23 
scious moral agent ; we are aware that this is sorely interfered 
with in countless cases ; and that human external government 
cannot remedy a great part of this interference and wrong; 
and that we still feel that the responsibility exists, even when 
we are unable to explain it ; and we find ourselves in the posi- 
tion of some scientific explorer, who comes on a fact which he 
wonders at, and yet must own. 
VII. 
41. It may be useful to mark how the Difficulties to which 
we now refer have been met by those who in various ways 
have had to deal with what are the facts of the world's life. 
The ancient philosophers (with certain remarkable ex- 
ceptions) found themselves obliged, by the necessities of 
the case, to turn as much as they could from the idea of 
Individual Responsibility, and attribute to the State even the 
highest governing functions for all. In logical consistency 
this treatment of politics implied utility as the only remaining 
ideal ground of right. It would not be enough for 
it to admit that the truest utility ultimately coin- Acuities of re* 
cides with right ; for this would not be denied ; but mS'thepre! 
it requires it to be said, that the “ useful " and the {gophers phi ' 
“ right " are not expressions of two ideas, but are 
essentially one and the same, in conception as well as fact. 
Yet it is most noticeable, how the only exact thinkers of the old 
world contradict their politics in all their ethical inquiries, and 
as if unintentionally admit the individual conscious agent as the 
responsible doer of right and wrong. Aristotle precedes his 
treatise on Politics by his Ethics, in which he By merging 
constructs a moral system on facts of human nature the ^ right: in 
examined in detail. In the closing chapter he is euse u - 
obliged to admit that he finds the “good" ultimately in the 
good man himself; /cat ecrriv ek aarov jusrpov 77 apcrr), k at 6 
ayaObg, y tolovtoq, jc.t.A. (Eth. ad Nic., x. 5) ; and this is 
scarcely in harmony with his view that the “ State is prior to 
the household, and the household prior to the individual, as 
the whole is prior to the part." (Pol., i. 2.) At least, the 
Personal Responsibility, if admitted at all in the sense de- 
manded by the facts of life, would be lost in responsibility to 
the State : which is merging the right in the useful. 
42. But the same difficulties of course have to be dealt with by 
governments of modern times, to whom the Chris- 
tian ethics and individual responsibility are familiar. m ^ 0 e 7 n m c e i bj°; 
Any of the “mixed questions," as they are some- satiouandiaw. 
