DEMOCRACY AND

LEADERSHIP
BY
IRVING BABBITT
Author of “Rousseau and Romanticism ” “The Masters of
Modem French Criticism” “The New Laokoon” etc.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Zl)t a&toerafoe Cambridge
 COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY ESTHER BABBITT HOWE

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY IRVING BABBITT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE

THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

EIGHTH IMPRESSION, MAY, 1962

)t JMtoersibe
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S A.

Such legislation [against private property] may have a spe¬
cious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and
are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner
everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when
some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states,
... which are said to arise out of the possession of private
property. These evils, however, are due to a very different
cause — the wickedness of human nature.
Aristotle: Politics, 1263b, 11.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and

appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is
within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the
eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds
cannot be free.
Burke: Letter to a member of the National Assembly.

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despot¬

ism or unlimited sovereignty or absolute power is the same in a
majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an
oligarchical junto, and a single emperor — equally arbitrary,
cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.
John Adams: Letter to Thomas Jefferson (13 November, 1815)

Den einzelnen Verkehrtheiten des Tags sollte man immer nur

grosse weltgeschichtliche Massen entgegensetzen.
Goethe: Spruche.
 PREFATORY NOTE

Parts of this book were used in a series of four lec¬

tures that I gave at Kenyon College on the Larwill
Foundation in March, 1920. I called the series
“ Democracy and Imperialism.” In April, 1922,1
gave four lectures at the Leland Stanford Univer¬
sity on the West Foundation. This series, which I
entitled “The Ethical Basis of Democracy,” con¬
tained some of the same material as the Kenyon
series, altered, however, in form and with consider¬
able additions. Finally, I drew on certain chapters
of the volume for a course of public lectures deliv¬
ered at'the Sorbonne (March-May, 1923) under the
title “Les Ecrits politiques de J.-J. Rousseau.” I
desire to thank the authorities of these institutions
for various courtesies extended to me in connection
with the giving of the lectures.
I. B.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February, 1924
l
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1
I. The Types of Political Thinking 27
II. Rousseau and the Idyllic Imagination 70
III. Burke and the Moral Imagination 97
IV. Democracy and Imperialism 117
V. Europe and Asia 158
VI. True and False Liberals 186
VII. Democracy and Standards 239
Appendix A: Theories of the Will 319
Appendix B: Absolute Sovereignty 331
Bibliography 337
Index 345
 DEMOCRACY AND
LEADERSHIP
O O

INTRODUCTION

According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even

more exclusively taken up than is the present with the
economic problem, especially with the relations between
capital and labor. In that case, one is tempted to reply,
the future will be very superficial. When studied with
any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will
be found to run into the political problem, the political
problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the
philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly
bound up at last with the religious problem. This book
is only one of a series in which I have been trying to
bring out these deeper implications of the modem move¬
ment. Though devoted to different topics, the volumes
of the series are yet bound together by their common
preoccupation with the naturalistic trend, which goes
back in some of its main aspects at least as far as the
Renaissance, but which won its decisive triumphs over
tradition in the eighteenth century. Among the men of
the eighteenth century who prepared the way for the
world in which we are now living I have, here as else¬
where in my writing, given a preeminent place to Rous¬
seau. It is hard for any one who has investigated the
2 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

facts to deny him this preeminence, even though one

should not go so far as to say with Lord Acton that
“ Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aris¬
totle, or Cicero, or Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas
Aquinas, or any other man who ever lived.”1 The great
distinction of Rousseau in the history of thought, if my
own analysis be correct, is that he gave the wrong an¬
swers to the right questions. It is no small distinction
even to have asked the right questions.
Rousseau has at all events suggested to me the terms
in which I have treated my present topic. He is easily
first among the theorists of radical democracy. He is
also the most eminent of those who have attacked civili¬
zation. Moreover, he has brought his advocacy of de¬
mocracy and his attack on civilization into a definite
relationship with one another. Herein he seems to go
deeper than those who relate democracy, not to the
question of civilization versus barbarism, but to the
question of progress versus reaction. For why should
men progress unless it can be shown that they are pro¬
gressing towards civilization; or of what avail, again, is
progress if barbarism is, as Rousseau affirms, more felici¬
tous? If we thought clearly enough, we should probably
dismiss as somewhat old-fashioned, as a mere survivor of
the nineteenth century, the man who puts his primary
emphasis on the contrast between the progressive and
the reactionary, and turn our attention to the more es¬
sential contrast between the civilized man and the bar¬
barian. The man of the nineteenth century was indeed
wont to take for granted that the type of progress he
1 See Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, p. xii.
 INTRODUCTION 3
sought to promote was a progress towards civilization.
Some persons began to have doubts on this point even
before the War, others had their doubts awakened by
the War itself, and still others have been made doubtful
by the peace. An age that thought it was progressing
towards a “far-off divine event,” and turned out instead
to be progressing towards Armageddon, suffered, one
cannot help surmising, from some fundamental confu¬
sion in its notions of progress. One may be aided in
detecting the nature of this confusion by the Emersonian
distinction of which I have made considerable use in my
previous writing — the distinction, namely, between a
“law for man” and a “law for thing.” The special
praise that Confucius bestowed on his favorite disciple
was that he was “always progressing and never came to
a standstill.” What Confucius plainly had in mind was
progress according to the human law. What the man of
the nineteenth century meant as a rule by the term was
no less plainly material progress. He seems to have as¬
sumed, so far as he gave the subject any thought at all,
that moral progress would issue almost automatically
from material progress. In view of the duality of human
experience, the whole question is, however, vastly more
complex than the ordinary progressive has ever sus¬
pected. Progress according to the natural law must, if it
is to make for civilization, be subordinated to some ade¬
quate end; and the natural law does not in itself supply
this end. As a result of the neglect of this truth, we have
the type of man who deems himself progressive and is
yet pursuing power and speed for their own sake, the
man who does not care where he is going, as some one
4 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

has put it, provided only he can go there faster and

faster.
If progress and civilization do not mean more than
this, one might be justified in sharing Rousseau’s pre¬
dilection for barbarism. The reason he gives for pre¬
ferring the barbaric to the civilized state is in itself
extremely weighty: the barbaric state is, he maintains,
the more fraternal. The fraternal spirit is the fine
flower, not merely of genuine philosophy, but of genuine
religion. One should be ready to make almost any
sacrifice in order to attain it. My endeavor has, how¬
ever, been to show that Rousseau’s fraternity is only a
sentimental dream. The psychic impossibility involved
in this dream is obvious, one may even say, glaring.
For example, Walt Whitman, one of the chief of Rous¬
seau’s American followers, preaches universal brother¬
hood among men each one of whom is, like himself,
to “permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without
check with original energy”;1 in other words, Whit¬
man proposes to base brotherhood, a religious virtue,
on expansive appetite.
I have tried here and elsewhere to show that demo¬
cratic fraternity, as a Rousseau and a Whitman conceive
it, and progress, as the utilitarian conceives it, are,
however much they may clash at certain points,
nevertheless only different aspects of the same natu¬
ralistic movement. This movement may be defined in
its totality as humanitarianism. I ventured the asser¬
tion several years ago that something is omitted in this
movement, and that the something may turn out to be
1 See Song of Myself.
 INTRODUCTION 5
the keystone of the arch.1 The error that results from
this central omission assumes many forms. I choose
almost at random a very crude form — the form in
which it is finally reaching the man in the street. A
writer in a widely circulated magazine, “ Photoplay,”
devotes several editorial paragraphs to denouncing the
people who say “don’t”; they are, he complains, mere
destroyers, the enemies of every generous creative im¬
pulse. Only in so far as one gets rid of the don’ts does
one fulfil the saying of the Teacher, “I am come that ye
shall have life, and that ye shall have it more abun¬
dantly.” Mr. Henry Ford would no doubt dismiss such
utterances as part of the great Jewish plot to destroy
Gentile civilization. It was not, however, a Jew, but
Madame de Stael who declared that everything expan¬
sive in human nature is divine. This notion of a divine
expansiveness has a long history in the Occident anterior
to Madame de Stael, a history that in some of its phases
goes at least as far back as the Neoplatonists.
In any case the assertion that one attains to more
abundant life (in the religious sense) by getting rid of
the don’ts sums up clearly, even though in an extreme
form, the side of the modern movement with which I
am taking issue. This book in particular is devoted to
the most unpopular of all tasks — a defence of the veto
power. Not the least singular feature of the singular
epoch in which we are living is that the very persons
who are least willing to hear about the veto power are
likewise the persons who are most certain that they
stand for the virtues that depend upon its exercise —
1 See The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912), p. 188.
6 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

