But to Mr. Herbert Spencer the contrary proposition is absolutely convincing, and, indeed, on {71} their common premises, with equal reason. [1] It is ridiculous, he points out, to think of a people as creating rights, which it had not before, by the process of creating a government in order to create them. It is absurd to treat an individual as having a share of rights qua member of the people, while in his private capacity he has no rights at all.
[1] Ib., p. 88.
We need not labour this point further. It is obvious that Mr. Herbert Spencer is simply preferring the opposite extreme, in the antithesis of “self” and “government,” to that which commended itself to Bentham. If it is a plain fact that “a right” can only be recognised by a society, it is no less plain that it can only be real in an individual. If individual claims, apart from social adjustment, are arbitrary, yet social recognitions, apart from individual qualities and relations, are meaningless. As long as the self and the law are alien and hostile, it is hopeless to do more than choose at random in which of the two we are to locate the essence of right.
ii. And how alien and hostile the self and the law may seem we see even more crudely enunciated in Herbert Spencer than in Bentham or Mill, as the fundamental principle of the tradition has worked itself more definitely to the front. “The liberty [1] which a citizen enjoys is to be {72} measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.” And so we are astounded to find it maintained that the positive and active element in the right to carry on self-sustaining activities is of a non-social character, depending only on the laws of life, [2] and if the matter were pushed home, would have to be identified, one must suppose, with the more strictly animal element of the mind; while only the negative element arises from social aggregation, and it is this negative element alone which gives ethical character to the right to live. Though these distinctions apply primarily to the ground of the right to live, yet it appears inevitable that they represent the point of view from which the active self or individuality must be regarded on the principle we are pursuing. The ground of the right to live, as here stated, is simply the recognition that life is a good; and if the positive element of this good is non-social and only the negative is of social origin, and this alone is ethical, it seems clearly to follow that the making the most of life—its positive expansion and intensification—is excluded from the ethical aspects of individuality, and, indeed, that individuality has no ethical aspect at all. Here is the ultimate result of accepting as irreducible the distinction between the self and government, or the negative relation of individuality and law. Liberty and self are divorced from the moral end, a tendency which we noted even in Mill. Selves in society are regarded as if they {73} were bees building their cells, and their ethical character becomes comparable to the absence of encroachment by which the workers maintain the hexagonal outline due to their equal impact on each other as they progress evenly from equidistant centres. The self, which has ranked through out these views as the end, to whose liberty all is to be sacrificed, turns out to be the non-ethical element of life.
[1] Man v. State, p. 15. Cf. Seeley, Introd. to Political Science, p. 119: “Perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence of government.” I have attempted to point out the fallacy of this in a way applying to its practical and everyday meaning in my essay on “Liberty and Legislation,” in the volume of essays called The Civilisation of Christendom.
[2] Man v. State, p. 98.
Thus, when Professor Huxley speaks of “self-restraint as the essence of the ethical process,” [1] while “natural liberty” consists in “the free play of self-assertion,” we see how the whole method of approaching social and ethical phenomena is turned upside down unless the paradox of self-government is conquered once for all. The idea that assertion and maximisation of the self and of the individuality first become possible and real in and through society, and that affirmation and not negation is its main characteristic; these fundamental conceptions of genuine social philosophy [2] can only be reached through a destructive criticism of the assumptions which erect that paradox into an insoluble contradiction.
[1] Evolution and Ethics; pp. 27 and 31.
[2] For the Greek, it is society which is natural, positive, and promotive of man’s individuality. See ch. ii. above.
5. We may now restate the essence of the problem of self-government as it presents itself to the thinkers whom we have been reviewing. On the assumptions which they accept, the annihilating criticism of self-government in the first chapter of Mill’s Liberty is indeed irresistible. He begins by pointing out that in times of political immaturity, {74} the conception of political liberty consisted in setting limits to the power which the ruler, considered as an independent force opposed in interest [1] to his subjects, should be suffered to exercise over the community. But as it was found possible, in a greater and greater degree, to make the ruling power emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled,