us things--religion, play, art, study,
conversation. In a world composed entirely of philosophers an hour or
two a day of manual labour--a very welcome quantity--would provide for
material wants; the rest could then be all the more competently
dedicated to a liberal life; for a healthy soul needs matter quite as
much for an object of interest as for a means of sustenance. But
philosophers do not yet people nor even govern the world, and so simple
a Utopia which reason, if it had direct efficacy, would long ago have
reduced to act, is made impossible by the cross-currents of instinct,
tradition, and fancy which variously deflect affairs.

[Sidenote: Basis of government.]

What are called the laws of nature are so many observations made by man
on a way things have of repeating themselves by replying always to their
old causes and never, as reason's prejudice would expect, to their new
opportunities. This inertia, which physics registers in the first law of
motion, natural history and psychology call habit. Habit is a physical
law. It is the basis and force of all morality, but is not morality
itself. In society it takes the form of custom which, when codified, is
called law and when enforced is called government. Government is the
political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of
inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. But, like any
mechanical complication, it may become rational, and many of its forms
and operations may be defended on rational grounds. All natural
organisms, from protoplasm to poetry, can exercise certain ideal
functions and symbolise in their structure certain ideal relations.
Protoplasm tends to propagate itself, and in so doing may turn into a
conscious ideal the end it already tends to realise; but there could be
no desire for self-preservation were there not already a self
preserved. So government can by its existence define the commonwealth
it tends to preserve, and its acts may be approved from the point of
view of those eventual interests which they satisfy. But government
neither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solely
because it is inevitable. It becomes good in so far as the inevitable
adjustment of political forces which it embodies is also a just
provision for all the human interests which it creates or affects.

[Sidenote: How rationality accrues.]

Suppose a cold and hungry savage, failing to find berries and game
enough in the woods,