And thus we recur to a suggestion noted { 332} above. Every people, as a rule, seems to find contentment in its own type of life. This cannot contradict, for us, the imperativeness of our own sense of the best. But it may make us cautious as to the general theory of progress, and ready to admit that one type of humanity cannot cover the whole ground of the possibilities of human nature. Our action must, no doubt, be guided by what we can understand of human needs, and this must depend ultimately on our own type of life. But it makes a difference whether we start from the hypothesis that our civilisation as such stands for the goal of progress, or admit that there is a necessity for covering the whole ground of human nature. And it may be that, as the ground is covered, our States may go the way which others have gone, without, however, leaving things as they are. If the State, moreover, is not ultimate nor above criticism, no more is any given idea of humanity; and reference to “the interests of mankind” only names the problem, which is to find out what those interests are, in terms of human qualities to be realised.
[1] It is remarkable that a limitation of the earth’s surface, raising an idea of unity, has always, I believe, been presupposed. For the Greeks, Delphi was the centre of the earth; for us, the earth being a sphere and returning into itself, gives a certainty that it does not stretch away to infinity, so making unity of its inhabitants inconceivable. The remark, I think, is Kant’s.
[2] “Humanity” = “humaneness.” Scotch “Humanities” = Greek and Latin. Oxford “Literae humaniores” = classics and philosophy. Greek φιλάνθρωπον [philanthropon], a sense of what is due to man, _e.g._ of poetical justice.
_(d)_ Neither the State, however, nor the idea of humanity, nor the interests of mankind, are the last word of theory. And even political theory must so far point ahead as to show that it knows where to look for its continuation. We have taken Society and the State throughout to have their value in the human capacities which they are the means of realising, in which realisation their social aspect is an inevitable condition (for human nature is not complete in solitude), but is not by itself, in its form of multitudes, the end. { 333} There is, therefore, no breach of continuity when the immediate participation of numbers, the direct moulding of life by the claims and relations of selves, falls away, and the human mind, consolidated and sustained by society, goes further on its path in removing contradictions and shaping its world and itself into unity. Art, philosophy, and religion, though in a sense the very life-blood of society, are not and could not be directly fashioned to meet the needs and uses of the multitude, and their aim is not _in that sense_ “social.” They should rather be regarded as a continuation, within and founded upon the commonwealth, of the work which the commonwealth begins in realising human nature; as fuller utterances of the same universal self which the “general will” reveals in more precarious forms; and as in the same sense implicit in the consciousness of all, being an inheritance which is theirs so far as they can take possession of it.