a duty, but duty complete and final. There is no individual life over and above a man's civic life: there is no province of individual freedom save the freedom which is perfect service to the community. Now compared with such views, how will the ideal of personality we have sketched find itself situated? Would obedience

to law, fulfilment of the duties assigned to a man in the organism of the State, secure that balance of admirable activities we have described? That it is not so at present is too plain to be argued. We have already noticed some of the many ways in which professional or social duties may entail the abnegation of some keen enjoyment, the cramping of some decided personal taste or power. But it might be pleaded that causes already admitted prevent this from being possible: that the State is in the first instance man's conspiracy against Nature, which is not yet so advanced that the greatest part of man's energy can be spared from the preliminary task of winning daily wants that as the State advances beyond this elementary duty, it does in a great measure bring forth and preserve a fine balance of various powers in its members that if it does this inadequately or unfairly, still no facts will live up to ideal conceptions that nevertheless enable us to define and understand them, and that the proper object of our discussion is the State ideally considered, dem Begriff nach, as Hegel would have said.

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Now a large measure of truth in all this must instantly be conceded. But it does not seem to affect the main contention that the self-conscious person is the true 'moral unit' and not any society, necessarily devoid of a self-consciousness of its own, in which the person lives and moves. In any case we have by now reached the

104 Exaltation of Societies over their Members

stage at which more precise and detailed statements are needed. Though neither corporation nor State has been allowed to possess higher value than the individual person, it must be fully admitted that highest values of personal life cannot be attained except in society. What is now needed is a closer examination of the different forms of society, and the different contributions they can make to individual perfection. For example, how exactly is the State concerned in the fuller developments of personality in art, knowledge, and religion? Clearly art may be encouraged by State prizes, taught in State schools, produced at a loss in State orchestras or theatres. But, even when the State thus makes artistic enjoyment possible, it does not seem to follow that the enjoyment can itself be regarded as a service rendered to the State. Or, again, if we turn from the contemplative life to what are generally called practical affairs, is there not a plain distinction between mere obedience to the State laws, and the everyday behaviour of parents to children or friends to friends? Not only in the contemplative but in a large part of the practical life, men seem generally to be doing something at once subtler and finer than obey the laws or run the institutions of their country. Can a philosophy of society then, without an undue subordination of the individual to the corporate body, go more into the concrete details of life, and show more precisely where and how man's life is essentially social, as so many generations of thinkers have insisted?

V

THE DIFFERENT FORM S

OF SOCIAL LIFE

§ 1. Introduction

IN attempting this difficult task I shall follow the Hegelian method of moving from 'abstract' and narrow to 'concrete' and full conceptions. Hegel himself shows the logical connexion of different social institutions in the masterly sketch given of the passage from the family, when the personality of each member is not yet realized as something existing for itself, on to 'bourgeois society' where the persons are not only realized, but so to speak over-realized, considered as separated by individual and unreconciled claims, and thence to the State where thesis and antithesis are synthesized and men possess themselves perfectly in the service they render to others in co-operation towards common ends. The discussion to which I now proceed necessarily deals with many of the same. subjects, and is implicitly a commentary on the Hegelian treatment both of bourgeois society' and the 'state'. But, rather than expound and criticize Hegel's teaching in detail, I prefer to consider three ways of looking at mankind which form an ascending scale of a less ambitious kind than the Hegelian dialectic offers. I do not pretend that the last stage here is the reconciliation of the first two I simply suggest that we necessarily move from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, if we wish to obtain a concrete view of the nature of human goodness and its relation to human society. At the

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first stage we treat man as 'economic man', at the second as 'legal subject', at the third as what may vaguely be called 'member of society'. Under the last head there may recur activities discussed also under the first two : and the earlier would be misconceived if we stayed at the earlier stages and did not move on to the full truth. This much these three stages have in common with the three members of an Hegelian triad. More cannot be claimed for them: except that some sort of scaffolding is necessary to support the enormous complication of the facts to be discussed.

§ 2. The Economic Man

WE accept then the truth that man must be studied as a social creature, and we are proposing to examine the various forms which this co-operative life can assume. Now first and foremost man, like any other animal, has his living to make: and the first impression society creates in the thinker is that it is an elaborately organized division of labour to secure that end. It is in the first place the production and distribution of material goods that take his attention. But, as ease and luxury increase, the variety and number of the commodities and services that exchange with one another become continually more wonderful. How the terms of exchange are affected is the primary, subject of economics. Economics does not, or ought not to claim that it is a complete study of society: it should confine itself to the arrangements for settling the problems of exchange. From this stand-point it must be described as abstract: it cannot pretend to exhaust the nature of society or of man. But the abstraction need harm no one who is conscious of it. The danger is that in studying economics we should have no clear views about the

proper province of the science. That this danger is pressing is shown clearly enough by the continual controversies about the 'economic man' who perhaps less blatantly than in earlier days would still appear to be the centre of economic studies and the basis of their discussions. Is the 'economic man' simply identical with man, or what is the difference? Violently assailed by the artist and moralist, condemned by his own creators to occasional exile on desert islands, the economic man has led a very doubtful and precarious existence. He has only remained alive at all because, with his assistance, something has been done to explain the markets of the world and the movements of prices, to predict future changes and to guide legislation. Differ as men may about the precise foundation of economic science, still on a question of the incidence of rates, the effects of various taxes, the penalties of issuing too much paper money, they will follow very similar lines of reasoning. They will agree that for the most part good money is retained and bad money passed on: that the employer will not pay a tax out of profits if he can transfer it to wages or to prices: that the more heavily we rate buildings, as compared with sites, the more seriously we discourage enterprise in the interests of possession. Yet all these results follow from the prevalence in human nature of certain motives which may perhaps be called distinctively economic: from the desire to attain the maximum of wealth at the minimum of effort, to exchange with his neighbour at an advantage.

Yet, plain as this may seem, it cannot be worked out with as much clearness as might be wished. As above described, economic conduct might seem to be at best