Authority and allegiance: Here is the head and center of the problem of authority. That problem, as I conceive it, is twofold in nature. It is the problem
- Of making the solutions of the ultimately unifying authority able to command the willing allegiance of citizens, and
- Of discovering a process through which the likelihood of its making that ability pre-eminent is maximized.
So to state the problem is, it must be admitted, to depart from the classic path of political science. For it is the assumption of the classic theory that the ultimately unifying authority must be supreme just because it unifies. That was why Hobbes, in his own vigorous phrase, refused to permit the existence of associations in society on the ground that they were like worms in the entrails of a natural man, they detracted from allegiance to the State and thus endangered the acceptance of its decisions.
So, too, with Rousseau, to whom corporations meant the interposition of a private will before that general will upon which the well-being of the State depended. So, too, it is argued that a strike in the public services stands upon a different ground from a strike in private employment. The State is conceived as the ultimate law making body which gives their character to all other bodies and institutions From the State, if not their existence, at least the rationale of their existence is derived.
To deny its law, even it it seems unjust, is to loosen the cement which holds society together. It is not merely, we are told, to risk anarchy, but also, what is worse, it is to leave the settlement of social arrangements to a decisions based on the might of the conflicting parties concerned.
We must therefore postulate the supremacy of the State’s will over all other wills in society. Its authority then, I take it, has not merely a legal pre-eminence but also a moral pre-eminence, as the fountain of social peace. For no purely legal order can be maintained without persuading those who support it that they do so on moral grounds exclusively theirs.
So stated, the first aspect of the problem of authority permits of an a priori solution. Because the State is the ultimately unifying organ, I must accept its orders and give my allegiance to it against the demands of any other body. The second aspect becomes then of merely minor importance.
I do not my self consider that the problem is so simple as this view would assume. For We are compelled, first of all, to analyses the State will as a function not less than a purpose. We must infer, that is, the nature of the State, not from what , it announces itself to be, but from what it does to the daily substance of men’s lives.
I have already argued that in general the State is the government, that the decisions of the latter body are the decisions which get enforced. The problem is then an inquiry into the authority of government which, in its turn, becomes an inquiry not merely into what a government is, but also what, in the modern social equation, a government is likely to be.
I have suggested that the inference must be drawn in the main from the property-system in the given State, that this system will suggest the actual incidence of power (whatever be its theoretic distribution) and that, in general, the holders of, power will divert its opportunities to their own use. I argued that only the operation of certain rights as the basis upon which authority rests can prevent that perversion, and that the existing system apotheosis’s inequality of power.
I am driven, accordingly, to two conclusions. The claim of authority upon myself is, firstly, legitimate proportionately to the moral urgency of its appeal and it is, secondly, important to make its decisions as closely woven from and into my own experience in order that its claim may be at a maximum.
Law is, of course, the origin of social peace, and I do not mean to deny for a moment the value of social peace. But I am arguing that I shall not feel it to be a condition inherently superior to any other until I know what it implies and I shall judge its implications by experience of their result in terms of my own life. I have to see, that is, what body of experience its maintenance is protecting, and What other experience is excluded from its protection.
Law will, in general, only appeal as legal to the citizen according as it seems to him genuinely, and not merely on a priori grounds, the reflection of a moral order. He will mean by that an order in which the rights he recognizes as valid find place and sanction. Where they are absent he will feel entitled to rebel against the demands of law.
The experience of citizens, in other words, is the true maker of law. What they find true to that experience will have authority for them. It is useless to ask them to yield to decisions which come to them without the reality they appreciate. They may yield to force or to fear. They may accept because they do not understand.
They may feel that resistance, on some given occasion, is not worth the penalty contingently involved. But they will net, on any other conditions, give to the State the only allegiance worth having, the obedience of a free and convinced under standing.
Admittedly this involves the thesis that the exercise of authority is surrounded by a penumbra of anarchy. Is it worth while to deny that truth? Law for men is not the voice of an authority related permanently to some given organ, but the voice of the authority they are prepared to accept.
That was what Ulster meant when it declared the Home Rule Act unconstitutional. That, also, was the motive force behind Passive Resistance to the Education Act of 1902. That is why Churchmen refuse to accept as valid the decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. It explains the resistance of South Wales miners to the Munitions Act of 1915 and of Communists to the whole social order under which we live.
