[1] See Green’s _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. i.
[2] This remains substantially true, even if we agree with Socrates that it is impossible to know the better and prefer the worse at a given moment. Our normal self will repudiate the view we took at some moment.
[3] There is something worthy of Dante in Rousseau’s observation (_Contrat Social_, Bk. iv. ch. 2, note) that the convicts in the galleys at Genoa had “Liberty” stamped on their chains. The fetters of the bad self are the symbol of freedom. Rousseau turns his remark to commonplace, after his fashion, by referring it to the mere liberation of society from malefactors.
_(e)_ The metaphorical application of the term Liberty to a state of the individual mind has both its danger and its justification. The state of mind in question, we repeat, is that in which the impulse towards self-satisfaction sets itself upon an object which represents the nature of the self as a whole, as free from contradiction or as at its maximum of being, and triumphs over the alien and partial will, the tendency to narrower tracks of indulgence, when entangled in which it feels itself oppressed and constrained by a foreign influence. When the mind does what, as a whole, it wills, as Plato implies, [1] it feels free. When it cannot be said to will anything as a whole, but is distracted among aims which cannot satisfy it, then there is no sense in which it can be said to do what _it_ wills, and it feels itself under constraint and a slave.
The metaphor has this danger. The contrast between whole and part is too readily transformed, in popular theory, into the contrast between an empty generality and everything in particular. The claim to be free then involves the separation between mind as a general faculty of volition, and every particular object. Mind is then said to be free as an undetermined faculty, but as filled and { 143} moulded by any object or idea, (the passive participles “filled” and “moulded” imply a relation which is not real, but, as assumed, is the ground of the fallacy in question) it has lost its freedom and become a slave. But if we retain the conception that mind has reality only as a whole of determinate character, self-determined through its power of being a self, but not through any power of creating particulars out of nothing, we shall avoid this caricature of the higher freedom.