Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet — John Shaqi
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard BosanquetGreen, Thomas Hill
Philosophy
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet
Green, Thomas Hill
Liberty; Natural law; Political obligation
23. According to the view here taken, then, reason and will, even
as they exist in men, are one in the sense that they are alike
expressions of one self-realising principle. In God, or rather in
the ideal human person as he really exists in God, they are actually
one; i.e. self-satisfaction is for ever sought and found in the
realisation of a completely articulated or thoroughly filled idea
of the perfection of the human person. In the historical man--in
the men that have been and are coming to be--they _tend_ to unite.
In the experience of mankind, and again in the experience of the
individual as determined by the experience of mankind, both the idea
of a possible perfection of man, the idea of which reason is the
faculty, and the impulse after self-satisfaction which belongs to
the will, undergo modifications which render their reconciliation
in the individual (and it is only in individuals that they can
be reconciled, because it is only in them that they exist) more
attainable. These modifications may be stated summarily as (1) an
increasing concreteness in the idea of human perfection; its gradual
development from the vague inarticulate feeling that there is such a
thing into a conception of a complex organisation of life, with laws
and institutions, with relationships, courtesies, and charities, with
arts and graces through which the perfection is to be attained; and
(2) a corresponding discipline, through inheritance and education, of
those impulses which may be called 'natural' in the sense of being
independent of any conscious direction to the fulfilment of an idea
of perfection. Such discipline does not amount to the reconciliation
of will and reason; it is not even, properly speaking, the beginning
of it; for the reconciliation only begins with the direction of the
impulse after self-satisfaction to the realisation of an idea of
what should be, as such (_because_ it should be); and no discipline
through inheritance or education, just because it is only impulses
that are natural (in the sense defined) which it can affect, can
bring about this direction, which, in theological language, must
be not of nature, but of grace. On the contrary, the most refined
impulses may be selfishly indulged; i.e. their gratification may
be made an object in place of that object which consists in the
realisation of the idea of perfection. But unless a discipline and
refinement of the natural impulses, through the operation of social
institutions and arts, went on _pari passu_ with the expression of
the idea of perfection in such institutions and arts, the direction
of the impulses of the individual by this idea, when in some form or
other it has been consciously awakened in him, would be practically
impossible. The moral progress of mankind has no reality except as
resulting in the formation of more perfect individual characters;
but on the other hand every progress towards perfection on the
part of the individual character presupposes some embodiment or
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