Law, for them, has the authority of its substance and not the authority of the legal organ that is its source of reference. There are, therefore, as many organs of authority in society as there are bodies which command the assent of men. I shall be with my Church and against the State, with my trade union and against the State, if the impact of the State upon my experience seems inadequate compared to the impact of the Church or the trade union. It is my activity which gives legality to the law.
Law, therefore, has to make its way to acceptance through the channels of the mind. And it will convey a different meaning to each mind it encounters because the experience of each mind, the system, therefore, of its wants, are different. The sanctions of authority are thus never ultimately single, because those Wants, though general in character, are in every ultimately the same. We can therefore never guarantee respect for law.
We can never say, for instance, that because the King in Parliament has spoken, therefore its will is bound to prevail. Normally,of course, we hate assurance that the decision announced will be accepted. The real problems occur at the margin and not at the circumference of law-making. But those margins are the urgent and controlling fact in any political philosophy which seeks to be true to its total environment.
Legal right has no meaning for the individual save as he himself makes it have meaning. It has no sanctions save the authority he lends to it by articulating it with his own experience. We are loyal to the demands of the State just to the degree that the articulation accomplished results for gs in a satisfied activity.
I am not, it should be noted, denying the need of obedience. Rather, I am arguing that it should be insisted that obedience is not a relation between an active source of decision and a passive receiver, but that, where it is to be creative, each is a participant in the environment built by their relationship.
We have, if our loyalty is to be at all genuine, to contribute to the State, not a self that is an inert recipient of orders, but a self which contributes to those orders and colors them with its own personality. The State, that is to say, must make its law valid, must discover what I have called the legality of law, by compounding it from the experiences of its citizens. It can only do so by associating them with the process of law-making.
For when we say that the State makes law, we tend to forget that the State must act through agents who are also men, Their wants and purposes are built from their own experience of life, and, naturally, are valid for themselves as they satisfy the implications of that experience. But they are inadequate for others save as they include others.
They lack, save in that way, the authority which makes their wants and purposes compelling because recognizable as our own. And that recognition can only come when we know that their authority is not merely made by us at some definite moment of origin, but continues to be so made by being interwoven, at each stage of the process of government with our own activities. These represent the wants we know as we only can know them. Authority, otherwise, has no profound roots in the soil of our own existence.
Certain contemporary examples will perhaps make this attitude clear. The most striking of all is the manner in which the Treaty of Versailles was made. It is generally agreed that, after the German Revolution of 1918, the desire for a reasonable peace in Germany was widespread. But a reasonable peace meant one in which the interests of the vanquished, not less than those of the victors, found a place.
In the Treaty actually made, not only did the vanquished receive no consideration, but they were even prohibited from expressing the view of what the Treaty meant to them. They were driven into acceptance of the Treaty by the fear of what might follow if they repudiated it. The result is what might have been expected. The average German does not feel that maintenance of the Treaty is an obligation of honor.
He does not ind that his relationship to it is built out of any experience that has validity for-himself. He accepts the Treaty to the point that force, actual or contingent, prevents his evasion of it. But what, in fact, is continually in his mind is the remaking of the Treaty. What, in fact, he is continually seeking is such a body of readjustments as will create obligations he can respect as reasonable.
And no such adjustments will be found save as he participates in the search for them. The process of making them must give him a creative part in their finding. It may even, I think he legitimately urged that the attitude of those politicians to whom the Treaty is a sacred document verbally inspired is largely derived from the recognition that its authority is inadequate. They were searching not for a solution, but for power over Germany.
They were insisting not on an instrument which should join into harmony experiences previously antagonistic, but an instrument which embodied their own experience. The lesson they are being taught is the simple one that while the instrument they have forged has authority for themselves, it has no authority for Germans. They attribute this, of course, to inherent immorality in the nature of Germans but it is, in fact, a simple psychological consequence verifiable from the everyday relationships of ordinary men.
Hardly less striking has been the post-war relation between Capital and Labour, especially in Great Britain. “Employers,” a great capitalist told the House of Lords recently,I have never been more anxious for the welfare of their workers than they are to-day and never has there been less response.
But good-will is inadequate as a means of creating response unless the objects to which it is directed are determined by co-operation. There is no such co-operation between Capital and Labour to-day, nor do there exist the institutions through which it might how.
