Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/256

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. VI.

alter-personalities of the family, the accomplishment in question. And, as to the second, it is likely that he will get a laugh for his pains.

But further, the law, thus tempered by the thought of the other selves involved, is a function of the socius-consciousness in each of its two aspects. It is 'projective' to the child when he first receives it and submits himself to it. He does not yet understand it; it requires him to act blindly. He, in his individual capacity, is not a judge of the wisdom or appropriateness of it. The other person sets it, the self in whom he is then finding his socius realized; and the child is properly social only if he submit, even if he has to be made properly social by being compelled to submit. And the other aspect of the law is equally important, that set by the other thought of self which the socius includes, the 'ejective' embodiment of the law. After the child has obeyed, and learned by obedience, he himself sets the law of the house for the other members of it. And the law then becomes 'common law,' inasmuch as it is engrained in the very thought of the better self of every member of the social group. All commands and behests which are not thus embodied in the spirit of the whole, are yet to a degree really only the reflection of the highest thought of self in the group, that of the father; if to the others these have not yet become 'common law,' the common dictates of the common social self, that is because the individuals are yet immature members of the circle or family. Put briefly, all law must arise somewhere in the family from the legitimate development of the social self; and it is realized, or obeyed as law, only as the members of the family come each in his turn to mould his social self into intelligent observance of it, and intelligent enforcement of it. And the family is typical of the community.

And a final observation is this: there is, as was intimated above, a sense in which the socius, the social self, and with it the ethical self, is a self of habit. If this thought of self which we are calling the 'socius' really be, in so far as the child understands his own thought of it, a sense of his denials of both his lower unsocial selves—the self of private interest and the self