[1] As distinct from hunting. We do not go to war with lions and tigers.
But no right can be founded on my mere desire to do what I like. [1] The wish for this is the sting of the claim to unrecognised rights, and this wish is to be met, as the fear that our view might lead to despotism was met. The matter is one of fact and logic, not of fancies and wishes. If I desire to assert an unrecognised right, I must show what “position” involves it, and how that position asserts itself in the system of recognitions which is the social mind, and my point can only be established universally with regard to a certain type of position, and not merely for myself as a particular A or B. In other words, I must show that the alleged right is a requirement of the realisation of capacities for good, and, further, that it does not demand a sacrifice of capacities now being realised, out of proportion to the capacities which it would enable to assert themselves. I must show, in short, that in so far as the claim in question is not secured by the State, Society is inconsistent with itself, and falls short of being what it professes to be, an organ of good life. And all my showing gives no _right_, till it has { 214} modified the law. To maintain a right against the State by force or disobedience is rebellion, and, in considering the duty of rebellion, we have to set the whole value of the existence of social order against the importance of the matter in which we think Society defective. There can hardly be a duty to rebellion in a State in which law can be altered by constitutional process.
[1] Green, _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. 149.
The State-maintained system of rights, then, in its relation to the normal self and will of ordinary citizens with their varying moods of enthusiasm and indolence, may be compared to the automatic action of a human body. Automatic actions are such as we perform in walking, eating, dressing, playing the piano or riding the bicycle. They have been formed by consciousness, and are of a character subservient to its purposes, and obedient to its signals. As a rule, they demand no effort of attention, and in this way attention is economised and enabled to devote itself to problems which demand its intenser efforts. They are relegated to automatism because they are uniform, necessary, and external--“external” in the sense explained above, that the way in which they are required makes it enough if they are done, whatever their motives, or with no motives at all.