c 
 
 THE SERVICE OF THE STATE
 
 THE SERVICE OF THE 
 STATE 
 
 FOUR LECTURES ON THE POLITICAL 
 TEACHING OF T. H. GREEN 
 
 BY J. H. MUIRHEAD, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM 
 
 "Who serves a greatness not his own" 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 i 908
 
 To M.T.M. 
 
 Who taught me to feel what Green 
 taught me to think. 
 
 1156919
 
 "Many of the troubles of to-day reflect the distraction 
 of minds to which a sane and balanced view of society 
 has never been adequately presented. 1 ' 1 
 
 B. BOSANQUET.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Prolegomena to Ethics. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 
 
 1883. 
 
 Works. Longmans, Green and Co., 1888. 
 Sermons. Longmans, Green and Co., 1888. 
 Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. (Reprinted 
 
 from Works, Vol. II.) Longmans, Green and Co., 1901. 
 The Philosophy of T. H. Green. BY W. H. FAIEBEOTHER, 
 
 1896. 
 Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green. BY H. SIDGWICK, 
 
 1902. 
 
 Principles of State Interference. BY D. G. RITCHIE, 1891. 
 Six Radical Thinkers. BY JOHN MAcCmJN, 1907.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 WHEN I was asked to lecture on T. H. Green's 
 political teaching at the Summer Meeting in 
 Oxford last year, it seemed a favourable oppor- 
 tunity to recall attention to the light that a 
 comprehensive and coherent theory of the nature 
 of the State and its relation to the individual 
 may throw upon current problems. 
 
 At the time at which Green wrote the Indi- 
 vidualism which had been the leading note of 
 the earlier part of the nineteenth century, though 
 largely discredited in practice, seemed to have 
 acquired new theoretic support from its supposed 
 alliance with the doctrine of natural selection, 
 and to be destined to recover all its old ground 
 under the vigorous leadership of Herbert Spencer. 
 Green was profoundly convinced of the inadequacy 
 of the whole point of view as a basis of construc- 
 tive statesmanship, and had the foresight, in his 
 Lectures on Political Obligations, to bring all the 
 resources of his mind to the task of rendering 
 the ground for it henceforth untenable. It is 
 mainly due to the influence which he exerted on 
 
 the thought of the last part of the century, that 
 
 xi
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 open appeals to the individualistic point of view 
 only serve to discredit in the public mind the 
 causes that depend upon them. If he has made 
 the bearing of his teaching upon the question of 
 Socialism less obvious, this is only because at the 
 time at which he wrote the danger to continuity 
 of national and industrial development seemed to 
 come chiefly from the other side. The principles 
 he advocated are not less applicable as a criticism 
 of the Realism that sees in the State the organ 
 of an all-wise and omnipotent Providence, than 
 to the Nominalism that sees in it only the name 
 for " a crowd of individual administrators." 
 
 In preparing the lectures on which this small 
 book is founded, I felt that it would be impossible 
 to make the fiill scope of Green's ideas compre- 
 hensible without some explanation of the philo- 
 sophical doctrine with which they were in organic 
 connection. In now venturing to publish them, 
 I need hardly say that I have added considerably 
 to what I found it possible to say upon this head 
 in the short course of popular lectures I was asked 
 to give. I have not, however, cared to alter the 
 lecture form, which may serve to remind the reader 
 of my justification for retailing much that is already 
 familiar in current philosophical literature. 
 
 A different justification is required for the 
 liberty I have permitted myself in not always 
 being careful to attribute to Green only these
 
 PREFACE xiii 
 
 applications of his teaching tor which chapter 
 and verse may be quoted in his writings. The 
 interest of his ideas seems to me to depend far 
 more on their general bearing upon contemporary 
 life and the ideas they have suggested to others, 
 than on the particular form in which he expressed 
 and sought himself to apply them. What I have 
 aimed at is to be true to the spirit of a teacher 
 whose power and personality as all who knew 
 him felt were, owing to his untimely death, very 
 inadequately expressed in his published works. 
 
 I am indebted to Dr Helen M. Wodehouse 
 for carefully reading the manuscript of these 
 lectures and for useful suggestions. 
 
 J. H. MUIRHEAD. 
 
 March 1908.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . ix 
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 Green and his contemporaries The problem of his 
 time Philosophical basis of solution in theory 
 of knowledge The human and divine mind . 1-18 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 Desire presupposes self-consciousness, self-conscious- 
 ness freedom The ideal not greatest happiness, 
 but a form of human life Objection to the 
 vagueness of the Good as thus defined The 
 pragmatic test Characteristics of the Good 
 as (1) personal, (8) social The Good as a 
 divine principle Idealism and Evolution- 
 Idealism anH Positivism , . >. 19-46 
 
 XV
 
 xvi CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 I'Mk. STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 The need of a new theory of the relation of the 
 State to the Individual "Will, not Force, 
 the basis of the State"" Earlier political 
 philosophy in England Meaning of Green's 
 Theory The place of circumstances Great 
 Men The general will The rights of indi- 
 viduals Illustration from the right of property 47-80 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 Idealism and Democracy State interference 
 
 Socialism Idealism and Empire Conclusion 81-113 
 
 APPENDIX 115 
 
 INDEX 117
 
 THE SERVICE OF THE STATE 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 Green and his contemporaries The problem of his time 
 Philosophical basis of solution in theory of knowledge 
 The human and divine mind. 
 
 GREEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. When in 
 1875 I entered as an undergraduate at Balliol, 
 there were three remarkable men in the College, 
 all since passed away, but then at the height 
 of their powers and reputation. Of these the 
 Master, Benjamin Jowett, exercised by far the 
 widest influence over the College and in the 
 outside world. He was like an atmosphere 
 pervading the place and extending its pungent 
 influence far beyond it. Whenever in the 
 world a Balliol man was settled, there was 
 a pupil of Jowett. Richard Lewis Nettleship 
 exercised a magnetic charm on all who came 
 in touch with him, and was the best-loved man 
 in the College perhaps in the University. This
 
 2 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 was not merely due to the union in him of the 
 scholar and athlete, so dear to Oxford. There 
 was an intellectual grace and modesty about 
 him that, while it prevented him from seeking 
 or making disciples, "won all men to him." 
 
 But undoubtedly the deepest influence was that 
 of Thomas Hill Green. This was clear at the time 
 from the impression he made upon the ablest 
 men in the College. " To other real or imagined 
 great people in Oxford," writes one, " I took off 
 my hat, but before Green I felt as if I could take 
 off not the hat only but also the head" It has 
 since been proved by the effect of his teaching on 
 the whole intellectual and social movement that has 
 marked the close of the nineteenth century. Yet 
 the source of this influence was by no means obvious 
 at the time. To many of his contemporaries he 
 appeared merely a somewhat eccentric college 
 tutor who wasted his time in attending unprofit- 
 able parochial discussions of the City Council, of 
 which he was a member, or starting evening 
 schools for working men in the slums of St 
 Clement's. To others he was a dry metaphysical 
 lecturer who wasted the time of his pupils in 
 minute and wiredrawn criticism of England's 
 greatest thinkers, expressed with an obscurity of 
 style which rivalled that of his favourite hero, Sir 
 Harry Vane, of whom it was said by Baxter that 
 "his unhappiness lay in this that his doctrines 
 were so cloudily formed and expressed that few 
 could understand them, and therefore he had few
 
 i.] THE MODERN SPIRIT 3 
 
 disciples." What in reality made him the greatest 
 force of his time in the University was just the 
 union in him of these two elements, the citizen and 
 the idealist philosopher not as accidentally com- 
 bined in a man distracted between them, but as 
 organically united with each other. To him an 
 ideal was no creation of an idle imagination, meta- 
 physics no mere play of the speculative reason. 
 Ideals were the most solid, and metaphysics the 
 most practical thing about a man. On the other 
 hand, practice was no conventional round of tasks, 
 but the opportunity of giving expression to ideas, 
 of clothing them with substance as we clothe our 
 thoughts in language. 
 
 The aim of these lectures is to show more 
 fully what the union of the two meant to Green 
 himself, and by what potency in his ideas they 
 have entered into the spirit of our own time, and 
 hold a place to-day as one of the chief directing 
 forces in thought and action. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF HIS TiME. 1 Green has him- 
 self described the characteristic spiritual feature 
 of our own time. "To be free, to understand, 
 to enjoy," he tells us, " is the claim of the modern 
 spirit." To find ourselves at home in the universe, 
 to realise all the capacities of human nature in 
 a world adaptable to our purposes, to feel that 
 we are cast in an environment that is responsive 
 
 1 See Popular Philosophy in its Relations to Life, Works, vol. iii. 
 p. 92 foil. What follows is a paraphrase rather than epitome of 
 this essay.
 
 4 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 to our deepest needs, are spiritual claims which 
 any system of doctrine seeking adherents in these 
 days must satisfy. A review of the chief move- 
 ments of recent times is a review of the chief 
 forms in which they have found expression. The 
 modern revivals of poetry and art are founded 
 on the conviction of the essential kinship between 
 nature and spirit ; religion seeks the divine in 
 the human ; political effort in all its highest forms 
 is the expression of a belief in the reality of the 
 social spirit as the deeper element in the indi- 
 vidual. Yet the teaching of the reigning philo- 
 sophy as represented by such great names as 
 John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes and 
 Herbert Spencer seemed to be entirely out of 
 sympathy with these assumptions. It is not 
 necessary to go deeply into it to find the reason. 
 The analysis of mental life in which it was 
 founded had succeeded in resolving the contents 
 of mind into impressions coming from without, 
 and their reproduction in images and ideas that 
 followed laws of their own analogous to the laws 
 of gravitation and cohesion which controlled and 
 explained the action of material things. In the 
 same spirit it had analysed our volitional life into 
 the attractions and repulsions which our pains and 
 pleasures have established between ourselves and 
 things. It is these feelings, or rather desire for 
 the one aversion from the other, and not the 
 things themselves or any relation in which by 
 inheritance or acquired disposition we stand to
 
 i.] MODERN PHILOSOPHY 5 
 
 them which are the real motives of our actions. 
 We are not here concerned with the details of 
 this theory, but merely with the consequences 
 that seemed to follow, and indeed were openly 
 claimed by its supporters. If man's thoughts 
 were thus controlled by laws of mechanical action 
 and reaction between his impressions and ideas, 
 if his conduct was the inevitable result of the 
 strongest desire or aversion as determined by 
 past or present feelings of pleasure and pain, 
 there seemed no place left for freedom. Every 
 stage and phase of the life of man as knower 
 and doer seemed as inevitably predetermined as 
 the fall of a stone or the flow of a river. 
 
 In other forms of determinism it has been 
 possible to find inspiration in the idea of an over- 
 ruling Providence selecting and directing man's 
 action as the higher form of his own will or self. 
 But the logical consequence of this philosophy 
 seemed to be the denial of the assurance of any 
 such direction, and even of any self at all. Nor 
 was this all. 
 
 Philosophy stands for the effort to understand 
 to know the very inmost reality of things. This 
 is its boast. To this it has sacrificed all. Yet 
 what has it gained ? Our impressions and ideas, 
 truly, we may understand, at least we must accept : 
 we have them, and therefore they are. But what 
 guarantee is there that they represent anything 
 more permanent than themselves? Once this 
 question is seriously asked, there can be but one
 
 6 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES [LBCT. 
 
 answer. Whether in the form of scepticism as 
 in Hume, or of agnosticism as in Huxley and 
 Spencer, we seem committed to the denial of 
 any real knowledge, the possibility of any true 
 understanding. Not only is the human spirit set 
 against itself in the antagonism between the 
 desire to know and to be free, between reason 
 and the deepest element in moral consciousness, 
 but there lurks this deeper contradiction in reason 
 itself. 
 
 To these conclusions an alternative was indeed 
 offered by the philosophy which from the time 
 of Butler had opposed itself to the Baconian 
 school, and this was powerfully represented in 
 such writers as James Martineau at the time of 
 which we are speaking. But the appeal to intui- 
 tions in which it sought to find protection against 
 the conclusions of a too victorious analysis, has 
 never been able to make its peace with modern 
 methods of research. To accept it was merely 
 to close one rift in the human spirit by opening 
 another. 
 
 Nor was it of any avail to appeal to the faith 
 of the poet, the evangelist or the practical reformer. 
 It was indeed true, as has been said, that their 
 work presupposed the existence of a world of 
 spiritual values, to which physical facts stood in 
 the relation of symbol to reality. "The man," 
 as Green puts it, "to whom nature has become 
 human, who has recognised either a kingdom of 
 God or a power of eternal death within himself,
 
 i.] THE NEED OF THEORY 7 
 
 who has found in a free state not a mere organisa- 
 tion for satisfying his wants, but an object of 
 interest identical with his interest in himself, has 
 already for himself answered the question whether 
 it is he that is natural or nature that is spiritual." 
 But valid as this answer might be for the indi- 
 vidual it could not be made generally available 
 for those who were touched with the peculiar 
 malady of the age " the disease of thought." 
 And this defect could not fail to react on practice. / 
 " Man needs the theory of his own greatness." 
 If in an age like ours no such theory is forth- 
 coming, "the very fullness of moral and artistic 
 life thickens into speculative chaos." Instead of 
 the whole-hearted co-operation between thought 
 and practice which has marked the great periods 
 of achievement, we have distraction and hesita- 
 tion the palsy that comes from "the scepticism 
 of the best." 
 
 If satisfaction was to be found at once for the 
 intellectual and the moral part of man's nature, 
 thought must be met on its own ground : nothing 
 short of an entire reconstruction of philosophical 
 theory would suffice. 
 
 It was here that Green saw the problem of 
 his time. His originality consisted not so much 
 in seeing it (others saw it as clearly as he), but 
 in the depth with which he felt it, and the 
 particular manner in which, both by thought and 
 practice, he set himself to meet it. 
 
 It is worth while, in view of recent criticism,
 
 8 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 to emphasise the point of view from which he thus 
 approached the problem of philosophy. He has 
 been attacked by humanistic writers as the prince 
 of intellectualists, a metaphysical Frankenstein who 
 spent himself in setting up as the ultimate truth 
 of things a logical monster unrelated to human 
 purposes. It may very well be that in the issue 
 of the controversy, which he waged unremittingly 
 with the abstractions of the prevailing philosophy, 
 he identified himself too exclusively with the in- 
 tellectual tradition which it represented. But his 
 starting-point, at least, was humanistic. The test 
 of philosophical ideas was their working power 
 as a basis for human effort. They must be in 
 harmony with man's deepest desires and aspira- 
 tions more particularly with his need to be at 
 one with nature and his fellow-men. To justify 
 this unity to the intelligence "to find formulas 
 adequate to the actions of reason as exhibited in 
 nature and human society in art and religion" 
 was the purpose of philosophy as he understood it. 
 Its failure just to discover such formula* was the 
 condemnation of the popular British philosophy 
 of his time. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF SOLUTION IN 
 THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. Stated in the most 
 general terms, Green saw that its mistake had 
 consisted in starting from parts taken in abstrac- 
 tion from the whole to which they belong. The 
 correction must be to insist upon the wholeness or
 
 i.] STARTING POINT OF IDEALISM 9 
 
 unity of life and experience as the only means of 
 understanding the parts. This, he held, must be 
 the keynote of the new philosophy, the master- 
 light of all its seeing. His own strenuous ana- 
 lytical studies were all directed to bring it home 
 from various sides. They take their start from i 
 the theory of knowledge as the most funda- 
 mental and the most clearly defined of the 
 problems of philosophy. The older analysis had 
 sought to explain knowledge as the result of 
 the mechanical aggregation or (if this was too 
 obviously inadequate a metaphor, as it seemed to 
 Mill himself) the chemical combination of ideas. 
 Interesting and fertile as this way of regarding 
 mind when adopted with full consciousness of 
 its presuppositions and limitations might be, it 
 could only lead to error when taken as an 
 adequate account of concrete mental processes, 
 and made the starting - point for metaphysical 
 deductions. The reason was that in its effort 
 after simplification it had overlooked the element 
 due to the particular nature of consciousness as 
 a unifying, interpreting and therefore interpene- 
 trating principle. In the language of the time it 
 overlooked the part played by the mind itself, 
 which as that by and for which alone there could 
 be any combination of ideas, could never be the 
 result of the mere combination. Rightly regarded 
 knowledge is an active function, not an accretion : 
 a development of the nature of mind as a 
 unifying process, not the mere filling of a passive 
 
 B
 
 10 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 receptacle, however mouldable this may be con- 
 ceived of as being. Adopting the language of 
 recent psychology, which Green's analysis antici- 
 pates, it is the fulfilment of a purpose or " intent," 
 not a mere forced acknowledgment of a " content " 
 a conquest as we might say required of the 
 mind by the conditions of its own expanding life, 
 not a mere passive acquiescence in a foreign 
 visitation. If we ask wherein particularly this 
 function consists, it is seen that, like all other 
 vital functions, it consists in a process of differ- 
 entiation and integration. It differs from others 
 in that its operation is motived by the conscious- 
 ness of the all-important distinction between self 
 and object, what appears to us and what is in 
 reality, and of the necessity which is bound up 
 with the very being of mind to bring the two to 
 a unity. It is this self-differentiating and self- 
 uniting process which marks off human con- 
 sciousness from that of the lower animals. The 
 precise difference between this interpretation and 
 that of the older school may be illustrated by an 
 example. If we ask wherein our knowledge of 
 the room in which we are consists, we may, if 
 we like, resolve it into "impressions" of colour, 
 expanse, light and shade, heat and cold, noise and 
 silence ; but these are not the room : taken by 
 themselves, they are mere appearances. To know 
 the room we have to recall where we are and 
 what we are about, the Oxford and the Schools 
 we otherwise know, and herewith its relations to
 
 i.] TO KNOW IS TO RELATE 11 
 
 other things and places, working it thus at once 
 into the organised context of our experience and 
 into the realities of our world. Before we can 
 be said to have an object of knowledge, we must 
 have interpreted the scattered data by the pre- 
 existing contents of our minds which we call our 
 " experience," and by recognising the harmony 
 and continuity which subsists between the new 
 and the old, have assented to the instatement of 
 the newcomer as part of a system or whole 
 constituted and maintained by the relations in 
 which all its parts stand to one another. 
 
 This in condensed statement is Green's well- 
 known doctrine that " to know is to relate." Thus 
 barely stated it is not without its difficulties, 
 and lends itself perhaps too easily to parody. 
 Thus he has been accused of seeking to resolve 
 everything into relations with nothing to relate, 
 as some physicists are accused of resolving matter 
 into motion with nothing to move. This is as 
 though we were to resolve a railway locomotive 
 into its coupling irons, 1 or a sentence into its 
 connecting particles. It need hardly be said that 
 this was not Green's meaning. What he meant 
 was that what gives reality and stability to our 
 knowledge is the reality and stability of the 
 relations that are established between its several 
 parts. To know a thing as it truly is, is to in- 
 corporate it through its differences and identities 
 with other things which already by a similar 
 
 1 Professor James's illustration.
 
 12 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 process have achieved comparative fixity and sub- 
 stantiality. Apart from this organising process 
 knowledge would resolve itself into a series of 
 isolated impressions as meaningless as the cars 
 without the couplings, the vocables without their 
 connection in articulate sentences. 
 