The industrial world is organized not for peace but for conflict. Each party, as strategic advantage presents itself, imposes terns upon the other. Neither has real~ access to the other‘s mind. Neither has agreed upon common objects of endeavor.
The employer who demands a larger output from his men has never set himself to discover the terms upon which a larger output can be secured. He has never tried to realize that it is a complex function of many variables. He is too often content to assume that if additional output is. followed by an addition to wages, the worker’s concern about the matter is over.
He has never seen that what is important for the worker is not an aspect of his behavior, but his integrated behavior. Additional output raises the question not merely of increased wages, but of proper piece-rates, of continuity and volume of employment, of fatigue in industry, of the relation, through fatigue, of sickness to security, and so forth.
None of these is a question that can be settled by the employer alone. Each of them, if it is to be settled m an adequate way, must be built upon the attachment of an equal weight to the worker’s experience with that of the employer. At present the content of the phrase “welfare ” in Lord Emmott’s remark is utterly different for each party.
And the fatal flaw in the whole relationship is that he assumes, as so many employers assume, that the lack of response on the worker’s part is either a war-neurosis, or else a slackness due to irresponsibility. The fact, of course. is that the war has merely sharpened the worker’s sense that he is not willing any longer to be ruled from without, even if the autocracy is a benevolent one.
For the most benevolent autocrat cannot penetrate an experience he does not share, its joys and its pains are equally unknown to him. What we are witnessing in industry is the birth-pangs of a new order. It may well be that conflict will stifle it before it emerges. Certainly it cannot be quick with healthy life unless the environment it is to encounter is reshaped to fit its wants.
And here a particular argument is of interest because it illustrates, more vividly than any other, the approach to the problem of authority I am seeking to emphasis. Men say they can understand strikes in industries which do not seriously affect the society as a whole. If the makers of perfume choose to cease work, that is a matter of indifference society will not die for lack of perfume.
But on the railways or in the police force a strike, it is urged, is a very different thing. For these functions are clothed with a directly public purpose, where they cease to Operate, a direct blow is aimed at the very heart of social organization. It is, therefore, so it is said, impossible to permit dislocation in enterprise of this kind. The State owes it to society to see that there is continuity of service. Either, then, it must make strikes in these functions definitely illegal, or it must have the means at its disposal of operating , alternatively the dislocated service.
I do not deny the seriousness of dislocation in these functions. But it follows from what I have urged above that the legal prohibition of strikes will not add one jot or tittle to, the authority which seeks to prevent them. To say that the purpose of these functions is continuity of service and that, therefore, a strike is a denial of their rationale, seems to mean entirely useless approach to the problem. For the purpose of a function is not a static form of words. The purpose is the meaning of the function in the daily life of those who are related to it.
The way to prevent dislocation is not to prohibit it, but to enable those so related to participate in its working. For their control is then an expression of their experience. The discipline they adopt grows naturally out of the needs they know. Men are not less likely to strike, say on the railways, because strikes are illegal that is only more likely to exacerbate their temper when they have struck.
Nor I suggest, does the provision of a temporary alternative really help the problem. For either it drives towards a settlement which, like the Treaty of Versailles, fails to carry with it a sense of obligation, or else, by using power on one side of the conflict, it turns the issue away from a consideration of the real facts involved to questions of method in truth irrelevant to them.
The secret of avoiding dislocation in industries of this kind is to make the necessary institutions of agreement at their foundation instead of creating them spontaneously as each temporary difference arises. For then the agreement is cloaked in the authority derived from continuous knowledge and that knowledge, in its turn, is a function of the total experience available to us.
We can then evaluate the factors of solution before the differences are precipitated. We can examine before the request becomes a demand, and the demand a threat, Above all, we can examine in common. In our present arrangements, what is emphasized is always the line of partition instead of the territory of agreement and, granted those arrangements, it is inevitable that it should be so.
I do not say that this method will prevent strikes,I only urge that it will minimize their number as no other method can do. But a new problem here arises upon which something must be said. So far I have mainly spoken of the individual as though he and the State were the only factors in the social process.
Clearly, of course, the issue is more complex than this for the State, as I argued earlier, does not exhaust the associative impulse in men. They build themselves groups as the expression of felt needs which cannot be satisfied by individual activity. The group is an attempt to advance some interest in which its members feel an answer to the wants of their experience.
