Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/182

168 B. BOSANQUET : Now it might be urged that the character of automatism is even more natural and necessary in social activities than in those which we primarily regard as individual. For the condition of automatism is a considerable degree of routine. And while routine is useful to individual life, in so far as it takes a definite shape, with activities which repeat them- selves, it is absolutely essential to co-operative existence. At every point, in the complicated work of a civilised society, we have to reckon infallibly upon the action of others with- out conscious arrangement or special agreement. Once people walking in the streets fought for the " crown of the causeway"; then they turned out of each other's way as chance might dictate ; and then, as Dr. Johnson tells us, the habit grew up that the pedestrian kept to the right. This habit has not passed into law in England, but it easily might do so as foot-passengers over the bridge at Dresden find that it has done and as the rule of the road for vehicles has done. The same account may be given of all the daily conduct of a law-abiding citizen. It moves in certain routines, determined by habit and sanctioned by law ; and it is this characteristic alone which enables the enormously complex life of a modern community to be carried on in such a way that, so far from absorbing, it progressively liberates the attention of its members from the maintenance of its necessary conditions. It is noticeable that in these habits the work of the best minds may be embodied ; so that while we economise our attention we are actually better guided than our own best attention could have guided us. When we speak of the State using force or coercion upon individuals, by far the greater part of what we mean consists in the fact that each private mind is rooted in the common life by interlocking adjustments which have become automatic to all. By being thus rooted, its capacities and faculties are immeasurably extended ; and this extension of the private mind, which is a consolidation of it with the social fabric, must inevitably in certain cases act upon it as force. We are necessarily under certain circumstances dragged along with the vast machine whose powers we use as our own. The intentional and deliberate coercion used by the State through law and punishment is only a recognition and regulation of this inevitable situation, on which as we have seen the possibility of progress depends. And we are in agreement with the best theory of punish- ment if we regard it from a point of view in harmony with this analogy. It is not the furnishing of a new motive to