out from one little
world to other and higher worlds, so that, through occupying successive
stations in life, they more and more come to make their own the life of
the social whole in which they move and have their being. They cannot
mark off or define their own individualities without reference to the
individualities of others. And so they unconsciously find themselves as
in truth pulse-beats of the whole system, and themselves the whole
system. It is real in them and they in it. They are real only because
they are social. The notion that the individual is the highest form of
reality, and that the relationship of individuals is one of mere
contract, the notion of Hobbes and of Bentham and of Austin, turns out
to be quite inadequate. Even of an everyday contract, that of marriage,
it has been well said that it is a contract to pass out of the sphere of
contract, and that it is possible only because the contracting parties
are already beyond and above that sphere. As a modern writer, F. H.
Bradley of Oxford, to whose investigations in these regions we owe much,
has finely said: "The moral organism is not a mere animal organism. In
the latter the member is not aware of itself as such, while in the
former it knows itself, and therefore knows the whole in itself. The
narrow external function of the man is not the whole man. He has a life
which we cannot see with our eyes, and there is no duty so mean that it
is not the realization of this, and knowable as such. What counts is
not the visible outer work so much as the spirit in which it is done.
The breadth of my life is not measured by the multitude of my pursuits,
nor the space I take up amongst other men; but by the fulness of the
whole life which I know as mine. It is true that less now depends on
each of us as this or that man; it is not true that our individuality is
therefore lessened; that therefore we have less in us."

There is, according to this view, a General Will with which the will of
the good citizen is in accord. He feels that he would despise himself
were his private will not in harmony with it. The notion of the reality
of such a will is no new one. It is as old as the Greeks, for whom the
moral order and the city state were closely related; and we find it in
modern books in which we do not look for it. Jean Jacques Rousseau is
probably best known to the world by the famous words in which he begins
the first chapter of the _Social Contract_: "Man is born fr