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
expression of itself by the self-realising principle in what may be
called (to speak most generally) the organisation of life. It is
in turn, however, only through the action of individuals that this
organisation of life is achieved.
24. Thus the process of reconciliation between will and reason,--the
process through which each alike comes actually to be or to do what
it is and does in possibility, or according to its idea, or according
to the law of its being,--so far as it comes within our experience
may be described as follows. A certain action of the self-realising
principle, of which individuals susceptible in various forms to the
desire to better themselves have been the media, has resulted in
conventional morality; in a system of recognised rules (whether in
the shape of law or custom) as to what the good of society requires,
which no people seem to be wholly without. The moral progress of
the individual, born and bred under such a system of conventional
morality, consists (1) in the adjustment of the self-seeking
principle in him to the requirements of conventional morality, so
that the modes in which he seeks self-satisfaction are regulated
by the sense of what is expected of him. This adjustment (which it
is the business of education to effect) is so far a determination
of the will as in the individual by objects which the universal or
national human will, of which the will of the individual is a partial
expression, has brought into existence, and is thus a determination
of the will by itself. It consists (2) in a process of reflection,
by which this feeling in the individual of what is expected of
him becomes a conception (under whatever name) of something that
universally should be, of something absolutely desirable, of a single
end or object of life. The content of this conception may be no more
than what was already involved in the individual's feeling of what is
expected of him; that is to say, if called upon to state in detail
what it is that has to be done for the attainment of the absolute
moral end or in obedience to the law of what universally should
be, he might only be able to specify conduct which, apart from any
such explicit conception, he felt was expected of him. For all that
there is a great difference between feeling that a certain line of
conduct is expected of me and conceiving it as a form of a universal
duty. So long as the requirements of established morality are felt
in the former way, they present themselves to the man as imposed
from without. Hence, though they are an expression of practical
reason, as operating in previous generations of men, yet, unless the
individual conceives them as relative to an absolute end common to
him with all men, they become antagonistic to the practical reason
which operates in him, and which in him is the source at once of the
demand for self-satisfaction and of the effort to find himself in,
to carry his own unity into, all things presented to him. Unless the
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