perfect embodiment of the national will, and the national will have completely identified itself with the idea of Right.1

Thus, starting from premisses in part the same as Rousseau's, Kant arrives at something entirely different from Rousseau's conclusion. The Social Contract is kept, and kept (as with Rousseau) on the ground that no man can rightfully be compelled to obey a law which he has not accepted of his own accord. But it is kept as a ‘mere idea'; it is kept with a wide opening for compulsion; and it appears at an altogether different stage of social development. It does not mark the passage from the complete isolation of the individual to his union with other individuals in society, but from a less to a more fully articulated form of social life; from a society resting on custom and tradition to a society based on written law or, at the very least, on oral law universally known and accepted.

There

Yet more important is Kant's divergence from Rousseau in his conception of the individual will. Throughout Rousseau's writings-bating those exceptional passages to which attention has repeatedly been called the implication is that, by instinct and nature, the will of man is wholly good. It is only society or evil institutions that have perverted and corrupted it. Kant is not so short-sighted as to meet this doctrine with a flat denial. is no need, he says, to suppose that the will of man is wholly bad. But the very idea of a Social Contract, the mere assertion that some outward rule of Right is necessary to secure justice, is an admission that oppression is possible, and consequently that the will of man is not invariably good. In fact, so far from being an age of innocence, the state of nature' is to Kant the age in which man is at his worst, and his sense of justice at its weakest. The history of mankind is a record of the stages by which the common sense of justice is gradually both strengthened and developed, and by which the higher self is disengaged from the instinctive or natural self of the individual. To Rousseau it is a story of progressive degeneration.3

2

This fundamental difference in his conception of the natural man led Kant to depart widely, and should have led him to depart more widely yet, from the conclusions of Rousseau. If the will of the individual is naturally and necessarily good then Rousseau was right in holding that justice may always be obtained by counting heads. In that case, general consent is an infallible guide to

1 Rechtslehre, § 52, pp. 184, 185.

2 Ib. § 44, P. 150.

3 [Vaughan would probably have modified this statement at a later date. Reference should be made to the Introduction to Rousseau's Political Writings, especially the summary on pp. 114-15.-ED.]

4 [But see the Introduction to Rousseau's Political Writings, p. 66, where it is recognised that we must clear Rousseau from the extravagance,

The

Right; the voice of the people is always the voice of God. innocence of man, if it does not rather prove that all government is superfluous, leads logically to the Social Contract as the only possible basis of the State. But, if the will of the individual is liable to be evil, then neither his consent nor his dissent can count for anything when Right and justice are in question. They may serve to secure or to defeat the triumph of Right; they can never serve to show on which side the cause of Right is to be found. The authority of a government may rest upon the mere force of habit. It may even have been established, in the first instance, by violence. But so long as it stands for justice, so long as it educates its citizens by successfully appealing from their lower to their higher selves, so long its right cannot be impeached; and the absence of an universal vote of confidence, whether at its foundation or at any other time, is absolutely irrelevant to its claims.

1

This is admitted by Kant himself just far enough to destroy his consistency in one direction, but not far enough to establish it in the other. We have a right,' he says, ' to compel every man, with whom we come into any kind of intercourse, to join us in forming a Constitution which shall assure us the possession of our property.' If the sanctity of individual freedom is violated at the moment in which of all others, on Kant's showing, it ought most to be respected, why, at any previous or subsequent stage of Kant's theory, should it be represented as inviolable? The whole community suffers tyranny when the rights of one member are disregarded,' wrote the Revolutionists of 1793. And, on the principles of Rousseau-which in this matter were the principles also of Kant-their word could not be gainsaid. How was it that Kant did not see the necessity of choosing once and for all between two contradictory theories? How was it that he did not perceive the absolute sanctity of the individual to be irreconcilable with the absolute supremacy of justice?

The answer to this question will show us precisely the points in which Kant's theory needed to be corrected and supplemented, and so lead us to the various stages of the advance slowly made by his successors. Speaking logically, we may say that Kant's theory broke down because he failed to distinguish clearly between two entirely different senses of the word 'freedom.' He could never make up his mind whether he meant to plead for freedom in the purely formal, or for freedom in the substantial, sense; for freedom as the mere caprice of the individual, or for freedom as scope for the

sometimes attributed to him, of holding that whatever the majority wills is always sure to be just.'-ED.]

1 Rechtslehre, § 9, p. 63.

development of his higher faculties. In the language more specially appropriate to Political Philosophy, we may say that Kant failed because he hovered between two entirely different conceptions of the State. He never decided whether to regard the State as a fortuitous aggregate of individuals, or as that without which even individual life would have no moral content nor significance.

And, if it be asked why so great a thinker vacillated on so important a point, the answer must be that Kant had inherited from his predecessors-from Locke and Hume on the one hand and from Rousseau on the other—a theory of reason, both practical and speculative, which made it almost impossible for him to conceive of the individual save as an isolated unit; or to pass, without flagrant contradiction, from the mere empty form-the 'transcendental apperception ' in the one case, the blank ideas of Duty and of Right in the other case-to a world constituted by rational objects of knowledge and desire. Hence, although the starting-point of his theory was a conception of Right which treated the individual not as an isolated unit but as bound, and therefore from the beginning qualified, by obligations to others a conception which logically excluded the recognition of individual caprice-Kant was perpetually impelled to fall back upon the contradictory doctrine which reduces Right to a mere matter of a chance majority; that being the notion of Right which logically corresponds to the conception of the individual as self-contained and as existing apart from all necessary relation to others. The same conception of the individual as essentially void of all content, as endowed solely with the faculty of willing nothing in particular, which had shaped the theory of Rousseau, in a less extreme (and therefore in a less consistent) form haunted also the imagination of Kant.

