CHAPTER XI.

INSTITUTIONS CONSIDERED AS ETHICAL IDEAS.

1. We have been guided throughout our argument by the idea that the

relation of a given mind to the mind of society [1] is comparable to

the relation between our apprehension of a single object and our view

of nature as a whole. The former term, in each case, we cannot but

suppose to be an individualised case of the latter. The latter seems

inevitably to imply a universal principle corresponding to every

feature of the former. We can never see through the connections, and

the connections of the connections--_e.g._ of gravitation and of

colour--in every part. But our ideal as theorists would be to analyse

the physical object into features, every one of which should be a

case of a natural law, and the whole taken together a case of the

whole system of natural law, which would be our scientific view of

the world.

[1] I neglect, for the moment, the difference between the mind

of society and mind at its best. The difference is practically

considerable, but I shall attempt to make it appear, in the course

of the present chapter, to be a difference of progress but not of

direction.

In treating of a human mind in its relation to {297} Society and

the State, our ideal is comparable to this. We should like to

analyse any given mind into features each of which should be an

individual case of a universal principle, and the whole of which,

taken together, should be a case of the whole system of principles

incarnate in the world, and proximately in the social world. Plato,

simplifying for the sake of elucidation the City-state, which to our

minds was already simple, represented a community, in diagrammatic

form, as consisting in a threefold structure of classes, in which

were incarnate the three main features which he discriminated in

the individual soul--the desires necessary to living, the spirit of

action, and the power of seeing things as a whole.

2. The principles which constitute a society are facts as well as

ideas, and purposes as well as facts. This threefold character is

united in what we describe by the general term “institutions,” a term

which would apply perfectly well to Plato’s “classes” in virtue of

the definite relations with which he invests them.

It is unnecessary to insist on the external aspect of institutions as

facts in the material world; but it will be worth while to gather up

the leading conceptions of our analysis by tracing the nature of some

prominent “institutions,” as ideas, constituent elements of the mind,

which are also purposes; that is, as ethical ideas. An institution

may have grown up without special ordinance, or may have been called

into existence by an act of public will. But it has always the

character of being recognised _as if_ it had been “instituted” or

established to fulfil some public or quasi-public {298} purpose. [1]

An old servant is sometimes said to be “quite an institution”--he

is characterised by the function of keeping alive certain common

traditions of a school, perhaps, or a family--an annual custom may

be an institution in virtue of the same kind of recognition; Sunday

is an institution; the word is indeed very vaguely applied, for

obviously almost every object or event can have a significance of

this kind attached to it in jest or earnest. But for all that, we can

see pretty plainly what usage is driving at. An institution implies

a purpose or sentiment of more minds than one, and a more or less

permanent embodiment of it. “Of more minds than one,” because it is

to fix the meeting points of minds that the external embodiment is

necessary.

[1] Why is not a memorial statue or building, which expresses a

public idea, an “institution” apart from its uses? Apparently because

it has not the notion of bringing persons together or inducing

persons to act in some definite way. An “institution,” then, belongs

to the level of society, as such, conceived as a number of persons.

Thus, a work of art is hardly an institution, though it expresses the

“universal” of many minds; but a weekly concert is an institution,

because many persons act together in giving and attending it.

In institutions, then, we have that meeting point of the individual

minds which is the social mind. But “meeting point” is an unhappy

term, suggesting objects in space that touch at certain spots. Rather

let us say, we have here the ideal substance, which, as a universal

structure, is the social, but in its differentiated cases is the

individual mind. And it is necessary to observe that the material of

this fabric has determinate sources. Mind is not an empty point. It

is the world as experienced. The institutions, which as ethical {299}

ideas constitute mind, are, like a theory, attempts at unity in face

of needs, pressures, facts, and suggestions which arise in what we

call our surroundings, and to each of which mind reveals a different

quality; as every tone of a landscape elicits its peculiar shade of

feeling, which but for it might have remained latent for ever. It

takes the whole world to call out the whole mind. But it will be

enough if we can trace, in some prominent examples, the nature of an

institution as at once a dealing with surroundings, [1] an ethical

idea, and a social principle.

[1] There are, of course, no absolute surroundings. At every point

experience rests on mind. But at any point at which we are observing,

we must take some facts as, comparatively speaking, given.

3. The family starts from the universal physical fact of parentage,

but takes its ethical value mainly from the special phase of parental

relation which leads to the formation of a household. The association

of parents and children in a household, which is permanent until

broken up into other households, is due to economic conditions.

Calling to mind the original meaning of words, we see that we are

asserting the formation of a house hold to be due to “household”

[1] conditions. And this is something more than a pun. Whatever the

surroundings may be which favour the formation of households, whether

the difficulty of procuring livelihood, which makes the father’s

continued care essential, [2] or the chances offered by agriculture

to a stable group, they operate as elements in a human world, in a

world which is constituted by {300} the focussing of “surroundings”

(circumstances) in a whole. Conditions which have become “economic”

have ceased to be material. They are motives, interests, means to

ends. They bring the world into the mind, but in doing so they become

factors in the purposiveness and re-adjustment, which the mind, as

unity asserting itself throughout varied suggestions, is busied in

bringing to pass. By demanding permanence, for instance, economic

conditions elicit in the relation of parent and child the simplest

form of universality necessary to an ethical idea.

[1] “Economy” = household management.

[2] It is said that the household does not readily form itself in

very easy conditions of life.

We will not venture upon the history of phases of the family life,

but will attempt at once to sketch its position and value in the

typical civilisation of a modern State. Only it must be insisted on

once more, [1] that the family or household as an ethical structure

is not anterior to the State, but is rather a growth dependent on the

spirit and protection of the State, and intentionally fostered by

it as against forms of kinship which do less justice to the ethical

possibilities of parentage.

[1] Cf. p. 272.

As an ethical idea, then, the monogamous family, which is in the

normal case also a household, has a unique place in the structure of

the citizen mind.

Its peculiarity is in being a natural union of feeling with ideal

purpose. That is to say, the ideal purpose, a permanent interest

in a comparatively permanent and external life, attaches itself

by imperceptible links to the most universal incident of animal

existence. The mere remaining together of the units, a demand of

their physical needs, is almost enough of itself to transform their

inevitable {301} mutual dependence into a relation of intentional

service, rooted in affection, and tinged with some degree of

forethought.

And, being thus “natural,” the idea of the family has a hold like no

other upon the whole man. In this respect it anticipates the powers

which have been claimed for the love of beauty. The very animal

roots of life, and every detail of man’s appetitive being, are made,

without conscious effort or moralising interference, factors in a

round of social service. The meal of a lonely individual [1] is

perhaps, at best, a refined and lawful pleasure. But the family meal,

quite apart from over-strained religionism, has in it, as a plain

matter of fact, the fundamental elements of a sacrament, none the

less effective that they are not thought of by that name. And both

through maintaining the fitness of the parents for their life work,

and through the training of the children to the same end, the natural

ethics of the family have an indispensable logical hold upon the more

explicit common good known to the social will.

[1] Note, however, what is said below of the secondary or transferred

idea of the family. The solitary may partake of the family sacrament,

so to speak, “by faith.”

And, in the last place, it should be noted that a feeling and

atmosphere of this kind is not confined to members actually living in

households formed by families. There is no race, it has been said,

that parts with its children so readily, or retains their affections

so permanently, as the Anglo-Saxon race. When the type and spirit are

once formed, they are contagious and persistent; they {302} affect

all who have seen or known them, and even those who have never formed

part of a household bound by kinship.

If we contrast the idea of the household with monasticism as its

repudiation, and with the tribal state or phalanstery as its

exaggeration, we shall see its uniqueness in the strongest light. The

naturalness of its foundation, and the completeness of the reciprocal

interest (involving monogamy) on which its idea rests, distinguish

it from all other forms of union or disunion in which the sexes are

concerned. It may be added that the family, and it alone, has the

right adjustment of population in its power. The fully trained and

equipped human being can never be superfluous in the world. And the

production of the fully trained and equipped human being depends on

the capacity of forming a true family and meeting its requirements,

and when this capacity and idea regulate the union of the sexes no

growth nor apparent decrease of population need cause anxiety.

It seems as idle to discuss whether civilisation is conceivable

without the family as whether human nature can change. All that

we can attempt, as philosophers, is to ascertain the distinctive

part which its idea plays in human life as such. There must be,

we can see, some such idea--an ethical idea covering some such

sides of life--while man is a spiritual animal. But by what

precise “institution” such an idea might come to be represented in

circumstances which we do not know, it would be beyond the modesty of

philosophy to predict.

