In institutions, then, we have that meeting point of the individual minds which is the social mind. But “meeting point” is an unhappy term, suggesting objects in space that touch at certain spots. Rather let us say, we have here the ideal substance, which, as a universal structure, is the social, but in its differentiated cases is the individual mind. And it is necessary to observe that the material of this fabric has determinate sources. Mind is not an empty point. It is the world as experienced. The institutions, which as ethical {299} ideas constitute mind, are, like a theory, attempts at unity in face of needs, pressures, facts, and suggestions which arise in what we call our surroundings, and to each of which mind reveals a different quality; as every tone of a landscape elicits its peculiar shade of feeling, which but for it might have remained latent for ever. It takes the whole world to call out the whole mind. But it will be enough if we can trace, in some prominent examples, the nature of an institution as at once a dealing with surroundings, [1] an ethical idea, and a social principle. [1] There are, of course, no absolute surroundings. At every point experience rests on mind. But at any point at which we are observing, we must take some facts as, comparatively speaking, given. 3. The family starts from the universal physical fact of parentage, but takes its ethical value mainly from the special phase of parental relation which leads to the formation of a household. The association of parents and children in a household, which is permanent until broken up into other households, is due to economic conditions. Calling to mind the original meaning of words, we see that we are asserting the formation of a house hold to be due to “household” [1] conditions. And this is something more than a pun. Whatever the surroundings may be which favour the formation of households, whether the difficulty of procuring livelihood, which makes the father’s continued care essential, [2] or the chances offered by agriculture to a stable group, they operate as elements in a human world, in a world which is constituted by {300} the focussing of “surroundings” (circumstances) in a whole. Conditions which have become “economic” have ceased to be material. They are motives, interests, means to ends. They bring the world into the mind, but in doing so they become factors in the purposiveness and re-adjustment, which the mind, as unity asserting itself throughout varied suggestions, is busied in bringing to pass. By demanding permanence, for instance, economic conditions elicit in the relation of parent and child the simplest form of universality necessary to an ethical idea. [1] “Economy” = household management. [2] It is said that the household does not readily form itself in very easy conditions of life.