The root idea then, of the views which we have been discussing, is simply that the individual or society--it makes no difference which we take--is what it _prima facie_ appears to be. This is why we have called them “_prima facie_” theories, or “theories of the first look.” It would be a long story to explain how a first look can be possible in the eighteenth or nineteenth century A.D. But in brief, the history of thought shows certain leaps or breaks in culture; when the human mind seems to open its eyes afresh, or to emerge on a new platform, from which new point of view all its adjustments have to be re-made and its perceptions re-analysed. In these new stages a great advance is involved; but the advance is potential, and the possible insight has to be paid for by an initial blindness.
Such an occasion it was on which the legislator or economist or natural philosopher of the modern world turned his gaze upon man in society. He saw him as “one of millions enjoying the protection of the law,” [1] and society as the millions of which he is one. Such an onlooker inevitably proceeds to treat the social whole as composed of units A, B, C, etc., who, _as they stand, and just as they seem to us when we rub against them in daily intercourse_, are taken to be the organs and centres of human life. From this assumption all { 83} the rest follows. Each of us, A, B, C, and all the others, seems to be, and to a great extent in the routine of life actually is, self-complete, self-satisfied, and self-willed. To each of us, A, B, or C, all the rest are “others.” They are “like” him; they are “repetitions” of him, but they are not himself. He knows that they are something to himself; but this “something” is still “something else,” and even in ethical reflection he is apt to call his recognition of it “altruism”--an indefinite claim and feeling, touching his being at its margin of contact with neighbouring circles, the centres of which are isolated.
[1] B. Jowett, in conversation, to author.
To the individual and society thus conceived--A, B, C, and the rest--it is plain that government can be nothing but self-protection. It is, in fact, a form of the impact of “others,” scientifically minimised, and accepted because it is minimised. For this reason it is, as we saw throughout, alien to the self, and incapable of being recognised as springing from a common root with the spontaneous life which we pretend to be aware of only within our private magic circle. Then the forcible impact of B and C upon the circle of A is a necessary evil, a diminution, _pro tanto_, of A. And the more altruistic A is, the more he will recognise this, as affecting not himself only, but B and C also.