The institution of Property may be mentioned {303} as a corollary to

the household-family. Its natural basis and ethical value are very

markedly correlative to those of the latter. The outlook upon life

which it essentially implies is co-extensive with that demanded by

the household, although in the relations of acquisition and exchange

many further rights and duties may attach to it. It depends on the

fact that, in order to express a will in an individual life (which

is incomplete except as the life of a household), there must be a

power of moulding the material world in the service of ideas, which

is conditioned by free acquisition and utilisation. The institution

of property, then, as an ethical idea, consists in the conception

of individual (properly speaking, household) life as a unity in

respect to its dealings with the material instruments of living.

It is not merely the idea of provision for the future; still less

the certainty of satisfying wants as they arise from day to day. It

is the idea that all dealings with the material conditions of life

form part of a connected system, in which our conceptions and our

abilities express themselves. It binds together the necessary care

for food and clothing with ideas of making the most of our life and

of the lives dependent upon us. A being which has no will has so far

no property--a child has in practice, and a slave had by Roman law,

property in a secondary sense--and a being which has no property

has so far no actual will. The “person,” or responsible head (or

heads), of a household, is the true unit to whom the idea of property

attaches, because he is the unit to which we normally ascribe an

individualised will, a single {304} distinctive shape of the social

mind. A child has not yet such a will; a group of mature persons has

more than one. The change which is passing over the household in

consequence of the recognition of married women as individual wills

is highly instructive on this point. They can hold and manage their

own property, because it is admitted that they can have their own

view of life. It is not proposed that young children should hold and

manage property, because every one knows that they have no mature

individualised view of life. The corporate person of the household

is so far dissolved by legal recognition of its more individual

components; and it is most important, theoretically, to note that its

unity is not diminished by the recognition, but is raised to a higher

power.

4. It might seem fanciful to say that our district is to our family

as space to time; but it would suggest something of the point of

view from which it is well to look at the structure of our ethical

ideas. It is desirable to realise how the simplest characters of our

surroundings and their necessary connections are ethically important,

not because they impose anything upon us, but because they respond

to something within us, or rather, to a possibility which is to be

realised by the world, as in us its variety strives towards unity.

Parentage, we saw, was a universal animal fact, and from it, in

an experience capable of unity and permanence, springs the family

household and all that it implies for our lives. One’s district, as

an element of life, implies, of course, some stability--a home, not

merely permanent as a {305} home, like the Scythian’s waggon, but

located on some spot of earth. The nomad, we must suppose, to a great

extent carries his neighbourhood--his tribe--along with him, and for

that very reason the fact of neighbourhood has not its full effect on

him.

But when a permanent home is fixed on some spot of earth, presumably

with the beginnings of agriculture, a new condition begins to

operate--the “indifference” of space. Perhaps we are surprised that

“indifference” should be an ethical stimulus. But nothing is more

instructive than to note how qualities of our surroundings, which by

themselves seem negative or the barest natural necessities, spring

into significance when taken up into the unity of life. Locality

means a potential neighbourhood. It may be long before any one comes

near you except your own cousinhood, your tribe or clan. But the

indifference of space is a standing invitation, and it is pretty

certain that some day strangers will become your neighbours, and

that you will have to take up some mental attitude towards them.

Historians and jurists have described to us the struggle between the

principle of kinship and the principle of neighbourhood. When we read

that a plebeian, in the eyes of a Roman patrician, simply could not

make a real marriage any more than the beasts of the field, this is

not, as it may have become by survival, intentional arrogance on the

patrician’s part. It was rather the state of mind of Mrs. Transome

towards Rufus Lyon, “sheer inability to consider him.” A proof of

what a struggle it involved to reach a new attitude of mind as

regarded the resident alien is given by {306} the half-way house at

which it was found necessary to pause in the process. The recognition

of kinship on the ground of residence was the fiction, we are told,

by which the mind assisted itself to a positive attitude towards

those whom the indifference of space insisted on bringing within its

range. And the positive attitude towards which it was groping its way

was of course the recognition of humanity, the equality of man in the

truest sense which that ambiguous phrase will bear.

In modern States, in which this struggle is on the whole behind

us, our district or locality asserts its full indifference. Its

“negative” here becomes a “positive.” That is to say, on the whole,

[1] and under some reasonable reservations as to evidence of

intention to accept duties, and to renounce incompatible ones, men

are full members of the district to which they choose to belong. The

challenge thrown down by the indifference of space has resulted in a

recognition of universal humanity. Our district is our neighbourhood.

We will look a little more closely at the ethical idea implied. We

notice at once, at least in English experience, that each of us

belongs to a variety of districts which are concentric as regards

him. Each of these districts represents a different purpose, and we

are told that for practical purposes great confusion results. But

it is a useful training to be made aware of the distinct purpose of

each {307} organised locality which surrounds us--to have the care

of our health, of public order, of education, of the relief of the

destitute, and of religion according to our view of it, represented

by different, or possibly different, boundary lines on the map. Each

of these boundaries indicates some common element of thought and

feeling--some common interest--in the mind of the neighbourhood, and

the difference of the boundaries, where they differ--the difference,

_e.g._, between the civil and ecclesiastical parish--may have a

long growth of ideas behind it. At any rate, all these are moral or

physical needs, which, like our household necessities, draw us out of

ourselves, and reveal us to ourselves as cases of a larger mind.

[1] Settlement, scholarships, fellowships, and charities generally,

“close” to localities, and perhaps domicile, maintain qualifications

in contradiction with actual residence, and in case of allegiance

even depending in part on birth. But some fixity is, of course,

convenient; and I believe that intention plus residence will cancel

almost any opposing qualification.

Every locality, then, is, however imperfectly and unconsciously, a

body which has a mind. It is, as an idea which enters into us, the

spiritual reflection of our adjacent surroundings, both human and

natural, as the family is of our animal parentage. The neighbourhood

is for the mind its immediate picture of the world, the frame into

which its further vista of society as a whole must be fitted, or, in

other words, its sphere of direct relations. The family is a group

of natural relations; but the neighbourhood consists of relations

which are as natural in a different way, not through blood, but

through contact. It is not a selection, but rather a specimen of

life as a whole, for it must include as a rule _all_ the necessary

elements of the social fabric. It includes all that comes to us by

direct sense-perception from day to day; all our chance meetings and

dealings with those outside our household, and probably the nearer

{308} and more reliable illustrations of all social and political

problems. For it is a context of life which we know and feel in its

total working, which is impossible with what we only gather from

writings or from hearsay.

As such a reflection of our direct surroundings, it colours our whole

basis of feeling, A peculiar tinge of happiness, anxiety, depression,

or resolution attaches to the streets or fields which we pass through

day by day, and the faces which we meet. How far these feelings are

true interpretations of what we see, and how far they spring from

superficial or sentimental associations, is one of the greatest tests

of the mind and heart. Do we see the body of a soul, the symbols of

character and happiness, in the houses, the streets, the tillage, the

workshops, or the gardens?

No other element of mind can be the substitute for the neighbourhood.

It is the faith in which we live, so far as embodied in our contact

with a sensuous world. It is a microcosm of humanity, in which, by

the very indifference of space, we are liable to the direct impact of

all possible factors. It is particularly the sphere of charity and

courtesy, of the right behaviour in immediate human relations of all

possible kinds.

The District or Neighbourhood, in short, as an ethical idea, is the

unity of the region with which we are in sensuous contact, as the

family is that of the world bound to us by blood or daily needs.

Local self-government, for example, acquires a peculiar character

from the possibilities of intimate knowledge of each other among

those who carry it on. A man’s whole way of living {309} is in

question when he sets up to be locally prominent, and though the

result may often be corruption or vulgarity, [1] these are only the

failure of what, at its best, is a true type of the relation of

fellow-citizens.

[1] The recriminations or interested intimacies of a vestry or parish

council rest at bottom on the personal knowledge which, rightly used,

gives security to local life.

As with the family, we may illustrate the significance of

Neighbourhood by the case in which it fails to be duly recognised,

and that in which nothing else is recognised.

To a great extent, in the life of modern cities, especially when

supplemented by suburban residence, the principle is disregarded.

In a great city, the actual neighbourhood is more than can be dealt

with, and has often no distinctive physical character--at least no

attractiveness--and the idea of a special relation to it falls away.

The fact, indeed, is less universal than is often asserted, and

nearness in space, together with local government, retain and will

retain a certain predominance over the mind. The total disregard

of an ethical purpose connecting us with the surroundings nearest

to us in bodily presence, tends to deprive the general life of its

vitality, its sensuous health, strength, and beauty. In many ways,

circuitous perhaps, but ultimately effective, it may be that this

factor of immediacy will regain a proper place in the national mind.

We may observe that in as far as electoral districts are treated as

mere circumscriptions of such and such numbers of electors, the life

of a neighbourhood is disregarded. To make the constituency a mere

{310} number (Hare’s scheme) would be the climax of this tendency.