for example, peace and brotherhood. As against the

expansionists of every kind, I do not hesitate to affirm
that what is specifically human in man and ultimately
divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is felt in its
relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain. The
affirmation of this quality of will is nothing new: it is
implied in the Pauline opposition between a law of the
spirit and a law of the members. In general, the
primacy accorded to will over intellect is Oriental. The
idea of humility, the idea that man needs to defer to a
higher will, came into Europe with an Oriental religion,
Christianity. This idea has been losing ground in al¬
most exact ratio to the decline of Christianity. Inas¬
much as the recognition of the supremacy of will seems
to me imperative in any wise view of life, I side in im¬
portant respects with the Christian against those who
have in the Occident, whether in ancient or modern
times, inclined to give the first place either to the in¬
tellect or the emotions. I differ from the Christian,
however, in that my interest in the higher will and the
power of veto it exercises over man’s expansive desires
is humanistic rather than religious. I am concerned, in
other words, less with the meditation in which true
religion always culminates, than in the mediation or ob¬
servance of the law of measure that should govern man
in his secular relations. Moreover, I am for coming at
my humanism in a positive and critical rather than in a
merely traditional manner. To this extent I am with
the naturalists, who have from the start been rejecting
outer authority in favor of the immediate and experi¬
mental. One should have only respect for the man of
 INTRODUCTION 7

science in so far as he deals in this critical fashion with

the natural law — and no small part of human nature
itself comes under the natural law. The error begins
when an attempt is made to extend this law to cover the
whole of human nature. This is to deny not merely
outer authority, but something that is a matter of im¬
mediate experience, the opposition, namely, of which
the individual is conscious in himself, between a law of
the spirit and a law of the members. Deny or dis¬
simulate this opposition and the inner life tends in the
same measure to disappear. Carlyle’s contrast between
the Rousseauism of the French Revolution and true
Christianity is also the contrast between humanitarian-
ism in general, in either its sentimental or its utilitarian
form, and any doctrine that affirms the higher will.
“Alas, no, M. Roux!” Carlyle exclaims. “A Gospel of
Brotherhood not according to any of the four old
Evangelists and calling on men to repent, and amend
each his own wicked existence, that they might be saved;
but a Gospel rather, as we often hint, according to a new
fifth Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to amend
each the whole world’s wicked existence and be saved by
making the Constitution. A thing different and distant
toto ccelo”
My own objection to this substitution of social re¬
form for self-reform is that it involves the turning away
from the more immediate to the less immediate. In
general I have sought in my attack on the utilitarian-
sentimental movement to avoid metaphysical and
theological assumptions, and to rely on psychological
analysis supported by an immense and growing body of
8 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

evidence. My humanism is in this sense not only posi¬

tive and critical, but, what will be found to come to the
same thing, individualistic. Under existing conditions,
the significant struggle seems to me to be not that be¬
tween the unsound individualist and the traditionalist,
nor again, as is currently assumed, that between the un¬
sound individualist and the altruist, but that between
the sound and the unsound individualist. To be a sound
individualist, one needs, as I take it, to retain one’s hold
on the truths of the inner life, even though breaking
more or less completely with the past.
It may help to a fuller understanding of my present
attempt to deal in a fashion at once critical and human¬
istic with the problem of the will in its bearing on the
political problem if I say a few words at this point about
certain previous stages in my argument. In the opening
chapters of “Literature and the American College” I
seek to discriminate between the humanist and the
humanitarians of either the utilitarian or the senti¬
mental brand. These two sides of the movement I
sometimes term the Baconian and the Rousseauistic
after the names of the men who seem to me to have pre¬
figured them most completely in their writings and per¬
sonalities. The humanitarian is not, I pointed out,
primarily concerned, like the humanist, with the individ¬
ual and his inner life, but with the welfare and progress
of mankind in the lump. His favorite word is “service.”
The current tendency to regard humanism simply as an
abbreviated and more convenient form for humanitari-
anism can only be the source of the most vicious con¬
fusions.
 INTRODUCTION 9

In “The Masters of Modern French Criticism” I

attempt to carry a stage farther my defence of a critical
humanism. Though the basis of the inner life is the op¬
position between a lower and a higher will, the higher
will cannot, after all, act at random. It must have
standards. Formerly the standards were supplied by
tradition. The man who accepted Christian tradition,
for example, was in no doubt as to the kind and degree
of discipline he needed to impose on his lower nature.
He thus achieved some measure of moral unity with
himself and also with other men who accepted the
same discipline. If the individualist, on the other hand,
is to have standards, he must rely on the critical spirit
in direct ratio to the completeness of his break with the
traditional unifications of life. He is confronted at the
outset with the most difficult of philosophical problems
— that of the One and the Many. For it is obvious that
standards cannot exist unless there is an element of one¬
ness somewhere with which to measure the infinite
otherwiseness of things. The special theme of “The
Masters” is the problem of the One and the Many and
the failure of Sainte-Beuve and other eminent French in¬
dividualists to deal with it adequately and so to achieve
standards in a modern fashion. The results of the critical
endeavor of the past century may be summed up most
completely, perhaps, in the word relativity. The failure
of criticism to attain to any centre of judgment set
above the shifting impressions of the individual and the
flux of phenomenal nature is a defeat for civilization it¬
self, if it be true, as I have tried to show, that civiliza¬
tion must ultimately depend on the maintenance of
 1

10 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

standards. In “The New Laokoon” I have sought to ex¬

hibit the anarchy that has supervened in literature and
the arts with the progressive decline of standards. Super¬
ficially, this anarchy seems above all an anarchy of the
emotions. On closer scrutiny, however, emotional an¬
archy itself turns out to be only a sign of something sub¬
tler and more dangerous — anarchy of the imagination.
In “Rousseau and Romanticism,” a book that is closely
connected in argument with “The New Laokoon,” the
problem of the imagination receives special treatment.
I come here to another distinctive feature of the type of
humanism I am defending. I not only have more to say
of will and less of reason than the humanist in the
Gracco-Roman tradition, but I also grant a most im¬
portant role to imagination. If one does not, like
Diderot, dismiss as “artificial” the conflict between a
natural or expansive will and a specifically human will
or will to refrain, if, on the contrary, one insists on this
conflict as a primordial fact of consciousness, one will
be led, I believe, to the further conclusion that the
outcome of this “civil war in the cave” will be deter¬
mined by the attitude of the imagination; that the
imagination, in other words, holds the balance of power
between the higher and the lower nature of man. In the
light of history (one need not go any farther back than
the Great War) man’s pretence to be governed by
reason in any ordinary sense of the word seems a bad
jest. The critical observer is forced to agree with
Napoleon that, not reason, but “imagination governs
mankind.” It does not follow that mankind need be
governed, as it has been very largely during the past
century, by the Napoleonic quality of imagination.
 INTRODUCTION 11

The complaint has been made that the word imagi¬

nation has been used in so many senses that it has
ceased to have any meaning. My own understanding
of the term may perhaps be made clearer by a brief
historical survey. The Latin word (imaginatio) from
which our word is derived is itself a rendering of the
Greek phantasy or fancy (<£avrao-ia). Fancy means
literally “what appears”; in other words, either the
various impressions of sense, or else a faculty that
stores up these impressions and is therefore closely
related to memory. Greek philosophy gave a rather
low rating to “fancy” or appearance in comparison
with reality, which it inclined to identify with reason or
mind. To the Stoic in particular it seemed both feasible
and imperative that reason should hold sway over all
the impressions that beat upon the gateway of the
senses and make a severe selection among them. “How
easy a thing it is,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to put away
and blot out every Taney’ [i.e., impression] that is dis¬
turbing or alien, and to be at once in perfect peace.” The
disparagement of fancy in this sense is already found in
Plato. He hopes to attain a truth that is “firm and not
pulled around this way and that by our ‘fancy.’” 1 A
chief source of Christian humility, on the other hand, was
the conviction that man is unable by his own resources
to achieve any such truth, the conviction, above all,

1 Cratylus, 386 E. It goes without saying that no philosopher

affords better examples of the higher uses of the imagination
(in the extended sense that we have come to give to the word)
than Plato. As for the Platonic theory of the imagination in
this extended sense, it is not altogether easy to grasp, even after
every allowance has been made for changes in terminology.
12 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

