[1] There is a difficulty in stating this point without confusion, just because the “ordinary” individual, being at the bottom different from what he seems, is actually determined in all sorts of ways, consciously and unconsciously, by demands and ideas which go far beyond what he would admit to determine him.
Following up such thoughts as these, we see that there is a meaning in the suggestion that our real self or individuality may be something which in one sense we are not, but which we recognise as imperative upon us. As Rousseau has said of the social self, we say more generally of the self or life which extends beyond our average private existence, that it is more real than we are, and we only feel ourselves real in proportion as we identify ourselves with it.
With such suggestions in our minds, we see the problem of liberty in a new light. Liberty, no doubt, is as Rousseau has told us, so far agreeing with Mill, the essential quality of human life. It is so, we understood, because it is the condition of our being ourselves. But now that it has occurred to us that in order to be ourselves we must be always becoming something which we are not, or in other words, we must always recognise that we are something more than we have become, liberty, as the condition of our being ourselves, cannot simply be something which { 127} we have, still less something which we have always had--a _status quo_ to be maintained. It must be a condition relevant to our continued struggle to assert the control of something in us, which we recognise as imperative upon us or as our real self, but which we only obey in a very imperfect degree. Thus it is that we can speak, without a contradiction, of being forced to be free. [1] It is possible for us to acquiesce, as rational beings, in a law and order which on the whole makes for the possibility of asserting our true or universal selves, at the very moment when this law and order is constraining our particular private wills in a way which we resent, or even condemn. Such a law and order, maintained by force, which we recognise as on the whole the instrument of our greatest self-affirmation, is a system of rights; and our liberty, or to use a good old expression, our liberties, may be identified with such a system considered as the condition and guarantee of our becoming the best that we have it in us to be, that is, of becoming ourselves. And because such an order is the embodiment up to a certain point of a self or system of will which we recognise as what ought to be, as against the indolence, ignorance, or rebellion of our casual private selves, we may rightly call it a system of self-government or free government; a system, that is to say, in which ourselves, in one sense, govern ourselves in another sense; not as Mill has said, by each one of us being subject to all the “others” (taking “others” in the same sense in which each of us is “one”), { 128} but by all of us, as casual private units, being subject to an order which expresses, up to a certain point, the rational self or will which, as rational beings, we may be assumed [2] to recognise as imperative.