 Along with this correction in what we might 
 call the psychology of knowledge (the analysis 
 of the process which actually takes place when 
 we know anything) goes a correction in the older 
 account of the criterion in the logic of knowledge. 
 Mill's statement of this in his Logic is well known. 
 We cannot here go into detail. The conclusion 
 is, that the truth of any item of knowledge, e.g. 
 that the sun has risen on this cloudy morning, 
 ultimately rests upon our belief in the uniform- 
 ing of nature, and that this itself rests on the 
 accumulated experiences of constancy in the 
 sequence of events. The defect of this account 
 is not that it finds the criterion in an objective 
 world of "nature," but that it seeks for the 
 guarantee of harmony with nature in the mere 
 accumulation of experiences of the connection 
 between "ideas." Such an accumulation could 
 only have meaning to a mind which brought to 
 experience the conception of a world of consistent 
 relations into which the fact that claims to be 
 true must enter as an integral part if its claim 
 is to be justified. The standard, in other words, 
 is to be found in the mind's own ideal of nature 
 as an inter- related whole. Without this no
 
 accumulation of experiences could give us more 
 than "a bundle of expectations of which one 
 might indefinitely strengthen or weaken another," 
 but of which none could give to any other the 
 right to claim to represent the real world and to 
 be true. With it we are justified in seeing in the 
 actual extent to which system is realised, as true 
 knowledge develops, the guarantee of an ultimate 
 unity between our knowledge and the reality of 
 things. 1 
 
 THE HUMAN AND DIVINE MIND. The last 
 words serve to remind us that a theory of 
 knowledge was with Green only a step to a 
 metaphysic or theory of reality and a theology 
 or theory of God. From the above analysis it 
 followed that there could be no reality that was 
 not related to mind and the activities of mind. 
 However beyond complete apprehension by our 
 minds the ultimate reality of things might be, it 
 could never be independent of mind. A thing 
 in and by itself, such as Kant had supposed, and 
 Hamilton and Spencer had borrowed from him, 
 was a contradiction in terms. Nor is there any 
 reason to believe that our thoughts about things, 
 
 1 For the more technical statement of the argument, I must refer 
 to Green's lectures on the Logic of J. S. Mill (Works, vol. ii. especially 
 pp. 304 and 306, quoted in the Appendix below). The point we have 
 to carry with us as bearing directly on Green's theory of the Will is that 
 when we speak of anything as true or false, we do so on the ground of 
 its relation to a whole of organised knowledge existing actually in no 
 human mind, but prefigured in every mind which is possessed of reason, 
 and feels itself pledged to be reasonable.
 
 14 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 the relations by which we seek to understand them, 
 are other than the real thoughts of real mind, or 
 that in defining them as metaphysics seeks to do 
 in its theory of cause, substance, and other ultimate 
 forms of conception, it is not handling reality. 
 From this Green passed with an almost startling 
 rapidity to the existence of a self-revealing spirit, 
 whose thoughts indeed are not as our thoughts, 
 seeing that we know only in part, yet are not in 
 essence different since it is part that we know. 
 
 The argument for the being of the Divine he 
 puts in several different ways, according as he looks 
 at the constitution or at the end, at the content or 
 at the " intent " of knowledge. From the former 
 point of view it is argued that the reality of 
 relations that can exist only in and for a mind, 
 and yet which are not our individual creation, 
 implies the reality of a universal mind by which 
 they are created and maintained. " To assume 
 because all reality requires thought to conceive 
 it, that therefore thought is the condition of 
 its existence, is indeed unwarrantable. But it is 
 another matter if when we come to examine the 
 constituents of that which we account real the 
 determinations of things we find that they all 
 imply some synthetic action which we only know 
 as exercised by our own spirit. Is it not true of 
 all of them that they have their being in relations ? 
 And what other medium do we know of but a 
 thinking consciousness in and through which the 
 separate can be united in that way which consti-
 
 i.] THE BEING OF GOD 16 
 
 tutes relation? We believe that these questions 
 cannot be worked out without leading to the con- 
 clusion that the real world is essentially a spiritual 
 world which forms one inter-related whole because 
 related throughout to a single subject." 1 
 
 From the second point of view it is argued 
 that the presence in us of an ideal of completed 
 knowledge which is at once the source and the 
 criterion of all truth, proves that our life is rooted 
 in a form of being whose fullness is not exhausted 
 in any merely temporal series. 
 
 "The assurance of there being a reality one, 
 complete and absolute has been the source of that 
 very knowledge which cannot become a knowledge 
 of such reality. It is involved in the presence of 
 reason in us as the consciousness of a subject 
 which we do not know but are, and through which 
 we know. Though communicated to us in a 
 mode which does not allow of its being in a strict 
 sense known, it keeps before us an object which 
 we may seek to become. It is an element of 
 identity between us and a perfect being who is 
 in full realisation what we only are in principle 
 and possibility. That God is it entitles us to say 
 with the same certainty as that the world is, or 
 that we ourselves are. What He is, it does not 
 indeed enable us to say in the same way in which 
 we make propositions about matter of fact, but 
 it moves us to seek to become as He is." 2 
 
 But these arguments are in principle the same. 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 145. 2 Works, vol. iii. pp. 267-268.
 
 16 THE PROBLEM OF THE SEVENTIES 
 
 They both rest upon the axiom that the part 
 implies the whole. Man only knows in part. But 
 this is not all : the animals also may be said to 
 know in part. Man knows that his knowledge 
 is partial, and this can only mean that in the 
 knowledge of the part the whole is in some sense 
 already present. 
 
 Stated in this condensed form, the doctrine of 
 the "timeless self" of which our individual selves 
 are " reproductions " is open to manifold misunder- 
 standing. Nor are its difficulties diminished by 
 the examination of the passages in which Green 
 develops it, where it becomes obvious that there is 
 a certain vacillation in his own thought. By some 
 he has been accused of going too far; by others 
 of not going far enough : he makes an unjustifiable 
 assumption in identifying the ultimate or absolute 
 reality with Mind and Will; and again he leaves us 
 with a conception of the divine personality which 
 excludes from it all movement, purpose, effort all, 
 in a word, that is really characteristic of mind and 
 will. 
 
 This is not the place for detailed criticism. I 
 am trying merely to make the general outlines 
 and spirit of Green's teaching intelligible in relation 
 to its practical tendencies. In reply, therefore, 
 to the first objection, it is sufficient to note that 
 he laid no stress on the attribute of personality as 
 commonly understood. He habitually thought of 
 the source of man's power as a " divine principle " 
 that was hidden within him, rather than as a
 
 i.] CRITICISM OF THEOLOGY 17 
 
 divine personality existing outside of him. He 
 maintained that we conceived most worthily of 
 the highest above ourselves when we conceived of 
 it under the form of the ideals which are highest 
 in ourselves. If it is urged that this is to make 
 God a merely subjective and at best " regulative " 
 idea, he was prepared to reply that it could only 
 appear so to one who made the twofold mistake 
 of thinking of an ideal as something merely indi- 
 vidual and subjective, and of God as we do of 
 particular things in space and time. That our 
 ideals are not merely subjective is shown not only 
 by their internal authority, but by the establish- 
 ment in the world of knowledge of the growing 
 system we call truth. Nor are we likely to under- 
 stand the real nature of our life in the world till 
 we have learned to know the principle which 
 sustains it not after the flesh but after the 
 spirit, and to seek God not in the wilderness of 
 temporal things but in the witness of reason and 
 conscience. 
 
 This explanation contains also the reply to the 
 second objection. It is quite true that Green 
 speaks of knowledge and good as something already 
 achieved in the universal mind, and of God as 
 "a subject which is eternally all that the self- 
 conscious subject as developed in time has the 
 possibility of becoming." l For such language there 
 is ample warrant in the utterances of religion. In- 
 deed it is difficult to see how it can be avoided by 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 197 ; cp. p. 199 and vol. iii. p. 247. 
 
 C
 
 18 THE PROBLEM OF THE 'SEVENTIES 
 
 a being who has only forms of language which pre- 
 suppose time to express his relation to the Eternal. 
 But the spirit of his teaching is to conceive of 
 the Absolute not as in a state of rest contrasted 
 with the movement and struggle of human life, 
 as something "already existent" contrasted with 
 a yet-to-be (this is to bring it under the conditions 
 of time from which it is expressly excluded), but 
 as the deeper reality of the life in time. And 
 this, as we have seen, is best figured by us through 
 the element in our own lives which we call our 
 highest purposes or ideals. There is thus nothing 
 to justify the criticism commonly brought against 
 him by pragmatic writers that he undermines the 
 value of human effort by making it a meaning- 
 less reproduction of results already attained in an 
 eternal world. It was no part of the Idealism with 
 which his name is identified to maintain that we 
 are unnecessary to the divine plan, or to deny that 
 in knowledge as it may be realised by us a new 
 result is achieved, new possibilities come to light, 
 that out of the treasure house of the Eternal are 
 brought forth things that are at once old and new. 
 From these metaphysical, it may be mystical 
 conclusions, we must now turn to the truths that 
 correspond to them in Green's theory of Good, 
 which more immediately underlies his political 
 teaching.
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 Desire presupposes self -consciousness, self - consciousness 
 freedom The ideal not greatest happiness, but a form 
 of human life Objection to the vagueness of the 
 Good as thus defined The Pragmatic Test Character- 
 istics of the Good as (1) personal, (2) social The Good 
 as a divine principle Idealism and Evolution Idealism 
 and Positivism. 
 
 IN the last lecture I tried to show how the problem 
 of his time presented itself to Green. While every- 
 where in art and poetry, in politics and religion, 
 there were the stirrings of new life inspired by the 
 belief in the presence in man of a principle that 
 raised him above nature, philosophy seemed to 
 offer no means of justifying this faith to the 
 logical reason, but appeared, on the contrary, to 
 have demonstrated man's entire subjection to the 
 laws of mechanical action and reaction, by which 
 physical events are explained. This division of the 
 modern spirit against itself Green sought to heal 
 by a re-examination in the light of fuller philo- 
 sophical knowledge of the grounds of this con- 
 clusion, whereby he succeeded in showing that the 
 popular theory rested on a misinterpretation of the 
 ultimate facts of human nature. Put in a word his 
 
 19
 
 20 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 argument was that the impressions and images 
 which had been taken as ultimate psychical con- 
 stituents analogous to the atoms of the material 
 world were in reality a fiction. Instead of being 
 primary data of consciousness, stuff of the mind 
 supplied ready-made from without, our sensations 
 take form and being as elements in knowledge 
 from the mind's own synthetic activity. Relation, 
 therefore, is a fundamental factor in our world 
 which so far from being derivable by analysis from 
 the data of experience is presupposed in the very 
 structure of all that can be given to a mind that 
 is capable of self -consciousness. As interpreted 
 by Green, we saw further that the admission of 
 this contention carried with it the consequence 
 that human consciousness was only explicable on 
 the presupposition of the existence of a universal 
 or divine consciousness, present at once in mind 
 and Nature and forming the guarantee of their 
 ultimate unity. We have now to see how he 
 applied these results to human conduct: what 
 light they seemed to him to throw on the nature 
 of desire and will, the ideal of human life, and 
 the relation between human ends and the wider 
 purposes discernible in the world at large. 
 
 DESIRE PRESUPPOSES SELF - CONSCIOUSNESS, 
 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS FREEDOM. We have already 
 seen the interpretation that the current theory gave 
 to the meaning and mode of operation of motives 
 in human conduct. Our actions were conceived
 
 .] HUMAN MOTIVE 21 
 
 of by it as determined partly by natural impulses 
 and wants, partly by the remembered pains and 
 pleasures that have accompanied former experiences. 
 In either case we have an entirely natural sequence 
 of events, the rise of the want or the idea of the 
 former feeling, followed by an activity deriving its 
 direction and energy from the direction given to 
 it by the motive and the strength with which it 
 acts. The cause or motive, and with it the action, 
 may be of any degree of complexity, but this can- 
 not alter its fundamental character as an event 
 conditioned by other events, as a resultant in 
 mechanics is conditioned by the forces that enter 
 into it. According to Green, this account is as 
 entirely misleading as the corresponding account 
 of knowledge. It omits the distinguishing mark 
 of human desire, whereby it becomes something 
 more than animal impulse or appetite. What 
 makes desire as what makes knowledge possible, 
 is the relation of an object to a conscious self, 
 and through it to other objects. To desire a thing 
 is not merely to feel a want or remember a pleasure, 
 but to set the idea of the thing before the mind 
 as more or less definitely related to the self, and 
 the other objects in which as a self it is perma- 
 nently interested. It is true men often seem to act 
 without any such reference beyond the moment, 
 but just in proportion as they do so, do they 
 relapse into the condition of the lower animals, 
 of creatures controlled not by conscious purposes 
 but by "events," accidental impulses coming to
 
 22 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD [cr. 
 
 them from the world without, or from organic 
 reflexes and instincts within their own bodies. 
 This correction implies several things which it is 
 important to carry along with us. 
 
 1. According to the older view of which Hume 
 was the most consistent exponent, the moving 
 force in human action was always some feeling ; 
 " passion " was the mistress, " reason " was only the 
 handmaid concerned with the discovery of means 
 to execute the behests laid upon her by another, 
 but without part in the determination of ends. 
 According to Green, the characteristic of human 
 action is that it is determined by desire, which 
 as distinct from mere appetite implies the distinc- 
 tion of object desired from the self that desires, 
 and the idea of some relation between them. To 
 realise this is to perceive that there can be no 
 such dualism between reason and passion or 
 desire, as the older theory imagined. Even our 
 most passing desires presuppose the operation of 
 reason. 
 
 2. While this is so with regard to all our 
 desires, it is still more obviously so in regard to 
 the deeper desires and purposes that we call our 
 sentiments and affections. These have been 
 formed in us by a process of self-identification 
 with things and other persons, presupposing more 
 or less conscious approval, so that there is a true 
 sense in which our world of interests or desired 
 objects, like our world of known objects, may be 
 said to be self-constituted.
 
 ii.] SELF-REALISATION 23 
 
 3. Seeing that the object of desire is conceived 
 of in relation to ourselves as something to be pos- 
 sessed or assimilated by us something we shall 
 be better with there is a sense in which all desire 
 may truly be said to be a form of self-seeking, the 
 resulting volition a form of self-fulfilment or self- 
 realisation. Whether this is accompanied by an 
 actual feeling of ^.^-satisfaction will depend upon 
 circumstances, as, for instance, our being alive and 
 cognisant of the fulfilment of our desires ; but this 
 does not alter the fact that desire projects itself 
 upon an object or form of being with which for 
 the time we identify ourselves, and in which in 
 anticipation we live. 
 
 The outcome of the whole analysis is not that 
 some desires are more than natural, but that 
 wherever we have desire at all, whether it be for 
 some satisfaction of our animal wants, as in Esau's 
 desire for the pottage, or for something as far as 
 possible removed from them as in the desire for 
 the kingdom of heaven, we have as an essential 
 element in it a selecting, distinguishing, idealising 
 activity, only possible to a being endowed with 
 self- consciousness, and not to be explained by any 
 merely physical analogies. To the student of 
 recent psychology which confirms this analysis 1 
 it is unnecessary to labour the point. Its signifi- 
 cance for Green lay in the fact that at a stroke it 
 seemed to establish human life on a basis which 
 
 1 See, e.g., Stout's Manual of Psychology, p. 533 foil. It is not 
 intended to identify Professor Stout with Green's deductions, or even 
 his manner of stating the theory of the will.
 
 24 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 raised it above the events and phenomena of the 
 natural world. Events and phenomena in the 
 shape of feelings and impulses enter into the 
 moral life as chemical and mechanical processes 
 enter into the life of a plant or sensations into the 
 life of conscious beings ; but they no more make 
 it what it is or explain its differentia than gravita- 
 tion and chemical action can alone explain the 
 plant, or sensations can explain the contents of 
 the mind. Wherever there is human desire (to 
 repeat it), there is a conception of something 
 as "good," and going along with it, of a self 
 which will be " better " for having realised a good 
 which is yet to be. And this means that there 
 is something present which is more than natural, 
 and gives us the right to speak of human action 
 as self-determined, and therefore free in a sense 
 in which nothing that falls short of it can be said 
 to be. 
 
 THE IDEAL NOT GREATEST HAPPINESS, BUT A 
 FORM OF HUMAN LIFE. But the freedom thus 
 guaranteed, however real it may be, is only formal. 
 The power of doing what he likes or what he 
 chooses marks man off from the lower animals, 
 but the value of the power depends wholly on 
 what he likes or chooses to do. This, as we shall 
 see, is an all-important point in Green's political 
 teaching. Here we are concerned with the ground 
 of it in his philosophy of conduct in general. And 
 what we have to note is that wherever reflection
 
 n.] TRUE FREEDOM 25 
 
 has been directed with earnestness and insight to 
 the question of the true meaning of freedom, it has 
 always been seen that while it has its foundation 
 in the power of self-determination as described 
 above, true freedom consists not merely in being 
 undetermined by any external or internal com- 
 pulsive force, but in the acceptance of some object 
 or principle of guidance felt to correspond with 
 our own inmost and truest desires. This principle 
 has been defined in various ways. To the Stoics 
 it was the law of nature, to Kant the law of 
 reason, to St Paul the divine will, that calls within 
 us. But these are mere phrases whose significance 
 altogether depends on the meaning we assign to 
 the terms that are used. What is "nature"? 
 What does " reason " enjoin ? What is the will 
 of God concerning us ? To put these questions 
 is to raise definitely the problem of the end of 
 human life, the supreme need of the human soul, 
 the principle that can give unity to our desires 
 and purposes. It was in the answer that it gave 
 to this question that Green found the central 
 error and the chief source of practical misguidance 
 in the popular philosophy. 
 
 Prima facie, there seems nothing particularly 
 impractical or misleading hi the doctrine that happi- 
 ness or enjoyment of some kind is the chief end of 
 man. As we have seen, it is implied in the claims 
 of the modern spirit which are admitted by Idealist 
 and Naturalist alike. It is not in the general defini- 
 tion but in the specific meaning to be assigned 
 
 D
 
 26 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD [MCCT. 
 
 to happiness that they part company. To the 
 Naturalism of the day it meant pleasant feeling 
 garnered into a life so arranged as to be pro- 
 ductive of the greatest sum total. It was on a 
 strenuous to some it now appears exaggerated 
 polemic against this doctrine that Green expended 
 his best powers of criticism in his chief ethical work. 
 It is unnecessary to follow his arguments in detail. 
 Their main tenor was to show in the first place 
 that it was impossible to assign any clear meaning 
 to the conception of a sum of pleasure. Our 
 feelings follow one another in a series, a moment 
 here then gone for ever, and there is no available 
 means of accumulating and enjoying them as a 
 whole. It is true (and this has since been argued 
 against him 1 ) that no experience really perishes: 
 everything that we feel as well as everything that 
 we think and do leaves a residue or deposit that 
 enters into all subsequent experience, but it is 
 not in their original character that our pleasures 
 and pains may be said thus to remain with us, 
 but as elements in sentiments or habits of feeling 
 deriving their value from the objects to which 
 they attach, and not from their forming a part 
 of an aggregate that can ever be enjoyed as 
 a whole. 
 
 But, secondly, even though the idea of a sum 
 total of happiness could be made comprehensible, 
 it never could be made to work as an ideal of 
 human conduct, or the source of the distinction 
 
 1 E.g., by Professor Taylor in Problem of Conduct, p. 323 foil.
 
 ii.] HEDONISM 27 
 
 between what is morally good and bad, between 
 what is and what ought to be. All that is 
 distinctively human in the life of man springs 
 not from the desire to possess this or that object, 
 and so far to realise a better, but to be some- 
 thing more and better than he is ; and this is 
 precisely what an end such as the Hedonist con- 
 ceives could never inspire. Hedonism emphasises 
 the desirability of being as happy as you can under 
 existing conditions of character ; it can offer no 
 sufficient reason why you should face the pain 
 of altering these conditions on the chance of in- 
 creasing the sum total of your pleasures. Offer- 
 ing no ideal of a qualitatively different self which 
 has a claim upon us simply and solely as human 
 beings, it fails to provide the rudiments of a sense 
 of obligation, and leaves us to explain as best we 
 may the distinction between inclination and duty, 
 what is as a matter of fact, and what ought to 
 be as a matter of right. Common-sense felt a 
 vague disquiet at this hiatus, and had found a 
 corresponding satisfaction in the vituperations of 
 Carlyle, Ruskin and others. Green sought to 
 justify the verdict of bankruptcy by showing 
 precisely wherein Hedonism had failed. It failed 
 because it offered as an end of human aspiration 
 an object in which the human spirit, pledged by 
 its own nature to self-betterment, in other words 
 to a concrete life of developed faculty spent upon 
 humanly worthy objects, could never find satisfac- 
 tion.
 
