Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections, and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,--a unity which transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in which the development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth: for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual. They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an appearance:--confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.
But they do not destroy personality and individuality: they only transform it and made it a more adequate and consistent representation of reality, by giving in it a place to factors or 'moments' which, though always effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements, and treated only as externally interfering agencies. It may be a question, of course, how far it is wise to retain the term after its meaning has thus been altered by expansion and redistribution of elements. On the whole it seems impracticable--and it would be undesirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible--to be too hard and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly the province of philosophy to coin new terms in which to deposit the results of her researches. A term no doubt--particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be luckily discovered, or judiciously selected--may save the expenditure of thought. But it is hardly the business of philosophy to encourage economy in this direction. Much more is it the perpetual task of philosophy to counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,--to reinterpret the meaning which is absorbed in these 'counters of thought,' and make them once more sterling money for the market of life. What, for instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to set free the genii which the black magic of every-day intercourse has incarcerated in the non-significant Greek term Εὐδαιμονία? Like our own Happiness, it flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name, which is still prized, but--except for a few synonyms that are equally vague with itself--is attached to things which a little reflection shows it cannot truly denote. Aristotle seeks--we may say--to define it. But the phrase 'definition' seems barely applicable to the complex process thus implied,--a process of which definition, as ordinarily understood, is only one small portion. For to define happiness, is to reconstruct the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really to construct it or reproduce in consciousness its construction. As it stands, the thing to be defined is a name and a thing, of which certain relations to other things soon begin to show themselves, which is more or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be distinguished from another. To mark it off from these co-terminous things, and to show how they are related to it on different sides,--this would be what we may perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, or _mere_ definition.