that mere reason cannot prevail over the deceits of the

senses. Pascal, for example, gives to the word imagi¬
nation about the same meaning that the Stoic gave
either to it or its Greek equivalent, and like the Stoic
he disparages imagination; only to this disparagement
he adds the disparagement of reason. What he opposes
to an imagination that is only a “mistress of error” and
to a reason that is impotent to resist this error is the
“heart,” by which he means the illumination of the
higher will in the form of grace. This inner revelation
has itself the support of outer revelation. Here, he
holds, one may find at last a firm footing of truth and
reality. He does not admit that imagination has any
part either in outer revelation or in the life of the
“heart.” He has this much at least in common with
Plato that he believes it possible to draw a firm and
fast line between imagination (or mere appearance)
and reality. Strict psychology, however, scarcely
warrants any such sharp discrimination between the
true and the illusory. It forces one rather to conclude
with Joubert that “illusion is an integral part of reality.”
This conclusion, however damaging it may be to mere
dogma, does not force one to forego standards. But in
that case one needs to attend to another possible mean¬
ing of the word imagination, the second main meaning,
one is tempted to say, that the word has actually had
in Occidental thought. The word in this other meaning
stands less for what one perceives, either inwardly or
outwardly, than for what one conceives. Conceit, it
should be remembered, was in older English usage not
only a complimentary term, but one of the synonyms of
 INTRODUCTION 13
imagination. The process by which the term has come
to have its present unfavorable meaning of vain imagin¬
ing has its adequate historical explanation into which I
need not here enter. Now to “conceive” is, in an al¬
most etymological sense, to gather things together, to
see likenesses and analogies and in so far to unify what
were else mere heterogeneity. The imagination, says
Coleridge somewhat pedantically, is the “ esemplastic ”
power — the power, that is, that fashions things into
one. The passages in which Coleridge expounds this
view of the imagination afford, perhaps, the best ex¬
ample in English of what I have called the second main
meaning of the word. For an instance of the other
main meaning we may turn to Addison’s papers on
the imagination in the “Spectator.” Addison not only
tends to reduce imagination to outer perception, but,
encouraged by the Latin rendering of the Greek
“fancy,” to narrow outer perception itself to visual
perception.
If we mean by imagination not merely what we per¬
ceive, but what we conceive, it follows inevitably that
the problem of the imagination is closely bound up with
that of the One and the Many and therefore with the
problem of standards; for it is impossible, let me repeat,
to achieve standards, at least along critical lines, unless
one can discover in life somewhere an abiding unity
with which to measure its mere variety and change.
Because “illusion is an integral part of reality,” we are
not justified in assuming that every unity that the
imagination may conceive must therefore be dismissed
as illusory. A somewhat paradoxical person might in-
14 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

deed affirm that, even though one did not raise directly
the question of reality at all, it would still be possible to
have standards; that one might measure men accurately
enough for most practical purposes simply by the qual¬
ity of their illusions — and their disillusions. However,
in spite of the fact that absolute unity and reality must
ever elude us and that the absolute in general must be
dismissed as a metaphysical dream, we may still deter¬
mine on experimental grounds to what degree any
particular view of life is sanctioned or repudiated by the
nature of things and rate it accordingly as more or less
real. God, according to Synesius, communicates with
man through the imagination. Unfortunately the devil
communicates with him in the same way and the test of
these communications is not, strictly speaking, in the
imagination itself. To determine the quality of our
imaginings, we need to supplement the power in man
that perceives and the power that conceives with a third
power — that which discriminates. All divisions of
man into powers or faculties are, I am aware, more or
less arbitrary, but, though arbitrary, they are inevitable,
if only as instruments of thought; and the threefold
division I am here employing will, I believe, be found
practically one of the most helpful.
In emphasizing the importance of the power in man
that discriminates, I mean this power, working not
abstractly, but on the actual material of experience. I
may perhaps best sum up my whole point of view by
saying that the only thing that finally counts in this
world is a concentration, at once imaginative and dis¬
criminating, on the facts. Now the facts that one may
 INTRODUCTION 15

perceive and on which one may concentrate are not

only infinite in number, but of entirely different orders.
This is one reason why material progress, so far from
assuring moral progress, is, on the contrary, extremely
difficult to combine with it. This progress has been
won by an almost tyrannical concentration on the
facts of the natural law. Man’s capacity for concen¬
tration is limited, so that the price he has paid for
material progress has been an increasing inattention to
facts of an entirely different order — those, namely, of
the human law. The resulting spiritual blindness has
been an invitation to Nemesis. One may have some
inkling of the nature of this Nemesis from the Great
War and other similar symptoms that have been mul¬
tiplying of late in our Western societies.
It goes without saying that the partisans of “prog¬
ress” have not admitted their spiritual blindness. They
have accepted as valid substitutes for the traditional
standards and the moral unity that these standards
tended to promote certain new unifications of life that
display great imagination, indeed, but an imagination
that has not been sufficiently tested from the point of
view of reality. These new schemes for unifying men
flourished especially in connection with the so-called
romantic movement. It is therefore no small matter
that the leaders of this movement can be shown to have
erected deliberately a cult of the creative imagination
on the ruins of discrimination. Any one who takes
seriously the creations of this type of imagination, an
imagination that is not disciplined to either the natural
or the human law, but is, in Young’s phrase, free to
16 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

wander wild in its own realm of chimeras, falls into

mere conceit or vain imagining. Conceit has always
been the specifically human malady, but never, perhaps,
more so than to-day. The outstanding trait of the men
of our period may seem in retrospect to have been the
facility with which they put forth untried conceits as
“ideals.” We have all grown familiar with the type of
person who is in his own conceit a lofty “idealist,” but
when put to the test has turned out to be only a dis¬
astrous dreamer.
Though man is governed by imagination, fortunately
it does not follow that he must be governed by conceit.
There remains the distinction between the mere vision¬
ary and the man of vision. This distinction acquires its
full importance only when related to the question of
leadership. A main purpose of my present argument is
to show that genuine leaders, good or bad, there will
always be, and that democracy becomes a menace to
civilization when it seeks to evade this truth. The
notion in particular that a substitute for leadership
may be found in numerical majorities that are sup¬
posed to reflect the “general will” is only a pernicious
conceit. In the long run democracy will be judged, no
less than other forms of government, by the quality of
its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the
quality of their vision. Where there is no vision, we are
told, the people perish; but where there is sham vision,
they perish even faster. The worst difficulties of the
present time arise, I am sometimes tempted to think,
even less from lack of vision than from sham vision.
Otherwise stated, what is disquieting about the time is
 INTRODUCTION 17

not so much its open and avowed materialism as what

it takes to be its spirituality.
Among the visionaries who have usurped the credit
that belongs only to the man of vision, Rousseau seems
to me to have been, at least in these recent ages of the
world, the most conspicuous. The Nature to which he
invites us to return is only a conceit. This conceit
encourages one to substitute for the vital control, which
is the true voice of man’s higher self, expansive emo¬
tion. Ideally this substitution is to be marked by a
triumph of the fraternal spirit. Actually, as I have
sought to prove, the outcome of yielding to a mere ex¬
pansive conceit of the emotions is not fraternity, but a
decadent imperialism. I have made a considerable use
of the word imperialism in this work and in a some¬
what broader sense than is familiar to English and
American readers. My justification lies in the fact that
one finds behind every other form of imperialism the
imperialism or push for power of the individual. In this
respect, at least, I am in accord with Bergson, who de¬
clares that “ imperialism is, as it were, inherent in the
vital urge. It is at the bottom of the soul of individuals
as well as of the soul of peoples.”1 By his cult of elan
vital Bergson is in the direct line of descent from Rous¬
seau. One must note, however, an important divergence
between master and disciple that is all to the advantage
of the latter. Bergson does not hope to base on elan
vital a fraternity that must be sought rather in the exer¬
cise of frein vital. On the contrary, elan vital is, he
1 See Bergson’s introductory note to Balzac et la morale roman-
tique, par E. Seilliere.
18 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

avows frankly, imperialistic. According to the new

Bergsonian beatitude, not the meek in spirit, but those
who have the most vigorous vital urge are to inherit the
earth. It is hard to overlook the affinity between this
world-famed philosophy, as interpreted by its author,
and the vulgar admiration for “punch.”
My application of the epithet decadent to the type of
imperialism that has been promoted by the glorification
of instinct from Rousseau to Bergson calls for a word of
comment. That there are various types of imperialism,
even if we use the word, not in the psychological, but in
the more familiar political sense, appears evident. For
example, the imperialism that made the Romans masters
of the world is not of the same kind as that which pre¬
vailed when they cringed beneath a Tiberius or a Nero.
Yet it is possible to trace the process by which the older
imperialism finally took on a decadent cast. The critical
moment for Rome was the moment of triumph when the
leaders of the State no longer felt the restraining influ¬
ence of dangerous rivals like Carthage. At the same
time they were beginning to grow individualistic in the
sense that they were beginning to throw off the tradi¬
tional controls. As a result of all this emancipation,
“men’s desires,” in Montesquieu’s phrase, “became
immense.” It has been usual to regard as the most
significant symptom of this inordinateness the growth of
luxury. “Luxury,” says Juvenal, “more cruel than the
foeman’s arms, fell upon us, and is avenging the con¬
quered world.” A still graver symptom, however, was
the appearance of leaders who were ever more and more
ruthless in the pursuit either of their personal advantage
 INTRODUCTION 19

