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

786 ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
standard of nutrition. If it is difficult for a sick man to
pursue the good life, it is not less difficult for an uneducated
one. The background function which I am *gning to
the State includes, therefore, such training of the mind,
such refining of the spirit, as will fit a man to pursue truth
and apprehend values. Minimum necessary educational
requirements are that the democratic citizen should be made
free of the inherited knowledge and culture of his race, that
he should be given an acquaintance with what great men
have thought and said memorably about life, and that his
critical faculties should be developed so as to emancipate
him from a slavish dependence upon the thought of others
and equip him with the means of thinking for himself.
The State as a Developer of Personality. The view
that the function of the State should be to remove impediments
to the living of the good life by its members, rather
than to prescribe the nature of the good life which they
should live envisages, it will be seen, a wide area of activity
for the State. Wide as it is, it remains, from the point of
view of the individual, a background activity. The State
has, however, one positive rdle to play which enables it to
assume a place in the foreground of the individual's
consciousness. Of this rdle, some indication was given
in the last
1
chapter. The good life, I have suggested
in Pan II, is to be identified with the pursuit of certain
absolute values. Of these values, happiness and moral
goodness are two. Now both these values may be realized
in the service of the community. To many individuals,
indeed, a life of vigorous and useful public service is the
most easily accessible avenue to happiness. Such a life,
moreover, develops their best qualities and evokes the
highest that they have it in them to be. It is in the service
of the State that this land of life may be most fully lived
not necessarily in the maintenance of the State as it is, but
in the endeavour to transform the State as it is into something
which is nearer the heart's desire. This is the truth
1 See Chapter XVIII, pp. 761, 76*.