ABSTRACT
i do not like the popular contemporary coupling of ‘Justice and Liberty’, nor yet, with the terms reversed, of ‘Liberty and Justice’. It is the logical implications of the juxtaposition which I dislike, not the noble moral and political sentiment that inspires it in the verses of the Italian Carducci. 1 I cannot accept these two ideas thus customarily presented and recommended to us together, as if they were two fruits set one beside the other on the table. Ideas are not related numerically like fruits as just two or three; they stand in the living system of thought. Thought destroys by analysis ideas created by the imagination and dismisses as alien those of empirical origin and meaning; to all genuine ideas or conceptions it assigns their proper place as a necessary moment in the unity which together they compose, each with its appropriate antecedent and consequent. When they are torn out of this context they become unrelated and lose their force and meaning. What then is the really intelligible significance of of the words ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’, and what is the relation between them? Can one co-exist with the other, or are they mutually exclusive and repugnant? Are they of equal status or can either be derived from and reduced to the other?