or that of some class or faction. The new spirit that

was undermining the Roman constitution manifested
itself even less, as Cicero notes, in acts of injustice and
cruelty to the vanquished peoples than in the rage
of civil strife. It can scarcely be maintained of the
Romans who thus precipitated the decadence that they
exercised to any serious degree their /rein vital, or will
to refrain. The right opponents of these anarchical
individualists, one may venture to affirm, were not the
mere traditionalists, but the individualists who had
qualified for true leadership by setting bounds to their
expansive lusts, especially the lust of domination.
Rome declined because she failed to produce individual¬
ists of this type in sufficient numbers. Certain analogies
may be discovered between this Roman dilemma and
the dilemma with which we are now confronted in
America. We, too, seem to be reaching the acme of our
power and are at the same time discarding the standards
of the past. This emancipation has been accompanied
by an extraordinary increase in luxury and self-indul¬
gence. Persons who postpone everything else to their
“ comfort ” and to commercial prosperity are probably
more numerous in America to-day than they were in
ancient Rome. Disturbing as this symptom may be, it
is less so than the increasing role played in our national
life by “blocs” with highly unethical leaders — leaders
who seek to advance the material interests of some
special group at the expense of the whole community.
The actual gravity of this symptom may perhaps be
exaggerated; if it should prove, however, to be some¬
thing more than a passing phase, it portends the end of
20 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

our constitutional liberties and the rise of a decadent

imperialism. The more one ponders either the modern
American or the ancient Roman situation, the more
surely will one be led from imperialism in the political,
to imperialism in the psychological sense. In other
words, one will be forced, if one wishes to get at the root
of the matter, to turn from the merely peripheral man¬
ifestations of the push for power to the inner life of the
individual.
My views as to the relation between the Rousseau-
istic movement and imperialism may perhaps be still
further elucidated by a comparison with the views on
the same subject of two recent European writers, the
German, Oswald Spengler, and the Frenchman, Ernest
Seilliere. Spengler has developed in his chief work,
“The Downfall of the Occident,” the thesis that the
Western world, especially Western European “culture,”
is now engaged in a sort of rake’s progress that starts
with Rousseau and his return to nature. The goal of
this decadence, as Spengler describes it, is not unlike
what I have termed a decadent imperialism. Moreover,
we are not only on a descending curve, but it is a fatal
curve. He has actually appended to the first volume of
his book a table exhibiting the degree of degeneracy
that the Occident will have attained about the year
2000. The whole conception not only implies a phil¬
osophy of history, but a philosophy of history that has,
in my judgment, gone mad. This conception is based in
any case on an utter denial of the quality of will in man
on which I myself put supreme emphasis. In spite
therefore of certain superficial resemblances in our re-
 INTRODUCTION 21

spective views, Spengler and I are at the opposite poles

of human thought. My own attitude is one of extreme
unfriendliness to every possible philosophy of history
(in the more technical sense of the term), whether it be
the older type found in a Saint Augustine or a Bossuet,
which tends to make of man the puppet of God, or the
newer type which tends in all its varieties to make of
man the puppet of nature. “The Downfall of the
Occident” seems to me a fairly complete repertory of
the naturalistic fallacies of the nineteenth century; it is
steeped throughout in the special brand of fatalism in
which these fallacies culminate, and as a result of which
the Occident is actually threatened with “downfall.”
One is justified in my opinion in dismissing Spengler as a
charlatan, even though one be forced to add that he is a
charlatan of genius. The immense sale of his books in
Germany, if it is indicative of a real influence, is a de¬
pressing symptom.
The second writer I have mentioned, M. Seilliere,
merits a very different judgment. In about a score of
volumes he has been tracing with great psychological
finesse the influence of Rousseau on the literature and
life of the past century. This influence he associates
with what he calls an irrational imperialism. In short,
the results of his survey are on the negative side very
similar to my own. On the positive or constructive
side, on the other hand, M. Seilliere and I diverge
sharply. What he opposes to an irrational imperialism
is a rational imperialism; by which he means “the social
army on the march towards the conquest of power by
the coordination of individual efforts.” 1 In his general
1 Balzac et la morale romantique, p. 42.
22 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

position, as revealed in such utterances, he seems to me

to strike back through the utilitarians to Hobbes and
ultimately, in some respects, to Machiavelli. The es¬
sential contrast for me is not, as for M. Seilli&re, that
between a rational and an irrational imperialism, but
between imperialism and that quality of will in man
which is, in every possible sense of the word, anti-
imperialistic. M. Seilliere, again, seems as much bent
on running together Stoical and Christian ethics as I am
on separating them and insisting on their final incom¬
patibility. Stoicism in both its ancient and modern
forms I regard, at least in its total trend, as false and
impossible; whereas I hold that at the heart of genuine
Christianity are certain truths which have already
once saved Western civilization and, judiciously em¬
ployed, may save it again.
I wish also to say a few words at the outset regarding
certain possible misapprehensions of my method. The
most serious of these misapprehensions may arise if one
looks either in this volume or in the previous volumes of
the series (with the partial exception of “The Masters of
Modern French Criticism”) for rounded estimates of
individuals. I have not attempted such estimates. Still
less have I attempted rounded estimates of historical
epochs — for example, of the nineteenth century. It is
even less sensible, perhaps, to indict a whole century
than it is, according to Burke, to indict a whole people.
I am attacking, not the nineteenth century in general,
but the naturalistic nineteenth century and its prolon¬
gation into the twentieth century, along with the
tendencies in the previous centuries, from the Re-
 INTRODUCTION 23

naissance down, that prepared the way for naturalism.

My treatment of this whole naturalistic trend has
seemed, even to critics who are not altogether un¬
friendly, to be negative, extreme, and one-sided. I hope
I may be pardoned if I reply briefly to each of these
three charges.
As to the charge that my treatment of naturalism is
one-sided, there is a sense, it must be admitted, in
which it is not only one-sided, but one-sided to the last
degree. There is, however, a humanistic intention even
in the one-sidedness. I dwell persistently on the aspect
of human nature that the naturalists have no less per¬
sistently neglected in the hope that the way may thus be
opened for a more balanced view. Moreover, what the
naturalists have neglected is not something that is on
the fringe or outer rim of human experience, but some¬
thing, on the contrary, that is very central. The nat¬
uralistic effort during the past century or more has
resulted in an immense and bewildering peripheral en¬
richment of life — in short, in what we are still glorify¬
ing under the name of progress. I have no quarrel with
this type of progress in itself, I merely maintain that no
amount of peripheral enrichment of life can atone for
any lack at the centre. Furthermore, though I assail the
naturalists for what seems to me a vital oversight, I
have, let me repeat, at least one trait in common with
them — I desire to be experimental. I seek to follow
out the actual consequences of this oversight, to deal
with it, not abstractly, but in its fruits. If certain
readers have persisted in seeing in my books something
that I myself have not sought to put there, namely,
24 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

rounded estimates of individuals and historic epochs,

the misapprehension has no doubt arisen from the very
abundance of my concrete illustrations.
As to the charge that I am negative, I have already
said that the element in man that has been overlooked
by naturalistic psychology is felt in relation to his ordi¬
nary self negatively. If instead of taking the point of
view of one’s ordinary self, one heeds the admonitions of
the inner monitor, the result is two of the most positive
of all things: character and happiness. This is the great
paradox of life itself. For being negative in this sense
I am not in the least apologetic. There is, however,
another sense in which I may seem negative and about
this I feel somewhat differently. The type of criticism
that prevailed about the beginning of the nineteenth
century proposed to substitute the “fruitful criticism of
beauties for the barren criticism of faults.” I may be
accused of reversing too sharply this maxim even by
some who admit that the proper remedy for the lax ap¬
preciativeness of the modern movement is a criticism
that displays a tonic astringency. I am constantly call¬
ing attention to the defects of certain eminent personal¬
ities, it may be urged, and at the same time have little
or nothing to say of their virtues. My method is even
in this respect, I believe, legitimate, provided that it be
properly understood, though I myself cannot help re¬
gretting that it should make me appear so constantly
unamiable.
The charge that I am extreme touches me even more
nearly than the charge that I am negative and one-sided;
for I aim to be a humanist and the essence of humanism
 INTRODUCTION 25

is moderation. There is, however, much confusion on

the subject of moderation. A man's moderation is
measured by his success in mediating between some
sound general principle and the infinitely various and
shifting circumstances of actual fife. The man who is
thus rightly mediatory attains to one of the most
precious of virtues — urbanity; though one must add
that probably no virtue has been more frequently coun¬
terfeited. When an intellectually and spiritually in¬
dolent person has to choose between two conflicting
views he often decides to “split the difference" between
them; but he may be splitting the difference between
truth and error, or between two errors. In any case, he
must dispose of the question of truth or error before he
can properly begin to mediate at all. Otherwise he will
run the risk of resembling the English statesman of whom
it was said that he never deviated from the straight
and narrow path between right and wrong. Some of
the casuists whom Pascal attacked had managed to
assume a moderate attitude towards murder! One may
fancy oneself urbane when in reality one is in danger of
being numbered with the immense multitude that Dante
saw in the vestibule of Hell — the multitude of those
who are equally “displeasing to God and to the enemies
of God." To be sure, it is not always easy in any par¬
ticular instance to distinguish between the humanist
and the mere Laodicean. Thus Luther denounced
Erasmus as a Laodicean, whereas to us he seems rather
to have shown real poise and urbanity in his dealings
with the religious and other extremists of his time.
At all events the differences of doctrine I debate in
26 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

the following pages are of a primary nature and so not

subject to mediation. Between the man who puts his
main emphasis on the inner life of the individual and
the man who puts this emphasis on something else —
for example, the progress and service of humanity —
the opposition is one of first principles. The question I
raise, therefore, is not whether one should be a moderate
humanitarian, but whether one should be a humani¬
tarian at all. In general I commit myself to the posi¬
tion that we are living in a world that in certain im¬
portant respects has gone wrong on first principles;
which will be found to be only another way of saying
that we are living in a world that has been betrayed by
its leaders. On the appearance of leaders who have re¬
covered in some form the truths of the inner life and re¬
pudiated the errors of naturalism may depend the very
survival of Western civilization. The truths of the inner
life may be proclaimed in various forms, religious and
humanistic, and have actually been so proclaimed in the
past and justified in each case by their fruits in life and
conduct. It is because I am unable to discover these
truths in any form in the philosophies now fashionable
that I have been led to prefer to the wisdom of the age
the wisdom of the ages.
 CHAPTER I
THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING

