Now, the truth of these criticisms may be granted in the same sense in which we grant the imperfection of knowledge (as currently conceived) or of morality--imperfections not accidental, but inherent in each particular form of human experience. The conflict of interests, the failure to reconcile rights, and the weight and opaqueness, so to speak, of law and custom to the individual mind, are contradictions of the same type and { 290} due to causes of the same kind as those which arise in the world of ethics and of theory. And, though the new relations which spring up in society are perpetually resulting in new contradictions, there is no reason to compare the State unfavourably, in this respect, with Morality or with Science. The contradictions, in fact, are the material of organisation. [1]
[1] Take, for instance, the chaos of the medical charities of London. It consists of endeavours to adjust help to needs, which endeavours are themselves unadjusted to each other. Thus, precisely as in the theoretical progress, the unadjustment of adjustments brings out ever new contradictions which demand readjustment.
Without differing profoundly from Green in theory, therefore, we venture to assign a greatly diminished importance to his criticisms. This is due in part to the growth of a more intimate experience, owing in some measure to his initiative, which seems to show the essentials of life to be far more identical throughout the so-called classes of society than is admitted by such a passage as that cited above about the dweller in a London yard. [1] It is due, further, and in connection with such experience, to the psychological conceptions developed in previous chapters, according to which the place of actual fear of punishment in maintaining the social system is really very small, while { 291} the place of a habituation, which is essentially ethical, is comparatively large. These suggestions, which lead us to lay decreasing stress on Green’s criticism of Hegel, point wholly in the general direction of his own convictions, and we may finally meet the general difficulty, which expresses itself in pessimism, by considerations such as Green himself alleges in mitigation of his own criticism.
