distinct from State; and, as Right is only one phase of life, the State does not include all the activities of life in any case. Religious bodies, for example, are perfectly distinct from it, co-ordinate and not subordinate.1

Besides the jurists, the economists came under the influence of Krause. He remarks on Good and Goods (in effect) that that is "good" which fulfils its end and is as it is meant to be; a man is good if he fulfils his end, and what we call "goods" or commodities are external means to man's goodness, and should not be represented as ends. This led Schäffle to his protest against the older Political Economy, which he said treated increase of goods too much as an end in itself, and forgot that man himself was the proper subject even of purely economic inquiries.3 But the question is not whether Man can be left out or not, for even if goods are in the forefront they have no meaning except in relation to man and his wants. The question is whether the relation of man to goods (considered strictly as means and without any distinction of moral good or evil) is not a large enough subject to deserve separate study. Recent economists (especially in Austria) have as a matter of fact kept goods in the forefront; and this particular aspect of economic inquiry (not wealth in the singular but commodities in the plural) has served to keep attention fixed with great advantage on the variation of wants, satisfied by different quantities as well as different kinds of goods. Indeed the whole theory of Final Utility, as distinguished from Utility in its generality, may be said to depend on the use of this category. The Final Utilitarians may (as we have seen) have erred in posing as Utilitarians, and speaking as if a commodity as such ministered only to pleasure. In this respect the analysis of Krause seems the more accurate.

The direct influence of Krause, however, is small when compared with the indirect influence of his contemporary Hegel on modern economics.

1 Rechtsphil., p. 353.

2 Ib., pp. 38, 173, cf. 289, 249, 216.

3 Mensch und Gut in der Volkswirthschaft, 1861.

4 See especially Prof. C. Menger, Volkswirthschaftslehre (1871), and compare Marshall, Principles of Pol. Econ., II. II. pp. 1–7.

CHAPTER IV.

HEGEL (1770-1831).

To Hegel all that is is Process, which means-development by union of opposites, which again means not a mere addition of the one to the other but a blending of them in a third, as two necessary sides of the same, so that, equally false when apart, they are equally true when together. We see this on a great scale if we consider the two opposite notions without which the world. would be nonsense to us-thought and nature. Thought (says Hegel), viewed abstractly or away from nature, gives us the Logic of abstract notions; and externality viewed by itself gives us the Philosophy of Nature. The truth is, however, that when we attempt to view them by themselves we are driven from the one to the other, and we reach the Philosophy of Spirit in which thought makes itself its own object, and thought and externality are concretely combined. The truth lies always in the concrete view; all else is abstract and half truth. But the progress of thinking begins with the half truth; it passes, from a notion that is relatively abstract, first of all to its equally abstract opposite, and thence to a notion that is relatively concrete, uniting the two abstractions. This reconciling Third is then found, itself to be abstract, and thought is driven to its opposite, thence reaching a new concrete.1

This dialectic is unlike development as ordinarily conceived; it is like Mr. Spencer's evolution by homogeneity, heterogeneity, individuation; but it is not Darwinian evolution, where the last stages of a species do not embody and include the previous. In Hegel's view

1 See other volumes of this series: Philosophy of Fine Art, p. 167. 2 Hegel, passim, e.g., Phil. of Right, § 31, p. 63.

1

of Development, the conflicting opposites are not destroyed; the surviving and victorious concrete includes them. Nothing is lost. With human beings, this and other features of the Dialectic come more evidently and obviously to the front than in the case of material objects or even of plants and animals. In Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, as expounded in the Encyclopädie, we see this happening when the stages of the "Subjective" Spirit have been passed, and when in "Psychology," looking for laws (and not simply for lists of qualities) in Nature, man brings it nearer his own rationality, general laws being transparently "thoughts." We see it more clearly when the spirit is fully "Objective" and seeks to find itself in the external world by action. Man is not one with himself and free till what seems external and alien and a mere limit of his action is shown to be (like the apparently external and alien limits of Knowledge) really rational and therefore not alien to him but one with him. At first his way of realizing himself is to follow his passions, as if the whole practical truth was in the particular as distinguished from the general element of his nature; but this turns out to be mere slavery to the chance desire of the moment. Nevertheless, if he goes to the opposite extreme and simply opposes to the desires his power (as a rational being) of abstracting from each and all of them, he is still not free, for he has nothing left to will. The truth lies in neither abstraction but in the recognition that the passions have a rational meaning, and are not merely particular, though they seem So. Rational beings have, no doubt, their particular desires, though even these have a wide range and deep intensity not discernible in merely animal beings; but, besides, they have a need for a permanent possibility of satisfaction, an ideal of happiness. This ideal may be simply Wealth, or the permanent power of gratifying appetite generally. In this case it involves a half concealed reference to other men, who are thought of as relatively poorer or richer than oneself. But this reference to others takes a more explicit form in the desire of procuring from others an express recognition

