the education of children, though the interest in one's education is certainly private as well as public, while the prohibition of alcoholic liquors he regards as a gross usurpation upon the liberty of private life, though he cannot even pretend that alcoholism is a merely private concern. In fact, the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct is quietly laid aside and a quite different standard for judging the proper sphere of legislation is substituted; viz.: What can such an instrument as law reasonably be expected to accomplish, without the application doing more harm than good? The latter principle, while clearly superior as a practical guide, is not really a principle of liberty at all, except on the further assumption that certain desirable traits of character are hindered, or at least not helped, by the application of law.
It is with the recognition of the inevitable failure of any such distinction as that made by Mill that the idealist theory of the State, first presented in English by F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green, comes upon the scene. What idealism championed was in general a more concrete and positive view of individuality. If the individual cannot be defined by the circumscription of his interests, by the fencing off of an area within which outsiders have no business and will not be admitted, it is clear that the definition must imply rather a distinctive position among other persons, a place and a function which others could not immediately and fully take up and occupy. For isolation and exclusion we thus substitute some sort of determinate achievement which gives a person standing and perhaps also recognition among his fellows. "It [individuality] always comes from taking hold of the world in some definite way, which, just because it is definite and affirmative, is at once a distinct assertion of the self, and a transition from the private self into the great communion of reality."[1] It must be agreed that this is in accord with the standard by which in practice individuality is judged and also with an historical estimate of the individual. He is the man of pre-eminent achievement in some significant department of human endeavor. So far from being one whose interests are
- ↑ The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 126.
