must take the two factors of the working idea of self-government in their full antagonism, and exhibit, through and because of this, the fundamental unity at their root, and the necessity and conditions of their coherence. We must show, in short, how man, the actual man of flesh and blood, demands to be governed; and how a government, which puts real force upon him, is essential, as he is aware, to his becoming what he has it in him to be. And if we fail to destroy the assumptions which hinder us from doing this, we shall have to admit that the maturity of democratic institutions has only liberated us from arbitrary despotism to subject us to necessary tyranny; and though, in spite of such a failure, we might still acquiesce in “counting heads to save breaking them,” we should have to agree that this may indeed be the shrewdest device of political expediency, but that the difference between the two processes corresponds to no real capacity of the human individual for partaking, by the exercise of will and intelligence, in a peacefully organised and yet effectually governed whole. We shall then, in short, be compelled to agree with Bentham and Mill and Spencer that “self-government” and “the general will” are meaningless phantoms, combinations of hostile factors, incapable of being united in a real experience. {79} CHAPTER IV. THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED. 1. The reader will no doubt have observed that the theory dealt with in the last chapter belongs to the general type of what is currently known as Individualism. For several reasons I have preferred not to make use of this hackneyed word. In the first place, it is very hackneyed; and the employment of such terms takes all life and expressiveness out of philosophy. And, in the next place, Individualism may mean many things, and in its fullest, which is surely, for the student of philosophy, its truest meaning, it is far too good for the theories under discussion. An “Individual” may be “individual” or indivisible because he has so little in him, that you cannot imagine it possible to break him up into lesser parts; or because, however full and great his nature, it is so thoroughly one, so vital and so true to itself, that, like a work of art, the whole of his being cannot be separated into parts without ceasing to be what it essentially is. In the former case the “individual” is an “atom”; in the latter he is “a great individuality.” [1] The sense in which we shall make {80} use of the notion of the individual, so far as we use it at all, will be the latter and not the former. And, therefore, we shall as far as possible discard the hackneyed term “Individualism,” which embodies the former meaning only. [1] See Nettleship’s _Remains_, i. 160.