In the ancient City-state, on the other hand, the district was all

powerful. The State was almost a sensuous fact. The members of the

State were essentially friends and neighbours, who for business or

pleasure were meeting all day long. When the district thus absorbs

the State, there is a want of what we call freedom, though there

may be enough of sensuous unconstraint. The State and its ideal

purposes are not clearly set above all flesh and blood. A great legal

system is not created till the State ceases to be a neighbourhood.

Individual intimacy [1] and the “hard case” obscure the idea of

universal law. The possibility of representative government, of a

political faith which does not work by sight, is not conceived.

The district, as a natural fact, was at first only a degree more

liberating than the natural fact of kinship. [2] It was not conceived

that man, as man, belonged “neither to this place nor to Jerusalem.”

With the ideal unity of a modern nation such conceptions harmonise

much more readily, and the neighbourhood can lend them flesh and

blood without hiding them.

[1] Imagine a Roman or English judge being addressed as Demosthenes,

in his speech against Pantaenetus, addressed (in his client’s name)

the Athenian jury: “I know I have a hurried gait and a loud voice,

and it annoys people; but I am as I was made, and I have a right

to justice all the same.” It sounds like a speech to a jury of

schoolboys.

[2] P. 300 above.

5. “Class” is in democratic countries no longer a political

institution. A man’s vote is secured to him on a minimum

qualification, and his practical influence and acceptance depend

neither on {311} birth nor on occupation, but on the power which

he can exercise by his qualities or his possessions. This is a

consequence of the recognition of humanity as such, and has its bad

side and its good side according to the baseness and nobility of the

influences which tell _de facto_ upon human nature. It is horrible,

we may say, that influence should belong to wealth without any

security whatever for a discharge of social function. But this, given

human nature as it is to-day, is a result of the same causes which

enable us to boast, with some truth, that a man ranks in the general

world by his powers, character, and behaviour, and that we do not

know or care whether his livelihood comes to him as a miner or as a

duke. Wealth has weight because people give it weight; but no one

need give weight to wealth in politics or social intercourse unless

he likes. It is a consequence, then, of the recognition of free

humanity that “class” no longer is an institution in political right

as such, while in social intercourse, though it practically exists as

an institution, it claims to be an expression of what people are in

character and behaviour, and its differences are not annexed by any

iron bond to differences of occupation. [1]

[1] It may be taken as proved that a “gentleman” can make his living

as a labourer or mechanic--at least in the U.S.A., where irrational

tradition is weaker than in England--and remain a gentleman in the

drawing-room sense of the term as well as in essentials. This being

so, there can be no inherent impossibility in men born and bred

as labourers or mechanics realising the same qualities. It would

be cant, I think, to say that full equality of social class, full

pleasantness and freedom of intercourse, could be attained without

those qualities.

But though occupation no longer determines either social or political

class, in the sense of {312} gradation by any formal bond, yet it

remains and must always remain a determinant of class in a narrower

sense, and one of the main ideas which constitute the ethical

structure of the mind.

The necessities which we compared roughly to time and space--the

proximate permanent group and the adjacent locality--give a value to

man’s animal routine, and a significance to the area of his every-day

perceptions. It is when the division of labour, the requital of

one service by a different one, becomes prominent in a community,

that a further grasp is laid upon the distinctive capacities of the

individual consciousness, in which must be reckoned the surroundings

which constitute its horizon of possibilities. We still answer

the general question, “What is he?” by naming a man’s industry or

profession. The family and the neighbourhood sustain and colour the

individual life, but the vocation stamps and moulds it. The more

definite and articulate summons of the organising world--in which of

course intelligence is active, ever discerning new purposes in old

routine--elicits a deeper response from, or takes a more concrete

shape in, the particular centre of consciousness. The individual has

his own nature communicated to him as he is summoned to fit himself

for rendering a distinctive service to the common good. He becomes

“something”; an incarnation of a factor in the social idea.

The Roman word “class,” which the English language has adopted, not

for every separate employment, but for the character and position

roughly connected with a whole group of employments, has an origin

worth recalling. Plato’s classes {313} were “_genera_” = clans,

extended families. The German classes were “Stände” = statuses,

positions, estates (compare the French “état,” which practically =

trade). But the Roman “classis” was “a summoning” to public service;

the first and second classes were the first and second summonings;

[1] then indeed to military service in an order based on wealth. But

the idea may survive. Our “class” may be thought of as the group or

body in which we are called out for distinctive service.

[1] _Mommsen Rom. Hist_., i. 101, E. tr. The “_classicus_” was the

trumpet.

One’s class, then, in the sense in which it indicates the type

of position and service involved in one’s occupation, approaches

very near the centre of one’s individuality. In principle, as an

ethical idea, it takes the man or woman beyond the family and the

neighbourhood; and for the same reason takes him deeper into himself.

He acquires in it a complex of qualities and capacities which put

a special point upon the general need of making a livelihood for

the support of his household. In principle, his individual service

_is_ the social mind, as it takes, in his consciousness, the shape

demanded by the logic of the social whole. He is “a public worker”

[1] by doing the service which society demands of him. And just

because the service is in principle something particular, unique, and

distinctive, he feels himself in it to be a member of a unity held

together by differences. And in this sense the bond of social union

is not in similarity, but in the highest degree of individuality

or specialisation, the ultimate point of which would be to feel

that I am rendering {314} to society a service which is necessary,

and which no one but me can render--the closest conceivable tie,

and yet one, which in a sense, really exists in every case. Your

special powers and functions supply my need, and my special powers

and functions supply your need, and each of us recognises this and

rejoices in it. This ethical idea of unique service, or the service

of a unique class, involves of course a more or less conscious

identity in difference. That is to say, the individual’s mind is not

reduced to his special service, or he would be a machine. Rather,

the whole social consciousness is present in him, but present in

a modified form, according to the point of view from which it is

looking. The problem is simply put by Plato’s diagrammatic scheme of

classes. The statesman’s function is to be wise for the community;

the carpenter’s to carpenter for the community. But plainly the

community for which the statesman knows that he has to be wise, must

include the carpenter’s life and the conditions of his work, and the

community for which the carpenter knows that he has to work must

include some of the order and organisation which belong to it in the

statesman’s vision. The individual, in short, is unique, or belongs

to a unique class, not as an atom, but as a case of a law, or term

of a connection. This is what is meant by individuality in the true

sense; the character of a unit which has a great deal that, being his

very self, cannot be divided from him; not one which has so little

that there is nothing by subtraction of which he can be imagined

less. Such individuality is in a sense the whole ethical idea, but

more particularly is embodied in {315} the idea of a vocation. Our

vocation, like our neighbourhood, and usually of course in connection

with it, stamps both mind and body; and what we consider most

intimately ourself is really the structure of ethical ideas which

we are describing, with the feelings and habits in which they are

rooted, but none of which are unmodified by them.

[1] Greek δημιοῦργος [demiourgos], “artisan.” Homer speaks of

“those who are public workers--the soothsayer, the doctor, and the

carpenter.”

Like the other ideas of which we have spoken, the idea of class

or specialised function may be illustrated both by the extreme in

which it is nothing, and the extreme in which it is everything.

The less a society is differentiated--the less that, considered as

a mind, it has developed intense and determinate capacities--the

more its structure repeats itself from household to household, [1]

and fails to exhibit lines of formation pervading the community as

a whole. Dicey’s _The Peasant State_ [2] gives an idea of a social

mind thus undifferentiated, without classes, without ambitions, and

without interests. Both in this case and in that of the Boers of the

Transvaal it would be rash for an outsider to pronounce dogmatically

on the value of the life which is achieved. But as cases of social

formation and of social minds, they illustrate our present theme. To

say that there is no specialised function, is the same as to say that

there is no developed intelligence.

[1] Durkheim’s “Segmentary Structure,” _De la Division_, p. 190.

[2] See also H. Bosanquet, _Standard of Life_, p. 8.

“Class” appears to be everything, an absolute and inflexible rule

of precedence and privilege, when it has lost or has not gained the

power of accommodating itself to function, and function to social

logic. Such denials of free adjustment, of {316} the career open to

talents, may take the form of a confusion of the principle of class

with that of birth, or even with that of private property. In the

former case function and position are inherited, in the latter they

are bought and sold. The two confusions may even be combined, as when

public functions are inherited like or with a house or an estate. [1]

Such a “class” system may be an oppression to its members, [2] or

to the community, or to both. But the essence of the evil is that a

function of mind is divorced from its characteristic of free logical

adaptation within the social system. The institution has become

ossified; and instead of moulding itself, like a theory or a living

organism, to the facts and needs which it is there to meet, it nails

itself to an alien principle, and becomes a fallacy in social logic,

or a dead organ in the social body.

[1] As in the judicial privileges of the Baron of Bradwardine and his

likes.

[2] The hereditary executioner in Maurus Jokai’s novel, _Die schöne

Michal_.

In both of these extreme cases individuality is minimised. In the

former the individual does not pretend to any high capacity. In

the latter he pretends to a considerable capacity, but this being

cut apart from the principle of the whole, and pretending to be

everything in itself to exist absolutely or for its own sake has lost

the connection which gave it value, and becomes a mere pretension.

