But we have seen that force, automatism, and suggestion, are in some ways necessary to the support and maintenance of the human consciousness, owing to its animal limitations. They are, indeed, as is well known, the condition of its progress. Therefore, in promoting the best life, these aids must be employed by society as exercising absolute power--viz., by the State. And the problem presented by their employment is _not_ a question of the “interference of the State with the Individual”--an antithesis which is strictly meaningless; but it is a question how far and in what way the use of force and the like by the State is a hindrance to the end for which the State itself exists. In other words, it is to be ascertained how far the fullest self-assertion of the social {184} universal in its differences--the best life--can be promoted or is likely to be endangered by means which are of a different order, and so in some circumstances opposed to it. The point is not that _I_ and some thousands more break in by force upon _you_ in particular and violate _your_ isolation; but that such breaking in by force, whoever does it and whoever suffers by it, and even if through passion or obsession _you_ do it to _your_self and _I_ to _my_self, is hostile _prima facie_ to the living logic of the will, which alone can create a unity and realise a best. How then, and under what reservations, in the complicated conflict of the fuller and narrower self, can this dangerous drug of violence be administered, so to speak, as a counter-poison to tendencies which would otherwise give no chance to the logical will? With this difficulty in our minds, we will endeavour to determine the general principle on which force and menace should be used by the State, and a routine be mechanically maintained by it.