OBEDIENCE 183 



are examples which show that the danger is not by any 

 means imaginary. 



It has already been seen, when its affinities came under 

 review, that the principle of obedience ranks with the public 

 or social, and is opposed to the private or self-regarding 

 elements of our active nature. It is indeed pre-eminent 

 among the qualities which serve the purposes of concerted 

 action, where the claims of the individual are lost sight of 

 in the interests of the community ; and it is this which deter 

 mines its general relations with the other impulses. Its 

 ethical valuation will vary with the success with which 

 the community and the individual respectively assert their 

 claims on the attention, and we can thus account for the 

 fact that in the same period of history it has been con 

 sidered as one of the chief of virtues by the religious or mili 

 tary classes, while it almost entirely escaped the notice of 

 the individualist philosophers. If we consider it impar 

 tially, with reference to the same final end as served as 

 a standard for the comparison of the various kinds of obedi 

 ence among themselves, we shall probably come to a similar 

 conclusion ; that is to say, that in the persistent conflict 

 between the social and the individualist impulses, it would 

 not be conducive to the safety of a community that either 

 should gain a decisive victory. In its relations with the 

 environment, every community requires two opposite 

 qualities first the power of both passive and aggressive 

 antagonism, and secondly the faculty of concession, when 

 successful resistance is no longer possible. The stability 

 of its manners and institutions must not be so great as to 

 destroy their adaptability. 



It is clear that the self-abnegation of which obedience 

 is one of the forms is the moral force which, more than 

 anything else, guarantees the strength of a community in 

 its resistance to its surroundings. By concentrating the 

 wills of the citizens on the same ends it greatly enhances 

 the effective value of each, and of the whole body in its 

 transactions with its neighbours ; at the same time, by the 

 suppression of individual ambitions, it acts as a safeguard 



