CHAPTER II. CIVIL POLITY IN GENERAL. 1.-THE POWER TO DESIGN AS GENERAL GROUND. II. RELATION OF STATE TO CITIZENS, AS GROUND OF RECIPROCAL III.-THE RELIGIOUS GROUND:-FAITH IN TRUTH AND IN PERSONS. It may be said that the intent of a civil polity is to promote harmony and prevent discord in the human family. But this implies that grounds exist for both the harmony and the discord. No theory of a polity would be rationalized, therefore, until these grounds were clearly discerned and put to use for the purpose. Before this clear perception of the means to be used, there would be no civil polity properly so called, no designed adaptation of means to ends. There would be a state of society, but not of civil polity. There would be a family state; for the human race, like every other genus of animals, is by Nature a family; but there would be no organized relation of men, such as we call a civil State, resting upon principles which, while they include the Natural relation, do so only by resting upon what is within and beyond or above it. I. It is easy to see that what harmonizes men is what they are willing to have in common, and that what occasions separation and discord is what they are not willing to have in common. But these vary with their situation as natural beings and their development as thinking beings. And only at an advanced stage of self-consciousness do men clearly perceive that the former is idea, and the latter what they call life, liberty and property." Neglecting to note this difference between the partial and full selfconsciousness of mankind, some writers confuse Natural Society with civil society, and try to derive a State from merely animal relations. But as no man fully knows himself as man, until he is conscious of having in idea something he can form and reform at his will, so no society comes to a capacity for organizing a State till it is conscious of ideas which all have in common, and all want to erect into a law for common action. For with this consciousness of thought as a designing power apart from and above Nature, comes also for man the con sciousness that he has various powers; a power to think, in which he is substantially in an absolute unity at bottom with all his fellow-men; a power to design or express his thoughts, in which he may differ in excellence but need not come in conflict with any; but also a power over Nature, in the exercise of which he must more or less be subject to competition, rivalry and collision with all others. This power which Man has over Nature, then, is the ground of conflict, his power to think is the ground of unity, and his power to design and will the execution of his design is the ground both for harmony and for discord with his fellow-men. The very business of a State is to organize the relation of these three powers of which men have become conscious. Now in this process of organizing a State as a mutual relating, in harmonious exercise, these three powers of mankind, the inventive power is itself the mediator, the finder of means to harmonize wills, just as it is also the stimulus of wills into their opposition to each other. It both creates and remedies the difficulty. In this respect it is analogous to gravity, which, being attractive as law and repulsive as form, is a maker of solar systems. But to look upon this forming of Statesby Man's own invention as a merely mechanical affair, and identical with the action of force, is to deny all freedom to Man's inventive power and to make of force itself the reason and the maker of right. On the contrary, force is only one of the powers which Man uses; and the business of the State is to coördinate it with his other and higher powers, and in subjection to them, as only a means of expression. No doubt mankind have had and still have these powers, and use them in an instinctive way, before they attain to an intelligent consciousness of them, and of how to relate them rationally. Hence the phenomena of states of human society more or less above animal society, but far below the character of a well-organized civil State. Even high intelligence is not enough if confined to a few. The perfect State does not issue from even a wise control of the few over the many, but only from an intelligent concord of the many in the same design. The inventive power must be active in all; this is what Mr. Seward, with the keen eye of a true statesman, pronounced lacking in China. He saw it was "paralyzed" there by an enforced devotion to inherited forms of government; as though a Civil Society were, like an animal, to accept from its ancestors a certain organism, as a genus which it cannot surpass or even change. So also in Hindoostan the same statesman observes that the intelligence of the few, unsurpassed merely as capacity for intelligence, has never risen to the capacity for forming a State, because lost in merely metaphysical views-a sort of identification of the operation of the moral world with that of the physical world which has disabled even the few from seizing upon the true relation of Man's powers, and transferring this in a systematic: way to the construction of a State. Always, when only the few do the thinking, the mass of men are, in one way or another, made into mere material for the civil power. There is a logical consistency in such forms of a State even when despotic, and even a necessity for them: because when the many do not invent, they have really no proper power of possession: it is the man's power to create, to invent and make, which gives him the right of property. Hence the necessity for intelligence, not merely as a capacity to think, but also as a practical power and will to design and create. When this is exuberant in all, there is a necessity for a perfect state which shall itself be an invention, and one of the highest and noblest inventions of a common ingenuity, seeking to relate all the powers of men in a concord of common efforts for common ends. These remarks may perhaps suffice to show that a really free State is essentially a "morality”—a rational coördination of individual men, whereby their necessary separation, as actors in and upon Nature is made into a harmonious unity through their conscious possession of idea as a common arbiter and authority. This inevitable resolution of a true State into a Moral relation, and the consequent fundamentai dependence of it at last upon a religious relation, is what must strike us in every phase of the discussion, as what is the secret,-the behind the veil, the unsayable, of all this process of State-making. This may be further enlarged upon in treating of the policy of this Nation in respect to morals and religion. Here we must be content to add in an unsystematic and cursory way some merely illustrative suggestions. The general problem in the forming of a State, as we have noted, is to so relate the three powers which all men possess, and so regulate their exercise, as to give the greatest freedom to all consistent with the general