And, secondly. All State action is at bottom the exercise of a Will; the real Will, or the Will as logically implied in intelligences as such, and more or less recognised as imperative upon them. And, therefore, though in the form of force it acts through automatism, that is, not directly as conscious Will, but through a system which gives rise to acts by influences apparently alien, yet the root and source of the whole structure is of the nature of Will, and its end, like that of organic automatism, is to clear the road for true volition; it is “forcing men to be free.” And in so far as by misdirection of the automatic [1] process it {234} encroaches on the region of living Will the region where the good realises itself directly by its own force as a motive it is “sawing off the branch on which it sits,” and superseding the aim by the instrument. [1] It must not be forgotten that the State is, by its nature, under a constant temptation to throw its weight on the side of the automatic process. A most striking example is its adoption of the automatic water-carriage system in drainage, with far-reaching economic consequences. See Poore’s _Rural Hygiene_ and _The Dwelling House_. {235} CHAPTER IX. ROUSSEAU’S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL. 1. Probably no other philosophical movement has ever focussed in itself so much human nature as the post-Kantian Idealism. It has fallen to the present writer to show elsewhere [1] how the “finding of Greek art,” which it owed to Winckelmann, gave it unrivalled insight into mind as embodied in objects of sense. Here we have to deal with another source of its ideas. As we pointed out in the first chapter, the ethical and political theory of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel springs from the same _Evangel of Jean Jacques_ from which the French Revolution drew its formulae. It would not be true to say that it springs from this alone. Great philosophers know how to fuse the materials they work in; and particularly the modern abstraction of “freedom” was blended, for Hegel, with the idea of concrete life through the tradition of the Greek city, with its affinity for autonomy on the one hand and for beauty on the other. Nevertheless, few lines of affiliation are better established in the history of philosophy than that between Rousseau’s {236} declaration that liberty is the quality of man and the philosophy of Right as it developed from Kant to Hegel. [1] _History of Aesthetic_ (Sonnenschein).