There is a strange and sad institution in which, it may be suggested,

the two extremes of error are combined. This is the institution of

“the {317} poor” as a class, representing, as an ethical idea in the

modern mind, a permanent object of compassion and self-sacrifice.

“Poverty,” it has been said, “has become a status.” The “déclassés”

have become a social class, with the passive social function of

stimulating the goodness of others. [1] Let any one consider

carefully, from the point of view which regards ethical ideas as

an embodiment of human or social purposes, the offertory sentences

of the Church of England. It is needless to press the criticism,

for no one would be likely to deny that here we have ideas gathered

from other soils and climates, and rightly applicable only in the

spirit, but not in the letter. “Give alms of thy goods, and never

turn thy face from any poor man; and then the face of the Lord

shall not be turned away from thee.” “He that hath pity upon the

poor lendeth unto the Lord, and look, what he layeth out it shall

be paid him again.” The victims of misfortune in a small community,

under strict regulations, as were the Jews, for the promotion of

industry, are one thing. The recognition of a class marked by _the

function of dependence_--to use a contradictory expression--in a

vast community whose industrial organisation rests on the individual

will, is another thing. The idea of pity and self-denial, inherited,

I presume, largely from the Jewish scriptures as also from the New

Testament, has tended, in the modern world, to become mechanical,

and combine with a false class-conception. All who know the inner

life of evangelical Christians a {318} generation ago will admit

that, among earnest persons of this type, the notion of the

tithe--the devotion of one tenth or more of the income to purposes

of religion or benevolence--had been inherited as a guiding idea,

representing an end valuable _per se_, almost according to the

letter of the offertory. I am not suggesting any vulgar charge of

other-worldliness, but recalling a genuine conviction that the

surrender of a portion of income to a less fortunate class of the

community was in itself desirable and a religious duty.

[1] The incurably sick and helpless in all ranks of society do, no

doubt, rightly fulfil such a passive function.

It would not be difficult to show that the true and highest idea

of Christian charity is remote from this conception of a dependent

status as inherent in a certain portion of society. What seems to be

needed here, as in so many aspects of morality and religion, is to

combine the inspiration and _abandon_ of the modern mind with the

definiteness of purpose and lucidity of plan that characterised the

ancient City-state.

Socialism, at its best, [1] unites with recent political economy

and with those who try to “organise” or rationalise charity, in

challenging the preconception that poverty must be recognised as a

permanent class-function. And this brave denial may remain written to

its credit when the controversies of immediate method are forgotten.

[1] I cannot think that in detail its advocates are consistent with

their principles on this point. But controversy is not my object here.

We may attempt to indicate in a few words the direction in which

the ethical idea incarnate in the institution of the “poor” is

tending to supplement and modify itself as clearer notions of a

commonwealth arise. It may be observed, by {319} way of introduction,

that we cruelly misconceive the Greek mind when we ascribe to it

a want of love and compassion, because we miss in its utterances

the religious note of devotion to the poor. [1] To a great extent

the truest idea of charity was presupposed in the very axioms of a

Greek commonwealth. The Greek spoke little of “the poor,” because

he recognised no such status. [2] It would have meant to him a

functionless class, a dislocation of the body politic. This, in

fact, is what it did mean when pauperism began to press upon the

Greeks, and the philosopher [3] at once diagnoses the evil, and uses

the term, “people without means,” _i.e._ without ways of supporting

themselves, instead of the older word, which rather suggests the

“object of ‘charity’”. To get them back into a function, “a means,”

is the course which _ipso facto_ rises before him; not to create a

new ethical idea for their sake _qua déclassés_.

[1] Not altogether true, of course. In Homer “all strangers and poor

men come from Zeus.”

[2] It is a mistake to treat all these problems as automatically

solved for the ancients by slavery. The citizen population had

enough dependence on industrial life to be liable to disaster from

its dislocation, and that this happened so little was a true success

while it lasted.

[3] Aristotle, _Politics_, 1320, d. 29. The older word is πτωχός

[ptochos], “one who crouches or cringes, a beggar”; it always had a

bad sense till it was ennobled in the _Gospels_ (Liddell and Scott).

Aristotle’s word is ἄπορος [aporos], “without ways and means.”

Different from both is πένης [penes], for which we have no proper

word, having spoilt “poor” by the idea of dependence. It means a

poor man in the sense of one who is not rich enough to live without

working. The speeches in which Poverty πενία [penia] defends her

merits against Wealth, and in distinction from Beggary πτώχεια

[ptocheia], in Aristophanes’ _Plutus_, are fine, though mixed with

fallacies.

The full modern conception of the “poor” as {320} an institution, if

they must be an institution, ought at least to avoid the pitfall of

acquiescence. Granting the fire and love of the Christian mind to be

a gain, yet its object must be brought into relation with the true

meaning of a mind or a commonwealth. Devotion to man at his weakest

must not be separated from devotion to the possibilities of man at

his strongest--possibilities either existent or at least symbolised

in the most unhappy of the functionless poor. Self-sacrifice for

the poor should not mean a tribute to the maintenance of a vicious

status, but an abiding and pervading sense of the claims which the

weaker humanity has to be made strong.

6. The Nation-State, we have already suggested, is the widest

organisation which has the common experience necessary to found

a common life. This is why it is recognised as absolute in power

over the individual, and as his representative and champion in the

affairs of the world outside. It is obvious that there can be but

one such absolute power in relation to any one person; and that, so

far as the world is organised, there must be one; and, in fact, his

discharge from one allegiance can only be effected by his acceptance

of another. The analysis of the previous chapter releases us from the

task of setting out the elements which combine in the Nation-State,

as the conception of sovereign and ultimate adjustment between the

spheres which realise the elements of our ethical life. It should be

noted, however, that the principles of the family, the district, and

the class, not only enter into the nation in these definite shapes,

but affect the general fabric of {321} the national State through the

sense of race, of country, and of a pervading standard of life and

culture. The reaction of ideal unity on the natural conditions of a

state is exemplified by the tendency to substitute ideal frontiers--a

meridian or a parallel [1]--for frontiers determined by natural

boundaries.

[1] See, _e.g._, the map of North America.

The Nation-State as an ethical idea is, then, a faith or a

purpose--we might say a mission, were not the word too narrow and

too aggressive. It seems to be less to its inhabitant than the

City-state to its citizens; but that is greatly because, as happens

with the higher achievements of mind, it includes too much to be

readily apprehended. The modern nation is a history and a religion

rather than a clear cut idea. Its power as an idea-force is not known

till it is tried. How little the outsider, and even members of the

community concerned, were able to gauge beforehand the strength of

the sentiment and conception that pervaded the United States through

the war of secession. [1] The place of the idea of the Nation-State

in the whole of ethical ideas may be illustrated by the Greek

conception of Happiness, as that organisation of aims, whatever it

may be which permits the fullest harmony to life. The State, as

such, we saw, is limited to the office of maintaining the external

conditions of a good life; but the conditions cannot be conceived

without reference to the life for which they exist, and {322} it

is true, therefore, to say that the conception of the Nation-State

involves at least an outline of the life to which, as a power, it is

instrumental. The State, in short, cannot be understood apart from

the nation, nor the conditions from the life, although in exerting

political force it is important to distinguish them. As an ethical

idea, the idea of a purpose, it is essential to hold the two sides

together, if we are not to walk blindly.

[2] The dangers besetting the French Republic to-day (December, 1898)

are, in essence, tests applied to the strength of a national idea. If

the idea cannot maintain itself, we must reluctantly suppose that it

ought not--that the common life has not the necessary depth.

7. Our analysis of the Nation-State suggests a point of view which

may be applied to the vexed question of whether State action is to be

judged by the same moral tests as private action.

The first step is to get a clear idea of the nature of State action.

It must be confined, one would think, to what is done in the name of

the State, and by something approaching to an act of will on its part

as a State. We only pass moral judgment on individuals in respect

of their acts of will, and we ought to extend the same justice to

a State. The question is complicated by the fact that a State has,

as its accredited agents, individuals whose acts it must normally

avow. But it can hardly be saddled with moral responsibility for

their personal misdoings, except under circumstances which are barely

conceivable. [1] The State, as such, can have no ends but public

ends; and in practice it has none but what its organs conceive to

be public ends. If an agent, even under the order of his executive

superior, commits a breach of morality, _bona fide_ in order to what

he conceives to be a public end desired by the State, he and his

superior are certainly {323} blamable, but the immorality can hardly

be laid at the door of the public will.

[1] _i.e._ That it should actually order a theft, murder, or the like.

