The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

(ii.) Every individual mind is a system of such systems corresponding to the totality of social groups as seen from a particular position.

(iii.) The social whole, though implied in every mind, only has reality in the totality of minds in a given community considered as an identical working system.

(i.) Society and the State and every institution present themselves to us at first sight as a number of persons, together, perhaps, with certain buildings and other external apparatus, and certain kinds of work carried on and tangible results produced—so many children “educated,” so many workmen “employed,” so many ships built or fields tilled.

But if we could bring before ourselves the complete reality of any social group or institution, we should find ourselves considering a very different order of facts. Let us think for a moment of a rate-supported elementary school. We imagine it as a heap of buildings and a mass of children with a percentage of teachers scattered among {171} them. But in what does its actual working really consist, and on what does it depend?

The actual reality of the school lies in the fact that certain living minds are connected in a certain way. Teachers, pupils, managers, parents, and the public must all of them have certain operative ideas, and must be guided according to these ideas in certain portions of their lives, if the school is to be a school. Now, the being guided by certain operative ideas is, in other words, the activity of certain appercipient masses dictating a certain point of view, in so far as those particular masses are awake. And it must be noted that the connection or identity in which the school exists presupposes a different activity, that is, a different appercipient system, in every mind, and more especially in every class of mind concerned. It is the same as in our old example of the screw and the nut. No school could be made of teachers alone or of pupils alone; nor, again, could a school be made with teachers who were all the same, or with pupils who were all the same.

So, if we could visualise the reality of the school—the institution—what we should see would be an identical connection running through a number of minds, various and variously conditioned. But within each mind the connection would take a particular shape, such as to play into the connections with all other minds, as a cogwheel plays into the other cogwheels of a machine. The pupil must be prepared to learn in his particular way and the teacher to teach in his particular way. The parents and the public also have their {172} own relations to the work of teaching, and whether for good or for evil they take up some attitude to it, and their attitude modifies it. Thus the connection, as it is within any one mind, is useless and meaningless if you take it wholly apart from what corresponds to it in the others. It is like a wheel without an axle or a pump handle without a pump. And it is because of this nature of the elements which make up the institution that it is possible for the institution itself to be an identity, or connection, or meeting point, by which many minds are bound together in a single system.

It may seem as if this way of analysing an institution was reducing a solid fact into mere thoughts. But it is not really so. Taking the ideas of all concerned as they really are, we have the facts in space and time—buildings, appliances, hours of work and attendance, and so on—included in them. It is impossible to state the idea fully and correctly without including the environment on which it rests, and the activities in which it is realised. We are not to omit the facts in space and time from what we mean by an institution; the only thing is that we have not known them as they really are till we have known them as bound into unity by the mental systems of which they are the context or the expression. The child and the teacher alike must think of their work with reference to particular times and places, or they would not do it at those times and places; and it is only in actually doing it at those times and places that the idea, or point of view, which stands for the school in each of their minds, is able to assert itself without frustration.

{173} Thus we may fairly say that every social group, or institution, is the aspect in space and time of a set of corresponding mental systems in individual minds. We may draw corollaries from this conception, both as to the nature of the individual will, or active mind, and as to the nature of the social and political whole.

(ii.) Every individual mind, in so far as it thinks and acts in definite schemes or contexts, is a structure of appercipient systems or organised dispositions. Now, we do not suggest at present that all appercipient systems can be represented as social groups, though there are few, if any, such systems which do not involve some relations with persons connected in time and space. But it is clear, from the explanations of the last section, that every social group or institution involves a system of appercipient systems, by which the minds that take part in it are kept in correspondence. Every individual mind, then, so far as it takes part in social groupings or institutions, is a structure of appercipient systems, answering, each to each, to the different capacities in which it enters into each grouping respectively. We have already remarked on the way in which the distinction between different “capacities” answers to the psychological tendency for the activity of one appercipient system to obstruct the activity of all others. It is hardly necessary to point out that, partly for this reason, though the mind must be an actual structure of systems, it is very far from being a rational system of systems. The fact that, when one system is active, all others, as a rule, are inert, conceals the contradictions which {174} underlie the entire fabric, and protects them from criticism and correction.

But though the mind is thus implicitly self-contradictory in various degrees, this does not alter the fact that its general nature is to be a unity of organised ideas answering to the actual set of parts which the individual plays in the world of space and time. Thus each individual mind, if we consider it as a whole, is an expression or reflection of society as a whole from a point of view which is distinctive and unique. Every social factor or relation, to which it in any way corresponds, or in which it in any way plays its part, is represented in some feature of its appercipient organism. And probably, just as, in any man’s idea of London, there is hardly any factor of London life which does not at least colour the background, so, in every individual impression of the social whole, there is no social feature that does not, in one way or another, contribute to the total effect. In the dispositions of every mind the entire social structure is reflected in a unique form, and it is on this reflection in every mind, and on the uniqueness of the form in which it is reflected, that the working of the social whole, by means of differences which play into one another, depends. If, so to speak, we lay a mind on the dissecting table, we find it to consist for the most part of a fabric of organised dispositions, each disposition corresponding to a unique point of view or special angle [1] from which it plays a part in some human function. About the precise relation of a human function to the fact that, as a {175} rule, it connects together a plurality of human beings, we shall have more to say in the following chapter. It is enough for the present that whatever does connect a plurality of human beings depends on the operation of appercipient systems in their minds, and therefore every individual mind is, as Plato has told us, so far as it goes, for good or evil, the true effective reality of the social whole. And it is easy to see when we consider the working of organised apperception, how it is possible actually to will more or less of our own volitional system. There is first the contrast between appercipient systems which are at any time active and those which are not active, and then there is the contrast between our actual volitional nature at its actual fullest, and the demands implied by the nature of the whole, from which it is inseparable. These demands are always appearing more or less in every act of willing our own will.