 28 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 His contention may be illustrated from what 
 has already been said of the criterion of truth. 
 We there saw that the error of sensationalism 
 consisted in setting up the mere accumulation 
 of subjective impressions, mere uniformity of 
 experience, as the ultimate test of the validity of 
 knowledge. Mutatis mutandis the error in regard 
 to the criterion of conduct is the same. It sets up 
 a mere accumulation of feelings, the multitude of 
 satisfactions as the test of the value of life and 
 conduct. And just as the logical error is corrected 
 by insisting on the conception of systematic inter- 
 dependence in the world of nature as the ultimate 
 test of truth, so the ethical error is corrected by 
 insisting on the conception of the harmonious 
 development of the whole of human nature as 
 the ultimate end, and the criterion of what is 
 truly good. 
 
 This correction enabled Green in the first place 
 to substitute a concrete form of life an " energy," 
 as the Greeks called it for the abstraction of a 
 sum of feeling. It enabled him in the second 
 place to give a real meaning to the distinction 
 between moral good and evil, between what it 
 is a duty and what it is pleasant or (in view of 
 future pleasures and pains) prudent to do. The 
 distinction presupposes a real qualitative difference 
 between the objects of choice, but it was just this 
 that the hedonist doctrine, according to which all 
 objects were equally means to the one supreme 
 good viz. pleasant feeling found it so difficult
 
 ".] THE GOOD LIFE 29 
 
 to justify. If on the other hand we start from the 
 conception of the whole person, or will, we can 
 understand how it may identify itself with different 
 forms of itself or seek fulfilment in qualitatively 
 different objects, some of which may be in 
 harmony, some inconsistent with the nature of the 
 self- objectify ing, self-idealising unity it claims to be. 
 
 The differentia of the good life is not that it is 
 controlled by a principle of intelligent self-seeking 
 as Hedonism, or of the greatest pleasure of sentient 
 beings as Utilitarianism teaches, but, as he himself 
 puts it, " by the consciousness of there being some 
 perfection which has to be attained, some vocation 
 which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to 
 be obeyed, something absolutely desirable whatever 
 the individual may for the time desire ; that it is 
 in ministry to such an end that the agent seeks 
 to satisfy himself." l 
 
 If it be objected that we find little evidence 
 of such a consciousness in ordinary human beings, 
 the reply is that this is because we seek it in 
 the wrong way. It is true that few men reflect 
 sufficiently on the meaning of moral conduct to 
 realise the presuppositions which underlie it, but 
 a moment's consideration of the attitude of mind 
 that we call loyalty to the established system of 
 social morality or to the work that lies nearest to 
 our hand, is enough to convince us that the spirit 
 that works in ordinary human life and in the 
 saint or missionary is the same. 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 134.
 
 30 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 OBJECTION TO THE VAGUENESS OF THE GOOD 
 AS THUS DEFINED. A more serious objection to 
 the whole point of view is raised by the vagueness 
 that seems to attach to the idea of perfection, as 
 contrasted with that of pleasure or happiness, and 
 its consequent ineffectiveness as a practical motive. 
 Its very character as an ideal something whose 
 realisation lies in the remote and even unimaginable 
 future seems to render it unavailable as a prin- 
 ciple of immediate guidance. And this has led 
 some recent writers, 1 who have in general accepted 
 Green's refutation of Hedonism as a theory of the 
 end, to seek to reintroduce it as a practical criterion. 
 The difficulty was anticipated by Green, who sought 
 to meet it by pointing out that while the objection 
 would hold of an ideal, no part of which has been 
 realised, it is inapplicable to one that has already 
 found partial embodiment in the actual life of man. 
 To a certain extent the ideal has shown by its 
 actual achievements what its contents specifically 
 are, nor is it beyond the power of reflection to 
 form at least some negative conclusion in regard 
 to its complete realisation. We may convince 
 ourselves that this realisation can only be attained 
 in certain directions of our activity, not in others. 2 
 In this passage it could, I think, be shown that 
 Green goes fatally near admitting the rival con- 
 tention in insisting on the merely " negative " 
 character of our knowledge of ideal good, but it 
 
 1 Particularly Dr M'Taggart in Studies of Hegelian Cosmology, 
 chap. iT. c. 8 Prolegomena to Ethict, p. 180.
 
 ii.] SOCIOLOGY AND ETHICS 31 
 
 could also be shown that this is no part of his 
 general doctrine, and, indeed, inconsistent with it. 
 He is on safer ground when he goes on to point 
 out that though we cannot say with any adequacy 
 what the ideal capabilities are, "yet because the 
 essence of man's spiritual endowment is the con- 
 sciousness of having it, the idea of his having such 
 capabilities, and of a possible better state of him- 
 self consisting in their further realisation, is a moving 
 influence in him. It has been the parent of the 
 institutions and usages of the social judgments and 
 aspirations through which human life has been so 
 far bettered, through which man has so far realised 
 his capabilities and marked out the path that he 
 must follow in their further realisation." l 
 
 THE PRAGMATIC TEST. For the detailed 
 account of the origin and development of these 
 institutions, and the moral ideas corresponding to 
 them, Green would have pointed to the new 
 science of sociology, at the same time warning 
 us against the assumption that is apt to mingle 
 with such investigations, that the interest in 
 physical life and the struggle for existence in 
 which the process of development starts, contains 
 the ground of explanation and the measure of 
 the value of the ideal interests in knowledge, art, 
 and types of moral character, in which it ends. 
 It is, he held, a fallacy, from which the sociologist 
 who accepts the idea of evolution ought of all 
 others to be free, to regard what is later in origin 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethust, p. 180.
 
 32 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 as inferior in value and authority, or as exhibiting 
 less of the nature and capabilities of the develop- 
 ing organism. Interest in science and art, love 
 of goodness for its own sake and of God as a 
 spirit develop later than interest in food and 
 housing, in a neighbour's territory or the happiness 
 that these may give, but it is only on a very crude 
 notion of development that they can be regarded 
 as for that reason of secondary or merely instru- 
 mental value. We may be willing to accept the 
 formula that Pragmatists have made popular, that 
 our ideas and ideals have value only in proportion 
 as they "work," but it would be a fundamental 
 error to interpret it in a crude utilitarian sense. 
 In the use that we make of it we have always 
 to remember that the "working" is relative to 
 what it is that is working, and what it is working 
 for. Here the fundamental fact is, that life 
 changes as the spirit of man develops in it, 
 and that what "works" is dependent on the 
 form which it takes, as well as the form on the 
 working. It was the clearness with which they 
 grasped this principle and were able to see in 
 the spiritual entities of science, art, morality and 
 religion, objects not merely of supreme instru- 
 mental value as the condition of the permanence 
 of all other goods, but of intrinsic value as them- 
 selves the expressions of self-conscious spirit that 
 constituted to Green's mind the lasting distinction 
 of the great Greek thinkers. It was this that 
 enabled them to express, with a fullness of outline
 
 ii.J THE ETHICAL IDEAL 33 
 
 that has not been surpassed, the contents of the 
 highest form of human good. Their account of 
 it he sums up in a sentence. 
 
 " It is the will to know what is true, to make 
 what is beautiful, to endure pain and fear, to 
 resist the allurements of pleasure (i.e. to be brave 
 and temperate), if not, as the Greek would have 
 said, in the service of the state, yet in the interest 
 of some form of human society ; to take for one- 
 self, to give to others, of these things which admit 
 of being given and taken, not what one is inclined 
 to but what is due." l 
 
 The modern idea of the good has developed 
 in respect of the range of persons who have the 
 capacity and therefore the right to participate in 
 this good and (as a consequence) in respect to 
 the range of the application of the virtues. To 
 the former we admit no exceptions wherever 
 human reason exists in its normal capacity. In 
 respect to the latter we admit no limits short 
 of perfection. With the rise of the conception 
 of human brotherhood have been swept away all 
 the reservations and compromises, the limitations 
 and narrowness of application that are so apt to 
 astonish and scandalise the student of Greek 
 civilisation. Yet when all allowances have been 
 made, the main outlines of the ethical ideal are 
 those which were fixed upon by the great 
 Greek thinkers the free, disinterested devotion 
 to knowledge and art, the conception of the 
 
 1 Prolegomena to tithics, p. 276. 
 

 
 84 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 intrinsic value of the rights of citizenship, and 
 the life of social activities that is made possible 
 by them. 
 
 If to these conclusions of reflection we add the 
 witness of the concrete forms in which the idea of 
 the Good has embodied itself in laws, customs and 
 institutions, as the best of the Greeks insisted that 
 we should, the way becomes plain enough to him 
 that will see. " In the broad result it is not 
 hard to understand how man has bettered him- 
 self through institutions and habits which tend 
 to make the welfare of all the welfare of each, 
 and through the arts which make nature, both as 
 used and contemplated, the friend of man. And 
 just so far as this is plain we know enough of 
 ultimate moral good to guide our conduct ; enough 
 to judge whether the prevailing interests which 
 make our character are or are not in the direction 
 which tends further to realise the capabilities of 
 the human spirit." 1 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOOD AS (1) 
 PERSONAL, (2) SOCIAL. From the account of the 
 good here given, we can further understand how 
 it should present itself to us under two aspects 
 apparently contradictory, really complementary to 
 each other. 
 
 (1) It follows from what has been said of it 
 as a form of will that it is individual or personal. 
 Aristotle called it evepyeia, which had the advantage 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 180,
 
 ii.] THE GOOD AS PERSONAL 35 
 
 of conveying the double meaning of activity and 
 realisation the movement outward to an object 
 which the soul sets before itself, and the corre- 
 spondence of the object within the limits of 
 human life to the " idea " or nature of the self 
 which seeks fulfilment in it. Circumstances may 
 be so arranged by education and adjustment of 
 the environment as to aid in the formation of the 
 habits on which such activity depends, but without 
 the individual reaction the appropriation of the 
 circumstances to the service of the end or some 
 part of the end as above defined and the permeation 
 of them with moral purpose there is no realisation 
 of any distinctively human good. This does not, 
 of course, mean that anything so abstract as the 
 highest good is an object which the individual 
 consciously sets before himself, but merely that 
 apart from the exercise of individual will no least 
 part of it is realisable. 
 
 (2) It follows, in the second place, that the 
 good is social. The ends in the pursuit of which 
 the individual realises his true good are common 
 to himself and all who are endowed with a like 
 nature. The self which is fulfilled in them is no 
 merely private self, but one which includes other 
 selves, in that it includes objects in which all are 
 interested as human beings. To the Utilitarian 
 we have seen this was a stumbling-block, to the 
 Hedonist foolishness. Happiness interpreted in 
 terms of pleasure is by its very nature a private 
 possession, one thing in the individual, another in
 
 36 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 society, whose claim for priority of consideration 
 in case of conflict can only be justified by a tour 
 de force. 1 
 
 On the idealist view, on the other hand, difficult 
 as it might be to see in detail that individual and 
 social good are identical, the problem of explaining 
 the distinction between selfishness and unselfishness, 
 inclination and duty was in principle solved when 
 it was seen that the good of others was bound up 
 with the good of the one, not merely as a means 
 to an end, but as an essential part of it. With the 
 possible exception of the satisfaction of the bodily 
 appetites, it would be difficult to point to any object 
 of human desire into the thought of which the 
 good of others or a good conceived of as common 
 to others does not enter. Even the satisfaction of 
 the animal wants comes in the course of normal 
 moral development to be conceived of as an element 
 in a good which is more than individual. 
 
 It only remains to be added that on this show- 
 ing the good is not merely personal and social. 
 It is the one precisely so far as it is the other. 
 It is just in so far as a man is able to set aside 
 merely private ends and identify himself with the 
 
 1 Bentham was not much troubled with speculative difficulties. He 
 held that all men were by nature selfish, but that fortunately in a few 
 himself among them selfishness took the form of benevolence. J. S. 
 Mill explained that as everybody desired his own happiness, the 
 happiness of everybody was desirable without mentioning to whom. 
 Sidgwick held that the possibility of discord between individual and 
 general happiness pointed to another order of things in which sacri- 
 fices of individuals should be compensated. Beutham may thus be 
 said to have met the difficulty by a psychological, Mill by a logical, 
 and Sidgwick by a theological tour deforce.
 
 .] UNITY OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL GOOD 37 
 
 larger purposes of society that his life becomes 
 rounded into the unity in which personality in 
 the full sense of the word consists. On the other 
 hand, social well-being is best served in the lives 
 of individuals who make one or other of the 
 elements in it a centre of personal interest, and 
 possess the power and freedom to develop it in 
 their own way. Personality lives in the material 
 ends with which society supplies it, society lives 
 through the form that free personality impresses 
 on its purposes. To recognise this in practice is 
 the sum and substance of political wisdom. It 
 is the ethical and political counterpart of the 
 religious principle that he that seeketh his life 
 shall lose it, he that loseth it shall find it. Just 
 in so far as the individual commits himself to the 
 principle of co - operation in a social whole does 
 he realise his end as individual personality ; just 
 in so far as society commits itself to the principle 
 of the individuality of the citizens does it realise 
 the unity and stability that constitute it a true 
 " State." The further development of this idea 
 must be left for the next lecture. 
 
 THE GOOD AS A DIVINE PRINCIPLE. Meantime 
 we have to add the note that is most characteristic 
 of Green's theory of good. The evidence for the 
 reality and the character of the ideal as we have 
 sketched it, consisted for him, as we have seen, not 
 in any mere inward witness or intuition, but in 
 the nature of self-conscious spirit and the actual
 
 38 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 facts of civilisation. It is this ideal operating at 
 first subconsciously, but as reflection develops 
 more and more becoming a conscious motive, that 
 has brought into existence and continually sus- 
 tains all that we value most in the world. But 
 whence does this ideal itself come ? What does 
 it imply as to the real nature and true affinities of 
 the being of whose life it is the guiding principle ? 
 Clearly though it reveals itself in him, it has not 
 been his own creation. The lines on which it can 
 be realised, the laws which control its development, 
 are different indeed from the laws of physical 
 nature, but they have their own definiteness and 
 inviolability. Practical wisdom depends on insight 
 into their character and acceptance of their guid- 
 ance. But to recognise them in practice is one 
 thing, to interpret their full meaning to ourselves 
 is another. It is here that Moral Philosophy 
 finds its deepest problem. 
 
 To some, indeed, a "metaphysic of ethics" 
 may seem to be of remote interest, having little 
 to do with the everyday traffic of life. This, as we 
 have seen, was not Green's view. He formulates 
 in this connection the great questions of religious 
 philosophy, insisting that it is idle to deny that a 
 man is different according to the answer which 
 he gives to them. " Is there a character which he 
 may and ought to form for himself irrespective 
 alike of what he is inclined to and of what is 
 expected of him ? Is there a God with whom as 
 the imperfect with the perfect, yet as spirit with
 
 n.] RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MORAL PRACTICE 89 
 
 spirit he may converse? Is he partaker of an 
 eternal life so that what he is and not merely 
 what he has done is untouched by physical death ? 
 These are perhaps questions which a man may 
 answer affirmatively with little practical result, 
 but which he can scarcely answer in the negative 
 without serious effect, not necessarily on his out- 
 ward course of action, or on the character which 
 he presents to other men, but in the long-run 
 on the inner life, on the character which he would 
 present to one who could see it from within, and 
 which he could scarcely help regarding in spite of 
 his creed as of eternal worth." 
 
 The philosophical ground of his own answer 
 has been already given in what has been said of 
 his theory of knowledge. In answer to the ques- 
 tion, what does knowledge presuppose, his reply 
 was a single interconnected world which could 
 only be rendered intelligible when conceived of 
 as sustained by the action of a single "self- 
 conditioning and self-determining mind." From 
 the point of view thus reached knowledge itself 
 appeared as the reproduction under the form of 
 time of the mind of a universal and timeless 
 consciousness which therein found itself anew. 
 
 The same answer mutatis mutandis forces itself 
 on us from the side of the will. As our know- 
 ledge, so our moral life is only ultimately explicable 
 as the reproduction of itself on the part of a 
 divine mind in which all the fullness of perfec- 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 222,
 
 40 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 tion after which man's will fitfully strives, eternally 
 dwells. This argument is not any more than the 
 other an appeal to mere intuition, or anything 
 deducible from an intuition. Still less is it an 
 appeal to a matter of fact that can be established 
 by induction in the ordinary sense, or that is open 
 to observation at all. It rests, as we may say 
 all truth inductive or deductive must ultimately 
 rest, on the insufficiency of anything else to 
 explain the facts. " Given this conception and not 
 without it, we can, at any rate, express that which 
 it cannot be denied demands expression, the nature 
 of man's reason and man's will, of human progress 
 and human shortcoming, of the effort after good 
 and the failure to gain it, of virtue and vice in 
 their connection and in their distinction, in their 
 essential opposition and in their no less essential 
 unity." 1 
 
 IDEALISM AND EVOLUTION. (1) This ethical 
 proof of the existence of a divine element in man 
 is open to the same objections as the metaphysical, 
 and may be defended on the same line. We need 
 only repeat the criticisms that seemed to Green to 
 call for particular answer. The argument rests on 
 the demonstrated presence in the mind of an idea 
 or ideal of what is possible, but this, it may be 
 said, forms no ground of inference to anything 
 that actually exists here or elsewhere. The real 
 is the actual ; the ideal is mere possibility an 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 182.
 
 .] IMPLICATIONS IN IDEA OF EVOLUTION 41 
 
 actual, perhaps, in the making, but to be taken with 
 all the discount that ideality and futurity involve. 
 
 Green's reply, so far as I know, is the first 
 attempt to turn the flank of the popular naturalism 
 of his own time from the side of its chief strong- 
 hold in the idea of evolution. This idea since its 
 announcement in biological form had been hailed as 
 giving the finishing stroke to the old spiritualistic 
 interpretation of the world. To Green belonged 
 the merit of seeing that out of the strong might 
 come forth sweetness, out of the eater meat. He 
 pointed out that in anything in which real develop- 
 ment is traceable, the present can only be under- 
 stood in the light of the future, the process in the 
 light of the end, the actual of the possible, the 
 real of the ideal ; and that, when this is reflected 
 on, the result must be to reverse our ordinary 
 judgments. For it forces us to see in what we 
 call the possibilities of a thing that which as 
 the guiding and formative principle in it is the 
 ground of its reality, in what we call the actuality 
 a merely passing phase in the development of 
 what it truly is. " To any one who understands 
 a process of development, the result being 
 developed is the reality ; and it is in its ability 
 to become this that the subject undergoing 
 development has its true nature. The actual at 
 any stage of the process is not ; while that which 
 at any stage is we have to call the possibility of 
 that which is not." 1 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 224. 
 
 F
 
 42 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 Applying this to human life we are justified in 
 holding that the possibilities (the idea of which is 
 the inspiring and formative principle of all moral 
 effort) constitute when properly regarded the true 
 underlying reality of which the finite embodiments 
 that fill our view in time are only transient and 
 imperfect phases. If we fail to recognise this 
 ideal in its operating power, or recognising it to 
 realise its significance, this is largely because of 
 our familiarity with it. The spiritual guides of 
 the race have been those who have been most 
 sensitive to its call, the most ready to recognise 
 in it the witness of a spirit greater than themselves. 
 
 What is original in Green is the clearness 
 with which he saw that this interpretation carried 
 with it the justification if not of the current 
 formulae yet of the essential faith of religion. 
 "That in virtue of which I am I, and can in 
 consequence so set before myself the realisation 
 of my own possibilities as to be a moral agent" 
 is seen to be identical with "that in virtue of 
 which I am one with God." If it be objected 
 from the side of religion, that this is to make 
 God the source, and in a sense partaker of my 
 sin and selfishness, Green is ready to admit it: 
 "but for the identity of consciousness between 
 man and God, man would not be a sinner." But 
 he adds that "the source of selfishness and sin 
 is also the source of that which overcomes sin." 
 For seeing that "sin is the effort to actualise 
 one's possibilities in that in which they cannot
 
 n.] POSITIVISM 43 
 
 be actualised," it is only overcome by the " moral 
 discipline which directs the same effort after self- 
 realisation into a truer way of attaining its end." 
 He thus reaches the conclusion that " God is 
 identical with the self of every man in the sense 
 of being the realisation of its determinate possi- 
 bilities, the completion of that which as merely 
 in it is incomplete and therefore unreal ... in 
 being conscious of himself man is conscious of 
 God and thus knows that God is, but knows what 
 He is only so far as he knows what he himself 
 really is." 1 
 
 IDEALISM AND POSITIVISM. (2) The second 
 difficulty comes from another side. In discussing 
 the nature of the good we saw that it resolved 
 itself into the development of a form of will and 
 personality which when closely scanned is perceived 
 to involve a society of mutually dependent wills 
 and personalities. We have now seen that this 
 development can only be adequately interpreted 
 when we conceive of it as the unfolding of a uni- 
 versal life, of which the actually existing things 
 of time are merely the passing moments. Are 
 these two results compatible with each other? 
 Does it not rather appear that in proportion as 
 we emphasise the divinity in human ends, we 
 must cease to regard them as finding their centre 
 and reaching fulfilment in anything so limited 
 and passing as individual selves ? 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 226-227.
 
 44 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD 
 
 While acknowledging the difficulty, and recog- 
 nising in it the reason that has led Positivists and 
 others to seek the centre in some larger idea such 
 as humanity, a national spirit or a perfected form 
 of social organisation, Green uses the opportunity 
 to insist that apart from their embodiment in 
 individual personalities all such substitutes are 
 mere abstractions. As Humanity can nowhere 
 exist apart from the nations that comprise it, so 
 neither can a national spirit exist apart from the 
 individuals who embody it. True, a nation is 
 more than an " aggregate " of individuals. But this 
 does not mean that we can have a national spirit 
 that finds utterance anywhere except in the moral 
 and intellectual achievements of persons. " Our 
 ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of personal 
 worth. All other values are relative to value for, 
 of or in a person. To speak of any progress 
 or improvement or development of a nation or 
 society or mankind except as relative to some 
 greater worth of persons, is to use words without 
 meaning." 1 
 
 Similarly from the point of view of history and 
 "progress," progress implies a process in time, 
 but it also implies that the results of the process 
 are gathered together either for that which is the 
 subject of it or for another. The distinguishing 
 mark of human history is that its results are 
 gathered together in self-conscious subjects. And 
 from this, again, it follows that "the spiritual 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 193.
 
 n.] THE PHILOSOPHER AS MYSTIC 45 
 
 progress of mankind is an unmeaning phrase unless 
 it means a progress of personal character and to 
 personal character a progress of which feeling, 
 thinking and willing subjects are the agents and 
 sustainers, and of which each step is a fuller 
 realisation of the capacities of such subjects. It 
 is simply unintelligible unless understood to be 
 in the direction of more perfect forms of personal 
 life." 1 
 
 In these passages Green is wrestling with meta- 
 physical difficulties which must be faced by all who 
 would make their way through thought to a stable 
 theory of human life. In others he gives himself a 
 freer scope and strikes the note of mysticism, which 
 some have felt to be the most attractive feature 
 in his writings. One of these may serve to 
 summarise for us the conclusions of this chapter, 
 and give us the atmosphere he imported into 
 all his practical teaching. 
 
 "As the poet traversing the world of sense 
 which he spiritualises by the aid of the forms of 
 beauty finds himself ever at home, yet never in 
 the same place, so the philosopher, while he ascends 
 the courts of the intelligible world is conscious of a 
 presence which is always his own, yet always fresh, 
 always lightened with the smile of a divine and 
 eternal youth. Everything is new to him, yet 
 nothing strange. The results of art and science, 
 of religion and law, are all to him 'workings of 
 one mind, features of the same face ' ; yet are the 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 195.
 
 46 THE IDEA OF THE GOOD [LKCT. H. 
 
 workings and the features infinite? No longer a 
 servant but a son, he rules as over his own house. 
 In it he moves freely and with that confidence 
 which comes of freedom. Such freedom and 
 confidence, indeed, if divorced from the moral 
 life, become a ridiculous conceit. In their proper 
 relation to it as giving fruition beforehand of that 
 of which the moral life is the gradual realisation, 
 they have the weakness, indeed, which belongs to 
 all ideas not actualised, to all forms not filled 
 up; yet are they not like faith without works, 
 dead, but like faith as Christianity knows it a 
 permanent source of unhasting activity." 1 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 90.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 The need of a new theory of the relation of the State to the 
 Individual" Will, not Force, the basis of the State " 
 Earlier political philosophy in England Meaning of 
 Green's theory The place of circumstances Great men 
 The general will The rights of individuals Illustra- 
 tion from the right of property. 
 
 WE have seen in the preceding lectures how 
 Green sought to solve the problem of his time 
 as it presented itself to him, by insisting on a 
 theory of the nature of mind in its characteristic 
 functions of knowing and willing, which, though 
 comparatively new in England, may be said to 
 have been the common property of idealistic 
 thinkers from Plato to Hegel. All knowledge 
 (to repeat it) is seen on ultimate analysis to rest 
 upon the idea of a fundamental unity between 
 subject and object, between the knower and that 
 which there is to be known. This unity in its 
 completed form is not something that can be 
 said to exist as a particular thing. So to take 
 it would be to reduce it to the level of another 
 object. Rather it is the presupposition of all 
 
 47
 
 48 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 knowledge : the ideal that sustains it, the principle 
 that endows it with life and energy. From this 
 it follows that in knowing the object the mind 
 is not going into exile from itself, but in a true 
 sense is coming to its own ; while, on the other 
 hand the object does not cease to be itself in 
 coming to mind, but is coming for the first 
 time to itself as an ordered world of rationally 
 connected things. 
 
 Similarly all conscious purpose, in which we 
 have to seek the characteristic of human as dis- 
 tinguished from merely animal action, presupposes 
 an ultimate unity between will and the good 
 which is its object. And this, again, mutatis 
 mutandis means, that in realising itself the will 
 is not destroying the difference between object 
 and subject, but is building up an object which 
 is more than itself; while, on the other hand, in 
 being realised the ideal does not cease to be 
 the very essence of the subject. 
 
 To all this Green only added, as the result of 
 his own analysis, that the principle that thus at 
 once guarantees the validity of man's aspirations 
 after knowledge and moral good, and fulfils itself 
 in them, can only be adequately conceived as 
 itself a mind and will which is related to his 
 as the universal to the particular, the complete 
 to the partial, the divine to the human. 
 
 It is in the light of these ideas that we must 
 interpret the particular subject of these lectures. 
 " The dependence of the will of man in its divine
 
 m.] NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICS 49 
 
 service," says Professor MacCunn, 1 "the constant 
 presence in human life of a universal spiritual 
 principle lies at the core of Green's whole ethical 
 and political thought." In the present lecture I 
 propose to take it in its wider aspect his theory 
 of the general nature of the State and Civic 
 Institutions, and of their relation to the rights 
 of individuals and classes. 
 
 THE NEED OF A NEW THEORY OF THE 
 RELATION OF THE STATE TO THE INDIVIDUAL. 
 In the political problem of his time Green saw 
 only an aspect, though to him the most important 
 and pressing one, of the general problem as already 
 defined. The first decade of the nineteenth 
 century had been a period of almost blinding 
 industrial prosperity. The inventions of the 
 previous century, combined with comparative 
 freedom from legislative restrictions upon employ- 
 ment and the great market which Europe offered 
 for the products of the new industry, had led to 
 unprecedented earnings in all classes. All the 
 darker seemed the results of the general collapse 
 that followed upon the cessation of the Con- 
 tinental war in 1815. The state of things that 
 was then revealed opened men's eyes to the 
 significance for human life of the change that 
 had come over the industrial world. The pheno 
 menal appearance of Robert Owen 2 with the 
 rise of " Socialism " was a sign of the times. 
 
 1 Six Radical Reformers. The Political Idealism of Thomas Hill 
 Green. 
 
 2 See Podinore's Life of Robert Owen, 1907.
 
 50 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 It stood for two things which may be said to 
 have given the keynote of the century's politics : 
 the possibilities of human life under favour- 
 able external conditions, and the power of the 
 community through collective action to assist 
 in creating the required environment. It soon 
 became evident that the particular lines advocated 
 by the Owenites led nowhere in particular, but 
 a movement of organisation had been set on foot 
 under a larger ideal of Political Justice, which 
 seemed to contain the promise of a higher form 
 of social life than had as yet anywhere been 
 achieved. Factory and health Acts, the rise 
 of trade - unionism, education and municipal 
 government were only the organs and outward 
 manifestations of the new constructive spirit act- 
 ing on the principle of corporate responsibility for 
 all that affected the welfare of the individual. 
 What had traditional political theory to say to 
 these movements of constructive reform ? 
 
 In the political teaching of the great English 
 philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to Herbert 
 Spencer, it is impossible to trace the same con- 
 tinuity as is discoverable in their theory of know- 
 ledge, and even in their theory of good. There 
 are important differences according as they recog- 
 nise (with Locke) or deny (with Hobbes) the 
 independent existence of social and sympathetic 
 impulses ; and, again, according as they conceive 
 of political society (with the earlier thinkers) as 
 the work of voluntary agreement, or (with the
 
 HI.] THE END OF INDIVIDUALISM 51 
 
 later) as the result of unconscious growth. But 
 a common note runs through them all. In all 
 of them there is the underlying assumption that 
 the State is a secondary and artificial product a 
 species of excrescence on the life of the individual 
 to whom, and not to the organised community, we 
 have to look if we would understand the rights of 
 man. Necessary as may be the actions and absten- 
 tions on which government insists under present 
 imperfect conditions, they represent in reality 
 encroachments upon natural liberties of which, 
 under more favourable circumstances, the indi- 
 vidual would possess the right to be left in 
 undisturbed enjoyment. 
 
 This "individualistic" theory had done good 
 work in its time. In the struggle for freedom 
 represented by the English Revolution it had 
 served as a philosophical background for the 
 claims of the reforming party. In the hands of 
 the political economists and utilitarian philosophers 
 of the eighteenth century it assisted the work 
 by which the mediaeval industrial and political 
 systems began to be transformed into something 
 more consonant with modern requirements. 
 More recently still it had proved its vitality by 
 welding together a powerful party committed to 
 "philosophical radicalism," with its programme 
 of free government, free trade, free thought, and 
 free exercise of public speech. But just at the 
 time of which we are now speaking it had begun 
 to show signs of decrepitude, and, instead of
 
 52 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 supporting the cause of reform, to be turned 
 against it. This reaction found its most powerful 
 expression in the essays of Herbert Spencer after- 
 wards published as The Man versm the State ; 
 the burden of which was, if not Paine's doctrine 
 that " Society is the outcome of our needs, 
 Government of our wickedness," yet that political 
 organisation existed for definitely limited ends, and 
 that the chief need of the time was to remind 
 reformers that they had outrun their mandate, 
 and to recall them to their true function of resist- 
 ing the usurpations of the State over the natural 
 rights of the individual. 
 
 There were few, probably, who believed that 
 the great codes of factory, health and education 
 Acts of these years were really signs of a " coming 
 slavery." Most people felt vaguely that they 
 represented rather the dawn of a new idea of 
 social liberty. But there was sufficient obscurity 
 in men's minds as to the conditions of progress, 
 and more particularly as to the bearing of the new 
 doctrine of biological evolution of which Spencer 
 was the accredited interpreter, 1 to justify a certain 
 
 1 What Mr L. T. Hobhouse says of the state of things at the 
 beginning of the present century, viz. that there has been no sufficient 
 protest against the doctrine of natural selection as the dominant 
 principle in life, with the consequence that " what has filtered through 
 into the social and political thought of the time has been the belief 
 that the time-honoured doctrine 'Might is Right' has a scientific 
 foundation in the law of biology " (Democracy and Reaction, p. 85), was 
 true a fortiori of Green's time. What difference there is, is largely 
 due to Green's political teaching, which included a deeper interpreta- 
 tion of the evolutionary doctrine than the "evolutionists'* were able 
 to extract from it. See D. G. Ritchie's Principles of State Interference, 
 Darunniam and Politics, and Darwin and Hegel, Preface.
 
 m.] KEYNOTE OF NEW POLITICS 53 
 
 hesitation among reformers of all parties in accept- 
 ing the guidance of their own deeper intuitions. 
 The national spirit was thus divided against itself, 
 and it appeared to Green, as to many, to be 
 the main problem of philosophy, as important 
 for practice as for theory, to find a basis of 
 reconciliation. 
 
 WILL, NOT FORCE, THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 
 His solution of it was the application of the 
 ideas with which we are already familiar to explain 
 the true nature of social and political organisation. 
 His chief political work 1 consists of two parts, in 
 the first of which he tracks the individualistic 
 fallacy through the main forms that it has taken 
 in modern philosophy ; in the second he develops 
 his own theory in constructive form. It is with 
 the general results, and more particularly with the 
 formula in which he sums them up, that we are 
 here concerned. 
 
 We have seen that the essence of human life, 
 and thus the deepest purpose of the will, is to be 
 found in the pursuit of an ideal of its own better- 
 ment, involving the betterment of the society of 
 which each individual is only a part. The mistake 
 of individualism had been that it took as its point 
 of departure a conception of the will and of good 
 
 1 Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, Works, vol. ii. <e No 
 other recent writer has the classical strength and sanity of Professor 
 Green, who was never more thorough and more at home than when 
 dealing with those questions affecting citizenship, in and for which 
 it may he said he lived." Professor Bosanquet in Preface to edition 
 separately published in 1901.
 
 54 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA [I-F.OT. 
 
 as something merely personal and particular, with 
 the result that law and social control in all its 
 forms appeared in the light of a permanent menace 
 to the free pursuit of individual ends. Starting 
 from the opposite idea of the community of man's 
 essential interests the idea, as Green liked to 
 call it, of a Common Good we see the justifica- 
 tion of the complete reversal of the perspective 
 which he effected. 
 
 The society which is entrusted with the realisa- 
 tion of such an idea (and this is just what a society 
 of any kind means) must by the very terms of its 
 existence seek (unconsciously in the first instance, 
 but with growing consciousness of its spiritual 
 purpose as time goes on) to secure by political 
 action the conditions that are prescribed by this 
 end. Corresponding, therefore, to the chief objects 
 of reasonable desire, the things that are of vital 
 interest to human life, we shall have forms of 
 social structure representing the permanence and 
 continuity of social purpose. These forms we call 
 generally "institutions." But they are not some- 
 thing set up from the outside, as to the individual 
 who gathers himself together in a state of self- 
 will and resentment they are apt to appear. 
 Rather they are meeting points of wills that are 
 in harmony with their own deeper meaning 
 precipitates of the common effort after fullness 
 and harmony of life. 
 
 The relation that subsists between the external 
 and internal, society and the individual, philosophers
 
 in.] SOCIAL AUTOMATISM 55 
 
 have expressed in different ways. To Plato social 
 institutions e.g. that of classes were features 
 of the individual soul writ large. 1 Others have 
 compared them to the scaffolding that society 
 has thrown round itself for the support of the 
 builders, others by a truer metaphor to the bone 
 and tissue which the body secretes for the common 
 service of its members in the performance of its 
 vital functions. But the most fruitful, because 
 the truest, analogy is that of the habits of the indi- 
 vidual himself. Just as the results of physical, 
 intellectual and moral effort are secured to a 
 man, and further progress rendered possible by the 
 formation of habits, so society falls into customs, 
 adopts conventions, acquires institutions which 
 represent at any particular time its actual achieve- 
 ments in its efforts after corporate good, and 
 become under favourable circumstances the basis of 
 further advance. And just as at a certain stage of 
 development habits obtain the stamp of conscious 
 approval and are adopted as principles of life, so 
 at a certain stage of civilisation societies establish 
 written laws and empower governments in order 
 to economise the labour of individuals, and carry 
 out automatically what has received the stamp of 
 social approval. 
 
 It is true that laws and customs, like the habits 
 of individuals, have their weak side, becoming 
 under particular circumstances an obstruction to 
 the free expansion of life, and temporarily justify ing 
 
 1 Green himself speaks of them as " the handwriting of ordinances."
 
 56 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA [UMJT. 
 
 the appeal from the " chains " of social ordinance 
 to the inborn freedom of the individual. But this 
 ought never to obscure the fundamental fact that 
 in origin and idea institutions are the repositories 
 of man's ideas of social good, and even at their 
 worst much more frequently ossifications of out- 
 grown purposes and ideals than forcible intrusions 
 from without. And what is true of particular 
 institutions is true of the State as a whole. The 
 State is not something different from organised 
 society, but merely the name which we give it at 
 the stage of its development, at which it rises to 
 the consciousness of its spiritual purposes and of 
 the resources it possesses for their furtherance. 
 
 The fact that political as contrasted with 
 domestic, economic or other forms of association 
 holds in reserve an appeal to force has led 
 theorists to fix upon this as its essential principle. 
 But it is just here that the analogy of habit 
 proves most helpful. We speak of the "force" 
 of habit, and there are times when our habits 
 become known to us as a forcible means of resist- 
 ing the violence or inertia of brute nature. In 
 just the same way we arm the State with the 
 means of meeting force with force. But just as 
 the raison d'etre of habit is not to be sought for 
 in the mere inertia of acquired tendency, so neither 
 is the root of the authority of states and govern- 
 ments to be looked for in the force they have at 
 their command, but in the end they serve as the 
 proper " setting " of individual life, the condition
 
 in.] THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 57 
 
 of the maintenance and development of free 
 personality. It is reflections such as these that 
 are summed up in Green's formula, "Will, not 
 force, is the basis of the State." 
 