Indeed, a strict definition of State action might raise a difficulty

like that of defining the General Will--if the act was immoral,

can the State, _as such_, really have willed it? And waiving this

as a mere refinement, it still seems clear that the selfishness or

sensuality, which has at least a good deal to do with the immorality

of private actions, can hardly be present in an act of the public

will, in the same sense as in a private volition. The State, as such,

certainly cannot be guilty of personal immorality, and it is hard to

see how it can commit theft or murder in the sense in which these

are moral offences. To speak of the question as if it concerned the

conduct of statesmen and their agents, instead of the volition of a

State as such, seems to introduce confusion. We are discussing the

parallel between public and private acts, and we are asked to begin

by treating the public acts as private.

It may be said that this distinction between public and private acts

leads to the casuistry of pure intention. We are saying, it will be

urged, that the State remains pure, because its will is on the whole

towards a public interest, whatever crimes its agents may commit.

And, no doubt, this line is often taken in practice. A successful

agent finds his evil deeds are winked at; an unsuccessful one is

disavowed. In either case the State pleads innocence. But this danger

cannot alter the conditions of a moral action, and we cannot impute

that as an action to the State, of which it knew no particulars,

which it never {324} willed, and which can hardly indeed be the

object of a public will. It has a duty to see to the character of its

agents and punish their excesses; but the conditions under which it

is true that _qui facit per alium facit per se_, can seldom apply to

a public body with regard to actions of its agent which are not of a

nature to embody public ends.

Promises and treaties, however, are acts which embody public ends.

And here the State, on its side, is bound to maintain good faith; but

still its agent is likely to go wrong if he mixes up the obligations

of the State with his private honour. The question for him, if he

has to keep or break a public undertaking, is, to what is the State

substantially bound, not to what extent would he be bound if he had

made the promise or engagement in question in his private capacity?

He, or the power which is to act, must consider the obligations and

aims of the State, as a whole, and work for the best fulfilment of

them as a whole. The question may be _parallel to_ that of a private

case of honour, but it is not _his_ honour nor _his_ promise that is

in question. Just so, if he introduces his private conscience about

religion or morality into his public acts on behalf of the State,

he may cause frightful persecutions or disasters. The religious

persecutions, and our position in India, supply examples.

The State, then, exists to promote good life, and what it does cannot

be morally indifferent; but its actions cannot be identified with

the deeds of its agents, or morally judged as private volitions

are judged. Its acts proper are always public acts, {325} and it

cannot, as a State, act within the relations of private life in which

organised morality exists. It has no determinate function in a larger

community, but is itself the supreme community; the guardian of a

whole moral world, but not a factor within an organised moral world.

Moral relations presuppose an organised life; but such a life is

only within the State, not in relations between the State and other

communities.

But all this, it may be urged, is beside the question. The question

is not, can a State be a moral individual (though this is certainly

one question)? but, does an interest of State justify what would

otherwise be immorality or wrong-doing on the part of an officer of

State?

Again, I think, we must distinguish between acts essentially private

and acts essentially public. To steal or murder, to lie, or to commit

personal immorality, for instance, as we said, cannot be a public

act. Such acts cannot embody a general interest willed by the public

will. A State agent who commits them in pursuit of information or

to secure a diplomatic result cannot be justified on the ground

that they are not his acts but the State’s; and they are as immoral

in him as in anyone else. Ultimately, indeed, it may be true that

there is no act which is incapable of justification, supposing some

extreme alternative; and in this sense, but in this sense only, it

might be that, treating the interest of a commonwealth like any other

ethically imperative interest, such acts might be relatively capable

of justification. But this justification would only mean that some

supreme interest was subserved by them, and would have {326} no

special relation to the supposed public character of the interest.

It is then a case of the conflict of duties. And the commoner

occurrence, which results in doubtful acts, probably is that an

agent, charged with some public service, finds it easiest to promote

it by some act of rascality, and acts on his idea. But over readiness

to make capital out of an apparent conflict of duties is neither made

worse nor better by the fact that one of the duties is the service of

the State. [1]

[1] Cruelty, it has been said, is a good deal owing to laziness.

It is more comfortable to sit in the shade rubbing red pepper into

a man’s eyes to make him confess than to run about in the sun

collecting evidence. I quote from memory, from a lecture, I think, by

Mr. Leslie Stephen.

A public act which inflicts loss, such as war, confiscation, the

repudiation of a debt, is wholly different from murder or theft. It

is not the act of a private person. It is not a violation of law.

[1] It can hardly be motived by private malice or cupidity in the

strict sense, and it is not a breach of an established moral order

by a being within it and dependent upon it for the organisation and

protection of his daily life. It is the act of a supreme power,

which has ultimate responsibility for protecting the form of life of

which it is the guardian, and which is not itself protected by any

scheme of functions or relations, such as prescribes a course for the

reconciliation of rights and secures its effectiveness. The means

adopted by such a supreme power to discharge its responsibilities

as a whole, are of course subject to criticism as respects the

conception of good which they {327} imply and their appropriateness

to the task of realising it. But it is mere confusion to apply

to them names borrowed from analogous acts of individuals within

communities, to impute them, as it were, to individuals under

dyslogistic predicates and to pass moral judgment upon them in the

same sense as on private acts. The nearest approach which we can

imagine to public immorality would be when the organs which act for

the State, as such, exhibit in their public action, on its behalf, a

narrow, selfish or brutal [2] conception of the interest of the State

as a whole, in which, so far as can be judged, public opinion at the

time agrees. In such a case the State, as such, may really be said

to be acting immorally, _i.e._ in contravention of its main duty to

sustain the conditions of as much good life as possible. This case

must be distinguished, if I am right, from the case in which the

individuals, acting as the public authority, are corrupted in their

own private interests [3] not shared with the public. For then the

case would rather be that the State, the organ of the public good,

had not been given a chance to speak, but had simply been defrauded

by those who spoke in its name.

[1] An act which violates its own law is not an act of the State. And

the State is not subject to the law of any other State.

[2] _e.g._ If, with the knowledge of Parliament, and without a

protest from it, a price were offered for the killing of a hostile

statesman or general.

[3] _e.g._ Bribed by a foreign potentate, or pursuing Stock Exchange

interests.

We do not suggest, then, that the action of States is beyond moral

criticism, nor that action of individuals in their interest is

above or below morality, except in the sense in which one moral

claim has constantly to be postponed to another. But we {328} deny

that States can be treated as the actors in private immoralities

which their agents permit themselves in the alleged interest of the

State; or, again, can be bound by the private honour and conscience

of such agents; and we deny, moreover, that the avowed public acts

of sovereign powers, which cause loss or injury, can be imputed to

individuals under the names of private offences; that someone is

guilty of murder when a country carries on war, or of theft when it

adopts the policy of repudiation, confiscation, or annexation.

8. It is obvious that the idea of humanity, of the world of

intelligent beings on the surface of our earth, conceived as a unity,

must hold such a place in any tolerably complete philosophical

thinking, as in some way to control the idea of particular States,

and to sum up the purposes and possibilities of human life. The idea

of humanity is universal, and whatever limits we have tacitly in

mind--whatever limits the Greek thinker had in mind while he based

his ethics on the distinction between man and beast--yet, when we

rely on the idea of man as man, we are committed to treat in some way

of the world of mankind.

_(a)_ The first point which forces itself upon our attention is,

that the idea which we tacitly entertain when we refer to humanity,

is not true of the greater part of mankind. No doubt, we are quite

aware of imperfection and inconsistency in the family and the State.

But here, in the case of mankind, the problem reaches an acuter form.

According to the current ideas of our civilisation, a great part of

the lives which {329} are being lived and have been lived by mankind

are not lives worth living, in the sense of embodying qualities for

which life seems valuable to us. [1] It is true that, in all to whom

we give the name of man, we suppose a possibility of such living, in

the sense that they have an intelligence distinguishable from that of

animals. But it is a possibility which, for the most part, has been

very slightly realised, and which involves no conscious connection,

so far as we can see, with any realisation. Our idea of man is not

formed by simple enumeration, but by framing a law which explains the

less perfect and consistent facts with reference to the more perfect

and more consistent facts.

[1] This idea is embodied in the doctrine of Salvation confined to

the few, and contains perhaps a similar error. But it has a _prima

facie_ truth.

_(b)_ This being so, it seems to follow that the object of our

ethical idea of humanity is not really mankind as a single community.

Putting aside the impossibilities arising from succession in time,

we see that no such identical experience can be presupposed in all

mankind as is necessary to effective membership of a common society

and exercise of a general will. It does not follow from this that

there can be no general recognition of the rights arising from

the capacities for good life which belong to man as man. Though

insufficient, as variously and imperfectly realised, to be the basis

of an effective community, they may, as far as realised, be a common

element or tissue of connection, running through the more concrete

experience on which effective communities {330} rest. Such a relation

as that of England and India brings the matter home. Englishmen

cannot make one effective self-governed community with the Indian

populations. It would be misery and inefficiency to both sides. But

our State can recognise the primary rights of humanity as determined

in the life of its Indian subjects, and enforce or respect these

rights, whether India be a dependency or an independent community.

