greater leisure and greater wealth, men set themselves to form societies for various immoral purposes, the sphere of legislation might become even more important than

But we need not so far distrust humanity as to expect crime to be its normal ambition: admitting that the State will still be bound to correct or suppress the abnormal, this does not involve constant interference with the normal. That as humanity progresses, the sphere of criminal law will actually extend, that bad temper and offensive manners will be met with fine or imprisonment, is indeed, an idea contemplated by some philosophers, but their advocacy of law seems overzealous. If humanity had advanced far enough to contemplate the possibility of such action, it would probably have passed beyond the need of it. Members of society made the victims of a cruel jest, or an outbreak of unreasonable anger, would not stand against their assailants as men with rights to be maintained, but rather as brothers who had been misused. Breaches of friendship, of sportsmanship, of private honour, would not be treated as legal offences, because they imply associations of an entirely different character and outlook from the assemblage of citizens, each a subject of rights and unrelative duties which must be jealously guarded and enforced. It may, therefore, be assumed that the sphere of law and politics will diminish as mankind advances in control of Nature and of himself. But the decrease of the State may be the increase of Society in its nobler though less imposing forms. Thus, though man's duty will then be ill-expressed by explaining his station

1 Cp. Aristotle, Ethics viii. 1. 4 καὶ φίλων μὲν ὄντων οὐδὲν δεῖ δικαιοσύνης, δίκαιοι δ ̓ ὄντες προσδέονται φιλίας, καὶ τῶν δικαίων τὸ μάλιστα φιλικὸν εἶναι δοκεῖ.

in the State, it will never be capable of expression without reference to society.

And his life will be

first in so far as his

social still in a double sense: will is directly engaged with the welfare of his fellows, secondly so far as the theoretic side of his nature also unlocks its riches, not merely in the solitary inspiration of genius, but in minds quickened by sympathy into a common enthusiasm. Of the three ideals of the Revolution the first two have been asserted to be necessarily incompatible: the more strong men gain freedom, the more sharply will inequality between the strong and the weak stand out. The State is, in fact, engaged in a constant struggle to do justice to both ideals to maintain the rights of weakness without destroying the enterprise of strength. With the third ideal it has clearly less to do: human brotherhood finds. its appropriate expression not in the modern state but in the Universal Church at one extreme, or in the intimacies of friendship at the other. Yet it is fraternity that alone can ultimately work the miracle of a reconciliation between the conflicting claims of liberty and equality.

VIII

CONCLUSION

Society, the State, and the Individual

IT is time to resume the substance of the foregoing discussions. It will be remembered that study of the individual revealed a complexity of nature that demanded a similar complexity in the moral ideal. Problems thus arose about the proper balance and harmony in the

complex wholes called personalities. These in turn gave birth to fresh problems about the relation of individual and society. It was suggested that the earlier difficulties might have been caused, not by the nature of the facts, but by an unnecessary abstraction in seeking an ideal of personal life apart from the demands of a community. There were other theories of the matter which held that justice would shine more clearly in a society than in an individual, and that man's duties depended entirely on his station. A passage from ethics to politics did, indeed, prove necessary, but nevertheless failed to refute the individualist stand-point. It had to be admitted that personal life apart from society was a mere fiction, but not that the State was something higher and nobler than the individual to whose harmonious perfection individual defects and mutilations might even be contributory. It appeared further that a philosophic study of the State required an examination of various forms of social life co-ordinated under the State; in some of which there was discovered a moral potency higher than could be ascribed to the State itself. If, in the treatment of these topics, any tendency may have been detected to write down the importance of the State, the reason was not simply that writers on political subjects become too much engrossed by it, but still more that its glorification is the chief obstacle to the belief in the supreme importance of individual life which this essay has throughout defended. Here, most of all, men have sought a concrete example of something higher and fuller than personality in the ordinary acceptation of that In the earlier discussions of certain cognate metaphysical topics it was found to be inconceivable that the sum of reality should be personal in nature, impossible

term.

that different self-conscious beings should really be nothing but phases in one supreme self-conscious person. So, too, in the narrower provinces of human life it has been urged that only by misuse of metaphor can personality be ascribed to the State or to any combination of men, only by a confusion could any value be supposed to exist in these institutions, that cannot ultimately be resolved into the value of individual persons. The feeling in the minds of many sincere and loyal citizens that their country is greater than themselves has to be set aside as misleading, although it is quite true that the individual may realize the highest within his powers in selfsacrificing devotion. Such forgetfulness of self is more common in smaller organizations than a modern State, and if any type of society could truly be called greater than its members, it would perhaps be some little group of men and women wholly devoted to one another and to some noble interest. Abandoning then the attempt to find a subordinate place for personality in some organism higher or more valuable than itself, we considered the various forms of society rather as the necessary outcome of personal needs, the necessary framework of personal goodness. The State formed not, perhaps, the most beautiful or the most elevated of such groups, but the foundation of them all. Its position in the hierarchy of social forms it was attempted to elucidate by a sketch of the development of one form from another. In the bare economic structure of society man was seen cooperating with his fellows in the struggle against nature; and here, where individuals at first appear to be most sharply divided, most ruthlessly condemned to fight each for his own advantage, it was possible to trace not the supremacy of the isolated self-sufficient person, but

rather his subordination in an elaborate mechanism of divided labour, possibly to some trivial task which will encroach on the wider potentialities of his gifts and talents the more completely in proportion as the machine itself works more efficiently and exactly. But as the methods of wealth-production improve, the sinking of mankind into their mere professional duties becomes less and less necessary. Secured against want and privation man begins to find leisure to be more than the expert servant of an inhuman machinery. In the division of labour then made possible there can be traced something more than a desperate fight against want and famine, the cruel task-masters of animals not yet certain of their place in nature: something more deserving to be called co-operation, the expression of a kindness and charity that demands less of its rights, and sees in its fellows not units in the market, but human beings whose joy and sorrow sympathy may relieve or heighten. The State, concerned chiefly with the system of rights and laws, has more to do with the economic man than with the artist or the lover. Its importance will stand out most clearly when rival claims press for adjustment, and must diminish as justice grows less and charity increases. Born in the dishonour of material struggles for existence, human society gradually rises to the honour of spiritual fellowship, and as this assumes its highest forms a unity of feeling and purpose is built up in which the suspicion does not so easily arise that this or that person is gaining more than his fair share of the goods society can offer. Yet it is also true that in these high regions the unity of a group in no way subordinates its members to itself. Such a charge might more easily be brought against the economic subdivision of labour through which men are