If then we are to coin an expression which will indicate the common features of the theories outlined in the previous chapter, we may venture upon some such phrase as “_prima facie_ theories,” or “theories of the first look.” By this I do not mean that they stand in the same rank with the views of the Greek thinkers, who, undisturbed by previous speculation, saw the great facts of social experience with a freshness and wholeness of vision with which they can never be seen again. The “first look” of our own day is of a different kind. It is the first look of the man in the street or of the traveller, struggling at a railway station, to whom the compact self-containedness and self-direction of the swarming human beings before him seems an obvious fact, while the social logic and spiritual history which lie behind the scene fail to impress themselves on his perceptive imagination. We see then that these theories of the first appearance are mainly guided by this impression of the natural separateness of the human unit. For this reason, as we noted, the experience of self-government is to them an enigma, with which they have to compromise in various ways. And because their explanations of it are not true explanations but only compromises, they rest on no principle, and dictate no consistent attitude. For Bentham all solid right is actually in the State, {81} though conceived by himself as a means to individual ends; for Mill, it is divided between the State and the individual, by a boundary which cannot be traced and therefore cannot be respected; for Herbert Spencer all right is in the individual, and the State has become little more than a record office of his contracts and consents. The assumption common to the theories in question is dictated by their very nature. It is not precisely, as is often supposed to be the case, that the individual is the end to which Society is a means. Such a definition fails to assign a character which is distinctive for any social theories whatever. For Society, being, at the lowest rate, a plurality of individuals, whatever we say of the individual may be construed as true of Society and _vice versa_, so long as all individuals are understood in the same sense as one. Thus the “means” and the “ends” are liable to change places, as, for practical purposes, we saw that they did in Bentham. The ethical term “altruism” illustrates this principle. It shows that by taking “the individual” as the “end,” nothing is determined as to the relation between each individual and all, and it remains a matter of chance how far it is required of “each” individual, in the name of the welfare of “the individual,” to sacrifice himself to “all.”