Thus, then, a right, being a power secured in order to fill a position, is simply a part of the fact that such a position is recognised as instrumental to the common good. It is impossible to argue that the position may exist, and not be recognised. For we are speaking of a relation of minds, and, in so far as minds are united into a single system by their attitudes towards each other, their “positions” and the recognition of them are one and the same thing. Their attitude, receptive, co-operative, tolerant, and the like, is so far a recognition, though not necessarily a reflective recognition. Probably this is what is intended by those who speak of imitation or other analogous principles as the ultimate social fact. They do not mean the repetition of another person’s conduct, though that may enter in part into the relation of interdependence. They mean the { 212} conscious adoption [1] of an attitude towards others, embodying the relations between the “positions” which social logic assigns to each.
[1] To call this imitation is something like calling fine art imitation. Really, in both cases, we find a re-arrangement and modification of material, incident to a new expression. The process, if we must name it, is “relative suggestion” rather than imitation.
(ii.) But then the question of page 210 presses upon us “If we deny that there can be unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular caprice?”
The sting of this suggestion is taken out when we thoroughly grasp the idea that recognition is a matter of logic, working on and through experience, and not of choice or fancy. If my mind has _no_ attitude to yours, there is no interdependence and I cannot be a party to securing you rights. You are not, for me, a sharer in a capacity for a common good, which each of us inevitably respects. A dog or a tree may be an instrument to the good life, and it may therefore be right to treat it in a certain way, but it cannot be a subject of rights. If my mind _has_ an attitude to yours, then there is certainly a recognition between us, and the nature of that recognition and what it involves are matters for reasoning and for the appeal to experience. It is idle for me, for instance, to communicate with you by language or to buy and sell with you, perhaps even idle to go to war with you, [1] and still to say that I recognise no capacity in you for a common good. My behaviour is then inconsistent with itself, and the question takes the form what rights are involved { 213} in the recognition of you which experience demonstrates. No person and no society is consistent with itself, and the proof and amendment of their inconsistency is always possible. And, one inconsistency being amended, the path is opened to progress by the emergence of another. If slaves come to be recognised as free but not as citizens, this of itself opens a road by which the new freeman may make good his claim that it is an inconsistency not to recognise him as a citizen.