 EARLIER POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLAND. 
 Prima facie this view does not seem to be in 
 any striking opposition to the earlier English 
 theory. From the outset the main current of 
 political philosophy in England (and herein con- 
 sisted its strength as a unique contribution to 
 social theory) had identified itself with the 
 principle that the authority of government must 
 rest ultimately upon the will of the governed. 
 What distinguishes the doctrine here expounded 
 is the conception of the nature of the will that 
 underlies it. Hobbes (for he may be said to have 
 spoken the first word of modern philosophy on the 
 whole subject) started with the idea of a multitude 
 of individual, personally independent wills. The 
 problem which he set himself and his immediate 
 successors was how to conceive of any government 
 that had actually existed, or was likely to exist, as 
 carrying with it the consent of such a multitude. 
 The answer to it was found in the idea of an 
 original contract in which individuals were con- 
 ceived of as having renounced, either in whole 
 or part, either temporarily or permanently, their 
 claim to independent action in return for certain 
 definite benefits without which human life, as we 
 know or desire to know it, must cease to exist. 
 Whatever germ of truth this doctrine contained, 
 
 H
 
 68 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA [LWT. 
 
 and however its error was veiled by qualifications 
 in detail, it was open to the fundamental objection 
 that it was obliged to assume the existence hi 
 individuals in a non-social condition of notions 
 of obligation and mutual rights which could only 
 arise through the operation on them of an already 
 organised society, and thus failed in the precise 
 object for which it was invented viz. the explana- 
 tion of the rise of political union. In the particular 
 forms in which it was worked out by different 
 writers, this teaching involved further difficulties. 
 Was the renunciation complete and permanent on 
 the part of the citizens in favour of a single all- 
 powerful sovereign as Hobbes tended to conceive 
 of it? In this case, though the unity of will is 
 preserved, it has ceased in any real sense to be 
 the will of the people. Protest is rebellion, and 
 rebellion unmitigated wrong, with the result that 
 might has become right, and a theory invented 
 to support an existing form of government can 
 be turned with equal force to an argument in 
 favour of its successor. 1 Was the renunciation, 
 on the other hand, partial and temporary as 
 conceived of by Locke ? In that case it was im- 
 possible to lay down any clear principle on which 
 obedience to an existing government, or indeed 
 to government of any kind, could be represented 
 as an obligation binding on the individuals. There 
 was thus nothing to divide the cautious suggestions 
 
 1 This was conveniently observed and acted on when the time 
 arrived by the sagacious author of the Leviathan.
 
 in.] MAN A POLITICAL ANIMAL 59 
 
 of British common-sense from the brilliant para- 
 doxes of a Rousseau, or to prevent a theory put 
 forward to justify a Reformation being utilised 
 in the interest of a Revolution. In one form 
 the Social Contract thus cancelled the right to 
 reform in the other the duty of obedience. 1 
 
 Green's doctrine, as above explained, in starting 
 with a wholly different conception of the relation 
 of the individual to society, meets these difficulties. 
 Man is a social being from the first, not only in 
 the sense that he craves as a lonely individual for 
 social intercourse, but that his individual ends are 
 only attainable in and through some form of social 
 organisation. There is no need, therefore, to beg 
 the question of the origin of social obligation. 
 Man is moral from the beginning. The recognition 
 of the right of others as members of the same 
 society and the recognition of a right and a 
 wrong for himself are not two separate things. 
 They spring from the same root in the conception, 
 however obscure, of a better self in the develop- 
 ment of which the betterment of others is involved ; 
 they develop together as the individual's conception 
 of the nature of the society on the well-being of 
 which his own depends, and of the constituents 
 of that well-being become clearer; finally, in the 
 
 1 Professor Bosanquet points the contrast by the aphorism that 
 Hobbes preserves the idea of will but sacrifices its generality, Locke 
 preserves the idea of generality but sacrifices the idea of will. As 
 above stated, both start from the idea of will, but in Hobbes it turns to 
 despotism, in Locke to anarchy, and in both cases for the same reason 
 that they both start with an " individualistic " conception of the nature 
 of will.
 
 60 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 fully-developed moral consciousness they are seen 
 to be only different sides or to mark off different 
 modes of applying the same principle. It further 
 enables him to set the doctrine of " natural rights " 
 in a new light. Instead of being conceived as an 
 original endowment which had to be renounced 
 in whole or in part on entry into the political 
 state, these must be understood as the rights that 
 the notion of a perfected human nature prescribes 
 as an ideal in the future. It is through the action 
 of organised society itself that we are able to 
 conceive the notion of any such rights at all. 
 Their claim against the existing social order is 
 not that of the more primordial in time against 
 the later, but of the more developed and the 
 fuller against the more elementary and the more 
 schematic in a word of the "idea" against the 
 partial embodiment. 
 
 The proof of this account must, of course, be 
 found in its power of setting in a true light the 
 claims of the State over the individual and the 
 less comprehensive forms of social organisation 
 such as the family. In the detailed exposition 
 of the theory of right, Green is perhaps more 
 convincing than in any other part of his philo- 
 sophy. To this we must return for particular 
 illustration of the above abstract statement of his 
 doctrine. But there are certain obvious objections 
 suggested by the very terms that have been used, 
 the discussion of which may here serve to bring 
 its general tenor into clearer light.
 
 m.] OBJECTIONS 61 
 
 MEANING OF GREEN'S THEORY. The objec- 
 tion from the point of view of the ordinary 
 citizen which Green himself 1 is at most pains 
 to meet, is perhaps less likely to cause difficulty 
 at the present time. Even the most restive 
 and revolutionary social groups among ourselves 
 are prepared to see in the general legal and 
 conventional restraints under which we live 
 conditions necessary for the public welfare, and 
 therefore to regard them as on the whole an 
 expression of fundamental social needs. A deeper 
 objection is likely to suggest itself from the point 
 of view of the student of history who, though he 
 has discarded the theory of a social contract in 
 favour of the axiom that " constitutions are not 
 made but grow," has yet convinced himself that 
 the chief factor in their growth is not will but 
 "circumstances." "Does the account that the 
 philosopher gives of the origin and meaning of 
 human institutions," he will be inclined to ask, 
 " really correspond with fact ? Is he not by a 
 species of anthropomorphism attributing to will 
 what is really due to climate, situation, economic 
 necessity in a word, to the pressure of circum- 
 stances ? What evidence is there in the institu- 
 tions of a country like Russia or Portugal of the 
 operation of anything that can be called the will 
 of the people, or in the last resort of anything 
 more than the mere brute force of geographical, 
 industrial and other external conditions interacting 
 with fixed features of inherited character? Great 
 
 1 Principles of Political Obligation, p. 121.
 
 62 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 men, truly, there have been men of will and 
 leading, but they have led by themselves becoming 
 the followers of circumstances whose trend they 
 have had the genius to discern. When it was not 
 their own personal glory, it was the glory of circum- 
 stances and not of any underlying moral and social 
 will which they declared. Even where development 
 has reached a point at which we are justified in 
 speaking of the "will of the community" as an 
 operative force in civilisation, what is this, after all, 
 but the result of the compromises and makeshifts by 
 which a multitude of individual and divergent wills 
 manage under the pressure of economic and political 
 necessity to act with some appearance of unity ? " 
 The answer to such an objection has to be gathered 
 from the general spirit of Green's philosophy, and 
 from particular passages in which he touches upon 
 one or other of the points involved in it. 
 
 THE PLACE OF CIRCUMSTANCES. Green was, of 
 course, prepared to recognise the force of circum- 
 stances. One of his earliest essays was upon this 
 subject, 1 and the striking Lectures on the English 
 Revolution" were written with the express object 
 of showing how the greatest concentration and 
 purity of moral purpose may fail when they are 
 dissociated from insight into the actual circum- 
 stances of the time. 3 On the other hand, it 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 3 foil. "To regard this vast environment 
 merely as the workings of the human mind seems nearly as far from 
 the truth as to regard ourselves as its creatures or slaves." 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 277. 
 
 3 Another interesting illustration was furnished by events going on
 
 in.] WILL AND CIRCUMSTANCES 6S 
 
 seemed to follow from the general principles of his 
 philosophy that there could be no ultimate distinc- 
 tion between will and circumstances when taken 
 each in its widest sense. Different as they may 
 appear to us, they cannot to the philosophical 
 Idealist be other than different sides of a wider 
 reality, which itself is only ultimately compre- 
 hensible when interpreted as itself a form of 
 Will. So regarded what appears to us in the 
 form of an outer or circumstantial world must 
 be in reality what it is to the eye of faith "no 
 independent existence, but a means through which 
 his own mind is ever more communicated to him." 1 
 But apart altogether from any question of 
 an overruling Providence in things Green would 
 have denied that the distinction between will and 
 circumstances could be anything but a relative 
 one. We speak of the circumstances of human 
 life as contrasted with the "surroundings" of an 
 animal or a thing, for the obvious reason that only 
 those parts of our environment are, properly speak- 
 in Italy before his own eyes, where the idealism of Mazzini was work- 
 ing as a source of discord and weakness just because of its aloofness 
 from the general tendency of feeling and event. 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 4. It is interesting to notice how this view of 
 man's environment anticipated by philosophy has recently come to 
 commend itself to some of the representatives of physical science. 
 Speaking of the change effected by the rise of consciousness in man, 
 Alfred Russell Wallace writes : " The whole universe in all its myriad 
 forms, in all its intricacies of structure and motion, in all its marvellous 
 beauty and inexhaustible utilities, in all its complex and mysterious 
 laws and forces, become to him a vast schoolroom, furnishing the 
 materials needed for the development of all his hitherto unused 
 faculties, and for the gradual elevation of his intellectual and moral 
 nature." Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1908.
 
 64 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA [I.CT. 
 
 ing, circumstances which enter our lives with a call 
 to us to recognise and understand them. Just as 
 before recognition they may be said to be less 
 than circumstances, after it they are more. In 
 being recognised they have already taken on the 
 impress of mind and will, and in doing so become 
 related to our life as a whole in a way that forbids 
 us thenceforth to treat them as a mere external 
 influence impinging upon it with an independent 
 moulding force of their own. 
 
 The application of these principles to the 
 circumstances of the rise and development of the 
 State may be said to constitute the main interest 
 of his political teaching. Circumstances on this 
 view might be said to constitute the impulse or 
 occasion, never the reason or the cause, of political 
 union. The cause lies deeper in the civic qualities 
 which he agreed with Plato and Aristotle were 
 man's "by nature" features stamped upon his 
 inward parts, bound therefore sooner or later to 
 manifest themselves in the external forms that 
 give them their purchase in the larger world. 
 
 And this truth becomes progressively obvious 
 as civilisation itself develops and the centre of 
 gravity moves from the physical to the social 
 environment. Henceforth the influence of "cir- 
 cumstances" is rather that of the general over 
 the particular will, the social over the individual 
 purpose, than that of the external and purpose- 
 less over the internal and volitional. It is quite 
 true, as the objection implies, that "physical"
 
 m.] GREAT MEN 65 
 
 wants form the original impulse, and are always 
 an important element in civilisation. But we 
 are apt to forget that these are wants directed 
 to a certain form of well-being, that man's will 
 is working in them, and that even from the out- 
 set they are only elements in the wider will of 
 whose nature we have already spoken. To take 
 a single instance : the institution of slavery as 
 known to the ancient and modern world, may be 
 said to have an economic basis : the slave was 
 a "living tool," and held a place in civilisation 
 so long as he was economically profitable. But it 
 is easy to show that there were other factors in its 
 origin, e.g. the incipient consciousness of a common 
 humanity and the desire to be recognised and held 
 in honour, and therefore that it represented more 
 than the mere will to live on the part of the captor. 
 It is easy, too, to show that though its economic 
 unprofitableness was an element, perhaps a con- 
 dition of its abolition, yet in the very recognition 
 of this fact by the planter, still more in the plea 
 of the philanthropist, will and idea took control of 
 the movement that led to emancipation. 
 
 GREAT MEN. Read in this light, too, it is not 
 difficult to see that the work of the leaders of men 
 is capable of quite a different interpretation from 
 that which the objection puts upon it. Their part 
 in the development of civilisation consists not 
 so much in interpreting circumstances as a force 
 external to man as in interpreting man's will 
 
 I
 
 66 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 to himself. The great man is he who realises 
 more clearly than others the existence and mean- 
 ing of the deeper instincts of the nation or the 
 race " that living will on ' which its dark founda- 
 tions rest." In him man's deeper purposes, which 
 are for most of us a "buried life," come to self- 
 consciousness, or at least rise sufficiently near it 
 to become immediate motives. 
 
 " He knows the hills where his life rose, 
 And the seas where it goes." 
 
 It is this that gives him his twofold aspect, as 
 at once the exponent and the corrector of his 
 age, the exponent of its rarer, the corrector of its 
 commoner mind. Green's treatment of greatness, 
 and the strange mixture of good and evil that it 
 commonly involves, is always suggestive. He 
 sums up his belief as to its true nature in a 
 characteristic sentence upon the reformer from 
 the essay just mentioned : " The very essence of 
 a true reformer consists in his being the corrector 
 and not the exponent of the common feeling of 
 his day. The breath of his life is inspired from 
 above, not drawn from below. The wants of the 
 age or some unknown influences from above set 
 the minds of thinking men in motion, they know 
 not whither, till at last the master-mind among 
 them reaches the wished-for light and reflects it 
 on his fellows. Immediately they recognise it as 
 that after which they have been striving, while the 
 world at large finds its darkness broken, but knows 
 not whence the light has come." 1 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 10.
 
 ni.] THE GENERAL WILL 67 
 
 THE GENERAL WILL. What holds of the 
 man of genius holds of ordinary men in their 
 better moments. It has often been noticed how 
 at great crises in the history of a nation or society, 
 or when it is stirred by some event of more than 
 common significance, the veil of habit and of 
 everyday obtuseness to the true values of things 
 seems to be momentarily lifted, ordinary interests 
 and animosities are forgotten, and the soul of a 
 people stands revealed to itself. But it is not 
 necessary to go for illustration to exceptional 
 times and events. The deliberations of any parish 
 council or village committee will often show in 
 the result a disinterestedness and wisdom beyond 
 anything that any individual has brought with him, 
 or in his unaided counsels was capable of sug- 
 gesting. Most (perhaps all) may have come with 
 their upper consciousness preoccupied with some 
 personal or sectional interest, but in the course of 
 the discussion new issues emerge, wider interests 
 are broached, a response comes from a deeper level 
 of consciousness, things are seen in a new light and 
 a decision ultimately arrived at which, while it does 
 not fail to take account of all legitimate interests, 
 does so in a way altogether different from that in 
 which it was sought at the outset to enforce them. 
 It is facts like these that contain the answer 
 finally to the objection that where, as in so-called 
 popular government, laws and institutions are 
 apparently the work of deliberate volition, they 
 are in reality the result of a compromise which,
 
 68 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 while by a kind of social contract it has the 
 acquiescence of all, expresses the will of none. 
 It is quite true, as the above illustration shows, 
 that private interests are compromised or set 
 aside. But they are set aside not to make room 
 for other interests equally private, and thus to 
 arrive at a species of average satisfaction or dis- 
 satisfaction of all concerned, but to give effect 
 to a wider purpose which subordinates while it 
 includes the narrower. 
 
 The general conclusion to which we are thus 
 brought is that while no interpretation of man's life 
 can be sound, which disregards the force of circum- 
 stances as something far beyond the dispositions of 
 his individual will, it is equally wide of the mark to 
 conceive of civilisation in general a fortiori of the 
 form of social organisation represented by the State 
 as the product of forces acting from without. 
 Whether looked at from the point of view of 
 general philosophical theory, or from the point of 
 view of the actual historical process by which it 
 has been achieved, it is only rightly interpreted 
 when recognised as the product of a spirit working 
 in man that is greater than himself, and that is 
 building better than he knows. 
 
 THE RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS. But the longer 
 we dwell on this side of Green's doctrine, and the 
 more closely we seek to connect his political ideas 
 with the religious aspect of his teaching, the more 
 difficult do we make it to understand the enthusi-
 
 m.] INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS 69 
 
 asm for reform which, as we have seen, was the 
 breath of his public life. The theory that sees in 
 law and government the ordinances of a divine 
 Providence was not, of course, a new one. It 
 may be said to have been the theory for which 
 Socrates died. 1 It was tie theory of Edmund 
 Burke, with whom Green had much in common. 
 More particularly it was the theory of Hegel from 
 whom Green largely borrowed it. But in all of 
 these thinkers it was combined with a spirit of 
 devout and even enthusiastic conservatism. To 
 understand how the view of the nature of human 
 institutions associated in his spiritual predecessors 
 with acquiescence, and even reaction, filled him 
 with a divine discontent, we must turn to the 
 other side of his teaching as it affected the rights 
 of the individual. 
 
 His idea of political right in general follows 
 from his conception of good as perfection of human 
 character. That which is right (jus] is that which 
 is demanded by this moral ideal: "what in the 
 outward intercourse of men corresponds to the 
 inviolability of the essential material conditions of 
 moral humanity, i.e. to the idea of the existence and 
 perfection of personality." Otherwise expressed, 
 right is the system of the conditions by means of 
 which the ethical whole is enabled to maintain and 
 develop itself as an articulate system of separate 
 members. 2 But, as these last words remind us, 
 
 1 See Plato's Crito. 
 
 2 See the definitions quoted in Principle* of Political Obligation, 
 214ii. ; cf. 180n., 186n.
 
 70 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 the ideal is one that has to be realised in individual 
 centres, and when we speak of what is just or 
 right, we do so in reference to the conditions 
 required for this individual realisation these 
 conditions themselves being describable in the 
 substantive form as the " rights " of the individual. 
 A right has therefore two sides, a positive and 
 a negative. From the positive side a right is 
 the condition or sphere of self-realisation, from 
 the negative it is that on which others are pro- 
 hibited from encroaching. But this limit, the side 
 from which the rights of one appear as the duties 
 of another, is wrongly interpreted when it is con- 
 ceived of as something accidental in the life of 
 the other, or merely imposed on him from without. 
 It follows from all that has already been said of 
 the good of each as including the good of all, 
 that an encroachment by any one on the rights 
 of another is in reality an act of violence against 
 his own. From this point of view it is no mere 
 word-play to insist that it is not only "right" 
 but " a right " of each to respect the right of 
 another. If going to the root of the matter we ask 
 on what the individual rights of each depend, the 
 only answer in conformity with our previous con- 
 clusions is, that it cannot be on his mere existence 
 as an individual mind and will, apart from what 
 he has the mind and will to do. What endows 
 the individual in the first instance with his rights, 
 is his power of doing right in other words, of con- 
 tributing from his own particular centre to social
 
 m.] NO RIGHT AGAINST SOCIETY 71 
 
 well-being. Where this is absent, as it is in the 
 lower animals, or where it is undeveloped, as in 
 children, or temporarily obscured, as in the in- 
 sane or the criminal, rights are admitted only in a 
 metaphorical or a secondary sense, corresponding 
 to present analogies or the promise of what may 
 hereafter be. Right is thus at every point relative 
 to society. In origin, contents, and in the con- 
 dition of its maintenance, it depends upon society. 
 "It is on the relation to a society, to other men 
 recognising a common good, that the individual's 
 rights depend, as much as the gravity of a body 
 depends on relations to other bodies." l From this 
 it follows, that to assert individual right against 
 society is to turn it against its own life. As 
 Green puts it: "A right against society is a 
 contradiction in terms." 
 
 With this conclusion as to the general nature 
 of right we might seem to have drifted still further 
 from the spirit of the reformer. But it is just here 
 that we have the characteristic note of Green's 
 doctrine of right. While there is no right to 
 be free from society, there is a right in every 
 individual to have the freedom of it. In the same 
 breath, therefore, that he insists that there is no 
 right against society, he proclaims the right to be 
 treated as a member of society. 2 And it is just 
 here again that the conditions under which the 
 
 1 Principles of Political Obligation, 99. 
 
 2 " It is a right against society as distinguished from a right to be 
 treated as a member of society" that is the contradiction.
 
 78 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 moral order reveals itself in time, throw a responsi- 
 bility on each succeeding generation. 
 
 While existing rights, the actual civic endow- 
 ment of individuals, must be conceived of as the 
 embodiment of a divine idea, yet at any moment 
 of social development the full idea is far from 
 realisation. It is only by a gradual process 
 (though at an accelerated rate as it comes to 
 be more fully understood) that this idea asserts 
 itself against the obstructions which the necessi- 
 ties of a natural history, the inertia of custom, or 
 the selfishness of established interests may have 
 created. It is true that the established order 
 which we call the State has a rightful, and in 
 a sense a paramount claim over the individual 
 in virtue of its being the condition of any 
 human life whatsoever, but this is only on the 
 assumption that it is a " State " indeed, an 
 organisation that with whatever shortcoming has 
 for its supreme object the fullest development of 
 the rights of all its members. As Green puts it : 
 "The claim of the state is only absolutely para- 
 mount on the supposition that in its commands 
 and prohibitions it takes account of all the claims 
 that arise out of human fellowship." 1 Where it 
 fails to do so, and just in so far as it fails, the 
 individual is in turn within his right in appealing, 
 if not to a law of nature independent of society, yet 
 to a law of nature presupposed in society however 
 imperfectly expressed in its laws and institutions. 
 
 1 Principles of Political Obligation, 146,
 
 ra.] RIGHT OF CITIZENSHIP 73 
 
 While, therefore, Green rejects the appeal to 
 a law of nature as conceived by Rousseau or 
 Tom Paine, or even Kant, he was yet able to 
 appeal to the conception itself as "the moving 
 principle of the modern reconstruction in Europe." l 
 It meant to him the idea of a human society 
 which, while it preserved the general features that 
 had rendered civilisation up to the present point 
 possible, and had stood the test of experience, 
 gave a far wider interpretation to what was 
 necessary if human life were ever to attain the 
 fullness to which in divine Providence he con- 
 ceived it to be destined. 
 