According to Aristotle, a government, if it is to endure,

must reflect the ethos or body of moral habits and beliefs
of the governed. There is no abstract and ideal political
form, as the French Jacobins inclined to believe, that
may be imposed to advantage on all communities. If we
attempt to apply the Aristotelian principle of the neces¬
sary relation between the government of any particular
community and its ethos to the governments that have
actually existed in the past, our first impression is of an
endless diversity in political forms as in everything else.
But if we penetrate beneath this bewildering surface
variety, we shall discover, as I have tried to show else¬
where, that human experience falls, after all, into a few
fairly distinct categories. The view of life that prevails
at any particular time or among any particular people
will be found, on close inspection, to be either predomi¬
nantly naturalistic, or humanistic, or religious; and it will
also be found that political forms tend to vary accord¬
ingly.
If, for example, a people is deeply religious, a govern¬
ment with a more or less strongly marked theocratic
element is probable. Fustel de Coulanges has shown how
closely allied the government of the ancient city-state
was at the outset with traditional religious forms, and
then how government tended to change when the hier¬
archy that traditional religion had established, first of
28 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

all in the family and then in the State, was gradually un¬
dermined by individualistic and equalitarian tendencies.
The yielding of religious control to an anarchical natu¬
ralism led in the political order to the triumph of naked
force and to the decline of ancient civilization. As
Christianity prevailed over this effete paganism, a new
religious ethos gradually took shape and, corresponding
to it, arose a theocratic conception of government that
was to prevail throughout the mediaeval period. During
that period Europe enjoyed, in theory and to no small
extent in practice, a genuine religious communion. The
Church had succeeded in creating symbols that in a very
literal sense held sway over men’s imagination and
united them from the top to the bottom of society in the
same spiritual hopes and fears. Every one might, as
Villon relates of his aged mother, enter the great cathe¬
dral and see depicted on one hand the torments of the
damned and on the other the bliss of paradise, and, like
her, he would normally be filled by the former images
with fear and by the latter with joy and gladness. As a
result of this imaginative control exercised over all
classes the Church did not need the support of physical
force: purely spiritual penalties, especially excommuni¬
cation, sufficed. Henry IV at Canossa is usually taken
to typify the extreme triumph of the theocratic idea.
The Church is no negligible factor even to-day. When
Cardinal Mercier visited America, it was reported in the
press that engineers and firemen knelt on the platform
of the Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York to
receive his blessing. Here is at least some survival of the
older loyalty, a loyalty utterly different in essence from
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 29

that of these same men to their unions. Still, if one com¬

pare the power of the Church to-day with its power in
the Middle Ages, one becomes aware of a change in the
ethos, not of this or that country merely, but of the
whole of the Occident. The older religious control has
been giving way for several centuries past to individual¬
istic and centrifugal tendencies, and the danger is now
manifest that in the absence of any new integrating
element, what may triumph in our modern world, as it
finally triumphed in the ancient world, is the principle
of naked force.
The theocratic conception of government always im¬
plies a divine grace or sanction somewhere; but as to the
channel through which this grace is received important
differences of opinion are possible. In the Middle Ages,
for example, some held that the only channel of grace
was the Church and so tended to subordinate the Em¬
peror, the head of the temporal order, to God’s vicar
upon earth, the Pope. Others maintained that the Em¬
peror derived his sanction, not through the Pope, but
immediately from on high. This latter form of the theo¬
cratic conception is best set forth, perhaps, in Dante’s
“De Monarchia.” Dante desires cooperation and ulti¬
mate unity of the two powers, secular and spiritual, but
without confusion.
Dante and other political theorists of the Middle Ages
who accepted the theocratic idea, but wished at the same
time to keep separate the things of God and the things
of Caesar, showed themselves in so far true Christians.
We need to remember, however, how much in the Chris¬
tian tradition itself goes back ultimately, not to Judaea,
30 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

but to Greece and Rome. There is no small element

of truth in the common assertion that Saint Augustine
is the Christian Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas the
Christian Aristotle. Yet we need to emphasize at this
point certain important differences between the Platonic
and Aristotelian type of political thinking and the type
that prevailed during the mediaeval period. In a certain
sense, Aristotle and Plato are in their true spirit nearer
to us than to the men of the Middle Ages. The mediae¬
val view of life rests on a belief in a supernatural revela¬
tion. This in turn is made the basis of an absolute outer
authority; whereas Plato and Aristotle belong, as I have
said, to an age of free critical inquiry. They are, in
short, true “moderns.” For, as I have tried to show
elsewhere, to be critical and individualistic in one’s out¬
look on life and to be modern come to very much the
same thing. In seeking to make of Aristotle a prop of
outer authority, Saint Thomas and other men of the
Middle Ages were therefore using Aristotle in a very un-
Aristotelian way; and the confusion continued when the
men of the Renaissance, on breaking with tradition in
favor of a more individualistic and experimental atti¬
tude, inclined to repudiate Aristotle as the chief source
of the scholastic logomachy. Bacon, for example, practi¬
cally never gets behind the scholastic Aristotle to the
real Aristotle.
Plato, then, differs from the mediaeval thinkers in
dealing critically with the political problem in the “Re¬
public” and elsewhere. He arrives, however, at a con¬
ception that is on the whole theocratic; so that if one
looks, not to the method, but to the conclusions, one is
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 31

forced to agree in part with those who assert that the

Middle Ages already begin in Plato. Add the all-impor¬
tant distinction between the things of God and the things
of Caesar and the class of Guardians in the “ Republic ”
would work out into something very similar to a monas¬
tic order. It is hard, again, not to see in the Nocturnal
Council and the House of Reformation of the “Laws”
a first adumbration of the Inquisition. In general Pla¬
to’s growing sense of the dependence of man on God
foreshadows Augustine and the reign of grace. Aristotle,
on the other hand, remains the chief example in the past
of a thinker who has treated in a way at once critical and
humanistic the problems of government. Before writing
his “Politics,” he had made detailed studies of the his¬
tory and constitutions of one hundred and fifty-eight
city-states, and in general rests his conclusions upon a
great body of actual political experience. One may dis¬
agree with these conclusions — I disagree with them in
essential particulars — but the method itself for any one
who aspires to be modern would seem to be impeccable.
Even when we differ from Aristotle, we should differ
from him on Aristotelian grounds. We have been en¬
lightened concerning certain problems by an enormous
mass of experience in both the East and the West that
he did not have at his command. We have been enlight¬
ened by the Christian experience above all and the great
new principle it brought into the Occident, namely, the
separation of the temporal and spiritual powers, and all
the consequences that flow from this principle either
directly or indirectly, especially the idea of individual
liberty that ultimately rests on this distinction, and of
32 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

which neither Aristotle nor Plato has any adequate

conception.
We have been enlightened since the time of Aristotle
not merely by the Christian experience; we also have
more or less available an enormous mass of experience
unknown until recently to the Occident — that of the
Far East, especially India and China. Here again we
find political institutions that reflect views of life that
are predominantly either naturalistic, humanistic, or
religious. Perhaps no country has ever been more reli¬
gious than India. India has always been the home of
religion, good, bad, or indifferent; and so one is not sur¬
prised to find the theocratic view of life set forth more
uncompromisingly perhaps than in any other book of
the world in the “Laws of Manu.” The precepts of this
work have probably never been applied in their full
rigor, but they have always been of great aid to the
Brahmin caste in maintaining what would seem to us a
veritable spiritual tyranny. In controlling men by an
appeal to their religious hopes and fears without any
need of physical compulsion, the Brahmin caste has per¬
haps been even more successful, and that down to our
own day, than the Church of mediaeval Europe. It has
been alleged that the Montagu Act (1919), designed to
give a greater measure of self-government to the Hindus,
would in practice simply play into the hands of the
Brahmin theocracy.
Buddhism, another product of ancient India, is inter¬
esting from the point of view of our present topic for
two reasons: first, because Buddha, even more perhaps
than Plato or Socrates, worked out a positive and criti-
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 33

