[1] W., ix. 34. Fichte remarked on the pregnancy of this principle.
Now, for us, after the explanations which have been given, the negative nature of our principle is to be seriously pressed, although its action has to take positive form. The State is in its right when it forcibly hinders hindrance to the best life or common good. In hindering such hindrances it will indeed do positive acts. It may try to hinder illiteracy and intemperance by compelling education and by municipalising the liquor traffic. Why not, it will be asked, hinder also unemployment by universal employment, over-crowding by universal house-building, and immorality by punishing immoral and rewarding moral actions? Here comes the value of remembering that, according to our principle, State action is negative in its immediate bearing, though positive both in its { 192} actual doings and its ultimate purpose. On every problem the question must recur, “Is the proposed measure _bona fide_ confined to hindering a hindrance, or is it attempting direct promotion of the common good by force?” For it is to be borne in mind throughout that whatever acts are enforced are, so far as the force operates, withdrawn from the higher life. The promotion of morality by force, for instance, is an absolute self-contradiction. [1] No general principle will tell us how in particular to solve this subtle question, apart from common sense and special experience. But there is perhaps more to be learned from this principle, if approached with _bona fides_ [2] than from most generalities of philosophy on social or ethical topics. It is well, I think, constantly to apply the idea of removing hindrances, in criticism of our efforts to promote the best life by means involving compulsion. We ought, as a rule, when we propose action involving compulsion, to be able to show a definite tendency to growth, or a definite reserve of capacity, which is frustrated by a known impediment, the removal of which is a small matter compared to the capacities to be set free. [3] For it should be remarked that { 193} every act done by the public power has one aspect of encroachment, however slight, on the sphere of character and intelligence, if only by using funds raised by taxation, or by introducing an automatic arrangement into life. It can, therefore, only be justified if it liberates resources of character and intelligence greater beyond all question than the encroachment which it involves. This relation is altogether perversely presented, as we saw above, if it is treated as an encroachment of society upon individuals. All this is beside the mark. The serious point is, that it is an interference, _so far as compulsion operates in it_, of one type of action with another and higher type of action; of automatism, so to speak, with intelligent volition. The higher type of action, the embodiment of the common good in logical growth, is so far from being merely individual as opposed to social, that it is the whole end and purpose in the name of which allegiance to society can be demanded from any individual. As in the private so in the general life, every encroachment of automatism must be justified by opening new possibilities to self-conscious development, if it is not to mean degeneration and senility.