up into lesser parts; or
because, however full and great his nature, it is so thoroughly one,
so vital and so true to itself, that, like a work of art, the whole of his
being cannot be separated into parts without ceasing to be what it
essentially is. In the former case the “individual” is an “atom”; in the
latter he is “a great individuality.” [1] The sense in which we shall
make {80} use of the notion of the individual, so far as we use it at
all, will be the latter and not the former. And, therefore, we shall as
far as possible discard the hackneyed term “Individualism,” which
embodies the former meaning only.

[1] See Nettleship’s Remains, i. 160.

If then we are to coin an expression which will indicate the

common features of the theories outlined in the previous chapter, we
may venture upon some such phrase as “prima facie theories,” or
“theories of the first look.” By this I do not mean that they stand in
the same rank with the views of the Greek thinkers, who,
undisturbed by previous speculation, saw the great facts of social
experience with a freshness and wholeness of vision with which they
can never be seen again. The “first look” of our own day is of a
different kind. It is the first look of the man in the street or of the
traveller, struggling at a railway station, to whom the compact self-
containedness and self-direction of the swarming human beings
before him seems an obvious fact, while the social logic and spiritual
history which lie behind the scene fail to impress themselves on his
perceptive imagination.

We see then that these theories of the first appearance are mainly
guided by this impression of the natural separateness of the human
unit. For this reason, as we noted, the experience of self-
government is to them an enigma, with which they have to
compromise in various ways. And because their explanations of it
are not true explanations but only compromises, they rest on no
principle, and dictate no consistent attitude. For Bentham all solid
right is actually in the State, {81} though conceived by himself as a
means to individual ends; for Mill, it is divided between the State
and the individual, by a boundary which cannot be traced and
therefore cannot be respected; for Herbert Spencer all right is in the
individual, and the State has become little more than a record office
of his contracts and consents.

The assumption common to the theories in question is dictated by

their very nature. It is not precisely, as is often supposed to be the
case, that the individual is the end to which Society is a means. Such
a definition fails to assign a character which is distinctive for any
social theories whatever. For Society, being, at the lowest rate, a
plurality of individuals, whatever we say of the individual may be
construed as true of Society and vice versa, so long as all individuals
are understood in the same sense as one. Thus the “means” and the
“ends” are liable to change places, as, for practical purposes, we saw
that they did in Bentham. The ethical term “altruism” illustrates this
principle. It shows that by taking “the individual” as the “end,”
nothing is determined as to the relation between each individual and
all, and it remains a matter of chance how far it is required of “each”
individual, in the name of the welfare of “the individual,” to sacrifice
himself to “all.”

The fact is that the decisive issue is not whether we call the
“individual” or “society” the “end”; but what we take to be the
nature at once of individuals and of society. This is the question of
principle; and views which are at one in this have nothing which can
in principle keep them apart, {82} although they may diverge to the
seemingly opposite poles of the liberty of each and the welfare of all.