Society is as necessary to form persons as persons are to constitute society. Social union is the indispensable condition of the development of the special capacities of the individual members. Human self-perfection cannot be gained in isolation; it is attainable only in inter-relation with fellow-citizens in the social community. The law of our being, so revealed, involves in its turn civic or political duties. Moral goodness cannot be limited to, still less constituted by, the cultivation of self-regarding virtues, but consists in the attempt to realize in practice that moral ideal which self-analysis has revealed to us as _our_ ideal. From this fact arises the ground of political obligation, for the institutions of political or civic life are the concrete embodiment of moral ideas in terms of our day and generation. But, as society exists only for the proper development of persons, we have a criterion by which to test these institutions, viz. do they, or do they not, contribute to the development of moral character in the individual citizens? It is obvious that the final moral ideal is not realized in any body of civic institutions actually existing, but the same analysis which demonstrates this deficiency points out the direction which a true development will take. Hence arises the conception of rights and duties which _should_ be maintained by law, as opposed to those actually maintained; with the further consequence that it may become occasionally a moral duty to rebel against the state in the interest of the state itself, that is, in order better to subserve that end or function which constitutes the _raison d'etre_ of the state. The state does not consist in any definite concrete organization formed once for all. It represents a "general will" which is a desire for a common good. Its basis is not a coercive authority imposed upon the citizens from without, but consists in the spiritual recognition, on the part of the citizens, of that which constitutes their true nature. "Will, not force, is the basis of the state." Green's teaching was, directly and indirectly, the most potent philosophical influence in England during the last quarter of the 19th century, while his enthusiasm for a common citizenship, and his personal example in practical municipal life, inspired much of the effort made, in the years succeeding his death, to bring the universities more into touch with the people, and to break down the rigour of class distinctions.