Dr Bosanquet[85], criticising Rousseau’s doctrine, says that the general will is expressed by the working of the institutions of the community which embody its dominant ideas; that no one man really grasps the nature and relations of the whole society and its tendencies; that the general will is thus unconscious (by which he seems to mean that the nation is unconscious of itself and of its ends or purposes); and he goes on to say that the general will is the product of practical activities making for nearer smaller ends, and that its harmony depends on the fact that the activities of each individual are parts of a systematic whole. Bosanquet’s theory amounts to a justification of the old individualist _laissez faire_ doctrine—the doctrine that the good of the whole is best achieved by giving freest possible scope to the play and conflict of individual purposes and strivings—the philosophic radicalism of Bentham and Mill, which teaches that, if each man honestly and efficiently pursues his private ends, the welfare of the State somehow results. How this systematic whole which is the State arises he does not explain; and it seems to me that Bosanquet leaves unsolved that difficulty which, as we saw, led Schiller and others to postulate an external power guiding each people—the difficulty, if we assume that individual wills strive only after private egoistic ends, of explaining how the good of the whole is nevertheless achieved. In all societies many general changes result, and in some nations no doubt the good of the whole is achieved in a measure by fortunate accident, in the way Bosanquet describes—namely, by the interplay of individual wills working for near individual ends. But, I think, it is improper to say that in such a case any general will exists. Such a nation, if it displays any collective activity, only does so in an impulsive blind way which is not true volition, but is comparable rather with instinctive action; for, as we have seen, self-consciousness is essential to volition; a truly volitional action is one which issues from the contemplation of some end represented in relation to the idea of the self and found to be desirable. And the changes of a society which result in the way Bosanquet claims as the expression of the general will are unforeseen and unwilled; they are no more the expression and effects of a general will than are the movements of a billiard ball struck simultaneously by two or more men each of whom aims at a different position.