harmony. But this is precisely the problem which presents ltself to every individual man as the problem of his own greatest personal freedom as a man. Were it not so, the same problem would not be reflected into the State as a question for that, in the guise of a larger or collective man. And for the same reason is it that we find in some State-solutions of it, those imperfections which spring from and reflect the half-conscious, and only tentative way in which the citizens themselves go about solving the question as a personal matter; each for himself, according to the degree in which he has developed and become conscious of his various powers as a man. The U. S. Constitution itself, and those of the States, advanced as they may be in the political art, over ancient codes, yet betray this merely half-reflection of the individual, and the consequent adoption of forms created by what may be called a mutual estoppel, rather than a mutual agreement. The individual thought itself had not gone far enough to see clearly what man is and wants, and how best to obtain it; but only rather to vaguely feel a repugnance or fear for this or that. Hence the "principle" is very fitly called a "balance of power" by those to whom such a balance seems static, and not really a Union of several into a one complete dynamic activity-a National reality. This tentacular, fearful mode of proceeding is wise and even necessary where the self-consciousness is not complete; for then, feeling rather than thought must guide, and prejudice must have its part. But to praise this, as some publicists do, as though the necessity for it depended upon some mysterious "spirit of a nation," which is conceived of (from the illusion of a metaphor), as quite parallel in all respects to the "life" which forms an animal body, and whose "laws" therefore must be practically left to form themselves,-this is one of the superstitions of metaphysicians. And oddly enough, it is derived from the sphere of mechanics, and does not recognize even the unmechanical operation of life, much less the mode of thought's development. The necessity in the case here depends simply upon an existing stupidity, or inferior development of the general intelligence, which is certainly not to be regarded as anything sacred, although it must be considered as a limit or estoppel for the time. Prejudices, although stages in development, are not of such divine' right to be simply because they are, or even because they are precious to the logical evolutionist as 'necessary stages," that they must needs be let alone till they die out of themselves. They are rather weeds, which, if thus let alone and sanctified to boot, will live long and propagate lustily. No State can come into the light of real freedom, where there is not such a full sense of moral responsibility in all its members, as to make them get rid as soon as possible of stale stages of development, and especially of the notion that they are something sacred, and that the "Spirit of the State" is particularly resident in and fond of them. However important "evolution” may be to the mere theorizer, as a name which describes nothing, it must be for Man at least, as a practical matter, something which he can help effectuate; otherwise he would never have known there was such a process in reality. 66 Since all really turns, then, upon the individual effort, and, on the greater or less real freedom of spirit which each brings to it, let us look at this moralizing of the relation of Man's three powers, from the individual point of view, and see how this comes to require an expression in the State and to be reflected in that. And let all its imperfections be referred to their true origin, so that the place and mode of remedy can be found. II Merely by instinct, every man feels that he has a power to know, a power to design an outer act, and a power to execute this as an act of force. How he exercises these three powers he does not at first inquire. When he becomes fully conscious of them, he knows that he has them but can no more explain how he can act upon natural forces, than how he can think or form designs. So long as it seems to him that all these processes come about by a co-ordination of mutual collisions, he carries that notion into the State, and his formings there are of the merely tentacular, estoppel sort. Thus he gets the notion of a morality which is made for him and not by him, and to that extent he loses all sense of moral responsibility for such a "State." Evidently he has made of the civil State a mere state of “things," a mechanical State. He has made no distinction between the unlimited power he has to think, in common with all, and in collision with none, and that limited power he has over the form of force. And so long as his thinking is only of designs to be expressed in the form of force, his thinking itself is thereby limited, and not free Neither is his will free in such a State of things His relation as a designer to others who design, is made just the same practically as that of their bodies or physical powers. However abstractly they may agree upon a unity of “thoughts and things," either as a one law of force, or a one nature of thought, yet in fact they, as "persons" are separated; just as much so as "spirits" as they are as bodies. No one is "free" All are limited in some fortuitous way, and their intercourse is adjusted only by collisions. This State of mutual enslavement leads men to deeper reflection. This reflection is both as to what these three powers are in the man, what their relation to each other should be, and finally, as to the best methods of using each. For a man is not fully free even to think till he finds the true method of thinking.—the law of true thinking. Nor is he perfectly free to design till he is free to think,-then only can he determine the best art-method.. Nor yet has he his largest freedom in exercise of his power over force, till he has learned the law, the method of operation in that To all three of his powers therefore the highest freedom comes only from a knowledge of the law of each,—the method of each within its own sphere,-of Idea, of Art, or of Nature.-This result will recur again and again in various phases:--the only real freedom is in knowing and following law or true method. Although the civil State, then, is thus based upon the individual "spirit, "(and no other as a ghostly outsider), and though all its phases reflect his errors, yet also is the State a necessity to him, to relate him properly to his fellows through a common law, in which alone they can be free. He would be non-effective,-not really Man,-merely as an isolated individual. Nature is no companion for him. She would make him more mute than herself. What would her noises signify, or even her echoes; where there was no speech of thought? Animals have a voice, birds have a song; but it perishes with the uttering. Nature has no memory, and no silent monuments of her past throes can stand |