NATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF STATE ACTION.
1. According to the course of thought which we have been pursuing, the distinction between the individual on the one hand, and the social or political whole on the other, is not relevant to the question where the “end” of man in Society is to be sought. For the conceptions of Society and the Individual are correlative conceptions through and through; at whatever level, therefore, we take the one, we are bound to construe the other as at the same level; so that, to distinguish the one element from the other as superior from inferior, or as means from end, becomes a contradiction in terms. If we begin by drawing boundaries round the individual, the boundaries which we draw reproduce themselves in society conceived as a total of such individuals, and the question of means and end, as we saw in Bentham’s case, [1] takes the form whether “each” is the means to the welfare of “all,” or “all” to the welfare of “each”; the distinction thus becoming purely verbal. While, if we set no limit to individuality, except the limit of the nature { 181} which makes it contributory to the social universal, then we find that the advancements of the universal and of its differences vary together, and are indeed one and the same thing. It is idle to think of dissociating them as means and end.
The only way in which the idea of means and end can be applied to the social whole and its parts, is to take Society when at its lower level, being dealt with under the aspect of mere plurality, as a means to what it is at its higher level, when realised as a communion of individualities at their best. But from this point of view we get no distinction of means and end as between Individuals and Society. What we get is Individuals and Society alike, as understood and partly existing at one level (that of commonplace Individualism and Collectivism), taken as a means to both Individuals and Society at a higher level. As we have seen, the only true explanation of self-government is to throw the reality of the self outside what passes for its average nature, and in this sense the average nature may be treated as a means to the truer or fuller self--as something, that is to say, which is instrumental to the latter, and has no rights against it.