Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/55

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
No. 1.]
ETHICS IN THE LAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.
43

must incorporate more successfully than Plato's justice the full personality and development of the individual. In other words it must if possible combine the weal of all with the fuller life of each. It must combine justice with democracy. In attempting this reconstruction idealism as represented by Bosanquet has employed Greek and Hegelian conceptions of the state which Hobhouse in his Democracy and Reaction attacked as lending themselves to reaction. Royce has sought in Loyalty a way to a better, more harmonious community. Fite has restated individualism in terms of the rights of intelligence. Nietzsche's disciples have pressed the claims of the strong and efficient. Socialists have seen the struggle of the non-privileged against the privileged as the heart of justice. Dewey has pointed out the danger of ideals kept separate from experience, and would measure the worth of a form of social life by the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. These criteria point to democracy. Democracy and education are reciprocally necessary, each to the other. Isolation is bad for the 'privileged' as well as for the non-privileged.

Democracy in Athens had to confront in a limited degree problems of foreign conquest and empire and of domestic class divisions and slavery. In our past quarter century, democracy has had problems of somewhat similar type but of extraordinary magnitude. In Germany social democracy has been confronted with the forces inherent in a rapidly growing industrial state, but above all with the military organization deemed necessary for the maintenance and progress of the imperial power surrounded by unfriendly states. In England democracy has found itself caught almost unawares in the problems of an enormously expanding empire which involved government of numerous races of all stages of development and of colonies remote from the supreme authority. As Lord Cromer has keenly stated the problem, the issue seems to lie between good government and self government. In the case of the colonies the problem has been measurably solved along democratic lines. In the case of India it has grown more serious. In its internal policies British