But the very inconsistency of Kant's theory is, in fact, its main title to our gratitude. For it was only when it became apparent that to graft the idea of Duty on to that of Right was to make a fatal wound in Rousseau's assumption of individual isolation, that men were forced to ask themselves whether that assumption was not unwarrantable and untenable from the very beginning. Kant's service is to have paved the way for the utter rejection of that assumption by unconsciously showing that it was incompatible with the idea of duty. And the work of his successors was, by slow and tentative stages, to build up a theory whose ultimate result is to show that moral relations, more or less imperfectly realised, have formed the essence of the individual from first to last, no less in the state of nature' than in the fully organised civil community; that such relations, even in their most rudimentary shape, imply the idea of social Right; that this idea, at first the work of instinct and

custom, has gradually come to be informed and remodelled by conscious reason, by the deliberate strivings of states and nations after its more complete realisation; and that the duty of the community to enforce its ideal of Right upon the individual, subject only to limits of expediency, has been recognised at each and every stage of its development, and has been a primary fact in the growth not only of the national but of the individual conscience. Thus, by the labours of Kant's successors, Philosophy has joined hands with primitive lore and with History. The problem of political enquiry has largely changed its shape. Its method, from being abstract, has become concrete and historical. It is seen that the individual can no longer be regarded as prior to the State; but that, in the words of Aristotle, the State is essentially prior to the individual.

The first writer to follow the path opened by Kant was Fichte. Fichte's work in Political Philosophy is comprised in three treatises, the last of which was separated from the first by an interval of twenty years. These are Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urtheile über die französische Revolution, published in 1793; Grundlage des Naturrechts, dating from 1796, and Die Staatslehre, oder das Verhältniss des Urstaats zum Vernunftreiche from 1813, the last year of his vigorous and noble life.

The first of these may, for our present purposes, be almost disregarded. It is little more than a restatement in a more technical, a less striking and an intolerably discursive, form of Rousseau's Contrat Social. The second is a far more important work. It preceded Kant's Rechtslehre by a year, but was itself preceded at about the same interval by the short sketch Zum ewigen Frieden,1 in which much of the Rechtslehre is anticipated. The conclusions of Fichte differ from those of Kant in some important points, or at least in some points which Fichte conceived to be important; but whether the difference represents an advance or no, is a questionable matter. The third treatise is at least as much beyond the second as the second was beyond the first. It definitely throws aside that hesitation about the significance of freedom,' which we have noticed in Kant, and finally adopts the moral qualification which Kant had failed consistently to fix upon it. It also contains the first serious and systematic attempt to press History, and with

1 [The high opinion that Vaughan had of this work is perhaps hardly sufficiently indicated in the present chapter. In the Preface to his translation of Rousseau's essay on A Lasting Peace he states that of all the pleas for a Federation of Europe, Rousseau's alone excepted, the Lasting Peace of Kant is the most striking and the most cogent.' See also Political Writings of Rousseau, vol. i. p. 363, and vol. ii. pp. 19-20 and 526. -ED.]

History the spirit of Nationality, into the service of Political Philosophy. It thus has a twofold interest. It marks the first definite step forward in Political theory which had been taken since Kant; and it marks a new era of European history, for it was the offspring of the great national uprising against which-alike in Spain, in Germany and in Russia-the power of Napoleon was broken and which, continued long after Napoleon's fall, has changed the face of Europe. It has a further but purely personal interest, as representing the last course of Lectures delivered by Fichte. Inspired throughout with a burning love for his country, it must have kindled a like fire in those who originally heard it. He closed the course, it is said, with the words: I will resume these lectures next year, in a free country.' Within a few weeks he was struck down by small-pox. He had lived only to see the opening reverses, he did not witness the closing truimphs, of the great campaign of liberation.

In all these

To pass from Kant to Fichte is a strange contrast. works there is that curious blending of flightiness and philosophic genius which is characteristic of Fichte. In all the main thread of the argument is apt to lose itself in unnecessary details and in hairsplitting refinements which too often deserve no better name than arrant sophistry. The first, as has been said, is in the main a repetition of the Contrat Social. It is built throughout on the theory of Contract, on the conception of a national Right preceding all society, which it professes to apply with more thoroughgoing consistency than had been done by Rousseau.1 There are, however, two points in which it may be said to carry the argument into a higher region than is common in Rousseau's work. It is more explicit in acknowledging that the state of nature' is a state governed by moral relations; 2 and it lays greater stress on the function of the State in the moral and intellectual training of its citizens, in the repression of their lower and the development of their higher faculties.3 The State is no longer, as it is apt to appear in Rousseau, a mere piece of machinery. It is an association for certain moral and spiritual ends; and it is an association which

1 Beiträge; Fichte's Werke, vi. p. 71; Rousseau . . . verfuhr viel zu schonend mit euch, ihr Empiriker; das war sein Fehler.'

2 Man glaubte ehemals im Naturrechte, auf einen ursprünglichen Naturzustand zurückgehen zu müssen. . . . Und doch ist dieser Weg der einzig richtige: um den Grund der Verbindlichkeit aller Verträge zu entdecken, muss man sich den Menschen noch von keinen äusseren Verträgen gebunden, bloss unter dem Gesetze seiner Natur, d. i. unter dem Sittengesetze stehend, denken; und das ist der Naturzustand' (ib. p. 82; compare p. 130).

3 lb. pp. 86-101.