The problem is not unlike that raised by the idea of a universal

language. As a substitute for national languages, it would mean a

dead level of intelligence unsuited to every actual national mind,

the destruction of literature and poetry. As an addition to existing

languages, or more simply, if it became customary for every people

to be acquainted with the tongues of other nations, there would be a

common understanding no less firm, and a vast gain of appreciation

and enjoyment, a levelling up instead of levelling down. The

recognition of human rights through communities founded on organic

unity of experience may be compared in just these terms to the idea

of a universal society including the entire human race.

_(c)_ The contrast between humanity and mankind has always uttered

itself through a dichotomous mode of expression--Jew and Gentile,

Greek [1] and barbarian, Mussulman and infidel, Christian {331} and

heathen, white civilisations and the black and yellow races. It will

be noted at once that some of these divisions contradict each other,

and this fact may suggest the probability that to every people its

own life has seemed the crown of things, and the remainder of mankind

only the remainder. Such a suggestion may have a real bearing on our

problem, and we will return to it. In the meantime, however, it is

plain that humanity [2] as an ethical idea is a type or a problem

rather than a fact. It means certain qualities, at once realised in

what we take to be the crown of the race, and including a sensibility

to the claims of the race as such. Sensibility to the claims of the

race as such, is least of all qualities common to the race as such.

The respect of States and individuals for humanity is then, after

all, in its essence, a duty to maintain a type of life, not general,

but the best we know, which we call the most human, and in accordance

with it to recognise and deal with the rights of alien individuals

and communities. This conception is opposed to the treatment of all

individual human beings as members of an identical community having

identical capacities and rights. It follows our general conviction

that not numbers but qualities determine the value of life. But

qualities, of course, become self-contradictory if they fail to meet

the demands imposed on them by numbers.

And thus we recur to a suggestion noted {332} above. Every people,

as a rule, seems to find contentment in its own type of life. This

cannot contradict, for us, the imperativeness of our own sense of

the best. But it may make us cautious as to the general theory of

progress, and ready to admit that one type of humanity cannot cover

the whole ground of the possibilities of human nature. Our action

must, no doubt, be guided by what we can understand of human needs,

and this must depend ultimately on our own type of life. But it

makes a difference whether we start from the hypothesis that our

civilisation as such stands for the goal of progress, or admit that

there is a necessity for covering the whole ground of human nature.

And it may be that, as the ground is covered, our States may go the

way which others have gone, without, however, leaving things as they

are. If the State, moreover, is not ultimate nor above criticism, no

more is any given idea of humanity; and reference to “the interests

of mankind” only names the problem, which is to find out what those

interests are, in terms of human qualities to be realised.

[1] It is remarkable that a limitation of the earth’s surface,

raising an idea of unity, has always, I believe, been presupposed.

For the Greeks, Delphi was the centre of the earth; for us, the earth

being a sphere and returning into itself, gives a certainty that it

does not stretch away to infinity, so making unity of its inhabitants

inconceivable. The remark, I think, is Kant’s.

[2] “Humanity” = “humaneness.” Scotch “Humanities” = Greek and

Latin. Oxford “Literae humaniores” = classics and philosophy. Greek

φιλάνθρωπον [philanthropon], a sense of what is due to man, _e.g._ of

poetical justice.

_(d)_ Neither the State, however, nor the idea of humanity, nor

the interests of mankind, are the last word of theory. And even

political theory must so far point ahead as to show that it knows

where to look for its continuation. We have taken Society and the

State throughout to have their value in the human capacities which

they are the means of realising, in which realisation their social

aspect is an inevitable condition (for human nature is not complete

in solitude), but is not by itself, in its form of multitudes, the

end. {333} There is, therefore, no breach of continuity when the

immediate participation of numbers, the direct moulding of life by

the claims and relations of selves, falls away, and the human mind,

consolidated and sustained by society, goes further on its path in

removing contradictions and shaping its world and itself into unity.

Art, philosophy, and religion, though in a sense the very life-blood

of society, are not and could not be directly fashioned to meet the

needs and uses of the multitude, and their aim is not _in that sense_

“social.” They should rather be regarded as a continuation, within

and founded upon the commonwealth, of the work which the commonwealth

begins in realising human nature; as fuller utterances of the same

universal self which the “general will” reveals in more precarious

forms; and as in the same sense implicit in the consciousness of

all, being an inheritance which is theirs so far as they can take

possession of it.

We have thus attempted to trace in outline the content of the self,

implied, but imperfectly and variously reached, in the actual

individual consciousness. It is because of this implication, carrying

the sense that something more than we are is imperative upon us, that

self-government has a meaning, and that freedom--the non-obstruction

of capacities--is to be found in a system which lays burdens on the

untamed self and “forces us to be free.” What we feel as mere force

cannot as such be freedom; but in our subtle and complex natures the

recognition of a force may, as we have tried to explain, sustain,

regularise, and reawaken the operation of {334} a consciousness

of good, which we rejoice to see maintained, if our intelligence

fails of itself to maintain it, against indolence, incompetence,

and rebellion, even if they are our own. This is the root of

self-government, and true political government is self-government.

INDEX.

A.

Absolutism, Administrative, 63.

Actual Will, contrast Real Will, 118.

Albion, Launch of, 96 note.

Alexander, Prof., 174 n.

All and each, as Society and Individual, 81, 180.

Will of All dist. General Will, 111.

Allness, Judgment of, 112.

Altruism in H. Spencer, 24.

and Egoism, 47, 81, 83.

Amiel, cit, 236 note.

Analysis of motive, fallacy of, 291 ff.

Anglo-Saxon race, 301.

Anthropology in Hegel, 254.

Appercipient masses, 165 ff.

cpd. social groups, 169.

Aristocracy, Monarchy and Democracy, 284.

Aristotle, 5 ff., 32, 129 ff., 295 note.

on the poor, 319 note.

Army, opp. crowd, 160 ff.

Art, how far a social good, 333.

Artisan or public worker, 313 note.

Association, of persons and of ideas, 156 ff.

_see_ ORGANISATION.

Athens, 115.

Attention, 216, _see_ AUTOMATISM, APPERCIPIENT.

Austin, theory of Law, 261.

Authority of Society over Individual in Mill, 62.

Automatism in society, 183, ch. viii.

Autonomy, in Greece, 4.

moral, in Plato, 253.

B.

Bagehot, _Physics and Politics_, 19.

Baldwin, Prof., _Social and Ethical Interpretations_, 44, 253.

Baron of Bradwardine, 316.

Beauty, reconciliation of Nature and State (Schiller), 237.

Beccaria, 56.

Bentham, 56 ff., 82, 180.

Bequest, power of, 272.

Biology and Sociology, 21 ff.

double influence on Sociology, 23 ff.

Birth, surviving as qualification, 306 note.

Boeckh, 33 note.

_Bona fides_, in political theory, 192.

Bourgeois Society (in Hegel), 27, 269, 273 ff.

Boot and Shoe Operatives, Trade Report, 279 note.

Bradley, F.H., _Principles of Logic_, 49 note.

on Punishment, 222.

_Ethical Studies_, 267 note.

Büchsenschütz, 33 note.

Buckle, 28,

Burlamaqui, 132.

Butcher, Prof, (on Nature), _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine

Art_ 131.

C.

Calvin at Geneva, 61.

Capacities, social, distinction of, 168, 173.

Cash nexus, 276.

Causation, physical, in human life, 31.

Cause, idea of, in Sociology, 21.

Charity Organisers, 318.

Christian consciousness, 263.

Church of England, offertory, 317.

Church and State, 285.

Cicero, 10.

Citizen of the World, 8.

City and town, distinguished in, Rousseau, 92 note.

City-State, 36, 116.

as a district, 310.

Civil condition, in Rousseau, 97, 100.

Civil Dispute, 262 note.

_Civil Government_ Locke, 101.

Civil Liberty, in Rousseau, 97.

_Civilisation of Christendom_, 137, 195.

Class, 278, 310 ff.

derivation, 312.

its absence, 315.

Classes in community, 7, 30.

Clan v. Family, 272.

Closed Commercial State, Fichte, 246.

Codification, 276 note.

Collectivism, uncritical, 70, 181.

Commonwealth and Soul, 6.

Comparative Politics, 41.

Competition and Co-operation, 24 ff.

Compulsion ch. viii.,

in elementary education, 67.

Comte, 18 ff., 41.

Conditions and purpose, in Greek thinkers, 32.

which come close to life, 198.

Conditions, man and his, 31.

Conscience, morality of, 259.

in public acts, 324.

Consciousness of Kind, 43.

Consent, in Locke, 101.

Constituencies, of mere numbers, 309.

Constraint and self-assertion, 58.

Continuity, idea of, 23.

