(c) The contrast between humanity and mankind has always uttered itself through a dichotomous mode of expression—Jew and Gentile, Greek [1] and barbarian, Mussulman and infidel, Christian {331} and heathen, white civilisations and the black and yellow races. It will be noted at once that some of these divisions contradict each other, and this fact may suggest the probability that to every people its own life has seemed the crown of things, and the remainder of mankind only the remainder. Such a suggestion may have a real bearing on our problem, and we will return to it. In the meantime, however, it is plain that humanity [2] as an ethical idea is a type or a problem rather than a fact. It means certain qualities, at once realised in what we take to be the crown of the race, and including a sensibility to the claims of the race as such. Sensibility to the claims of the race as such, is least of all qualities common to the race as such. The respect of States and individuals for humanity is then, after all, in its essence, a duty to maintain a type of life, not general, but the best we know, which we call the most human, and in accordance with it to recognise and deal with the rights of alien individuals and communities. This conception is opposed to the treatment of all individual human beings as members of an identical community having identical capacities and rights. It follows our general conviction that not numbers but qualities determine the value of life. But qualities, of course, become self-contradictory if they fail to meet the demands imposed on them by numbers.
And thus we recur to a suggestion noted {332} above. Every people, as a rule, seems to find contentment in its own type of life. This cannot contradict, for us, the imperativeness of our own sense of the best. But it may make us cautious as to the general theory of progress, and ready to admit that one type of humanity cannot cover the whole ground of the possibilities of human nature. Our action must, no doubt, be guided by what we can understand of human needs, and this must depend ultimately on our own type of life. But it makes a difference whether we start from the hypothesis that our civilisation as such stands for the goal of progress, or admit that there is a necessity for covering the whole ground of human nature. And it may be that, as the ground is covered, our States may go the way which others have gone, without, however, leaving things as they are. If the State, moreover, is not ultimate nor above criticism, no more is any given idea of humanity; and reference to “the interests of mankind” only names the problem, which is to find out what those interests are, in terms of human qualities to be realised.
[1] It is remarkable that a limitation of the earth’s surface, raising an idea of unity, has always, I believe, been presupposed. For the Greeks, Delphi was the centre of the earth; for us, the earth being a sphere and returning into itself, gives a certainty that it does not stretch away to infinity, so making unity of its inhabitants inconceivable. The remark, I think, is Kant’s.
[2] “Humanity” = “humaneness.” Scotch “Humanities” = Greek and Latin. Oxford “Literae humaniores” = classics and philosophy. Greek φιλάνθρωπον [philanthropon], a sense of what is due to man, e.g. of poetical justice.
(d) Neither the State, however, nor the idea of humanity, nor the interests of mankind, are the last word of theory. And even political theory must so far point ahead as to show that it knows where to look for its continuation. We have taken Society and the State throughout to have their value in the human capacities which they are the means of realising, in which realisation their social aspect is an inevitable condition (for human nature is not complete in solitude), but is not by itself, in its form of multitudes, the end. {333} There is, therefore, no breach of continuity when the immediate participation of numbers, the direct moulding of life by the claims and relations of selves, falls away, and the human mind, consolidated and sustained by society, goes further on its path in removing contradictions and shaping its world and itself into unity. Art, philosophy, and religion, though in a sense the very life-blood of society, are not and could not be directly fashioned to meet the needs and uses of the multitude, and their aim is not in that sense “social.” They should rather be regarded as a continuation, within and founded upon the commonwealth, of the work which the commonwealth begins in realising human nature; as fuller utterances of the same universal self which the “general will” reveals in more precarious forms; and as in the same sense implicit in the consciousness of all, being an inheritance which is theirs so far as they can take possession of it.
We have thus attempted to trace in outline the content of the self, implied, but imperfectly and variously reached, in the actual individual consciousness. It is because of this implication, carrying the sense that something more than we are is imperative upon us, that self-government has a meaning, and that freedom—the non-obstruction of capacities—is to be found in a system which lays burdens on the untamed self and “forces us to be free.” What we feel as mere force cannot as such be freedom; but in our subtle and complex natures the recognition of a force may, as we have tried to explain, sustain, regularise, and reawaken the operation of {334} a consciousness of good, which we rejoice to see maintained, if our intelligence fails of itself to maintain it, against indolence, incompetence, and rebellion, even if they are our own. This is the root of self-government, and true political government is self-government.
INDEX.
A.
Absolutism, Administrative, 63.
Actual Will, contrast Real Will, 118.
Albion, Launch of, 96 note.
Alexander, Prof., 174 n.
All and each, as Society and Individual, 81, 180.
Will of All dist. General Will, 111.
Allness, Judgment of, 112.
Altruism in H. Spencer, 24.
and Egoism, 47, 81, 83.
Amiel, cit, 236 note.
Analysis of motive, fallacy of, 291 ff.
Anglo-Saxon race, 301.
Anthropology in Hegel, 254.
Appercipient masses, 165 ff.
cpd. social groups, 169.
Aristocracy, Monarchy and Democracy, 284.
Aristotle, 5 ff., 32, 129 ff., 295 note.
on the poor, 319 note.
Army, opp. crowd, 160 ff.
Art, how far a social good, 333.
Artisan or public worker, 313 note.
Association, of persons and of ideas, 156 ff.
see ORGANISATION.
Athens, 115.
Attention, 216, see AUTOMATISM, APPERCIPIENT.
Austin, theory of Law, 261.
Authority of Society over Individual in Mill, 62.
Automatism in society, 183, ch. viii.
Autonomy, in Greece, 4.
moral, in Plato, 253.