Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/690

674 type'; it becomes the recognized standard to which conduct ought to conform, the basis of the rights which the individual may reasonably expect to enjoy and of the duties which he may reasonably be expected to perform. The type passes over into the province of habit or convention from which it will emerge only as an element in a possible later reconstruction.

Now it is clear that from this point of view there is no ground for the antithesis which formerly was supposed to exist between habit and reason; they are correlated and equally indispensable aspects of 'the individual's behavior. Similarly, it may be added, there is, from a generalization of the same point of view, no antithesis between the liberty of the individual and his restraint by the accepted types of social behavior. There may indeed be opposition between the two on special occasions. A person may become so much the slave of an easy, habitual course of life that his intelligence suffers dry-rot and he ceases to have any initiative in the adaptation of his behavior to new situations. Similarly the accepted types of behavior may be- come so thoroughly conventionalized that they ossify into a system which seriously hampers the higher types of ethical deliberation and political liberty. But both these are merely instances of the destructive effects of over-functioning in a given direction. It nevertheless remains true that social types of behavior are indispensable to individual growth. It may be confidently asserted, therefore, that the main objective of the idealist theory of the state may be secured without appealing to the assumption of a social will by comparison with which the individual is only a fragment torn from his context.

At the same time the view which we have sketched has the immense advantage of opening the way for a sane and healthy individualism, which from the time when the theory of natural rights emerged in modern history has been the only effective instrument of political liberalism and which is also the only sound principle of social and moral reform. Social conditions and social evolution must be ultimately matters of individual responsibility. There is no inevitable dialectic of social progress, nor is any man his brother's keeper, unless his brother is a