Contract, true province of, 260, _see_ STATUS.

_Contrat Social_, _see_ ROUSSEAU.

in Kant, 244.

in Fichte, 245.

in Hegel, 239, 261.

Convention, Law treated as, 8.

Co-operative Societies, 280 note.

Corporation, or Trade Society, 278.,

Cosmopolitanism, 9.

Crawford, Marion, _Corleone_, 226 note.

Crime, sociological analysis of, 37.

Criminal offence, 262 note.

Crowd, 160 ff.

mind of a, 43.

Culture, 275.

Curtius, E., on Peloponnese, 33 note.

Czar, the (in 1818), 248.

D.

Dante, 31.

Decadence in Rousseau, 85.

_Déclassés_ as a class, 317.

De Coulanges, _La Cité Antique_, 44.

Demarcation between self-regarding and other regarding action, 64, 68, 76.

Democracy, _see_ ARISTOCRACY.

Democratic principle, 74, 284.

true d. passion, 98.

De Morgan, Prof., _Budget of Paradoxes_, 20.

Despotic Government, 53.

Deterrent, _see_ PUNISHMENT.

Dicey, _The Peasant State_, 315.

Difference and Identity compared with Invention and Imitation, 46.

Dijon, Academy of, 85.

District, the, as Ethical Idea, 304 ff.,

Division of Labour, 278.

Dress, 8.

Dreyfus-Brisac, M., editor of _Contrat Social_, 101.

Duncker, 33 note.

Duproix, _Kant et Fichte_, 236 ff.

Durkheim, E., _Annee Sociologique_, 30

_De la Division du Travail Social_, 34, 37 ff., 43, 220 ff., 227 note, 315.

Duty, dist. right and obligation, 208 ff.

E.

Each, _see_ ALL.

Economic view of History, 28.

facts, pressure of, 30.

world, the, 275.

Egoism, _see_ ALTRUISM.

_Émile_, Rousseau’s, 98 note.

_Emma_, Jane Austen’s, 162.

End and means in society, 81, 180 ff.

of Society and the State, 181.

English people, the, 116.

Epicureanism, 9.

Epiphenomena, 29.

Equality and Inequality, natural in Rousseau, 87.

Equivalence of punishment and offence, 228.

États, 278 note.

Eternal Relations, in Montesquieu, 59.

Ethical purpose of Philosophy, 50.

obligation, paradox of, 55, 139.

aspect negative in Spencer and Huxley, 72-3, cp. 124.

use and wont, 259.

ideas, ch. xi.

_Être de raison_, State is not, 95.

“Evangel of a _Contrat Social_” 14.

Examination in Elementary Education, 67.

Extenuating circumstances, 231.

External aspect of action, 64, 188 ff.

F.

Family meal, the, 301.

Family, monogamous, in Mill, 66, 269 ff., ch. xi.

_Faust_, 97 note.

Fichte, on Kant, 190 note, ch. ix.

Fiction, historical of contract in Rousseau, 91 ff., 98.

Force, in relation to end of State, ch. viii.

Foreigners Court at Rome, 10.

Form and Matter, in life of peoples, 32.

Freedom, _see_ ROUSSEAU.

Rousseau’s idea of, 237 ff.

and thought (Hegel), 240.

as understood by Kant and Fichte (Hegel), 247.

Freeman, _Comparative Politics_, 42.

French Republic, 321 note.

Friendly Societies, 280 note.

Fries, 249.

Frontiers, ideal, 321.

Fyffe, _History of Modern Europe_, 248.

G.

Geddes, Prof. Patrick, “Parasitism,” 26.

“Regional Survey,” 48 note.

General Will, 59, 93, ch. v.

“always right,” 121.

_see_ SOVEREIGNTY.

misunderstanding about (Hegel), 240.

Geneva, Calvin at, 61.

Geneva and Rousseau, 86.

Genevese, Rousseau’s father a, 98.

Giddings, Prof., _Principles of Sociology_, 18, 51.

Goethe, 41.

Götz, 237.

Golden Age, the, 129.

Good, meaning of, 182.

Good Will, _see_ CONSCIENCE, MORALITY.

Government Departments, legislation by, 285.

Graduation of Punishment, 228.

Gravitation, 19.

Green, T.H., _Principles of Political Obligation_, 93, 110, 137,

141, 144, 188 ff., 203, 213, 227.

principle of State interference, 193.

criticism of Hegel, 288 ff.

Greeks, poor among, 319.

Grotius, 59.

H.

Happiness, Greek idea of, 321.

Hardenberg, 248.

Hare’s scheme, 310.

Hegel, 13, 27, 203, chs. ix. and x.

Henrici cit. by Green, 203.

Herder, 237.

Herodotus, 136.

Hesiod, 129.

Hindrance of hindrances, in State action, 192 ff., 199.

_History of Aesthetic_, 235.

Hobbes, 13, 59, 77, 93, 104 ff.

Holland, Prof., 56.

Homer, 31, 135.

Honour, private, in public acts, 324.

Household, 271.

Housing of poor, 198-9.

Howard, “the Philanthropist,” 56.

Humanity, and man, 328 ff.

compared with idea of universal language, 330.

dichotomous appellations for, 330.

Huxley, Prof., _Evolution and Ethics_, 26 ff., 73.

I.

Ideal, 274.

Ideas, influence of, in economic sphere, 30.

and community, 7.

Identity, _see_ DIFFERENCE.

Imitation and Invention, 43, 211, 252 ff.

Immorality, prevention of, by law, 65.

Indifference of space, 305.

Individual, fuller and narrower meaning of term, 79.

independent existence of, 95.

Individualism, 70, 79, 80, 181.

Individuality, in Mill, 61, cp. 79, 125.

limits of, 176.

highest point of, 313 ff.

Individual Mind, _see_ MIND.

Industrial world, the, 275.

Inequality, _see_ EQUALITY.

Influence, Rousseau’s double, 16.

Insanity, as loss of systematic control, 163.

Institutions, ch. xi., real nature of, 170 ff.

Intention, in theory of State coercion, 188 ff.

Interference by State, ch. viii.

Irreligion, prevention of, by law, 65.

Isonomy, in Greece, 4.

J.

Jacobi, at Geneva, 237.

James, Prof. W., 140, 164.

Joint-stock company and community compared, 76.

Jokai, Maurus, _Die Schöne Michal_, 316.

Jurisprudence, 34 ff.

Juristic meaning of liberty, 135.

Justice, administration of, 276.

K.

Kant, 13, 59, 190, ch. ix., 263.

_Klassenkampf_, 275 note.

Klinger, _Sturm und Drang_, 237.

Kinship and Neighbourhood, struggle of principles, 305.

Kotzebue, murder of, 248.

Krause cit. by Green, 203.

L.

Labourer, an English, and the State, 292.

Law of Nature (and of Nations), 10.

Law, sociological analysis of, 37.

and sentiment, 38.

Law, province of, in Mill, 63.

Le Bon G., _Psychologie des Foules_, 43.

Legislation, idea of, in Rousseau, 117 ff.

Le Play, 28.

Letter of the Law, 259, 276.

Lévy, Bruhl M., 236 ff.

Liberty, ch. vi.

in Bentham, 57 ff.

Mill’s _Liberty_, 60 ff.

“real”, in Mill, 69.

in Spencer and Seeley, 71, 133.

_see_ NATURAL, CIVIL, MORAL, JURISTIC.

“the quality of man,” 99, 118, 126.

in Locke, 101.

on convicts chains, 142 note.

bare and determinate Liberty contrasted, 194 ff.

Life, human, some of its elements, 31.

Limitation of earth’s surface, Kant on, 330 note.

Locality, mind of, 307.

Loch, C.S., 142 note.

Locke, 13, 101, 104 ff.

Logic of social progress, 258.

_Lucinde_, Schlegel’s, 271.

M.

Mafia, the, 226.

Maine, origin of penal law, 227 note.

Majority, will of, 4, 5.

“tyranny of,” 75, 240.

Marriage, prohibition suggested by Mill, 68, 271.

Married Women’s Property, 272.

Marx, 28, 29 note.

Materialism, 28 ff.

Matter and form, in life of peoples, 32.

Maximisation, 187.

Means, _see_ END.

Medical Charities of London, 290 note.

_Merrie England_, 129 note.

Metternich, 249.

Mill, J.S., 60 ff., 82, 118, 190, 194.

Mind and body of community, 7.

as a structure of systems, 173.

as a reflection of society, 174.

_see_ ASSOCIATION, ORGANISATION, APPERCIPIENT MASSES.

subjective and objective, 254-5.

absolute, 255.

of Society, 296.

Minority, _see_ MAJORITY.

Mommsen, 313 note.

Monarchy, 284.

_see_ ARISTOCRACY.

Monasticism, 302.

Montesquieu, 13, 40, 59.

Moral freedom in Rousseau, 98, 100.