They are original functions of the environment. They are an effort so to adjust it that the individual can by its means feed impulses which, otherwise, are either starved or inadequately nourished. The group is real in the , Same sense as the State is real. It has, that is to say, an interest to promote, a function to serve.
The State does not call it into being. It is hot, outside the categories of law dependent upon the State. It grows in the whole environment as a natural response to factors in that environment. It lives and moves as its surrounding circumstances seem to warrant.
The group we say, is real. What is it real as ? Is it real in the sense . that Jones is real, or Smith, or Robinson, a complete finite entity to be immediately and recognizably differentiated from other complete and finite entities? The group is real, I suggest, as a relation or a process. It is a binding together of its individual parts to certain modes of behavior deemed by them likely to promote the interests with which they are concerned. In that sense it possesses personality.
It results in integrated behavior. It enables its members to find channels of satisfied activity which, other wise, would be absent. It has life only through that behavior. It lives, not as a thing apart from its members, but in and through what they do. It enables them to form habits which satisfy, in greater or less degree, the needs their experience seems to warrant.
It moulds the background of their lives and, simultaneously, serves as an instrument through which they themselves contribute to the moulding. It gathers together strands of conduct into a unification of behavior for that area of experience it seeks to control. Its absence would be felt by them as the deprivation of a linkage between themselves and the outer world.
The variety of this group-life is almost bewildering in its profusion. Political parties, churches, trade unions, employers associations, friendly societies, golf-clubs, research bodies like the Institute of France, dramatic societies, are only instances of their place in social organization. They do not, of course, exhaust the allegiance of the individual. He is a center from which there radiate outward lines of contact with the groups to which his experience calls him. They determine, quite largely, his choice of friends, of opportunities, of a career.
They drive roads through life along which, a little timidly and dubiously, he makes his way to his goal. They represent, for the vast majority, a necessary economy of effort. They Plan his activities and give him room in their planning for the expression of his desire. They fail or succeed as they are sensitive to his groping for satisfaction, by the degree to which they realize in him the energy which is seeking to find a meaning that satisfies in the vast social forces before him.
They seek to give him mastery of the event, to enable him, in concert with like-minded men, to control the environment to a destiny he wants. They have, often enough, a special validity for him because they are the channel of his deliberate preference. They mould a tradition about which he feels urgently. Where he is recognizably at home.
They evoke, accordingly, a loyalty which, not seldom, goes down to the very roots of his being. They Give him a feeling that he has found himself, a power of Self-recognition that is an invaluable factor in the achievement of personal harmony. What, without them, is a chaotic world, becomes a world ordered by the opportunity to do something he believes it worth while it do with others who share an experience akin to his own.
To urge in this way that the group is necessary to the individual is not necessarily to be blind to its possible defects. Like the nation-State, it tends to exclusiveness as a means of self-protection. It grows willing to sacrifice the tradition of other bodies to its own tradition. It asks of its members at surrender of their personality to its prevailing tone and atmosphere. It asks him to be loud about its merits and either complacent or silent about its defects.
In the absence of keen criticism from within, it will become rigid and arrogant unable to realize the possibility that it is not infallible. It will substitute for a healthy esprit dc corps an idolatrous fanaticism which destroys what there is of plasticity in its members. It will persecute dissent and eulogise obedience with little regard to the substance they contain.
It will insist that its partial good is good itself, and its glimpse of truth the whole truth. It will be impatient, particularly at moments of conflict with other groups, of a willingness in its members to consider solutions alternative to its own. Its leaders, like the governors of a State, will tend to develop purposes and interests different from, often in antagonism to, the purposes and interests of the general body of its members.
However faithfully, says Mr. Cole,
“ the members of a committee may try to fulfill their whole duty to their members, an element of committee loyalty will almost inevitably enter into their actions.”
A cabinet that is in tact alien in temper from its party will Seek to emphasis a non-existent unity with it. Its very sense of disharmony will make it insist on mechanical obedience even more than if it were satisfactory to its constituents. Absorption in any group tends to mean narrowness instead of breadth, rigour instead of plasticity, unquestioning acceptance instead of enlightened agreement.
Yet all this, after all, is only to say that groups are built from human beings and that they act as the State in its own turn acts. Everyone prefers the routine to the novelty. Everyone is more comfortable in obedience than in dispute. Everyone desires that his particular solution be accepted as universal truth. And with all groups save the State there is one saving condition of basic importance. They are voluntary bodies. They lack the instruments of ultimate coercion.