cal view of life; secondly, because he displayed this posi¬

tive and critical spirit in the field of religion. His king¬
dom, like that of Jesus, and unlike that of Plato, is not of
this world. He does not seek, like the Plato of the “Re¬
public,” to achieve ideal good in the secular order and
with the aid of political institutions. Buddha did not
set out to reform society directly, but established a reli¬
gious order in which caste and other like distinctions did
not exist. Later Buddhism, especially Buddhism of the
so-called Great Vehicle, is a vast and complex move¬
ment that departs widely from the positive and critical
spirit of the founder. Lamaism, the very corrupt form
of the doctrine that prevails in Tibet, marks an extreme
of theocratic interference with the secular order. In a
country like Burma, where something of the older and
more individualistic form of the faith still survives, the
distinction between spiritual and temporal is fairly well
maintained. In general the rival pretensions of Church
and State have led to less frequent and less serious polit¬
ical clashes in Buddhist than in Christian lands. It is,
indeed, this aspect of Christianity that more than any
other seems to justify Christ’s saying that he brought
not peace, but a sword.
India has never seen an important humanistic move¬
ment. The nearest approach to it, perhaps, is the doc¬
trine of the middle path that Buddha proclaimed in the
religious life itself. It is difficult to imagine a more com¬
plete contrast in this respect than that between India
and China, which in its central tradition, of which Con¬
fucius is the chief exponent, has always been humanistic.
The bathing ghats at Benares suggest something almost
34 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

as remote from ordinary Chinese psychology as from our

own. Confucius is less concerned with the other wTorld
than with the art of living to the best advantage in this.
To live to the best advantage in this world is, he holds,
to live proportionately and moderately; so that the Con-
fucian tradition of the Far East has much in common
with the Aristotelian tradition of the Occident. In one
important respect, however, Confucius recalls not Aris¬
totle, but Christ. Though his kingdom is very much of
this world, he puts emphasis not merely on the law of
measure, but also on the law of humility. He was hum¬
ble both in his “submission to the will of Heaven” and
in his attitude towards the sages of old. He aspired at
most to be the channel through which the moral experi¬
ence of his race that had accumulated through long cen¬
turies and found living embodiment in these sages should
be conveyed to the present and the future; in his own
words, he wTas not a creator but a transmitter. A man
who looks up to the great traditional models and imi¬
tates them, becomes worthy of imitation in his turn. He
must be thus rightly imitative if he is to be a true leader.
No one has ever insisted more than Confucius on a right
example and the imitation that it inspires as the neces¬
sary basis of civilized society. This insistence would
seem justified by the force of his own example which has
moulded, for seventy generations or more, the ethos of
about a fourth of the human race — and that with little
or no appeal to the principle of fear either in this world
or the next. The Confucian influence seems, indeed, to
offer more warrant than anything in our Occidental
experience for the belief that man may after all be a
reasonable animal.
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 35

In dealing with the political problem, Confucius is

inevitably led to brush aside, as of slight account, every¬
thing except the question of leadership. “The virtue of
the leader,” he says, “is like unto wind; that of the peo^
pie like unto grass. For it is the nature of grass to bend
when the wind blows upon it.”1 Now the true leader is
the man of character, and the ultimate root of character
is humility. This Confucian conception has such a cen¬
tral soundness that I shall need to return to it later. At
the same time, Confucianism, like all great doctrines,
has its characteristic weaknesses. The chief of these, we
scarcely need to be reminded, is that the present seems
to be held in a perpetual spiritual mortmain by the past.
A purely traditional humanism is always in danger of
falling into a rut of pseudo-classic formalism. Confu¬
cius himself had a deep and genuine perception of what
is specifically human in man which he defines as a prin¬
ciple of inner control; this principle, however, at least if
we accept as ancient and authentic all that is in the
“Li-Ki” or Book of Rites, is from the start too much as¬
sociated with outer forms and, at times, with the rules of
etiquette. Some of the prescriptions are not much
more closely related to the decorum which is at the
centre of every truly humanistic doctrine than the in¬
formation, which has also been piously handed down
to us, that Confucius ate ginger at every meal, and that
he always changed countenance in a thunderstorm. We
desire a spirit that is more free, flexible, and imagina-

1 Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1273a: “Whenever the chiefs of the

state deem anything honorable, the other citizens are sure to
follow their example.”
 !

36 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

tive, such as is found in Greek humanism at its bestc

We are also likely to feel something more modern and,
therefore, more congenial to us in the highly untradi-
tional and individualistic Buddha. Still Confucius,
though traditional, is not dogmatic; he is not even sys¬
tematic. His extreme reticence about ultimate things
that so irritated his translator, the Christian dogmatist,
Dr. Legge, seems, now that we are coming more and
more to appreciate the psychological method of dealing
with certain problems, a merit rather than a defect. As a
result of all that is summed up in Confucianism, China
has, perhaps, in spite of all its corrupt mandarins and
officials of the past and present, planted itself more con¬
sistently than any other country on moral ideas, and this
fact is not unrelated to its long survival. The Greeks
have disappeared; for the Greeks of to-day can be re¬
garded only in a very qualified sense as the descendants
of the Greeks of the age of Pericles: whereas the de¬
scendants of the Chinese of the age of Confucius are
still with us to the number of several hundred millions.
Their civilization has numerous and grave peripheral
faults. At the same time, it is likely to have a secret
strength as long as the Chinese refuse to “drop their
pilot,” as long as they hold fast, in other words, in spite
of pressure from the West, to what is best in the Confu-
cian tradition.
I have been considering thus far, in both East and
West, various religious and humanistic views of fife,
whether on a traditional or a positive and critical basis,
and the corresponding types of political thinking. It re-
mains to consider the naturalistic view of life and its
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 37

political implications. The naturalist no longer looks on

man as subject to a law of his own distinct from that
of the material order — a law, the acceptance of which
leads, on the religious level, to the miracles of other¬
worldliness that one finds in Christians and Buddhists
at their best, and the acceptance of which, in this world,
leads to the subduing of the ordinary self and its spon¬
taneous impulses to the law of measure that one finds
in Confucianists and Aristotelians. The rise of the indi¬
vidualistic and critical spirit and the resulting break
with the mediaeval and theocratic ideal, from the Renais¬
sance on, might have assumed a religious or humanistic
character; it has actually been in the main naturalistic.
One important outcome of this naturalistic trend has
been the growth of the national spirit. The Protestant
religion itself, if one takes a sufficiently long-range view,
appears largely as an incident in the rise of nationalism.
If one wishes, however, to study, in its purest form, the
new nationalistic spirit that was destined finally to de¬
stroy the religious unity of mediaeval Europe, one needs
to turn to Machiavelli. He will probably remain the
best type in either East or West of the unflinching politi¬
cal naturalist. To understand Machiavelli, one needs to
study him in his relation to traditional religion. Chris¬
tianity, especially in its Pauline and Augustinian forms,
has always tended to oppose a stark supernaturalism to
a stark naturalism; so that when an austere Christian,
such as Pascal, considers man in his fallen estate, man
unsupported by divine grace, he quickly arrives at con¬
clusions regarding the secular order and its political
problems that are, if possible, more Machiavellian than
38 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

those of Machiavelli himself. One seems to have no ah

ternative except to get rid of ethics in getting rid of
theology. Moreover, the Church, as an actual institu¬
tion, had such a monopoly of the higher life of man that
to seek, like Machiavelli, to give the State a basis inde¬
pendent of the Church was to run the risk of giving it a
basis independent of morality. Furthermore, Machia¬
velli was, within certain limits, an extraordinarily
shrewd observer. His views reflect the failure of Chris¬
tianity to control men’s actual deeds, either in his own
time or in the mediaeval past with which he was familiar.
His intention, as he proclaims it, is “to follow up the real
truth of a matter rather than the imagination of it, . . .
because how one lives is so far distant from how one
ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what
ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preser¬
vation.” 1 The statesman should, therefore, be sternly
realistic. As a matter of fact, any one who neglects men’s
ideals and fine phrases and attends solely to their actual
performance is always likely to seem a bit Machiavel¬
lian. There is, for example, a strong Machiavellian ele¬
ment in this sense in Thucydides.
The conclusions to which Machiavelli was led by his
special type of realism are familiar. The rules of ordi¬
nary morality may hold in the relations between man
and man, but have only a secondary place in the rela¬
tions between state and state; what prevails in these lat¬
ter relations is the law of cunning and the law of force.
The ruler who wishes to succeed should, therefore, blend
harmoniously in himself the virtues of the lion and the
1 The Prince, ch. xv.
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 39

fox.1 The true essence of any doctrine is revealed finally

in the kind of personality in which it becomes incarnate.
Machiavelli, as is well known, saw the perfect incarna¬
tion of his own conception in Caesar Borgia. He relates,
in one place, the detestable treachery by which Borgia
trapped and then had strangled several of his political
enemies, and then says elsewhere: “When all the ac¬
tions of the duke are recalled, I do not know how to
blame him, but rather it appears to me, as I have said,
that I ought to offer him for imitation to all those who,
by fortune or the arms of others, are raised to govern¬
ment.’’ 2 One should mark especially the meaning that
Machiavelli attaches to the word virtue. He begins an
account of the mediaeval tyrant, Castruccio Castricani,
in which the main traits that emerge are ruthlessness and
cruelty, by praise of his “virtue.” The virtue of the
Machiavellian political leader plainly has very little in
common with humanistic virtue and nothing at all with
religious virtue. Christian virtue in particular has its
foundation in the law of humility. The man who takes
on the yoke of this law enters, at the same time, into a
realm of free conscience; he has ceased to be subject to
any mundane state and has become a member of a heav¬
enly commonwealth or City of God. This divided alle¬
giance seemed to Machiavelli a source of weakness and
effeminacy. Humility should give way to patriotic pride.
The ruler above all should have no conscience apart
from the State and its material aggrandizement. Any
one who consents to become a passive instrument in the
service of any corporation, political, commercial, or re-
1 The Prince, ch. xix. 2 Ibid., ch. vn.
 «

