impulses which solicit his interest. Thus, even in the case where law and institutions exercise restraint by force upon him, the restraint is only the extreme assertion of the real will, and therefore the instrument of liberty; he is forced to be free. "It is possible for us to acquiesce, as rational beings, in a law and order which on the whole makes for the possibility of asserting our true or universal selves, at the very moment when this law and order is constraining our particular private wills in a way which we resent, or even condemn."[1]
What we have here is but an application in political theory of the conception of system which is elaborated in idealist logic and metaphysics. In the consistency logic, every judgment is tested by its inclusion in a system of judgments, by its capacity to contribute to a consistent system of knowledge. In the metaphysics of absolute idealism, every experience is combined with, taken up into, the total experience of the Absolute, and thus its partiality and unreality are transcended. In precisely the same way the individual is taken up into the social system, which for ethical purposes is the manifestation of the Absolute. The individual in himself is partial, casual, one-sided; as Mr. Bradley says, a fragment torn from his context. Whatever positive ethical value he may possess arises from the place which he comes to occupy in an objective system of values. Society is conceived as a system of rights embodied in law, institutions, and generally recognized values. The self -development of the individual consists primarily in entering into and possessing the culture embodied in this system. His primary obligation is to find his place in the system; his good consists in being the instrument of the common good. The theory cannot be better summarized than in the title of Mr. Bradley's famous chapter, "My Station and its Duties." The reality of the individual is embodied in his station in the social system. If compulsion is necessary to make the individual fill his station, the compulsion is fully justified as the compulsion of the lower by the higher. The station and its duties are what the individual would will were he not infected by "indolence, ignorance, or rebellion."
- ↑ Bosanquet, op. cit., p. 127.