1 In Mr. Bosanquet's happy phrase they are "put by."

of superiority. This is the desire of Honour, which makes us "sleep on brambles till we've killed our man. But to kill the enemy is to miss the recognition; an enemy killed is an enemy who is not there to recognise our superiority. Gain and glory are brought together when my enemy is spared and made, in slavery, a means of satisfying my desires by working to increase my wealth. Slavery, however, though historically a step towards true freedom, is not consistent with true freedom itself. The master cannot be said to "find himself" in the slave; and the slave, though disciplined by his subjection, is excluded by it from his rights as a man.1 Hegel, therefore, in the Philosophy of History is quite consistent in describing the whole progress of development in history as an enlarging of the notion of freedom -from the notion that only one is free (the Emperor of China or the King of Persia), to the notion that only some are free (the Greeks but not the barbarians), and from that again to the notion that all men are free. The notion of Freedom is dominant in the Philosophy of History.

It is also dominant in the Philosophy of Right (1820). True freedom does not lie either in mere legal recognition of my rights as a person, or in the mere consciousness of my empire over myself as obeying an inward law of duty, but in my consciousness of my oneness with social institutions in which, while I have personal rights, I find my duties embodied. Law and Morality are opposites and abstractions which are reconciled and made concrete and true in social morality.

This is the part of Hegel's work which touches our subject most closely. The early treatise (on Natural Right, 1802-3, Wks., vol. i.) had been largely a criticism. of Fichte and Kant. The Philosophy of Right contains Hegel's positive teaching, which may be described as follows:

If we would conceive true freedom (says Hegel), we must distinguish rights from duties, and therefore Law from Morality. To fulfil his personal programme, to do

1 Rechtsphilosophie, § 57; Philosophie der Geschichte, Part II., Sect. 11. But the locus classicus is Phänomenologie, Bk. IV., A. (ed. 1841), Wks., vol. ii., p. 139 seq.

the work which it is in him to do, each individual must have his separate personality and "rights" recognised; he must "be a person, and respect the others as persons (§ 36). His "rights" mean simply the conditions postulated for proper fulfilment of his "duties." They are therefore natural only in the sense that men are born for them, not that men are born in possession of them or that there is any innate perception of them.

But to assert his personality (he proceeds) man must reflect it in external objects; for the body to be free, there must be some command over "things"; a man is not fully conscious of his personality till he has embodied it in Property. To be without property is to be without a condition on which freedom depends. In this respect all men are equal; all equally have the right to hold property (Rechtsphil., § 49, p. 85). The rationale of property is not the economic one, the satisfaction of wants, but the embodying of the Will in an external object; it involves rather the satisfaction of Ownership than the pleasure of having a larger source for supplying the appetites. In property, as distinguished from possession, the will is identified with the external object, and this makes property the object of Law. The more clearly I leave my mark on the external object the more clearly I make it my property. Even my body is more clearly mine when I acquire bodily dexterities. Land must become private property like anything else (cf. Rechtsphil., § 203).

I show my appropriation first positively by taking possession, then negatively by using (altering or consuming) the thing; property divorced from use or use from property is an unreal abstraction; and it is essential to property that the proprietor can dispose of it to another, exchanging, or at any rate in some way alienating it. This leads to contract. Real ownership enables me to dispose of a thing in its whole value, not simply in its single use but in its general power of satisfying human wants (§ 63, p. 79). Alienation is Alienation is only possible of things," including particular services (as in labour for wages contrasted with selling oneself into slavery) (§ 67, cf. 66). The slave never can contract himself out of § his absolute right to emancipate himself (p. 104). Con