But (ii.) there is a different sense in which every right implies a duty. And this, the true meaning of the phrase, is involved in what we have said of the nature of a “position.” All rights, as claims which both are and ought to be enforceable by law, derive their imperative authority from their relation to an end which enters into the better life. All rights, then, are powers instrumental to making the best of human capacities, and can only be recognised or exercised upon this ground.
In this sense, the duty is the purpose with a view to which the right is secured, and not merely { 210} a corresponding obligation equally derived from a common ground; and the right and duty are not distinguished as something claimed by self and something owed to others, but the duty as an imperative purpose, and the right as a power secured because instrumental to it.
_(d)_ We have treated rights throughout as claims, the enforcement of which by the State is merely the climax of their recognition by society. Why do we thus demand recognition for rights? If we deny that there can be unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular caprice?
(i.) In dealing with the general question why recognition is demanded as an essential of rights, we must remember what we took to be the nature of society and the source of obligation. We conceived a society to be a structure of intelligences so related as to co-operate with and to imply one another. We took the source of obligation to lie in the fact that the logic of the whole is operative in every part, and consequently that every part has a reality which goes beyond its average self, and identifies it with the whole, making demands upon it in doing so.
Now, we are said to “recognise” anything when it comes to us with a consciousness of familiarity, as something in which we feel at home. And this is our general attitude to the demands which the logic of the whole, implied in our every act, is continuously making upon us. It is involved in the interdependence of minds, which has been explained to constitute _the mind_ of which the visible community is the body. A teacher’s { 211} behaviour towards his pupils, for example, implies a certain special kind of interdependence between their minds. What he can do for them is conditioned by what they expect of him and are ready to do for him, and _vice versa_. The relation of each to the other is a special form of “recognition.” That is to say, the mind of each has a definite and positive attitude towards that of the other, which is based on, or rather, so far as it goes, simply _is_, the relation of their “positions” to each other. Thus, social positions or vocations actually have their being in the medium of recognition. They _are_ the attitudes of minds towards one another, through which their several distinct characteristics are instrumental to a common good.