 In this sense he was prepared to advocate the 
 rights of man, but they were not the rights of 
 man versus the State, but the rights of a better 
 form of State against a worse. And this carried 
 with it an all-important consequence, seeing that, 
 when read in this way, the question of right 
 merged with that of duty. There is no sense, he 
 writes, in asking what gives individuals a right 
 to resist society, " unless we suppose a wrong done 
 to society in their persons, and then it becomes 
 a question not of right merely, but of duty." 2 
 
 In the light of these ideas, Green could not 
 fail to see in the condition of the vast majority of 
 those in whom a Christian society professed to 
 recognise the rights of citizenship, not only a 
 massive obstruction to their own self- development, 
 but a source of degradation and impoverishment 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 296. 
 
 2 Principle* of Political Obfyution, 1 107. 
 
 I
 
 74 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 to the civilisation from which they were excluded. 
 It was the conviction of the gulf that separated 
 herein our ideal from our practice, and of what 
 might be done to bridge it by an enlightened 
 system of legal enactment that was the source of 
 his political enthusiasm. To him reform did not 
 mean the triumph of one class or political party over 
 another, but the development of the idea of what 
 the social union could be made to mean for all 
 one more step in the long process by which the 
 civilisation of Christendom was to be achieved and 
 its divine purpose realised. 
 
 ILLUSTRATION FROM THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 
 In Green's treatment l of the institution of 
 private ownership we have an epitome of his 
 whole political teaching, and the best concrete 
 illustration of his general doctrine of embodied 
 will. 
 
 In the essential realism of property in the 
 materiality and fixity of the things that are 
 possessed, we might appear to have the very 
 antithesis of idealism in all its forms. More 
 particularly in the forcible manner in which 
 property has been acquired, and the apparently 
 accidental and unreasonable proportion of its 
 distribution, we seem to see the disproof of the 
 doctrine that will and not force is the basis of 
 the State. To obtain a clear view of the true 
 nature of the institution, we have, in the first 
 place, to take it in its widest acceptation as the 
 
 1 Principles of Political Obligation, c. xiv. (N.).
 
 m.] ILLUSTRATION OF PROPERTY 75 
 
 individual appropriation for the purposes of life in 
 general, of material objects of any kind, or (what 
 amounts to the same thing) of their properties ; in 
 the second place, we have to recognise the distinc- 
 tion (at all times important in dealing with human 
 affairs) between fact and value, between the way 
 in which a thing has come into existence, together 
 with the form that it takes, and the purpose that 
 is served by it. It is to the narrowness with which 
 the idea of private property is commonly conceived, 
 and to the failure to distinguish between historical 
 form and ethical value, that the chief errors of 
 popular discussions of the subject are due. Because 
 property as a whole has begun in uncovenanted 
 appropriation, or because some particular form of 
 property has been abused, the institution itself is 
 denounced as based upon injustice. 
 
 Taking it in its widest sense, and setting aside 
 the questions of the origin and different historical 
 forms of ownership, which, however illuminating 
 and important, belong strictly to another study, 
 what, we have to ask, is the meaning of property 
 for human life as a whole, what does it imply in 
 the individual, and in the society of which he is 
 a part? Green's whole doctrine is summed up 
 in two points which admit of succinct, and, after 
 what has been already said, from his point of 
 view convincing statement. 
 
 1. Property is more than seizure and appropria- 
 tion of an object for the supply of a passing need. 
 Even a store laid up for future need is not
 
 76 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 necessarily property. Appropriation in both these 
 forms is possible for the lower animals, in which 
 we recognise no rights of property. Property 
 as a human institution implies in a particularly 
 striking form the idea of the distinction between 
 a permanent self and its passing state, which 
 we have seen to lie at the foundation of man's 
 whole intellectual and moral nature. It " implies 
 the conception of himself on the part of the 
 appropriator as a permanent subject for whose 
 use as instruments of satisfaction and expression 
 he takes and fashions certain external things." 
 The proprietor must be able to say of it, " This 
 shall be mine to do as I like with, to satisfy 
 my wants, and express my emotions as they 
 arise." 
 
 So conceived of property stands for the more 
 permanent and stable elements of a man's person- 
 ality, like the body itself, of which it is merely an 
 extension in place and time, a part of the " constant 
 apparatus through which he gives reality to his 
 ideas and wishes." In this we have its rationale. 
 Just as it is in and through the use of his body 
 that a man first realises his personality as at once 
 an individual and a member of a social whole, so 
 it is through the extension of it in private property 
 that the further development of personality in 
 all its higher phases of producer, distributer, dis- 
 coverer, testator, is rendered possible. 
 
 If it be argued that primitive civilisation in 
 which private ownership is unknown, and land
 
 m.] COMMUNISM 77 
 
 and the instruments of production are held in 
 common, offers no support to such a theory, the 
 answer is, that this is to misunderstand the facts. 
 
 Common ownership in early societies is not 
 the denial of a man's private property in the 
 products of his own labour, but the only way 
 under the circumstances of securing it. " The 
 characteristic of primitive communities is not the 
 absence of the distinction between meum and 
 tuum, without which no society of intelligent 
 agents would be possible at all, but the common 
 possession of certain materials, in particular land, 
 on which labour may be expended. It is the 
 same common interest which prevents the separate 
 appropriation of these materials, and which secures 
 the individual in the enjoyment and use of that 
 which his labour can extract from them." 1 
 
 While at one stage of civilisation the clan or 
 village ownership of land, praised by communistic 
 writers, undoubtedly represented the condition of 
 rendering industry its due, at another it repre- 
 sented an arbitrary limit, both of the society 
 whose recognition is the condition of any kind of 
 property, and of the forms of property which it is 
 socially beneficial to recognise. In order that the 
 power of acquisition may serve its purpose as a 
 means to moral freedom, " the range of appropria- 
 tion must be extended ; it must include more of 
 the permanent material on which labour may be 
 expended, and not merely the passing products of 
 
 1 Prineiplet of Political Obligation, 218.
 
 78 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA 
 
 labour spent on unappropriated material ; and they 
 must be at once secured and controlled in it by 
 the goodwill, by the sense of common interest 
 of a wider society: in other words, by the law 
 written or unwritten of a free state." 1 
 
 2. This brings us to the second condition of 
 the existence of property, viz. the " recognition by 
 others of a man's appropriations as something 
 which they will treat as his, not theirs, and the 
 guarantee to him of his appropriations by means 
 of that recognition." What, asks Green, is the 
 ground of this recognition? He finds it, as he 
 found the ground of the State in general, in the 
 will. And if there seems to be an even more pro- 
 nounced paradox in this than in the more general 
 statement, the explanation is given in the same 
 line of thought. By will is not meant "the 
 momentary spring of any and every spontaneous 
 action, but a constant principle operative in all 
 men qualified for any form of society however 
 frequently overborne by passing impulses, in 
 virtue of which each seeks to give reality to 
 the conception of a well-being which he neces- 
 sarily regards as common to himself with others." 
 True, as we have seen, property has too often 
 seemed to represent nothing more than the strong 
 hand. Its actual maintenance, moreover, even in 
 the most highly civilised communities, calls for the 
 constant application of force a circumstance that 
 has given rise to the theory that the State mainly, 
 
 1 Principle* of Political Obligation, 219, condensed.
 
 in. THE AIM OF REFORM 79 
 
 if not exclusively, exists for its protection. But 
 force is not of the essence of property any more 
 than of the State. It is not the power of forcible 
 tenure but the power of utilisation for social ends 
 that is the ground of the permanent recognition 
 that constitutes a right to property. Where this 
 is absent possession must be, and continue to be, 
 robbery ; where it once may have been, but has 
 ceased any longer to be, tenure may remain, but 
 it remains as a mere survival, rightly liable at 
 any moment to be challenged in the interest of 
 the community, whose will has made and is 
 necessary to sustain it. 
 
 The particular forms of possession that have 
 thus become ossified in the course of history and 
 constitute a challenge to the reformer is not a 
 question in this lecture. We are dealing here with 
 general principles, and the condition of classes and 
 individuals in relation to established embodiments 
 of the common will. The general principle is, 
 that property in its idea is a means (so far as 
 can be seen, a necessary means) to the highest 
 moral development. From this it follows for a 
 philosophy which sees the end of political action 
 in "the emancipation of the individual from all 
 restrictions upon the free moral life, and his pro- 
 vision with means for it," that the aim of legislation 
 can never at any time be either the mere conserva- 
 tion of existing rights of property, or the mere 
 substitution of common for individual ownership. 
 The aim of the reformer must always be the
 
 80 THE STATE AS WILL AND IDEA [user, in. 
 
 twofold one of the extension to each and all of 
 the opportunity of self - development and self - 
 expression that the ownership of " means " affords, 
 and the penetration of property in all its forms 
 by a sense of responsibility to the social end 
 which is served by the self -development of indi- 
 viduals. " The rationale of property," in Green's 
 condensed summary, "is that every one should be 
 secured by society in the power of getting and 
 keeping the means of realising a will which in 
 possibility is a will directed to social good." 1 
 
 Looking out on the conditions of the people 
 in all European countries in the 'seventies, Green 
 could not fail to be profoundly impressed with the 
 contrast between ideal and actuality. " The actual 
 result of the development of rights of property in 
 Europe as part of its general political development 
 has so far been a state of things in which all indeed 
 may have property, but great numbers, in fact, 
 cannot have it in that sense in which alone it 
 is of value, viz. as a permanent apparatus for 
 carrying out a plan of life for expressing ideas 
 of what is beautiful, or giving effect to benevolent 
 wishes." s 
 
 Green yielded to none in the " sacred indigna- 
 tion " with which he viewed so apparently abortive 
 a result of our civilisation. He differed, as we 
 shall see, from the more revolutionary school of 
 reformers in his analysis of the causes, and in the 
 direction in which he held that a remedy was to 
 be sought. 
 
 1 Principle* qf Political Obligation, 220. * Ibid,
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 Idealism and Democracy State interference Socialism 
 Idealism and Empire Conclusion. 
 
 GREEN called himself in politics a "Liberal by 
 conviction," and he has recently had an honour- 
 able place assigned to him by Professor MacCimn 
 in his fine portrait gallery of Radical Thinkers ; 
 but the emphasis, in his case at least, is upon the 
 thinking. He was a philosophical radical, and 
 even here he differed from the men to whom the 
 term is usually applied in using his philosophy 
 rather as a point of view from which the best in 
 all parties might be regarded than as the basis of 
 a programme for any one particular party. In the 
 same spirit I propose to select as illustrations of his 
 practical attitude one or two problems of politics 
 which may be said to be either no longer or not 
 yet a ground of party contention. 
 
 IDEALISM AND DEMOCRACY. I have already 
 dwelt on his whole - hearted acceptance of the 
 modern spirit as pledged to the ideal of en- 
 lightened freedom and enjoyment. That in face 
 of the right to understand, to be free, to enjoy, 
 
 any large class should continue to exist imprisoned 
 
 81 L
 
 82 IDEALISM AND POLITICS [MCT. 
 
 in crass ignorance, and without the opportunity or 
 capacity for rational enjoyment, seemed to him 
 the condemnation of our present civilisation. He 
 would have echoed Carlyle's saying : " That one 
 man should die ignorant who has the capacity 
 of knowledge, that I call a tragedy, though it 
 should happen, as by some computations it does, 
 a thousand times a minute." He had no false 
 sentiment about the proletariat. "A proletariat 
 could be nothing else in his eyes but an index of 
 the failure of civilisation." 1 To this conviction 
 was due his enthusiasm for higher education among 
 all classes, at a time when few had risen above the 
 idea of the three " rs " and a smattering of technical 
 instruction as the suitable measure for the working 
 population. He had an old-fashioned affection for 
 the phrase, the "education of a gentleman." Like 
 his hero Cromwell, he "loved a gentleman that 
 was so indeed," conceiving of him, if not as one 
 who "knew what he was fighting for, and loved 
 what he knew," at any rate as one who possessed 
 definite capacities of knowledge and emotion, access 
 to which, instead of being the privilege of a few, 
 ought to be the acknowledged right of all. Hence 
 he was a pioneer in school reform, holding that 
 the line of progress was in the extension of the 
 principles of 1870 to a wider circle of schools, and 
 to the training colleges, combined with the grading 
 of secondary schools. He ends one of his addresses 
 on this subject with the fine sentence : 
 
 1 MacCunn, op. cit. p. 250.
 
 iv.] EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY 83 
 
 "As it was the aspiration of Moses that all 
 the Lord's people should be prophets, so with all 
 seriousness and reverence we may hope and pray 
 for a condition of English society in which all 
 honest citizens will recognise themselves and be 
 recognised by each other as gentlemen." 
 
 To him this hope was a beacon in all his 
 social efforts. Those who were undergraduates in 
 Balliol in the early 'seventies will remember the 
 Temperance Public House and Evening School 
 he started with the aid of some of them in St 
 Clement's. It was a small thing, but derived 
 significance from being an early anticipation of 
 the larger movement now represented in all 
 parts of the world by the University Settlement, 
 which owes its original inspiration, if not its 
 actual inception, to Green. The first University 
 Settlement bore with justice the name of Arnold 
 Toynbee, but the ideas, as Toynbee always acknow- 
 ledged, were those of Green. We have already 
 seen what " institutions " in general meant to him. 
 The " Settlement," had he lived to see its spread, 
 would have been an institution after his own heart. 
 The manifest creation of the better will, which is 
 also the will for social betterment, it stands for a 
 permanent opportunity of personal service ; and, 
 like other institutions the spirit of whose origin 
 is still fresh upon them, is fitted to become to 
 its members what he would not have hesitated to 
 call with something of its old pregnancy of mean- 
 ing a " means of grace," returning to them in
 
 84 IDEALISM AND POLITICS [urn. 
 
 knowledge and insight, in opportunities of wider 
 friendship, and in the extension of sympathy in 
 a word, in "social will" far more than it receives 
 from them. 
 
 In all this he may be said only to have given 
 a more practical turn to the gospel that Carlyle 
 had preached for half a century. He was merely 
 voicing the democratic claim for equality in the 
 only form in which it represents a claim to justice. 1 
 But Green had penetrated further into the spirit 
 of life than had Carlyle, and in doing so had 
 penetrated further into the spirit of democracy. 
 He saw that equality was impossible without 
 liberty both individual and civil. Liberty was 
 essential, not only as the older radicals taught as 
 a means to equality, but as a part of it. 
 
 The " opportunity " which was to be equalised 
 was the opportunity not merely to have and to 
 be happy, but to do and to realise. Hence to 
 the claim for equality Green added the claim for 
 liberty again in the only sense in which it could 
 be of any value : " the right of a man to make 
 the best of himself." Herein he joins hands, as 
 Mr Hobhouse 2 points out, with the teaching of 
 Mill in his great Essay on Liberty. When, how- 
 ever, Mr Hobhouse goes on to claim that Mill's 
 argument cuts deeper, seeing that Green fails to 
 meet the vital question, who is the judge, himself 
 
 1 He would have retained the phrase " equality of opportunity " in 
 spite of Dr Rashdall's recent criticism of it. (See The Theory of Good 
 and Evil, vol. i. p. 232.) 
 
 8 Democracy and Reaction, p. 224. L. T. Hobhouse, 1904.
 
 iv.] LIBERTY 86 
 
 or another, what is best for him, he forgets the 
 express and striking statement of his creed that 
 Green has himself given us. I have no wish to 
 belittle Mill, for whom Green, in spite of philo- 
 sophical differences, had the deepest reverence. 1 
 But in this respect the great utilitarian apostle of 
 liberty had no advantage over the idealist philo- 
 sopher. Speaking of the Reform Act of 1867 
 Green said : " We who were reformers from the 
 beginning always said that the enfranchisement of 
 the people was an end in itself. We said, and we 
 were much derided for saying so, that only citizen- 
 ship makes the moral man ; that only citizenship 
 gives that self-respect which is the true basis of 
 respect for others, and without which there is no 
 lasting social order or real morality." Only by 
 the vote, as he elsewhere explained, can the 
 instinctive loyalty of the ordinary good subject 
 be turned into intelligent citizenship, and thence, 
 again, at a higher level into enthusiastic patrotism. 
 " Only thus will a man learn to regard the 
 work of the State as a whole, and to transfer 
 to the whole the interest which otherwise his 
 particular experience would lead him to feel only 
 in that part of its work which goes to the main- 
 tenance of his own and his neighbour's rights." 2 
 In the substance of their teaching there is nothing 
 to choose between them. The difference is that 
 
 1 He once said he would rather have been Mill than Carlyle, " be 
 seems to have been such an extraordinarily good man." 
 ' Works, vol. iii. p. 436.
 
 86 IDEALISM AND POLITICS [LBCT. 
 
 to Mill the doctrine came rather as an after- 
 thought, with no obvious connection with the 
 happiness theory of which he was the recognised 
 exponent like a bit of true Gothic let into the 
 ordinary popular renaissance or modern ricocco 
 structure while in Green it was an organic part 
 of his whole philosophy springing from it as an 
 arch from the supporting pillars. 
 
 To the reformer of to-day to whom this doctrine 
 itself does not appear a commonplace, it is apt to 
 appeal with diminished force. We have become 
 painfully conscious of the failings, some would 
 say, the failure of democracy ; and progressive 
 thinkers, looking as they pride themselves beyond 
 the means to the end, have shown a tendency to 
 lay the emphasis on organisation and efficiency of 
 administration to the comparative neglect of the 
 older democratic ideal. This has recently shown 
 itself in foreign politics in a certain impatience 
 with the obstructions offered to Western European 
 ideals by the slowness and obtuseness of less 
 advanced communities entering at least as one 
 factor into the circumstances that led to the South 
 African War. 
 
 At home it has taken the form of a growing 
 readiness to transfer the responsibility of govern- 
 ment to paid officials, and to strengthen the machine 
 at the expense of its temporary administrators. 
 This is, indeed, a necessity of the situation, and 
 within proper limits is entirely good and useful. 
 But its utility may easily be exaggerated so as
 
 iv.] SELF-GOVERNMENT 87 
 
 to obscure the real ends of government. It is 
 easy to imagine a combination of all the talents, 
 directed with entire disinterestedness, taking the 
 place of present blundering attempts at self- 
 government. But would the result be in reality 
 better, would it be the " end " which we desire ? 
 Mr Hobhouse, who in the book already referred 
 to discusses the question with admirable lucidity, 
 has given us the answer : " Self-government with 
 all its defects implies a recognition of the duties 
 of government and the rights of the people; it 
 postulates a .measure of personal freedom and of 
 equal consideration for all classes. It is the natural 
 instrument of a growing sense of social solidarity 
 and the appropriate organ of a stirring national 
 life. In a word, it is the political expression of 
 the idea of Right on which the modern State rests, 
 and if there be any other mode of government 
 which would maintain that idea equally well, it 
 has yet to be produced." This I believe to be 
 gospel-truth, but it is truth which the writer owes, 
 I venture to think, to Green, and not to Mill. 
 
 STATE INTERFERENCE. It is hardly necessary 
 to dwell at any length on Green's teaching on this 
 head after what has been already said. We have 
 seen how his conception of the nature of liberty 
 carried him at once beyond the suspicion of State 
 interference, which was a tradition of the popular 
 philosophy of his time. Progress in the early 
 part of the century was rightly identified with
 
 88 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 liberation from many obstructive forms of central 
 control. But this was only one side of true liberal 
 legislation. 
 