Morality, province of, in Mill, 63.

of conscience, 259.

of State action, 322.

_Moralität_, 265.

N.

Napoleon, 294.

Nation-State, 3, n, 116, 321 ff.

Natural Law, 133 note.

Natural Liberty in Rousseau, 97.

Natural Right, 10 ff., 59.

on biological basis, 70.

Nature, 128 ff.

in Aristotle, 130 ff.

as self-assertion, 27.

State of, in Rousseau, 86.

in Burlamaqui, 132.

Neighbourhood, _see_ KINSHIP, 308.

Nettleship, R.L., 79 note, 146.

Newman, W.L., edition of Aristotle’s _Politics_, 33 note.

New Testament, 10.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 20.

Nihilism, Administrative, _see_ ABSOLUTISM.

O.

Obligation, ethical and political, 55.

enforcement of moral, 67 ff.

dist. right, 206.

Offer for Sale, a public matter, 278.

Organisation of ideas or persons opp. Association, 156 ff., 162.

Organism, comparison of society to, in Fichte, 245.

Origin of Inequality (Rousseau’s Discourse), 86.

“Others,” in Society, 58, 66, 83, 113, 182, 207.

_see_ INTERFERENCE.

P.

Parsimony, political, 185.

Paternal Government, 270.

Pattison, Rev. Mark, on Calvin, 60.

Person or Persona in Law and Politics, 12, 93, 104.

Phenomenology, 254 note.

Philanthropy and public honours, 219 note.

Philosopher, ancient, compared with Sociologist, 18.

Philosophical Theory described, 1.

Philosophy, purpose of, 50.

relation to social good, 333.

of Right (or Law) of Kant, 243.

of Hegel, 247 ff.

its position in _Philosophy of Mind_, 522 ff.

of Fichte, 244.

_Pirate, the_ (Scott), 162.

Plato, 5 ff., 20, 27, 32, 55, 74 note, 131, 139, 142, 218 note, 221, 253, 297.

Police State, 273.

Political Economy, 27, 273.

Political Obligation, paradox of, 55.

Political Speculation, in 17th century,

Politics and Science, relations of, 5.

Poor, the, as a class, 316, 320.

Poore, G.V., _Rural Hygiene_, 34 note.

_Dwelling House_, 233 note.

Position in society, dist. Right and Obligation, 205.

Property, 260, 302.

Proportional systems, Stout on, 165.

Protection, mere, as function of the State, 276.

of children’s earnings, 272.

Protestant consciousness, 263.

Psychology, a natural science, 49.

two tendencies in, 51.

Public or State action, dist. private, 322.

Public opinion, 287.

Publicity of discussion, 285.

Punishment, ch. viii., 37 ff., 220 ff.

right of capital, in Rousseau, 90.

Purposes and conditions in Greek philosophers, 32.

Pyramids, 278.

R.

“Real” Will, ch. v., and Actual, contrasted, 118.

Rebellion, duty of, 213-4.

Re-establishment of Sciences and Arts (Rousseau’s Discourse), 85.

Referendum, 105 note.

Reformation of offenders, _see_ PUNISHMENT.

Religion and State, 285, 333.

Repetition, 44.

Representation of the People, 104.

Representative Government, 115, 244.

Republic of Plato criticised, 274.

Republic of San Marino, 106.

Retribution, _see_ PUNISHMENT.

Return to Nature, 8, 23.

Returns in Social Science, 42 note.

Revolution, French, 14.

Reward, 217 ff.

_Richard the Second_, Shakespeare’s, 12.

Right, science of, 34 ff.

_see_ PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT.

of first occupant, 99.

dist. obligation, 206.

unrecognized, 210.

Rights, natural, 35 ff.

in Bentham and Spencer, 70 ff.

in Rousseau, 99.

system of, 127, 201 ff.

negative basis of, 191.

sphere of, 258-9.

Ritchie, Prof., _Natural Rights_, 12, 14

note, 88.

Rogers, J.D., 17 note.

Roman Jurisprudence, 10.

Roman Rule, 10.

Rousseau, 13 40, 59, 70 note, 74, chs. iv. and v., 142 note.

his idea of freedom, 237-8.

on force and right, 238 n., 282.

Ruskin (quoted) 252 n.

S.

St. Paul, 29.

Salamis, 115.

Scheme, general, in thought and in society, 162 ff.

unconscious operation of, 166.

Schiller, _Rauber_ and _Letters on Aesthetic Education_, 237.

Scott, Sir Walter, 162.

Seamanship, Technical training in, 192 note.

Seeley, J., 42 note, 133.

Self, the given, 143.

Self-assertion and self-restraint, 27, 72.

Self-government, ch. iii., 101, 139, 155, 134, 334

Self-improvement as freedom, 144 ff.

Self-mastery, Plato’s account of, 139.

Self-regarding conduct, 62 ff.

Shakespeare, 31.

Sidgwick, Prof., 44, 88.

Similarities, etc., in social consciousness, 43.

_Sittlichkeit_, _see_ _Moralität_.

Slavery, 8, 69.

Social contract, 59, ch. vi.

_see_ “_Contrat Social_“

groups compared with appercipient masses, 169.

Logic, 43.

observance = ethical use and wont, 259.

Physics, 20.

Spirit, 40, 122.

Science, ch. ii.

Socialism, 318.

Society as self-restraint, 27, 73.

for Greeks implies self-assertion, 73 note.

as a psychical whole, 175, 178.

and Individual, demarcation between, 62, 64.

relation to plurality of individuals, 176.

dist. State, 184.

as restraint, 27.

compared with animal species, 23.

compared with individual organism, 24.

as viewed by Philosophy, 50.

Sociologists, criticism of, 21 ff.

Sociology, ch. ii.

Socrates, 5 ff., 265.

Sophists, 265.

Soul and Commonwealth, 6, _see_ MIND.

Sources in Sociology, 47.

Sovereign, fallacy respecting, in Rousseau, 94 ff.

nature of, 103, 108.

Sovereignty, as exercise of General Will, 232 ff.

of people, 282.

Spencer, Herbert, 24 ff., 69 ff., 82, 145.

Spinoza, 14 ff.

Standard of Life, 30.

Stände, 278 note.

State, _see_ CITY-STATE AND NATION-STATE.

dist. Bourgeois Society, 27, 93, 273.

not an abstraction, 95.

inclusive notion of, 150 ff.

interference by, ch. viii.

analysis of, ch. x.

dist. Society, 184.

v. Nature, 237.

actual and ideal, 250.

political organism, 269, 280 ff.

and Religion, 285.

Regulation, 277.

Statistics, 42.

Status to Contract, Durkheim, 277.

Steinthal, 164.

Stephen, Mr. Leslie, on cruelty, 326 note.

Stoicism, 9, 263.

Stout, G.F., _Analytic Psychology_, 49, 162 note, 165 note.

Struggle for life, 23.

Subjectivity, 274.

Successes in social research, not due to Sociology, 22.

Suggestion in Society, 45, 183.

Super-organic, 26.

Supply and Demand, 277 ff.

Survival of fittest, _see_ STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

Sutherland, A., _Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct_, 27 note.

T.

Tacitus, _Annals_ and _Germania_, 129.

Tarde, G., 43 note, 44 ff.

Teleological character of Philosophy, 52.

Themistocles, 114.

Theories of the first look, 80, 82, 96, 144.

Theory, society compared to, 258.

Thomson’s _Seasons_, 237.

Thring, Life of, 197 note.

Thucydides, 218 note.

Tithe, the, 318.

Trade Societies, 277, 279 ff., 283.

Traffic returns, French, 43.

Training for Seamanship, 192 note.

Transvaal, 315.

Truth, meaning of, 182.

U.

Uniqueness of service, 25, 314.

United States of America, 284, 321.

Units, Delimitation of political, 185.

Unity of Social Mind, 177.

Universal good and common good, 110.

Judgment dist. Judgment of Allness, 112 ff.

Self, realised not solely in State, 332 ff.

Universe of Discourse, 163.

Unlawful Games, Statutes respecting, 66.

V.

Valet, the psychological, 292.

Vegetarianism, 8.

Vengeance dist. retribution, 227.

Vico, _New Science_, 13, 17, 40.

Virtue, 268.

W.

Wallace, Prof. W., _Lectures and Essays_, 85.

_Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind_, 249, 265.

War, dist. hunting, 212.

Wartburg, demonstration at, 248.

Water-drinking, 8.

Webb, Mr. and Mrs., 22 note.

_Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre cit_., 273 note.

Will, Real or General, 96, ch. v.

in Hobbes and Locke contrasted, 106.

of All contrasted with General, 111.

Real with Actual, 118.

that wills itself, 146.

implies a whole, 177.

particular, how universalised, 267.

_see_ SOVEREIGNTY, SOCIAL OBSERVANCE.

Wycliffite cry, 12.