To the individual and society thus conceived--A, B, C, and the rest--it is plain that government can be nothing but self-protection. It is, in fact, a form of the impact of “others,” scientifically minimised, and accepted because it is minimised. For this reason it is, as we saw throughout, alien to the self, and incapable of being recognised as springing from a common root with the spontaneous life which we pretend to be aware of only within our private magic circle. Then the forcible impact of B and C upon the circle of A is a necessary evil, a diminution, _pro tanto_, of A. And the more altruistic A is, the more he will recognise this, as affecting not himself only, but B and C also. It is for this reason that, on the views in question, all law and government necessarily remain formal and negative as compared with the substantive and positive ends of the self. The maintenance of “liberty,” of the circular or hexagonal [1] fences round A, B, C, and the rest, is {84} conceived as involving no determinate type of life, no relation to the ends which the units pursue within their hexagons. If in any way the self went beyond itself, and A recognised a positive end and nature which peremptorily bound him to B and the others, it would be impossible to keep this nature and end from reflecting themselves in the determinate content of the conditions of association between them. The assumption would be destroyed which keeps “government” alien to “self,” and it would be possible to consider in what sense and for what reason the nature of a spiritual animal turns against itself with the dualism which the paradox of self-government embodies, and that in pursuit of its true unity. [1] See P. 73 2. We will now discuss Rousseau’s treatment of the paradox of “self-government.” And we discuss it, not because it is complete or self-consistent, but rather because, while breaking through to the root of the whole matter, it is as incomplete and as inconsistent as are the efforts of our own minds to lay hold of any profound truth. It displays, in fact, on the great stage of the history of philosophy, precisely the struggle which each of us has to go through if he tries to pierce the surface of commonplace fiction and tradition which persistently weaves itself about social facts. On almost every page there is relapse and vacillation. The fictions which are being cast aside continually reassert themselves; the embodiment of the principle which the author’s genius has discerned is sought for in expedients essentially opposite to its nature, while the instruments which it has developed for itself are contemptuously rejected.