2. The principles which constitute a society are facts as well as ideas, and purposes as well as facts. This threefold character is united in what we describe by the general term “institutions,” a term which would apply perfectly well to Plato’s “classes” in virtue of the definite relations with which he invests them.
It is unnecessary to insist on the external aspect of institutions as facts in the material world; but it will be worth while to gather up the leading conceptions of our analysis by tracing the nature of some prominent “institutions,” as ideas, constituent elements of the mind, which are also purposes; that is, as ethical ideas. An institution may have grown up without special ordinance, or may have been called into existence by an act of public will. But it has always the character of being recognised as if it had been “instituted” or established to fulfil some public or quasi-public {298} purpose. [1] An old servant is sometimes said to be “quite an institution”—he is characterised by the function of keeping alive certain common traditions of a school, perhaps, or a family—an annual custom may be an institution in virtue of the same kind of recognition; Sunday is an institution; the word is indeed very vaguely applied, for obviously almost every object or event can have a significance of this kind attached to it in jest or earnest. But for all that, we can see pretty plainly what usage is driving at. An institution implies a purpose or sentiment of more minds than one, and a more or less permanent embodiment of it. “Of more minds than one,” because it is to fix the meeting points of minds that the external embodiment is necessary.
[1] Why is not a memorial statue or building, which expresses a public idea, an “institution” apart from its uses? Apparently because it has not the notion of bringing persons together or inducing persons to act in some definite way. An “institution,” then, belongs to the level of society, as such, conceived as a number of persons. Thus, a work of art is hardly an institution, though it expresses the “universal” of many minds; but a weekly concert is an institution, because many persons act together in giving and attending it.
In institutions, then, we have that meeting point of the individual minds which is the social mind. But “meeting point” is an unhappy term, suggesting objects in space that touch at certain spots. Rather let us say, we have here the ideal substance, which, as a universal structure, is the social, but in its differentiated cases is the individual mind. And it is necessary to observe that the material of this fabric has determinate sources. Mind is not an empty point. It is the world as experienced. The institutions, which as ethical {299} ideas constitute mind, are, like a theory, attempts at unity in face of needs, pressures, facts, and suggestions which arise in what we call our surroundings, and to each of which mind reveals a different quality; as every tone of a landscape elicits its peculiar shade of feeling, which but for it might have remained latent for ever. It takes the whole world to call out the whole mind. But it will be enough if we can trace, in some prominent examples, the nature of an institution as at once a dealing with surroundings, [1] an ethical idea, and a social principle.
[1] There are, of course, no absolute surroundings. At every point experience rests on mind. But at any point at which we are observing, we must take some facts as, comparatively speaking, given.
3. The family starts from the universal physical fact of parentage, but takes its ethical value mainly from the special phase of parental relation which leads to the formation of a household. The association of parents and children in a household, which is permanent until broken up into other households, is due to economic conditions. Calling to mind the original meaning of words, we see that we are asserting the formation of a house hold to be due to “household” [1] conditions. And this is something more than a pun. Whatever the surroundings may be which favour the formation of households, whether the difficulty of procuring livelihood, which makes the father’s continued care essential, [2] or the chances offered by agriculture to a stable group, they operate as elements in a human world, in a world which is constituted by {300} the focussing of “surroundings” (circumstances) in a whole. Conditions which have become “economic” have ceased to be material. They are motives, interests, means to ends. They bring the world into the mind, but in doing so they become factors in the purposiveness and re-adjustment, which the mind, as unity asserting itself throughout varied suggestions, is busied in bringing to pass. By demanding permanence, for instance, economic conditions elicit in the relation of parent and child the simplest form of universality necessary to an ethical idea.
[1] “Economy” = household management.
[2] It is said that the household does not readily form itself in very easy conditions of life.
We will not venture upon the history of phases of the family life, but will attempt at once to sketch its position and value in the typical civilisation of a modern State. Only it must be insisted on once more, [1] that the family or household as an ethical structure is not anterior to the State, but is rather a growth dependent on the spirit and protection of the State, and intentionally fostered by it as against forms of kinship which do less justice to the ethical possibilities of parentage.
[1] Cf. p. 272.