Social compulsion therefore may be defined as discipline in the interest of positive freedom. We may expect that in future this salutary kind of compulsion will go to even much greater lengths than it has yet gone. Society as organized in the state has undoubtedly the right to interfere in the choice of the sexes by prohibiting the marriage of persons afflicted with infectious disease. If the study of human character could ever be so far developed as to determine what kind of temperaments are radically incompatible with one another (a bare throw in the air of course), it would be within the province of the state to prohibit the conjugal union of such temperaments, and thus to prevent the disastrous effects on real freedom which such incompatibilities are apt to cause. I am well aware of the perils of this point of view. There is a brutal factor in the action of society, as in that of individuals. A given community is apt to mistake its prejudices for principles, its torpor for conservatism, its superstitions for spirituality. Such apprehensions as those that weighed on the mind of John Stuart Mill as set forth in his _Essay on Liberty_ are not to be lightly dismissed. And yet the main trend of his argument was plainly determined by an individualistic conception of liberty which many of us no longer share. It is safe to say that on the whole the benefits of coercion outweigh the detriments. We have only to picture to ourselves a state of society in which these coercions should not exist to realize that this is so. The dangers are real, but are due to the abuse of force and not to the exercise of it under the controlling idea of positive freedom which is here proposed. FOOTNOTES: [103] A paper read before the Fourth Conference on Legal and Social Philosophy at Columbia University, November, 1915. (Reprinted from the _International Journal of Ethics_, April, 1916, pp. 420-423.) INDEX Achilles, 210 Africa, exploitation of, 187f, 335 Altruism, 79, 218, 220, 256 Antæus, 355 ἄπαξ λεγόμενον, 228 A priori knowledge, 105f, 111 Architecture, 286n Aristotle, 105, 127, 168n, 190, 281, 305, 319, 365 Ark of the Covenant, 77 Arnold, Matthew, 10, 298 Arnold von Winkelried, 358 Art, relation to Ethics, 277f; limitations, 287n; students of, 296 Asceticism, 363 Bacon, _On Studies_, 10 Baptism, 353 Beatrice, 170 Beauty, 281f Bereavement, 64, 162f Bergson, 108, 131n Blackstone, 185 Blake, William, 356 Bloch, 242 Bluntschli, 327f Buddha, 16, 32, 199, 347 Cæsar Borgia, 172 Cana, feast at, 206 Categorical Imperative, 75f; and hypothetical, 80 Causality, “prejudice of,” 110f, 136, 141, 171 Christianity, an estimate of, 30-42; other-worldliness of, 140, 268; national, 321; forced on the East, 331 Church, 347 Citizenship, 322 Confucius, 16, 31, 299 Congo, atrocities in, 330, 335, 338 Conscience, origin of, 78 Copernicus, 141