myself at different times as the limiting case, [1] we shall find it very hard to establish a difference of principle between the unity of what we call one mind and that of all the “minds” which enter into a single social experience. [1] Cp. p. 110 above. In any case, we have said enough to suggest that Society _prima facie_ exists in the correlated dispositions by which a plurality of individual minds meets the need for covering the ground open to human nature, by division of labour in the fullest sense. But we have further pointed out that the true particularisation of the human universal does not necessarily coincide with the distinction between different persons, and that the correlation of differences and the identity which they constitute remain much the same whether they chance to fall within a single human being, or to be dispersed over several. The stress seems, therefore, to lie on the attainment of the true particularisation which does justice to the maximum of human capacity, rather than on the mere relations which arise between the members of a _de facto_ plurality. Not that the presence of human nature in any {179} individual does not constitute a claim that it shall be perfected in him, but that its perfecting must be judged by a criticism addressed to determining real capacities, and not by the accidental standard of a given plurality. We shall pursue these ideas further in the following chapter. {180} CHAPTER VIII. NATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF STATE ACTION. 1. According to the course of thought which we have been pursuing, the distinction between the individual on the one hand, and the social or political whole on the other, is not relevant to the question where the “end” of man in Society is to be sought. For the conceptions of Society and the Individual are correlative conceptions through and through; at whatever level, therefore, we take the one, we are bound to construe the other as at the same level; so that, to distinguish the one element from the other as superior from inferior, or as means from end, becomes a contradiction in terms. If we begin by drawing boundaries round the individual, the boundaries which we draw reproduce themselves in society conceived as a total of such individuals, and the question of means and end, as we saw in Bentham’s case, [1] takes the form whether “each” is the means to the welfare of “all,” or “all” to the welfare of “each”; the distinction thus becoming purely verbal. While, if we set no limit to individuality, except the limit of the nature {181} which makes it contributory to the social universal, then we find that the advancements of the universal and of its differences vary together, and are indeed one and the same thing. It is idle to think of dissociating them as means and end. [1] Chapter III.