Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/83

 must certainly be taken into account in regarding his thought. Few personalities were so strong and rigorous in their central rationality, a command which belittles alike the play of the fragmentary selves, so apparent in the lives of ordinary men, and the merging of personalities in easy companionship or close co-operation. One other feature of his social philosophy has sometimes been called in question, his presentation of supreme personal value in terms of harmony. That there must be a measure of harmonious co-operation in all personal or social progress is certain, but the achievement of complete harmony would seem to bring progress to an end and to carry a purely static conception of “the good.” This was, no doubt, not the meaning which Hobhouse intended or would have accepted, but his stress on harmony in personality seems to conflict with the conception of progress as dynamic and unending. Here, as elsewhere, sociology is peculiarly affected by the necessity of using language made for the looser general purposes of communication, not for logical or even descriptive exactitude.

I have dwelt upon the mind of Hobhouse, partly to illustrate my thesis that no worker in any of the human sciences can obtain an objectivity that is unaffected by his private physical and mental make-up and his personal history. But I have also wished to show how strongly my own intellectual life has been affected by long, close, direct personal intercourse with a student