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Liberty does not consist in doing what one likes. As little does it in the ethical order. The distinction of a rational being, whereby he is altogether differentiated from irrational nature, is, in Kant's admirable phrase, "the faculty of acting according to the consciousness of laws." Free action means action from a rational, not an animal motive. The essential condition of moral Liberty is obedience to the moral law-a doctrine widely discredited in the present day, as I am well aware. Many and influential are the teachers of hedonism, of utilitarianism, of sensism, in various forms, who labour to show that the moral law, in any intelligible sense of the word, has no existence. And the people who hear them gladly are an exceeding great multitude. We may take as a type of them Mr. John Morley, who, in his interesting work On Compromise, uncompromisingly declares : "Moral principles, when they are true, are at bottom only generalizations from experience." But generalizations from experience cannot possibly be, in any real sense, laws. They are merely in. dications of what is useful or expedient. They may suggest; they cannot command. They may furnish motives; they cannot impose obligations. And the essence of law is necessity. In physical law that necessity is expressed by the word "must." In ethical law by the word "ought." No "generalizations from experience," no considerations derived

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from Mr. Mill's " utility," Mr. Herbert Spencer's "agrecable feeling," or Professor Huxley's "laws of comfort," can yield that word "ought."

This command of duty, this inner voice in man, Kant has well called "the categorical imperative," because of the unconditioned constraining force which it exercises over us. According to his admirable teaching, the one only worthy motive of action for man, as a moral being, is the moral law speaking to us from within, through conscience. And ethical freedom consists in this, that a man emancipate himself from the world of sense and its influences; that he renounce every outer material spring of action, and simply obey the heavenly calling. For the moral law is a divine. order throughout the universe, "a just and acceptable and perfect Will," ruling over all, either by its mandates or by its penalties. To apprehend it, and to bring his own volition into harmony with it, is the only means by which man can tend without obstruction to his true end, which is to live according to reason. Our willing subjection to it is the condition of ethical Liberty. To resist it is to fall into the base captivity of "the sensual and the dull," "slaves by their own compulsion." This ethical contest of volition is the sphere of freedom. The imperative dictate of the moral law implies the power to obey it. "Ought" is a meaningless word without "can."

Freedom and

necessity are closely interwoven.

Will any one

ever succeed in tracing the line of demarcation? Probably not, for the roots of freedom are in the domain of necessity.

But I must not here occupy myself with that profound question. It is enough, for our present purpose, to insist upon this primary verity, that, in

the moral order, Liberty is not independence of law; that, on the contrary, only in obedience to law is Liberty realised. And the reason is because man is not, as Rousseau fabled, naturally good. The same instincts which lead him to respect the laws of the material order prompt him to infringe the laws of the moral order. Atavism is unques tionable truth. There is, Plato taught, a wild beast within us, always ready to overpower us. The wild beast, he added, must be chained. In all of us there are evil instincts, vile passions, inordinate desires, importunate impulses of physical nature; "the law in our members," to use St. Paul's phrase, "warring against the law of our mind." We may choose which law we will obey, and in the choice lies our probation. But in obedience to the higher law alone is moral Liberty. Universally true is the doctrine of Leibnitz, that God, in creating beings, placed within them the law of their development. The law of man's development is ethical. In proportion as he learns it and follows it is he man and master of his fate." According to the saying of another deep thinker, "Summa Deo servitus, summa

11.]

THE LAWS OF HUMAN SOCIETY.

61

libertas." "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." This is the freedom which is our real summum bonum, the veritable end of life. Rightly does a poet of our own day make it the burden of the mystic chant of Orpheus.

"Nor sang he of unfading bowers,

Where they a tearless painless age fulfil
In fields Elysian, spending blissful hours.
Remote from every ill.

"But of pure goodness found in temperance high,
In duty owned and reverenced with awe:
Of man's true freedom that may only lie
In servitude to law."

And so, in the public order, Liberty is not found in lawlessness. Here, too, it dwells only with right reason. The The very words "political order" imply as much. Human society is an organism with its proper laws, not a fortuitous congeries of individuals mechanically combined. Man comes into the world under the law of solidarity. His country is to him what the soil is to the plant. One of the notes of modern thought, at least in this country and in France, is the well-nigh complete obliteration of that truth from the public mind. This is due to two causes. The advance from status to contract, as Sir Henry Maine has told us, is a distinctive characteristic of the progressive societies of the West. And one consequence of it is, to use his excellent phrase, "the trituration

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of the groups which once lived with an independent life." Again, one of the most potent factors in modern politics is unquestionably the doctrine formulated by Rousseau, and first translated into the concrete by his Jacobin disciples. And that doctrine is essentially mechanical and devoid of any true notion of the organic nature of human society, and of the laws proper to it as an organism. We have already seen his receipt for making the constitution. "Making the constitution!" though any real constitution could be made! You might as well talk of making a tree. But his disciples, with no qualm of misgiving, applied his doctrine, and in one brief night of verbose intoxication swept away well nigh all the historical institutions of their country, in order to make room for their brand new constitutional machine: a State constructed as a kind of combination of inquisition and police upon the basis of unrelated human units, inorganic atoms, impalpable sterile dust, mocked with the title and attributes of sovereignty. "Every individual is free to think what he likes; his freedom to say and do what he likes shall be infringed as little as possible by law; and after all, this is no real infringement, for he is his own lawgiver; he is one of the sovereign people, free to vote as he likes, and so, in obeying the law, he must be taken to obey only himself, and to be as free as he was before":—such is the political Liberty wherewith

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