 Freedom means self-determination, but its value 
 to its possessor depends altogether on what the 
 self determines to do. A man's right to liberty 
 is not a right to do what he likes with what 
 society permits him to call his own, but to make 
 the best of himself; and to secure this right for 
 each and all may involve a far larger measure of 
 control over particular individuals and classes than 
 has become apparent to the classes themselves, or to 
 those who look at society through their spectacles. 
 True, there is an obvious limit to what the State 
 can do for any individual. Granted that the end 
 for all is, as Green defines it, "the free exercise 
 of human faculties," there is much that the law 
 can do to secure " the conditions without which a 
 free exercise of the human faculties is impossible " ; 
 it obviously cannot secure the end itself. But 
 this limitation is not imposed upon the State by 
 anything external to it, or to its own idea, as the 
 supporter of natural rights believed. The limit 
 is self-imposed in the sense that it is implied 
 in the very nature of the end which the State 
 exists to secure. 
 
 The phrase that Green chose in order to 
 express the function of the State as so limited 
 was " the removal of obstacles " to the free exercise 
 of capacity. But, seeing that the obstacles may 
 come from within as well as from without, seeing
 
 iv.] LIMITS OF STATE ACTION 89 
 
 that they may be the result not only of the 
 ignorance, the inertia, or the selfishness of others, 
 but also of the same habits in a man's self, the 
 phrase has to be interpreted in a liberal sense. 1 
 Green himself was more afraid that too little than 
 that too much in the way of constructive inter- 
 ference with existing rights should be attempted 
 by the legislature. In two respects especially he 
 thought that the older view of freedom was still 
 acting to the detriment of the material and moral 
 well-being of the community, in ways of which 
 the State was bound to take cognisance, viz. in the 
 system of landed proprietorship and in the sale 
 of intoxicating liquor. Both of these happen at 
 the present time to be burning questions on which 
 it may be safer here to refrain from entering. One 
 thing, however, may be said. If there is a change 
 in the spirit in which these questions are being 
 approached, if all parties alike admit in words at 
 least, that the " health of the people is the supreme 
 law," against which no appeal to merely individual 
 or sectional " rights " can be permitted to stand, 
 it is in large part owing to the teaching of Green 
 and the philosophy which first established on a 
 sure basis of theory the principle that to argue 
 against any reform however drastic, that it was 
 an interference with individual liberty, "was to 
 
 1 Professor Bosanquet has tried to render Green's meaning by the 
 phrase, "hindrance of hindrances/' but it is doubtful whether once 
 the protest has been clearly made against " grandmotherly," which may 
 easily turn into stepmotherly legislation, any purpose is to be served 
 by the attempt to keep within the lines of negative description. 
 
 M
 
 90 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 ignore the essential condition under which alone 
 every particular liberty can rightly be allowed to 
 the individual the condition that the allowance 
 of it was not an impediment to social good." 1 
 
 So completely, indeed, has this idea won the 
 day that already there is an old-world air about 
 the whole controversy as to the right, and even as 
 to the limits of State interference with any of the 
 actions of individuals. There is a general admis- 
 sion that liberty is no fixed quantity which neces- 
 sarily diminishes as corporate control increases, 
 but that it is a growing function to which wisely- 
 directed legislation may continually contribute. 
 The idea, we may say, of a fixed liberty-fund has 
 gone the way of the wage-fund, the work-fund 
 and other similar metaphysical and mischievous 
 theories. The centre of political interest at the 
 present day has shifted to the different and more 
 definite issue of the general type of social and 
 industrial order that is most favourable to social 
 liberty in the new and positive meaning of the 
 word ; more specifically to the question of the 
 consonance of the control of land and of capital 
 by individuals or private associations with the 
 material and moral well-being of the people as a 
 whole. The question that the philosophic student 
 of politics is more likely to ask is the bearing of 
 the ideas with which we have been occupied 
 on the meaning and prospects of the growing 
 movement that is founded on the belief in the 
 
 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 384.
 
 iv.] SOCIALISM 91 
 
 fundamental inconsistency between private owner- 
 ship of capital and social liberty. 
 
 SOCIALISM. Green nowhere submits Socialism 
 to the same searching criticism which he applies 
 to the theory from which Individualism drew its 
 strength. We are therefore left to gather what 
 his treatment of it would have been from the 
 general bearing of his philosophy and from one 
 or two isolated passages on particular points. 
 
 We may start from a distinction between 
 different senses of the word, which has been 
 suggested by some of those who may be taken 
 as followers of his teaching. 1 
 
 1. If we take it to mean (as it ought to) the 
 doctrine of the reality of the social will (the desire 
 for a good that is common to all), as the deepest 
 practical principle in human life, Green's teaching 
 may be said to be rootedly socialistic. With the 
 motto of early English Socialism, chosen for it 
 on the death of its founder by his friends : " It is 
 the one great and universal interest of the human 
 race to be cordially united, and to aid each other 
 to the full extent of their capacities " 2 he would 
 have entirely agreed. He merely differs from its 
 popular exponents in seeking to establish the 
 sentiment it expresses in a sure foundation of 
 philosophical theory. 
 
 2. If we pass from this which we might call 
 
 1 Particularly by Professor Bosanquet in Civilisation of Christendom, 
 c. x. 
 
 3 Oil Robert Owen's grave in Newport Churchyard, Shropshire.
 
 92 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 Moral Socialism, " the view that makes society the 
 moral essence of the individual," 1 to what we 
 might call Revolutionary Socialism, the bearings 
 are equally clear. Green would have agreed with 
 the now generally accepted formula that progress 
 must be by evolution, not revolution. He would 
 merely have differed from those who make glib 
 use of the phrase in the depth of meaning he 
 would have attached to it, and the seriousness with 
 which he would have accepted the responsibilities 
 it implies. To him it would have meant that little 
 is to be hoped for from a reforming zeal which 
 regards itself as a new and solitary witness to the 
 power of the spirit. It was, as we have seen, a 
 rooted principle in Green's philosophy that from 
 the beginning and everywhere a spirit has worked 
 in human society forming and re-forming institu- 
 tions so as more fully to express man's better 
 mind. We only require to look a little way 
 below the surface to see that while there is much 
 in human nature that is mere survival of the tiger 
 and the ape, much in human environment, both 
 physical and social, that is imperfectly subdued to 
 the service of the spirit, there are yet enormous 
 positive assets that mark out the course by which 
 we have come, and point to the goal that is set 
 before us and the lines of progress towards it. 
 
 We have already seen how he applied this idea 
 to the case of private property. Whatever the 
 changes (and these, he would have admitted, may 
 
 1 Bosanquet, op. cit.
 
 iv.] NATIONALISM 93 
 
 be of quite indefinite extent) in the forms of pro- 
 perty and in the conditions of its tenure, that may 
 be required in the interest of national economy and 
 moral well-being, none are likely to be permanent 
 or to represent real progress which shall have for 
 their result either a diminished security of the 
 fruits of individual labour or a restricted command 
 by individuals over the means of carrying their ideas 
 into execution, or giving expression to their better 
 emotions. This is the condemnation of pure Com- 
 munism, but it is passed not in the name of any 
 abstract rights of the individual, but of the right of 
 the community itself to the best that individuals 
 can contribute through the free and spontaneous 
 exercise of their powers of self-expression. 
 
 As it condemns the destruction of property in 
 the interest of the community, so Green's Idealism 
 condemns the destruction of nationality in the 
 interest of humanity. In the national movement 
 of the earlier part of his own century he saw a real 
 gain to civilisation the overruling by Providence 
 of personal ambition masquerading in the guise of 
 an abstract humanitarianism. In the same spirit 
 he would have criticised the internationalism of the 
 early socialists, and would have applied to their 
 ideal Aristotle's profound remark upon Plato's pro- 
 posals that "the parts which are to constitute a 
 single organic whole must be different in kind." 
 He would agree with the saner Socialism that has 
 come to see in the life of a nation "a precious 
 vessel that contains a priceless ointment easily
 
 94 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 destroyed, and once destroyed, never to be re- 
 placed." 1 
 
 Like property and nationality, the modern ideal 
 of the family expresses a fundamental element in 
 social good. Property, as we saw, is founded on 
 the "effort on the part of the individual to give 
 reality to a conception of his own good as a whole, 
 or as something permanent in distinction from the 
 mere effort to satisfy a need as it arises." The 
 family is founded on a like capacity with the 
 addition that in the conception of his own good 
 is included a conception of the well-being of others 
 connected with him by natural ties as something 
 over and above and altogether distinct from the 
 satisfaction of passing desires. 2 
 
 The history of the institution is the history of 
 the process whereby family rights have come to 
 be regarded, in the first place, as independent of 
 special tribal custom, and as inherent in human 
 beings as such ; and, secondly, as existing between 
 persons and as throughout reciprocal. That the 
 full realisation of these ideals is only possible on a 
 monogamous basis involving, among other things, 
 the suppression of all forms of slavery and the 
 concubinage to which slavery constitutes a stand- 
 ing temptation, was one of Green's profoundest 
 convictions. "The principles (1) that all men and 
 all women are entitled to marry and form house- 
 holds, and (2) that within the household the claims 
 
 1 Speech at Socialistic Congress at Essen, 1907. Quoted from 
 memory. 
 
 3 Works, vol. ii. p. 639.
 
 iv.] THE FAMILY 95 
 
 of the husband and wife are throughout reciprocal, 
 cannot be realised without carrying with them not 
 merely monogamy, but the removal of these faulty 
 relations between men and women which survive in 
 countries where monogamy is established by law." 1 
 From this it followed that any scheme which in 
 the name of progress sought to break up the unity 
 of the family that " unity in all interests and for 
 the whole of a lifetime" which he held to be the 
 ideal of this relation not only was a reversal of 
 the order of historic evolution, but a betrayal of 
 the purpose which has given history a meaning. 
 
 The work of the reformer is not to destroy but 
 to fulfil the idea of the family and the home by 
 making it a real possibility for all. For this reason 
 he would probably have viewed with grave distrust 
 such proposals as those which have recently been 
 put forward by Mr H. G. Wells and others for the 
 " economic independence " of married women. He 
 would have seen in them not the corollaries of 
 socialistic principles, but proof of imperfect emanci- 
 pation from an individualism which was founded on 
 the denial of the reality and power of any higher 
 forms of personality than the merely bodily self. 
 
 3. Passing from moral and revolutionary to 
 the Economic Socialism which is more familiar 
 in popular discussion at the present time, while it 
 would be a mistake to identify this form of it with 
 any particular view of the course of history, yet 
 in its actual beginnings, both in England 2 and on 
 
 1 Works, vol. ii. p. 64. 2 See Podmore's Life of Robert Owen, ch. x.
 
 96 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 the Continent, it owed its hold to the conviction 
 that the capitalistic system was responsible for 
 the condition of the working classes in the first 
 quarter of the century, and that no permanent im- 
 provement was possible so long as this continued. 
 This view seemed to Green to be superficial. He 
 maintained that it was unjust to attribute to the 
 growth of the new industry effects which were 
 the result of much more complicated causes, and 
 had their roots, so far at least as England was 
 concerned, far back in the history of the people 
 and its government. More particularly he pointed 
 to the series of events by which the labourer and 
 the peasant proprietor had been driven from the 
 land, and by massing in the towns were ready 
 to become food for machinery, and to the slow- 
 ness with which the community had come to realise 
 at once its responsibility and the conditions under 
 which it was possible effectively to assist them in 
 their struggle towards an improved standard of life. 
 With regard to the first he held that "landless 
 countrymen whose ancestors were serfs were the 
 parents of the proletariate of great towns," and 
 with regard to the second, that there was little to 
 be hoped for from government action alternately 
 directed by a policy of a pauperising communism 
 and a no less disastrous laissez-faire. A new era 
 would open for reform when the true nature of 
 the problem and the duty of the State to bring 
 the whole of its resources to bear upon the solution
 
 iv.] PROGRESS OF WORKING CLASSES 97 
 
 of it in the interest of all classes alike should 
 be clearly discerned and frankly recognised. 
 
 Reviewing the work of the previous generation 
 from the point of view of the situation as thus 
 defined, he felt that in spite of the hesitancy and 
 vacillation of political parties, a substantial founda- 
 tion had been laid in the reform of the poor 
 law, the removal of restrictions on trade-unionism, 
 and working-class combinations, in the protective 
 legislation of which the long series of factory 
 Acts was the type, and in the education Act 
 of the early 'seventies. The general movement 
 which these represented had already resulted in a 
 marked advance in the whole standard of comfort 
 and manner of living of the great class of skilled 
 mechanics effectively disproving the contention 
 of the early socialists that no permanent improve- 
 ment was possible under the capitalistic regime, 
 and entirely altering the problem as it faces our- 
 selves. While there was still a boundless vista 
 of needed reform, particularly as concerned the 
 lower classes of labour, the uncertainty of employ- 
 ment and the security of life in general, it was 
 even then clear, as it has since become clearer still, 
 that the upper ranks of labour have passed into 
 a new world. With Sir Charles Booth he " would 
 have believed, and been glad to believe, that this 
 class had reached firm footing in all forms of 
 co-operation and combination, and that it held 
 its future in its own hands." 1 So far as it was 
 
 1 Labour and Lnfe of the People, vol. i p. 61. 
 
 N
 
 98 IDEALISM AND POLITICS [MOT. 
 
 concerned, the immediate question was far more 
 one of the use to which it was prepared to put 
 its improved circumstances than of any wide- 
 reaching change in the organisation of society. 
 The present system of administration offered no 
 insurmountable obstacle, but, on the contrary, 
 every opportunity of promoting better general, 
 industrial and artistic education, the reattachment 
 of the agricultural population to the land, and 
 all forms of social and industrial organisation 
 through which the will for a human and common 
 as opposed to a merely animal and private good 
 expresses itself, and so assisting in the formation 
 of the type of character on which the right use of 
 the new opportunities depends. 
 
 Nor was there any reason to believe that the 
 same methods that had worked so striking an 
 improvement in the higher ranks would be less 
 effective in dealing with the economic position of 
 the lower ranks of industry. The problem, truly, 
 was different. Since Green's time the emergence 
 into clearness of the problem of home work and 
 sweated industries, of seasonal trades and unemploy- 
 ment, has brought home to us the probability that 
 more drastic applications of these methods, more 
 inquisitorial and providential "interference," more 
 elemental and practical forms of education, a more 
 differential and selective treatment of the various 
 types of economic unfitness may be necessary. 
 But if society is prepared fearlessly to face its 
 responsibilities in the light of past experience, and
 
 nr.] LABOUR POLHICS 99 
 
 with a clear consciousness of the ideal at which 
 it aims, as a form of will to which the increase of 
 physical comfort and the release from avoidable 
 economic uncertainty are merely a first and ele- 
 mentary condition, it may well leave the question 
 of the particular form of industrial organisation 
 best suited to millennial existence to settle itself 
 when the time arrives. To insist upon the com- 
 plete "propaganda," the creed, the whole creed, 
 and nothing but the creed, as the test of political 
 communion, can only have the effect of dividing 
 and weakening the forces on which we have 
 to rely for the next great instalment of social 
 reform. On the other hand, the fragments of the 
 socialist faith that are apt to find their way into 
 parliamentary programmes, and to form the actual 
 bond of the labour party itself State limit of hours 
 of employment, minimum wage, old age pensions, 
 poor law administration, including methods of 
 dealing with unemployment are pre-eminently 
 matters to be treated apart from doctrinaire 
 economics in the light of a true social ideal and 
 of the best available experience. 
 
 On these and other practical problems it would 
 be pedantic to seek for guidance in the deductions 
 from abstract philosophical principles. Yet ideas 
 like Green's will serve a useful purpose if they 
 help to remind us that indispensable though a 
 beginning in some of these directions may be, the 
 surest way to the end is not always what seems 
 the shortest, and that it would be easy to adopt
 
 100 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 measures of immediate relief that would have the 
 result of lowering the tone and relaxing the work- 
 ing energy of the permanent organs of progress. 
 To take a single example which seems likely to 
 form a battle-ground in the immediate future. 
 No one who feels the pressure of industrial dis- 
 organisation on those who are most helpless to 
 protect themselves against it can fail to under- 
 stand the attraction of proposals to throw upon 
 the State the responsibility of finding work for 
 the unemployed. But no one who has faced the 
 problem with the requisite detachment and with 
 an eye to all its bearings can fail also to be struck 
 with the danger which the acceptance of it would 
 involve not only to industry in general, from 
 whose disorganisation the weaker industrial units 
 would be the first to suffer, but to every kind 
 of combination and co-operative effort, whether 
 voluntary as in the trade-union, or municipal as 
 in the labour bureau, which rests in any part on 
 the desire to meet in a spirit of courage the con- 
 tingencies of working life as a whole. Labour 
 organisations have had their enemies, and severe 
 blows have recently been aimed at them, but it 
 is doubtful whether their worst enemies, without 
 intending it, are not those who seek by providing 
 soft options for membership of a society or con- 
 nection with other character-forming institutions 
 to undermine the claim they have on the support 
 of the working classes. 
 
 While keeping, therefore, an open mind as to
 
 nr.] THE APPEAL OF IDEALISM 101 
 
 what the future may bring forth in respect to the 
 development of new forms in the ownership and 
 administration of land and capital, and of the 
 nature and amount of the aid that the State and 
 the Municipality may be able to offer in the 
 development of a higher standard of life in all 
 classes of workers, Green would probably have 
 directed his main efforts as a politician, had he lived, 
 to securing a concentration of progressive pur- 
 pose, inspired by the ideal of more fully-developed 
 human capacity, upon some such programme as 
 that sketched above. To this he would have 
 summoned fellow-workers, not only in the name 
 of temporal betterment or of better adaptation of 
 society to its terrestrial environment, but in the 
 name of a life whose time-order is only one aspect 
 (perhaps a superficial one) of its real nature, and 
 whose outlook is not bounded by any merely 
 earthly existence. 
 
 With such a union in view I can conceive of 
 him addressing at the present crisis a concordat 
 to all classes of active reformers, liberal and 
 radical, moderate and progressive, religious and 
 secular, and more particularly to individualists and 
 socialists. To the individualist it would say : " By 
 all means hold to the moral individualism which 
 is the counterpart of the moral socialism we have 
 spoken of. Individual character is the bed-rock 
 the one thing that is needful. But remember, 
 too, that character, particularly in its early forma- 
 tions, is a sensitive and delicately responsive thing.
 
 102 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 Environment exercises an enormous influence upon 
 it. Environment, moreover, is itself enormously 
 controllable, and in these days we have made 
 enormous strides in learning how to control it. 
 See, therefore, that no individualistic shibboleths, 
 or the ghosts of shibboleths, frighten you out 
 of the courageous and consistent use of the most 
 effective means of moulding it to your purpose 
 that civilisation has put into your hands the 
 modern state and municipality." 
 
 To the socialist it would say : " By all means 
 preach the influence of circumstance and the power 
 and duty of the organised community to mould it 
 to the highest ends. If you like, and you under- 
 stand what it means, teach as a part of this the 
 collective control of the means of production. 
 But never forget that the highest and only real 
 end or good is a form of will and character, and 
 that this is something that can never in strict 
 sense be given from without. The community 
 may open up to each the way to achieving it for 
 himself. It is pledged by the Grace and the 
 human effort in the past that have brought it into 
 being to nothing less on behalf of each and all in 
 the time to come. But if its gifts are such as to 
 fail to call out the energy needed to turn them 
 to truly human ends, they will serve merely to 
 hinder the object it has in view. Socialism, or as 
 much of it as you deserve and as is good for you, 
 will come sure enough with the spread of the social 
 will. When it tries to outrun the available supply
 
 iv.] IDEALISM AND EMPIRE 105 
 
 of enlightened public spirit it only courts disaster 
 like a column in battle that outruns its base." 
 
