192 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
community are the result of free discussion between those whose minds are 
trained to be free and encouraged to express themselves freely. As the 
principle of the direction of education in accordance with the ‘ spirit of 
the State’ must necessarily result, in the authoritarian State, in training 
citizens not to think, so education in the spirit of a polity of free men and 
women must above all train them to think freely and accurately, and to 
desire to carry the results of their thinking into action. As the former 
type of State will try to produce a standardised and unresisting mentality, 
the latter will allow the utmost variety and will look for the good life of 
the community to the clash in rational discussion of the most diverse 
views, brought to judgment before the bar of a public opinion in the 
formation of which all alike may take their part. 
The freedom of which I am speaking has two aspects. It includes, in 
the first place, the power of the individual to realise the good, as he under- 
stands it, in his own life ; and in the second place, the power to take an 
equal share with any other citizen in determining the action of the com- 
munity of which he is a member, and in bringing about the realisation of 
good in the community as a whole, or, in other words, in the lives of others 
as well as himself. In both aspects freedom depends in part upon the 
individual’s own capacity, in part upon the political and social structure and 
behaviour of the community, i.e. upon the will of others. 
So far as the individual life is concerned, I do not think that much 
argument is needed to show that the freedom which serious persons 
desire, and the freedom which is desirable, is just freedom to realise 
whatever is regarded as good—as possessing: value ; the power to act 
in accordance with a deliberately chosen ideal of good, in whatever 
sphere of action. (It is an illustration of this that the determinist, who 
thinks that human actions are determined by something other than human 
free will, usually alleges his theory as the reason (or excuse) why he or 
others cannot do good.) So far as the community is concerned, the ideal 
State and community will be a democracy in which every individual is 
free to realise the highest values, physical, moral and spiritual ; and the 
realisation of some of these is only possible if he can enter into freely 
determined mutual relations with others, participating fully in the life of 
the community, communicating his share of good to it, receiving his share 
of good from it. The community and the State will recognise fully the 
value of the individual personality, and will acquiesce in no condition 
which makes any individual merely a means to the well-being of others, 
or to the stability of the organised community, for the sake of which in 
authoritarian States, real or Utopian, individuality is sternly suppressed. 
Doubtless such an ideal community is far in advance of anything that has 
so far been realised ; but it is the ideal at which democracy aims and 
which is implicit in most of the social reforms effected or demanded in 
our own day ; and,so far as I can judge, it is the one political ideal which — 
is worth working for. Ever since the authoritarian State and the authori- 
tarian Church of the Middle Ages had to yield most of their power to a 
steadily broadening political freedom and a growing liberty of thought, 
the principle which has been implicit in all political progress in the Western 
world has been that of the inviolability of the individual personality, and 