If I do not like my club, I can resign. If I disagree with my (Church, I can leave it. Even industrial bodies cannot coerce their members beyond the point of insisting on what may be termed mental conformity. The group, in other words, is largely driven by the circumstances of its situation to respond more vividly than the State responds to the wants of its members.
It is compelled to lean much more heavily upon their conscious willingness to act together, mast less upon the inert and almost automatic habit of indifferent acceptance. It is, if it is to be successful, much more dependent upon the assent which arises from deliberate mental activity. It has to readjust itself more continuously to new conditions.
It has to revise its dogmas, to allow a broader interpretation of purpose, than the State. Its penalty is more costly to itself, and its failure to readjust entails a heavier penalty. For while its members are linked with it because they place. value upon the interests it promotes, they do not all place the same value upon those interests and those interests have for them a marginal utility which exists in the perspective of knowledge that loyalty may be transferred elsewhere.
A Church of England that is unduly subservient to the State loses members to the Church of Rome a Liberal Party which is vague about its industrial policy finds an apparent drift among its members to the forces of Labor. Even the proud boast of semipermeable does not persuade the Roman Catholic Church -to force upon its members an attempt to apply the Syllabus of 1864 and the development of a specifically Catholic Socialism is evidence that Popes are infallible rather as a matter of courtesy than of administration.
A Republican Party which calls attention rather to its past than to its future finds that its own members search for the symbols of rebellion against it. Groups, in short, are forced in the end to the conviction that what gives them life is what their members think about them. No allegiance is permanent that does not prove itself to them as it works. Their obligations become sterilized save as they grow spontaneously from an experience that proves their worth.
This has been put by Father Tyrrell in an admirable phrase. “It is not their red robes,” he said, I but my own judgment about them that gives the pack of cardinals any title to distinction. Like Elizabeth, it has frocked them and can unfrock them. It is they who are in peril, not we. The authority of any group is based, in fact, upon the living and spontaneous trust it can command. If it betrays or stultifies itself it ceases to win the loyalty that is its life.
Here, as elsewhere, it is plain that the real field of social action is the individual human mind. Its experience, forces it to judge, and all judgment, . ultimately is a choice. It is, of course, a choice with penalties. The soldier who comes to believe in the moral error of coercion has no alternative save to lay down his sword but he will suffer from his decision.
The Churchman who comes to doubt the validity of his faith has, equally, no alternative save resignation. There comes a point in individual experience when, again in Tyrrell’s words one is driven on to follow the dominant influence of one’s life even if it should break the heart of all the world. That is the ultimate fact by which all authority, voluntary or otherwise, is conditioned. Loyalty is won from us, it cannot be imposed upon us.
It must grow spontaneously Out of our experience and the body which seeks to retain it must be able continuously to adapt itself to an experience that is ever-changing. It will never quite succeed. Men will never be content to be syllables in the mouth of Allah. Their difference from their fellows will always prevent their absorption. Our sense is that we experience ourselves not in unity but in division. We are conscious of separateness from others, as well as an enfolding with others. We prove that separateness to be real by the dis harmonies of which it makes us aware.
We cannot act without the sense that we are only partially with our fellows, and with them partially only in parts which refuse reduction to an ultimate unity. Our isolation, however uncomfortable,is ultimately so inescapable and so immense that it makes us see the universe not as an alphabet in which we are the letters, but as a discrete series of symbols only part of which convey to us a meaning . We can accept.
If this be true, it follows that there is no necessary unity in society. There are, at points within its structure, unities of which the transience varies in degree. But these unities are always external, and they unite at points only upon their boundaries.
They are means through which men realize themselves, never ends in which they from themselves. We are never, as human beings, wholly included in any relation. About us is always an environment which separates us from others, or, at the best, makes our union with them but a partial one.
For Out minds, at least so far as social theory is concerned, are finite minds. We know some things, but not all things, and what we know we know differently from one another. We have to take the world of sense as we meet it, its losses and gains, its struggles and its victories, and assume that, as We meet it, it is a real world in space and time.
We have to treat what seems to us evil as genuine and not merely as an appearance capable, other where, of being harmonized into good. The unity we encounter in the world of social fact is never complete. For while we may all seek an end which can be described as identical, the end is one only in the description. The good life for me is not the same as the good life for you. It has, of course, resemblances.
