THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Most men are at heart individualistic rebels against law 01 custom: the
social instincts are later and weaker than the individualistic, and need
reinforcement; man is not "good by nature/' as Rousseau was so dis-
astrously to suppose. But through association if even merely in the family,
sympathy comes, a feeling of kind, and at last of kindness. We like what
but also one which
is like us ; "we pity not only a thing we have loved,
we judge similar to ourselves"; 123 out of this comes an "imitation of
emotions," 124 and finally some degree of conscience. Conscience, however,
is not innate, but acquired; and varies with geography. 123 It is the deposit,
in the mind of the growing individual, of the moral traditions of the
group; through it society creates for itself an ally in the heart of .its enemy
the naturally individualistic soul.
Gradually, in this development,
dividual power which obtains in a state of nature, yields in organized
society to the legal and moral power of the whole. Might still remains
right; but the might of the whole limits the might of the individual
it comes about that the law of in-
limits it theoretically to his rights, to such exercise of his powers as agrees
with the equal freedom of others. Part of the individual's natural might,
or sovereignty, is handed over to the organized community, in return for
the enlargement of the sphere of his remaining powers. We abandon, for
example, the right to fly from anger to violence, and are freed from the
danger of such violence from others. Law is necessary because men are
subject to passions; if all men were reasonable, law would be superfluous.
The perfect law would bear to individuals the same relation which perfect
reason bears to passions : it would be the coordination of conflicting forces
to avoid the ruin and increase the power of the whole. Just as, in
metaphysics, reason is the perception of order in things, and in ethics
the establishment of order among desires, so in politics
it is the establishment
of order among men. The perfect state would limit the powers of
its citizens only as far as these powers were mutually destructive; it would
withdraw no liberty except to add a greater one.
The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by
fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with
full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the
state, I repeat, is not to make rational beings into brute beasts and machines.
It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead
men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason; that they may not waste their
strength in hatred, anger and guile, nor act unfairly toward one another.
Thus the end of the state is 126
really liberty.
Freedom is the goal of the state because the function of the state is to
promote growth, and growth depends on capacity finding freedom. But
^Ethics, III, 22, note. *"Ibid., 27, note i.
I, App. 27. T. T-P., ch. 20.