Page:Liberalism (1919).djvu/111

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

reflection and feeling, corrupted by the intrusion of material considerations, slain by the guillotine of finality. The same conception is broadened out to cover the whole idea of personality. Social well-being cannot be incompatible with individual well-being. But individual well-being has as its foundation the responsible life of the rational creature. Manhood, and Mill would emphatically add womanhood too, rests on the spontaneous development of faculty. To find vent for the capacities of feeling, of emotion, of thought, of action, is to find oneself. The result is no anarchy. The self so found has as the pivot of its life the power of control. To introduce some unity into life, some harmony into thought, action and feeling, is its central achievement, and to realize its relation to others and guide its own life thereby, its noblest rule. But the essential of control is that it should be self-control. Compulsion may be necessary for the purposes of external order, but it adds nothing to the inward life that is the true being of man. It even threatens it with loss of authority and infringes the sphere of its responsibility. It is a means and not an end, and a means that