We may approach the matter in this way. The paradox is, that if you scrutinise the acts which have made States, and which carry them on, or which go on under and within them, you will every where be able to urge that they spring from self-interest and ambition—not from a desire for the common good. How then can we say that the State exists for a common good? Hegel’s large conception of a social fabric and the temper of mind which maintains it should have done some thing to meet this problem. But we may come a little closer to the precise difficulty.
Nothing is so fallacious as mere psychological analysis applied to the estimation of the purposes which rule a mind. In every act there is necessarily an aspect of the agent’s particular self. One way or another he is satisfied in it. So the pessimistic or superficial psychologist can always—not in some acts merely, but in all—discover a form of self-seeking. Life is a whole made up of particulars, and the universal is a connection within them, not another particular outside them; it is a mistake of principle to suppose that any act can be outside the tissue of aims, impulses, and emotions which affect the sensitive self. Great purposes work through these affections and transform them, but {292} cannot obliterate them without obliterating life. “There is nothing degrading in being alive.” [1] But there is a kind of eye which sees all these particulars apart from the substantive aims which give them their character, and treats them as if they were the sole determining motives of the agent. Hegel calls such a critic—he is thinking especially of historians—“the psychological valet, for whom there are no heroes, not because they are no heroes, but because he is only a valet.” On the whole, a man is what he does. If his series of actions has the root of the matter in it, it is wrong either for him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because they bring him gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement. To shrink from particular occasions of action because one’s self may find satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing of the abstract good. And “the laurels of mere willing are dry leaves that never have been green.”
[1] Rechtsphil., sect. 123.
We may illustrate these ideas from the life of the ordinary members of States, and from the career of a great ruler or conqueror. [1]
[1] Green, Principles of Political Obligation, sects. 121 and 128.
The life of an English labourer, for example, may concern itself with no such abstract ideas [1] as are expressed by the words “State” or “common good.” But, to begin with, he is a law-abiding citizen. He keeps his hands off others and their belongings by the same rule by which he expects others to keep their hands off him and his belongings. {293} [2] He recognises fairness of bargaining, and is prepared to treat others fairly, as he expects them to treat him. He is aware of his claims, that is to say, as depending on something in common between himself and others; and if he does not practically admit any such community, “he is one of the dangerous classes, virtually outlawed by himself.” [3]
[1] Although the literary class are liable very seriously to under-rate the significance of forms of thought unfamiliar to them.
[2] Habits, such as our habit of relying on security of life and property, are secondarily automatic, i.e. are very intimately connected with ideas. See chap. viii.
[3] Green, Loc. cit.
So far he is a loyal subject only. If he is to have a fuller sense of a social good, he must either take part in the work of the State, or at least be familiar with such work, through interest in his fellows share of it, and in the organisations which connect his class interests with the public good. His mind must not merely work in its place in the social mind, but must be in some degree aware of the connection between its place and the whole—of the appercipient structure to which it belongs. He must, in short, have touch with the connection which Hegel represents as that between the Bourgeois Society and the State proper. And this, in modern States, is in principle open to him.