 To both it would say : " Remember withal that 
 in politics as in life, where the end, as here it would 
 seem, is the same, common -sense and common 
 charity can carry people a long way together, 
 Remember that your opponent is more than in 
 his war-paint you take him to be the indi- 
 vidualist more than a capitalist, or the friend of 
 the capitalist ; the socialist more than an agitator, 
 or the dupe of agitators. This is not to say merely 
 that he is a good fellow, though he is likely enough 
 to be that, too ; but to say that, wanting at bottom 
 to do right, he knows in his heart that life at the 
 best is a complicated business, and that he is in 
 mortal doubt as to what in particular it is right to 
 do. And this means that underneath your differ- 
 ences, whether in inherited instinct or in formed 
 opinion, there is working a principle (perhaps a 
 Will like the best part of your own) leading you 
 by ways that you do not clearly understand to a 
 good that is greater than you know." 
 
 IDEALISM AND EMPIRE. But to many these 
 questions may seem to be of secondary and some- 
 what parochial interest as compared with the larger 
 political issues which in the last quarter of a 
 century have opened to our view. The really 
 important phenomenon in our own time, it may 
 be held, is the breakdown of the ideal of national 
 commonwealths which dominated the middle part
 
 104 IDEALISM AND POLITICS [LEW. 
 
 of last century and the rise of the conviction that 
 the future lies with the great world-wide empires. 
 With this the most pressing problem has come for 
 us to be the possibility of an Empire which shall also 
 be a State in any real sense of the word. Can com- 
 munities widely separated by the sea, with different 
 social ideals, and with the constant reminder before 
 them of their individual geographical unity and the 
 possibilities of internal development, feeling in their 
 veins the instincts and the energy of indepen- 
 dent personality, be permanently welded together 
 under the sense of a common good represented 
 by a central government ? This is not a ques- 
 tion merely of colonies that have sprung from a 
 common stock, speaking the same language, owning 
 allegiance to the same moral and religious tradi- 
 tion, cherishing the same pride in the military, 
 literary, artistic, political achievements of the 
 British race, but of many divergent nationalities 
 united by no bond but subjection to a distant, 
 to multitudes scarcely imaginable government. 
 Have the ideas which we have been examining, 
 it may be asked, any application here ? Have 
 they anything to teach us? It is this and not 
 any merely " social " bearing that must be the 
 test of their political value. 
 
 Green taught at a time at which the " problem 
 of empire " was just beginning to be realised. 
 Seeley's Expansion of England was not published 
 till a year, Froude's Oceana till three years after 
 his death. There was, moreover, much in his own
 
 iv.] THE TASK OF EMPIRE 105 
 
 political instincts, particularly in his admiration 
 for John Bright and his antipathy to the policy 
 of Palmerston and Disraeli, that tended to blind 
 him to its significance. On the other hand, his 
 attitude to the American War, in which he ardently 
 supported the North, to the demand for Polish 
 independence which he "took to be an impossi- 
 bility," and to the maintenance of the Union with 
 Ireland and its pacification by good rule which 
 he held to be possible and necessary, showed how 
 little sympathy he had with separatist proposals 
 founded on abstract theories of liberty. For the 
 existence of political union he held it to be 
 essential "not, indeed, that every one subject to 
 the laws should take part in voting them, still 
 less that he should consent to their application to 
 himself, but that it should represent an idea of 
 common good which each member of the society 
 can make his own so far as he is rational." 
 
 On these slight indications it would be improper 
 to attempt to deduce definite teaching on the 
 Welt-Politik of the present day, but I should fail 
 of the intention of these lectures if I did not try 
 to indicate the general bearing of the view of 
 life for which he stood upon its main problems. 
 
 On the meaning of our Empire in general it 
 is not, I think, difficult to see what his Idealism 
 implies. I have myself tried to interpret it in the 
 light of similar ideas. * Starting from the dis- 
 tinction between questions of origin and of right, 
 
 1 " The Meaning of Imperialism " (Fortnightly Review, August 1900). 
 
 O
 
 106 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 I have tried to show that we must repudiate any 
 attempt to interpret our responsibilities in the 
 light of the facts of their origin alone. We 
 must insist that the question of the acts by which 
 our Empire has been won is entirely different 
 from the question of the responsibilities we have 
 incurred by winning it. A nation, like an in- 
 dividual, is tied by a mysterious and irrevocable 
 bond to its own past, and to repudiate the duties 
 its past has brought on the ground of the in- 
 advertence, or the wickedness of the acts which 
 have led to them, is only to add one sin to another. 
 The question is not whether we were right in 
 undertaking all that our rule involves, but of the 
 nature of the task itself, and our prospects of 
 success in the effort to perform it. 
 
 The task I defined as "nothing less than the 
 reconstruction of the moral, industrial and political 
 ideas of some four or five hundred million of souls 
 of every race and religion and at every stage in 
 civilisation." This I would here correct, substi- 
 tuting " development " for reconstruction, and add 
 that the development must be of what is best in 
 the instincts and traditions of these races them- 
 selves. The principle which we are coming to 
 recognise as the teaching of common-sense appears 
 here from a new side as a corollary of the theoretic 
 relation of the Will of a people, however backward 
 its civilisation may be, to its customs and institu- 
 tions. If there be any truth in the above teach- 
 ing, there is latent in the laws, institutions and
 
 TV.] THE COMMON BASIS OF CIVILISATION 107 
 
 ritual observances of even the most backward 
 societies the aspiration after a form of life which, 
 while in its details it is adapted to the particular 
 instincts and experience of the people who have 
 developed them, yet in its broad features is human 
 and universal. What a sovereign, or, as I should 
 prefer to call it, a protector nation has to aim at 
 can never be the destruction of the subject's faith 
 in the particular forms in which the general will 
 has expressed itself among them, but in the recogni- 
 tion of the better elements which they contain, 
 and the attempt to develop them in the spirit ot 
 the original deposit. Only thus can there be any 
 internal coherence and strength ; only thus, I 
 would venture to say, any value to civilisation in 
 the life of the races which by our rule we seek 
 to preserve and educate. 
 
 In illustration of my point I would quote from 
 a document which has attracted far less notice in 
 this country than it deserves. Though published 
 in view of the state of matters in China some 
 years ago, it is sufficiently significant as a warning 
 of what might be the result in our own Empire 
 of the policy that is denounced. It bears the date 
 of the thirty- third year of Meiji (1900), and is 
 signed by six representatives of the Great Japan 
 Buddhists' Union at their Headquarters in the 
 Kenninji Temple, Kyoto. Its object is to protest 
 in the name of the " higher religion " and of civilisa- 
 tion against the methods which European mission- 
 aries and educational agencies have seen fit to
 
 108 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 adopt in China. In their dealings with individuals 
 and with the Government, these, it points out, have 
 often pursued their ends in a spirit of worldliness 
 and self-assertion the very opposite to that of 
 true religion. On the other hand, by their dis- 
 regard of the laws and customs of the country, 
 they have succeeded in undermining the respect 
 of their converts, and through them of the worst 
 part of the population, for the existing order. To 
 these causes it attributes in large part the exist- 
 ing distrust of foreign influence throughout the 
 Empire, and the violent outbreaks against its 
 representatives that have recently horrified man- 
 kind. By way of contrast and example it goes 
 on to quote the striking action of the Japanese 
 Buddhists who, on the occasion of the destruction 
 by the Chinese of their temple at Amoy, used 
 every effort to dissuade the Home Government 
 from pressing for damages. It ends with an 
 appeal to foreign authorities for a radical change 
 of method, imploring them henceforth to pro- 
 hibit their agencies from "any line of conduct 
 subversive of the ancient customs and manners 
 of China, or derogating to the laws, or liable 
 to be recognised as producing misprision through 
 partiality displayed towards the converts as against 
 the unbeliever." The true way is to "assume 
 a respectful attitude towards the customs and eti- 
 quette as well as the laws of China, however rudi- 
 mentary those may seem to be ; and endeavour by 
 degrees to implant the seeds of civilisation and
 
 iv.] THE SPIRIT OF LOYALTY 109 
 
 religion." Only thus "will the sources of disturb- 
 ance in China become extinct, and a new era of 
 mental enlightenment immediately dawn upon the 
 Chinese, with every prospect of the reconciliation 
 of the Occidental and Oriental civilisations." These 
 are golden words. In no other way than this will 
 it be possible for us to establish and maintain an 
 empire that is more than one in name. 
 
 As a foundation for the whole, Idealism would 
 agree with what would seem to.be the obvious sug- 
 gestion of common-sense, that our first task must be 
 that of building up some sort of loyalty to ourselves 
 in the mind of the subjects. It would merely add, 
 from its own particular point of view, that this can 
 only mean the creation in these vast populations 
 of some sense of their dependence on the institu- 
 tions which are the symbol of our government for 
 all that they most value in their lives for peace 
 and security of person and property, for command 
 of the resources of science in the control of nature, 
 for freedom of thought and speech, for their terri- 
 torial homes, and for the graves and worship of 
 their ancestors. To state the problem in this way 
 does not, perhaps, carry us very far in the direction 
 of its solution, but it has the advantage of taking 
 imperial politics out of the narrow setting it is apt 
 to receive in current discussions. It reminds us, for 
 instance, that such proposals as fiscal reform could 
 be at their best but a small contribution to the real 
 end we have to view, and do not touch the most 
 difficult part of our immediate task the attach-
 
 110 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 ment to ourselves of the native populations of 
 Africa and India. It sets our problem before us 
 in all its extent and in its essential difficulty. But 
 it sets it before us also as a call to the spirit of 
 humanity within ourselves. For it suggests to us 
 that while the forms of civilisation with which we 
 are dealing are manifold, it is the same human will 
 that is working in all 
 
 As the corollary, moreover, of a philosophy 
 that teaches the unity of human nature, it comes 
 with an even more definite suggestion of hope. 
 Feeling is not something separate from intelligence. 
 If we have as yet failed to capture the imagination 
 and the heart of the vast majority of our fellow- 
 subjects, there remains their intelligence. What 
 Green held to be true of Nature (and this was the 
 central point of all his teaching), he held to be 
 still more obviously true of the civilised State. 
 The State is founded on the deepest element 
 in the will, but as will and intelligence are ulti- 
 mately one, it may be said just for this reason 
 to be "traversed by currents of the intellect," 
 and "where intellect has gone, sentiment has 
 followed." Let the peoples then but know. Let 
 them know through education and example what 
 good government means, and we may leave it to 
 the spirit of all good of which government is the 
 highest earthly expression to enlist their feeling 
 and conscious will upon its side. 
 
 And this suggests a last point: true know- 
 ledge comes only through action. On nothing, as
 
 iv.] SELF-GOVERNMENT AND EMPIRE 111 
 
 we have seen, does Green lay greater stress than 
 on the effect of participation in government as the 
 only way to turn loyal subjection into intelligent 
 patriotism. One passage bears so directly on the 
 present question that it seems to have been 
 written for our guidance : " That active interest in 
 the service of the State which makes patriotism 
 in the better sense, can hardly arise while the 
 individual's relation to the State is that of a passive 
 recipient of protection in the exercise of his rights 
 of person and property. While this is the case, he 
 will give the State no thanks for the protection, 
 which he will come to take as a matter of course, 
 and will only be conscious of it when it descends 
 upon him with some unusual demand for service 
 or payment, and then he will be conscious of it 
 in the way of resentment. If he is to have a 
 higher feeling of political duty he must take part 
 in the work of the State. He must have a share, 
 direct or indirect, by himself acting as a member, 
 or by voting for the members of supreme or pro- 
 vincial assemblies in making and maintaining the 
 laws which he obeys." 1 
 
 These are words of truth and soberness the 
 foundation of philosophical and all other forms of 
 radicalism. They are theory indeed ; and to the 
 distant administrator contending with the super- 
 stition, the petty jealousies and the stupidities of 
 communities scarcely emerged from barbarism, 
 may seem to have little relation to the hard facts 
 
 1 Principles of Political Obligation, 122.
 
 118 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 
 
 of the situation, while to the governing classes at 
 home they suggest a long vista of agitation in the 
 interest of revolt and separation. But to Green 
 the incapacity of subjects is not the justification 
 but the condemnation of autocratic government, 
 while the uses, to which we forebode upon sur- 
 mise that representative institutions will be put, 
 can never, in the case of subject nations abroad 
 any more than subject classes at home, be urged 
 as a valid reason why they should be withheld. 
 It becomes, indeed, more and more obvious that 
 in bestowing self-government or any beginning of 
 it upon dependencies, the limits both of the " self" 
 and of the "government" have to be carefully 
 defined. Witness at the present moment the 
 difficulty of regulating the tide of immigration 
 from one part of the Empire to another. But 
 within these limits the ideal can never safely be 
 lost sight of. 
 
 CONCLUSION. Words like the above, together 
 with the philosophy of which they are a part, may 
 at least serve in a time of some discouragement to 
 strengthen us in the true democratic, which is also 
 the true imperialist faith, and to remind us that if 
 we fail to live up to it, it will not be owing to any 
 fault in its theory, but to some defect in ourselves 
 or our instruments, some inability to enter into the 
 common purpose of all civilisation, and to embody 
 the spirit of the best political teaching in our actual 
 administration. What, perhaps, is chiefly wanted
 
 iv.] SELF-GOVERNMENT AND EMPIRE 113 
 
 at the present time is not, indeed, that philosophers 
 should be rulers, but that rulers should have some- 
 thing of the rooted conviction of the reality of their 
 best ideals, for which all the great philosophers, 
 and more particularly the philosopher we have 
 been studying, stand.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Green's Criticism of Popular Logic (p. 28) 
 
 " IF all reality were reducible to a multitude of 
 connected successions and simultaneities (we must 
 add * connected,' if such an account of reality is 
 to have any appearance of corresponding with 
 Science) there would still be implied a single 
 subject to which all these were relative. And it 
 would still be misleading to speak (as Mill does) 
 of nature as made up of separate uniformities 
 in respect of simultaneity and succession, since 
 this conveys the notion that each uniformity is 
 independent of all the rest ; which is to reduce 
 the world to chaos. That which gives its character 
 to any sequence or simultaneity (that character 
 which Science seeks to ascertain) is not the number 
 of instances in which the sequence or simultaneity 
 has occurred, though that is what we seem to 
 imply when we make 'uniformity' the differentia 
 of the sequence or the simultaneity (the appear- 
 ance of life in a particular part of the earth, and 
 certain conditions of temperature, etc., could but 
 occur once, yet it is not the less a determined 
 simultaneity which could not have been other than 
 it was) ; it is its relation to the other simultaneities 
 and successions which, if it be so, form the system 
 of nature. 
 
 Now this relation ol all simultaneities and suc- 
 cessions to each other, so that one could not be 
 without the rest, is not itself simultaneous with 
 
 115
 
 116 APPENDIX 
 
 or successive upon anything. It is not an event- 
 not in time and simultaneity and sequence are 
 only applicable to events. . . . The experience of 
 the constant sequence of event e on event d may 
 doubtless lead to the strongest refutation of one 
 on occasion of the other. But how should that 
 cause the belief that c will follow f when there 
 has been no constant experience of it, or lead to 
 an interrogation of nature in order to explain the 
 apparent irregularity in the sequence of e on y? 
 In fact, all the attempts to explain * belief in 
 uniformity ' as resulting from the passive experience 
 of constancy in the sequence of events, presuppose 
 some rudimentary conception of nature. Without 
 this, such experience could only yield a bundle 
 of expectations of which one might indefinitely 
 strengthen or weaken another, but of which none 
 could afford any explanation of another. With 
 this rudimentary conception (of which the true 
 account is that it is the presence in us, as our 
 self-consciousness, of the single subject which is 
 presupposed in the possibility of nature) the several 
 constancies and inconstancies become constantly 
 more and more explanatory of each other." 1 
 
 1 Works, vol. ii. pp. 304-306
 
 INDEX 
 
 ARISTOTLE, 84, 64, 97 
 
 BALLIOL COLLEGE, 1, 83 
 
 Bentham, 36n. 
 
 Booth, Sir C., 97 
 
 Bosanquet, B., viii, 53, 59n., 89n., 
 
 91 u. 
 
 Bright, John, 105 
 Burke, Edmund, 69 
 Butler, 6 
 
 CAPITALISM, 96 
 Carlyle, 27, 82, 84, 85n. 
 Christianity, 46, 73 
 Circumstances, 35, 62, 102 
 Communism, 77 
 Cromwell, 62, 82 
 
 DEMOCRACY, 81 foil. 
 Desire, 20 foil. 
 Determinism, 5 
 Disraeli, 105 
 
 EDUCATION, 82 foil. 
 Efficiency, 86 
 Empire, 103 
 Evolution, 40 foil. 
 
 FACTORY Acts, 54 
 Family, the, 94 foil. 
 Freedom, 24 foil. 
 Froude, 10, 104 
 
 GREEK Ethics, 33 
 
 God, 13, 14 foil., 39, 42 
 
 Good, Theory of, 18 foil. ; 
 
 Common, 54 ; Individual and 
 
 Social, 34 
 
 HAMILTON, 13 
 Happiness, 24, 27, 35 
 Hedonism, 4, 27, 29, 36 
 Hegel, 47, 69 
 
 Hobbes, 50, 57, 58, 59n. 
 Hobhouse, L. T., 54n., 84, 87 
 Humanism, 8 
 Humanity, 43 
 Hume, 6, 22 
 Huxley, 6 
 
 IMPERIALISM, 103 foil. 
 Individualism, xi, 51, 54, 87 foil., 
 
 101 
 Institutions, 83 
 
 JAMES, Professor WILLIAM, 11 
 Japan, 107 
 Jowett, 1 
 
 KANT, 13, 25, 73 
 Knowledge, Theory of, 9 foil. 
 
 LABOUR Politics, 99 
 
 Land, 89 
 
 Law, 55 foil. 
 
 Lewes, G. H., 4 
 
 Liberty, 84, 90 ; see Freedom 
 
 Locke, 60, 68 
 
 r, Professor, x, 49, 81 
 M'Taggart, J. M. E., 30 
 Martineau, J., 6 
 Mazzini, 63n. 
 Mill, J. S., 4, 9, 12, IS, 36n., 84, 
 
 87, 115 
 
 Modern spirit, 3 
 Motive, 21 foil. 
 
 NATIONALITY, 93 
 Natural rights, 88 
 Naturalism, 4 foil., 7, 41, 93 
 Nature, 20, 110 ; Law of, 26, 72 
 Nettleship, R. L., 1 
 
 OWEN, ROBERT, 49, 9i 
 
 117
 
 118 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAINE, 52, 73 
 
 Palmerstou, 105 
 
 Personality, 37 
 
 Philosophy, 6, 45; Moral, 38; 
 
 and Practice, 39 
 Plato, 47, 55, 64, 09n., 93 
 Pleasure, 26 foil. 
 Poor Law, 97 
 Positivism, 43 
 Pragmatism, 8, 18, 32 
 Property, 74 foil., 93 foil. 
 Providence, 63, 69, 73, 93 
 
 R \-nn.\i.r., Dr, 84n. 
 
 Reason, 25 
 
 Reform, 85 
 
 Relation as basis of Knowledge 
 
 and Reality, ]1 
 Right, 59, 68 foil., 73 ; Natural, 
 
 88 
 
 Ritchie, D. G., x, 52n. 
 Rousseau, 59, 73 
 Ruskin, 27 
 
 ST PAUL, 25 
 Seeley, 104 
 
 Self, The Timeless, 16 
 Self-government, 110 
 
 realisation, 23 foil. 
 
 Sidgwick, H., 36n. 
 
 Sin, 42 
 
 Social contract, 58 
 
 Socialism, xii, 49, 91 foil. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert., ix, 4, 13, 60, 52 
 
 State, 47 foil., 56 ; Interference, 87 
 
 Stoics, 25 
 
 Stout, Professor G. F., 23n. 
 
 TAYLOR, Professor A. E., 26n. 
 Temperance legislation, 89 
 Theology, see God 
 Toynbee, 83 
 Trade-unionism, 97 
 
 UTILITARIANISM, 29, 35, 51 
 
 WALLACE, A. R., 63n. 
 Wells, H. G., 95! 
 Will, 5, 20 foil. ; and Circum- 
 stance, 62 foil. ; the General, 67 
 Working classes, 97
 
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