In a well-ordered society it has sufficient resemblance to make social peace effective. But resemblance does not involve identity. The things we want do not flow together with each other. What we meet is pluralistic and not monastic. There is no plane on which the differences can somehow be Coerced into unity.
If this be true, it follows that what there is of unity in our relations is not a priori there. Our groups do not grow together into a vast monastic whole we build them together as and how we can. We find the means of connection by the discovery of kindred purpose, of sameness in difference, of like origin. The oneness we achieve is a contribution we ourselves make. But we make it only in a partial way. I may co-operate with X in industry while I try to deprive him of his religious rights.
I may be an earnest propagandist for the study of Czechoslovak literature even while I wish to restore Czech-Slovakia to its old place in a re-made Austria-Hungary. I may, that is to say, relate myself to parts without, simultaneously, involving wholes. We are in, so to say, not a universe but a multiverse. We recognize as valid the claims not of some final synthesized unity, but of unities to which we feel ourselves sympathetic. We respond to those claims.
But We do not feel them part of some great system which moves by logical sequence from its pieces to a whole. Our relations are not like chords in a great symphony in which what is important is the ultimate impression conveyed. Each piece of our experience is real for us and, therefore, the attachments of each piece guide our personalities into a system bf loyalties.
How that system maintains its equilibrium, where, at any moment, the emphasis is to be thrown is a matter that each of us must decide. For that system is ours and ours only. Its impact is decisive for ourselves. Its authority for us is the fact that it has grown within our own conscience and our own mind, is, so to speak, ultimately a part of each.
To accept another system is to make our own experience the slave of another. It is to yield my personality, all that makes me most distinctively myself, to the desires of another and to the will another bases upon those desires. But there is never enough oneness of desire between me and another to make a real solution of this kind. The co-operation I discover myself to need is, in James phrase, federal and not,imperial, in character.
What I search for is not a center of active willing in which I myself am lost, but a center to the will of which I can myself contribute the thing that is distinctively myself.
If this be true, the implications, as I think, are of importance for political philosophy. The center of significance is no longer the search for unity, but, rather, what that unity makes. And what it makes must, if it is to win my allegiance, include results I recognize as expressive of my need, results, even more, that I realize I have helped to make. For my needs will go unexpressed save as I make them articulate.
I must build myself into the decisions which bind my behavior. For, otherwise, the coherence that is effected is only accidentally relevant not only for myself, but also for those groups through which I seek self-expression. A unity achieved without my contribution may adjust me to the new environment it creates, but it will not be a creative adjustment.
Once it is realized that the structure made is intended to contain my activities, it is obvious that I must put my own hand to its construction. The edifice, whatever it emerges as, will not be perfect. Something of myself will be omitted in whatever synthesis is made. But, clearly, that synthesis will seem to me less an evasion or a betrayal if it is a process compounded in part from me not less than from others,
It is the difference between occupying one’s own house and living in a prison-cell. To the former I can add myself. It becomes a thing through which and in which I can add my peculiar grasp of life. In the latter I inherit uniformity which I am powerless to alter.
The routine of form and activity is there for me to accept. No increment of myself can color or change it. It remains consistently external to my personality. It separates me from the world instead of giving me a place in the world. It ensures dislocation instead of promoting union.
The political inference is, I think, clear. The structure of social organization must be federal if it is to be adequate. Its pattern involves, not myself and the State, my groups and the State, but all these and their interrelationships. For when I respond to the demands of the State, there grows up between us a process which alters both response and demand. That process is compounded not merely from my State-context,but from the total environment in which I find myself.
The State which seeks my loyalty by seeking. it is altering my relation to Church and trade union, to all the multiplicity of fellowships to which I belong. It has to validate that alteration. It has to prove to me that the adjustment it asks me to make adds to my satisfaction.
It can do so only by the demonstration that the change to be effected is not an imposition upon those fellowships but a growth from their experience. It has to show that its demand represents a genuine reciprocal increase of good. And good means good for me as well as others it must be a co-operative creation in which I feel myself to share.
It must be a good which elicits not merely an apathetic acceptance on my part, but a response which enables me to experiment with the growing realization of my best self. That realization, above all, must be my own. For it is when I am guided by self-knowledge to the sense of , what I may become that I begin most genuinely to enter my inheritance.