x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 195 



the other, contend for his obedience. Even to fulfil his own 

 personality may be as much a man's duty as his right. He 

 has become the subject of more than one allegiance, and in 

 virtue of one or other of these may have claims upon 

 society as legitimate as the claims of society upon hiiru 

 Indeed, there is a sense in which the personal life is more 

 fundamental than the social. For in the instincts, the 

 needs, the impulses of the personality are implicit all the 

 strands that connect the individual with the whole life of 

 mind, whereas in the actual fabric of society wherein he is 

 called to play his part the requirements of the spiritual 

 order may be very imperfectly met. If in one sense society 

 is clearly greater than the individual, there is another sense 

 in which the individual may stand above society, and any 

 reconciliation of personal and social claims must reckon 

 with this relation. The problem then is so to conceive the 

 heightened claims of personality as to make them not dis- 

 ruptive of the social order but working constituents of 

 social harmony. 



In the solution of this problem the question of personal 

 liberty takes the central place. Nor will it be personal liberty 

 alone, but liberty for all the forms of social life or combined 

 efforts which arise spontaneously out of the special relations 

 of men that will need consideration. To put it shortly, the 

 synthesis now required is one which will harmonise not 

 merely individual with social interests, but a many-sided 

 freedom, social and personal, with an orderly and disci- 

 plined co-operation. In such a synthesis the idea of 

 Development is the keystone. For the implication of 

 liberty is that the error, the wrong and the discord which it 

 renders possible are the price of truth, character and co- 

 operation. In the end we get nearer to truth by letting 

 error develop its fallacies than by stifling it at birth. From 

 beginning to end we develop character not by sheer 

 coercion, but by self-conquest and the knowledge or 

 rather the full imaginative realisation of the meaning of 

 good and evil. We approach assured social co-operation 

 not by compelling obedience, but by winning assent. In 

 fine, those things which we ourselves hold true and right and 

 socially just we know for partial truths which will gain in 



