But it is not merely a matter of flat utilitarianism, it is not even unjust, if society, without inquiring whether the Will is free or not, makes the individual responsible for his actions and only makes an exception from this universal rule in extreme cases. Even though his will is subject to the law of causation, and the individual always acts as he must, he nevertheless has a means of keeping within the moral law despite inner impulses and outer pressure, and that is by his judgment and its instrument, inhibition. Like every organic function which is not purely vegetative and therefore beyond the influence of the Will, judgment and inhibition can be strengthened and perfected by methodical exercise, while total neglect of them will weaken and finally atrophy them. The community may demand that each of its members shall devote attention to the development of the natural functions which permit him to discriminate and to suppress any inclination to evil which may appear. It facilitates this duty towards itself and himself for the individual--for it is a question of the increase of his organic efficiency and of his personal worth--by the institutions it founds for the education of youth, by schools which not only impart knowledge, but also form the character, by instruction after the school age, by the honours with which it distinguishes especially excellent persons, thereby holding them up to example. The community prescribes that everyone should acquire a certain minimum of knowledge, and for this purpose forces each individual by law to go to school for a certain number of years. It may and ought to force him also to render himself more capable of obeying the moral law by methodical exercise of his will. Every citizen is responsible to the state for being able to read and write. In this sense the individual is also responsible for sufficiently strengthening his faculty of inhibition to be able to control his selfish, anti-social and immoral desires.
The particular purpose for which he is to employ his faculty of inhibition depends on the current moral law of the age, which is determined not by the individual, but by the community. The individual does quite enough and is free of blame if he strives with all his might to approximate his actions to the ideal which the community demands at a given time for the life of its members in common and for their mutual relations. To alter and perfect this ideal is the business of a few select men with wider judgment, stronger will and warmer sympathies than the average. In these exceptional cases it is not the community which imposes its ideal on the individual, but, on the contrary, the individual who works out a new ideal for the community, and, so to speak, thanks to his personal qualities, establishes a new record in the gymnastic of the Will which beats all earlier ones.