40 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

ligious, to the point of practising a morality different

from that which should rule the individual, is in the
Machiavellian tradition. Machiavelli is the ancestor
of the German who puts the fatherland “over all,” and
of his equivalent the one hundred per cent American,
and in general of those who are so patriotic that they
are ready to back their country right or wrong. He em¬
bodies, more completely than any one else, what is
usually defined as the realistic tradition in European
politics. Yet one cannot grant that either Machiavelli
or his spiritual descendants, the Realpolitiker, are thor¬
oughgoing realists. The Nemesis, or divine judgment,
or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later over¬
takes those who transgress the moral law, is not some¬
thing that one has to take on authority, either Greek or
Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation. Without as¬
serting that there is no such thing as reason of state and
that public and private morality should coincide pre¬
cisely at all points, nevertheless, one may affirm that
it is chimerical to set up a dual code in the Machiavel¬
lian sense, to suppose that men can, as a rule, be ruth¬
less in the service of country and at the same time up¬
right as individuals. To be merely a naturalistic realist,
to combine, that is, a clear perception of the facts of the
material order with spiritual blindness, leads practically
to imperialistic dreaming. Machiavelli relates how at
the time he was composing “The Prince” he was wont,
after a day spent in petty occupations on his small prop¬
erty at San Casciano, to pull off his peasant clothes and
don court attire in the evening, and then, retiring into
his study, escape from the trivialities of the present to
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 41

the imperial glories of ancient Rome. This particular

land of heart’s desire is still that of a certain number of
Italians.
Perhaps the most important followers of Machiavelli,
in actual practice, have been found among the Germans
from Frederick the Great to Bismarck. For the student
of political theory, on the other hand, the most signifi¬
cant line of development runs rather through England.
Hobbes is possibly even more lacking in ethical percep¬
tion, even more naturalistic in his conception of human
nature, than Machiavelli himself. Strip man of the con¬
ventions that have been imposed upon him from with¬
out, says Hobbes, and what one discovers as his essence
is “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power,
that ceaseth only in death.” 1 Hobbes reflects, to some
extent, in his philosophy the cynicism and disillusion
that had been engendered in many by the civil convul¬
sions of seventeenth-century England. If one is to re¬
tain a rose-colored view” of human nature, it is not well,
it should seem, to see it at too close range in periods of
great upheaval. La Rochefoucauld, who is also in the
Machiavellian tradition by his insistence on the egoistic
element even in what appear to be man’s fairest virtues,
was influenced, we are told, in no small measure by his
participation in the Fronde.
Though Hobbes is Machiavellian in his emphasis on
the law of cunning and the law of force, he is, unlike
Machiavelli, not merely systematic but metaphysical.
He seeks to develop the postulates of naturalism into a
logical and closed system. The difference between the
1 Leviathan, Part i, ch. ix.
42 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

two men is related to Pascal’s distinction between the

geometrical spirit and the spirit of finesse. Hobbes’s
extreme confidence in reasoning of the abstract or geo¬
metrical type (la raison raisonnante) strikes one as
rather un-English, but in other respects he belongs to
the great English utilitarian tradition, and points the
way to Locke, who is himself, in essential respects, a
dogmatic rationalist. For a striking fact about the Eng¬
lish utilitarian is that, while professing to appeal from
mere theory to experience, he repudiates that whole side
of experience that belongs to the realm of the human
law. Wishing to be thoroughly positive and critical, he
inclines to identify this experience with the traditional
forms in which it had become embedded and so to reject
it as mere myth and fable; and herein he is at one with
the traditionalists themselves who do not admit that the
truths of the human law can be disengaged from certain
special forms and, like the truths of the natural law,
dealt with in a purely critical fashion. As I have tried
to show elsewhere, the positivists have failed signally
thus far to live up to their own programme. Hobbes, for
example, opposes to the dogmas and metaphysical as¬
sumptions of the traditionalists other assumptions that
are almost equally metaphysical. One needs to consider
what some of these assumptions are, for, in one shape or
other, they have pervaded most political thinking from
the time of Hobbes to our own day, even the thinking
of those who at first sight seem most opposed to him.
One may take as the first of these metaphysical as¬
sumptions the conception of absolute and unlimited
sovereignty. When anything absolute is set up, we may
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 43

know that we are running into metaphysics; for precise

observation of life does not give anything absolute. The
only thing that approaches the absolute in man is
his ignorance, and even that is not quite absolute.
Hobbes’s assertion of absolute and unlimited sovereignty
recalls the mediaeval notion of sovereignty with a most
important difference: it rests upon force and is in this
sense imperialistic; it does not, like the sovereignty of
the Middle Ages, have a supernatural sanction. For the
mediaeval sovereign, whether Pope or Emperor, if not
responsible to the people, is responsible to God, who is,
finally, fhe only absolute and unlimited ruler. Further¬
more, the individual in the State of Hobbes has no
refuge from its despotic control in religion, or, what
amounts to the same thing, in a domain of conscience
set apart from the secular order. Hobbes subordinates
the spiritual to the temporal, and, in his dealing with
the rival claims of Church and State, is, like Machia-
velli, not only unmediaeval but un-Christian.
Whence, one may inquire, does the sovereign of
Hobbes derive a power so unlimited and irresponsible
as to be subversive not only of liberty in the temporal
order, but also of the “liberty wherewith Christ hath
made us free.” The reply is that the sovereign holds his
unlimited and irresponsible power, not by the grace of
God, but as a result of a contract with the people; and
here emerges another metaphysical assumption, that of
the social contract, which dominated to an extraordinary
degree the political thinking of several generations.
This involves, in some form or other, the assumption of
a state of nature, in which man is isolated and unsocial,
44 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

in opposition to a state of society where men escape

from their isolation on the basis of a convention or con¬
tract. Just as Machiavelli is infinitely below Aristotle
in setting up two codes of morality, one for the State
and one for the individual, so Hobbes marks a great
retrogression from Aristotle in accepting this mythical
contrast between man in society and man as he is natu¬
rally. According to Aristotle, it is natural for man, being
as he is a political animal, to live in society. Hobbes,
also, as we have just seen, by running together the things
of God and the things of Caesar, compromises the chief
advance in political thinking that has been made since
Aristotle. As a whole, his work may be described as an
attempt to justify metaphysically what would result
practically in a violent materialism.
To the social contract, unlimited sovereignty, and the
state of nature, we need to add natural rights if we wish
to complete the list of abstract and metaphysical con¬
ceptions that have dominated so much modern political
thinking. The rights that man possesses in the “state of
nature” would not seem very valuable, since his life in
this state, as conceived by Hobbes, is “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short”; and since, as a result of the
dominance of self-love, every one is at war with every
one else (helium omnium contra omnes). From the point
of view of theory, it is, however, important that man has
in the state of nature unlimited liberty, in the sense that
he has unlimited sovereignty over his own person, and
can, therefore, transfer by the social contract this un¬
limited sovereignty to the State. Men also tend to be
equal in the natural state, since the physically weak may,
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 45

according to Hobbes, develop a cunning that will in the

conflict of egoisms put them more or less on a level with
the strong. The state of nature according to Hobbes
may, then, be defined as liberty, equality — and war.
Natural rights and the freedom and equality that are
supposed to be based upon them become increasingly
important with the tendency that appears about the
time of Hobbes to interpret more optimistically the
state of nature. The origins of this tendency are com¬
plex. Perhaps the most important single influence was
the revival of Stoical philosophy and the Stoical views
regarding jus naturale and jus gentium that had been in¬
corporated in Roman law. The underlying driving
power behind the “return to nature” from the Renais¬
sance down was the rise of the new astronomy and the
growing triumphs of physical science. The success of
the great revolt on naturalistic lines against the Chris¬
tian and mediaeval dualism was due even less perhaps to
scientific discovery, and to the type of progress that re¬
sulted, than to the positive and critical method by
which the progress and the discoveries had been
achieved, a method that was in direct conflict with the
dogmatic and uncritical affirmations of the traditional¬
ists. In the political theorists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the naturalistic and Stoical ele¬
ments are combined in almost every conceivable propor¬
tion with elements that derive from the traditional su¬
pernaturalism. A mixture of this kind is especially
evident in the “De Jure belli et pads” (1625) of Grotius,
the father of international law. The great nationalities,
that were arising with the breakdown of mediaeval
46 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

