GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THB IDEALIST THEORY OF THB STATE 599
of the value which the individual may derive from participation
in them. Hegel would agree that loyalty to
family, church or union is a good and should be cultivated.
But he conceived of political education as consisting in an
expansion of these local loyalties* so that the ever-widening
circle of the individual's loyalties would ultimately become
coterminous with his relation to the State in which all
the lesser loyalties would be gathered up and trans-
cended. The English philosopher Dr. Bosanquet ( 1848-1923)
goes further than Hegel and looks to political education
not merely to transcend, but ultimately to eliminate all
loyalties other than loyalties to the State. In the perfect
State there will, .in his view, be no loyalties independent
of a man's loyalty to the State, since even loyalty to a
cricket dub will in effect be loyalty to the State of which
the cricket club is itself an expression. It is for this reason
that sports organisations in fascist countries are regarded
as temporary repositories of the honour of the State.
of the Individual in the State
(6) Absorption
The conclusion of this line of thought is the complete
absorption of the individual in the State. The more completely
the individual permits his will to be dominated
by that of the State, the more wholeheartedly he makes
its welfare his concern, its ends his ends, the higher the
degree of morality which he will achieve. Thus the theory
ultimately envisages individual morality as identical with
service to the State, provided that the term "service"
is
interpreted in the wide Sense in which it is used by
Plato, die sense in which to serve is to observe one's station
and to perform one's duties in the community to which
one belongs. Arguing on these lines Bradley reaches the
conclusion that "a man's life with its moral duties is in
the main filled up by his station in that system
of wholes
which the State is, and . . . this partly by its laws and
institutions, arid still more by its spirit, gives him the life
which he does live and ought to live". To sum up, since
the texture of morality is woven from our relations with our