time: the refreshing river 



place is taken by the idea of a free community, each member of which 

 has as large a share in determining the 'general will' as his fellows; 

 in which, so far as human frailty allows, the general will takes up 

 into itself the will of all. . . . The only State he recognises as legitimate 

 is the State of which the sovereign is the People." But it is evident 

 that none of this service which is perfect freedom can be secured 

 without unlimited universal education and the abolition of classes. 

 The matter has been put more shortly: "Every cook," said Lenin, 

 "must learn to rule the State." 



Every transition from the unconscious to the conscious implies a 

 step from bondage to freedom, from lower to higher level of organi- 

 sation. All early agriculture and storage of food-products necessitated 

 more conscious control than before. Increases in the efficiency of 

 mechanisms of transport from the horse to the aeroplane widened 

 men's conscious horizons. In the realm of the individual, modern 

 psychology provides brilliant examples of the liberating effects of a 

 passage from the unconscious to the conscious, e.g. in the cure of the 

 obsessional neuroses. Up to the present all commercial transactions 

 have been the instruments of a peculiarly subtle form of bondage 

 which was called by Marx the "fetishism of commodities."^ Relations 

 such as those of exchange in the open market between commodities, 

 appear at first sight to be relations between things, but are on the 

 contrary relations between persons, the persons who produced them 

 and the persons who will consume them. To forget this is to be forced 

 to assent to the various "iron laws" of political economy, which have 

 in reality nothing inescapable about them, once the personal relation- 

 ship is grasped.^ In one of the most inspired passages he ever 



^ "The commodity form, and the value relation between the labour products which 

 finds expression in the commodity form, have nothing whatever to do with the physical 

 properties of the commodities or with the material relations that arise out of these 

 physical properties. We are concerned only with a definite social relation between human 

 beings, which in their eyes, has here assumed the semblance of a relation between things. 

 To find an analogy, we must enter the nebulous world of religion. In that world, products 

 of the human mind become independent shapes, endowed with lives of their own, and 

 able to enter into relations witli men and women. The products of the human hand do 

 the same thing in the world of commodities. I speak of this as the fetishistic character 

 which attaches to the products of labour, as soon as they are produced in the form of 

 commodities. It is inseparable from commodity production." — K. Marx, Capital, tr. 

 E. and C. Paul (London, 1928), p. 45, 



^ The realisation of the entry of personal relationships at this point gives us the 

 answer to the perplexity of Frederic Harrison the positivist in his Herbert Spencer 

 lecture of 1905. He said that, while according to "evolutionary philosophy" the un- 

 ceasing redistribution of matter and motion seemed to be the fundamental law, he himself 



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