theocracy, were plainly in a state of nature as regards

one another, so that it was even more important to de¬
termine, in the case of the nation than in the case of the
individual, whether there can prevail in the state of
nature any other law than the law of cunning and the
law of force. If one is to refute Machiavelli and Hobbes,
one must show that there is some universal principle
that tends to unite men even across national frontiers, a
principle that continues to act even when their egoistic
impulses are no longer controlled by the laws of some
particular state supported by its organized force.
Whether one starts with a state of nature in which men
are conceived as mere isolated units, and then imagines
a contract of some kind by which they pass from a state
of nature into society, or whether one asserts with Aris¬
totle that man is a political animal, and that it is, there¬
fore, natural for him to live in society, one needs in
either case to define with some care the principle of co¬
hesion among men. According to the true Christian, the
final counterpoise to egoism, in virtue of which alone
men may be drawn to a common centre, is submission
to the will of God, a submission that is conceived in
terms of the inner life. The attempt to find a bond of
union among men in a “rule of reason,” and the associa¬
tion of this rule of reason with nature, is, strictly speak¬
ing, not Christian, but Stoical. It is as natural for a man
to serve other men, says Marcus Aurelius in his exposi¬
tion of Stoical “reason,” as it is for the eye to see. This
doctrine of service, which the Stoic deems at once ra¬
tional and natural, does not involve the inner life in the
Christian sense. The final appeal is to something out-
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 47

side the individual — namely, to what Cicero, a main

source of Stoical influence upon the modem world, calls
the “common utility” (utilitas communis). The com¬
munity that one serves may again, according to Cicero,
be either one’s country or mankind at large (societas
generis humani). Stoical utilitarianism is in general
highly rationalistic. English utilitarianism, on the other
hand (and England is the chief source of utilitarian doc¬
trine in modern times), puts far greater emphasis on the
principle of pleasure, and in general on the instinctive
side of man, an emphasis that is less Stoical than
Epicurean. Cumberland, for example, seeks to refute
Hobbes not merely by an appeal to right reason, but
by asserting the presence in man of an instinct to pro¬
mote the common good; thus to serve the community,
says Cumberland, combining the new utilitarian con¬
ception with the older theology, is to fulfil the will of God.
One finds, however, in writers like Cumberland only
the beginnings of the transformation in the very basis of
ethics that has taken place in connection with the great
movement, partly utilitarian, partly sentimental, that
I have defined in its totality as humanitarianism. What
is singular about the representatives of this movement
is that they wish to live on the naturalistic level, and at
the same time to enjoy the benefits that the past had
hoped to achieve as a result of some humanistic or reli¬
gious discipline. They have contradicted religion by
asserting in substance that man, in order to rise above
his selfish impulses, does not need conversion and the
system of supernatural sanctions on which conversion
has traditionally rested. They have also sought to refute
48 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

the egoistic naturalists of the type of Maohiavelli and

Hobbes, who have maintained that the most funda¬
mental impulse in man is the push for power. The rise of
emotional ethics may be studied, especially in the Eng¬
land of the early eighteenth century, in connection with
the deistic movement. The trend of deistic moralists
like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is all towards what we
should call, nowadays, altruism and social service.
With the decline of the doctrine of total depravity, the
age of theology is beginning to give way to the age of
sociology. The word beneficence gains currency about
this time. The sympathetic man, the good-natured man,
the man of feeling are emerging and are being held in
ever-increasing estimation.
Those who believed in the intrinsic evil of human na¬
ture on either theological or naturalistic grounds were
still numerous and aggressive. The divergent views con¬
cerning the goodness or badness of human nature were
combined in almost every conceivable proportion in dif¬
ferent individuals. They were so combined in Pope and
Voltaire, for example, as to introduce into their writings
a central incoherency. A curious attempt to combine
the new expansiveness with an attack on the school of
Shaftesbury and an affirmation of the egoistic element
in man that reminds one of Hobbes and La Rochefou¬
cauld and Machiavelli, is found in Mandeville’s “Fable
of the Bees.” With the growth of the new philosophy,
man was encouraged to indulge more freely his natural
desires. At the same time, scientific discovery was mak¬
ing increasingly possible the satisfaction of these desires.
It was gradually developing a vast machinery designed
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 49

to minister to man’s material comfort and convenience

and destined to culminate in the industrial revolution.
Mandeville warned the English, who were entering an
era of commercial and imperialistic expansion, that this
expansion, with its concomitant growth of luxury, would,
so far as the individual is concerned, be an expansion of
vice and selfishness. The Stoical notion that mere “rea¬
son” can control the selfish passions, he refutes. The
assertion of Shaftesbury that there inheres in the na¬
tural man a “moral sense” or will to serve, that can pre¬
vail over the will to power, or instinct of sovereignty, as
he terms it, he dismisses as “romantic and chimerical.”
He recommends ironically as a remedy a return to the
Golden Age and its diet of acorns. The true remedy, he
professes to believe, is the most austere Christianity and
its renunciation of the lusts of the flesh. The real sting
of his argument, however, is in the new turn that he
gives to the Machiavellian idea of the double standard.
The multiplication of wants, which is bad, considered
from the point of view of the individual, may, if properly
directed by government, make for the greatness of the
State. Private vices are public benefits:
Thus every part was full of vice.
Yet the whole mass a paradise.
.Luxury
Employ’d a million of the poor,
And odious pride a million more;
Envy itself and vanity,
Were ministers of industry.
Mandeville concludes:
Fools only strive
To make a great an honest hive.
50 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

In Shaftesbury and Mandeville, we see clearly re¬

vealed, for perhaps the first time, the opposition be¬
tween the romantic idealist and the Machiavellian
realist. Much of Shaftesbury’s doctrine stands in close
relation to that of the ancient Stoics, notably Marcus
Aurelius and Epictetus, so that there is truth in Mande-
ville’s accusation that Shaftesbury “endeavored to
establish heathen virtue on the ruins of Christianity.”
Shaftesbury, for example, does not go beyond Stoicism
when he hopes, in Mandeville’s phrase, to “govern him¬
self by his reason with as much ease and readiness as a
good rider manages a well taught horse by the bridle.”
But Mandeville is not entirely wrong in discovering in
Shaftesbury a flattery of human nature beyond what
the Stoics or other pagan moralists ever attempted.
“He imagines that men without any trouble or violence
upon themselves may be naturally virtuous. He seems
to expect and require goodness in his species as we do a
sweet taste in grapes and China oranges.” On the basis
of this natural goodness which displays itself in an in¬
stinctive affection of man for his own species, Shaftes¬
bury was the first “to maintain virtue without self-
denial.” The word sympathy first became current
largely as a result of its use by the Greek Stoics, but
there is a wide gap between Stoical sympathy and the
incipient sentimentalism of a Shaftesbury. So far from
encouraging emotional effusion, the Stoic aimed at
“apathy,” and in his more austere moments would
have us serve men, but refrain from pitying them.1
The moral aestheticism that is beginning to appear in
1 See Seneca, de Clem., u, 4-6.
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 51

Shaftesbury, though it has no strict parallel in classical

antiquity, is Epicurean rather than Stoical. The more
advanced type of sentimentalist has, in order to display
his “ virtue,” merely to palpitate deliciously.1 As a mat¬
ter of fact, the love or sympathy on which the romantic
idealist puts so much emphasis is, as I shall try to show
later, a subrational parody of Christian charity.
The moral sense of Shaftesbury and his disciple
Hutcheson was developed by Hume and Adam Smith
and other exponents of emotional ethics, and is not un¬
related to the emphasis that the later utilitarians put on
the principle of pleasure. Though Mandeville denied
that sympathy of the humanitarian type can prevail
over the “instinct of sovereignty,” it is well to remem¬
ber that he was himself an emotional moralist. He even
recognizes among man’s natural passions a passion of
pity that may on occasion be violent. One has only to
exalt this passion of pity and, at the same time, to take
seriously Mandeville’s occasional praises of ignorance
and the simple life, to be in sight of the primitivistic
solution of the problem of luxury and of civilization it-
1 The following passage from Rousseau (Emile, Livre iv) may
serve as a sample of the fully developed emotional ethics of which
the beginnings are found in Shaftesbury: “Cet enthousiasme de la
vertu, quel rapport a-t-il avec notre int6ret priv6? . . . Otez de nos
coeurs cet amour du beau, vous otez tout le charme de la vie.
Celui dont les viles passions ont 6touff6 dans son &me 6troite ces
sentiments delicieux; celui qui, k force de se concentrer au dedans
de lui, vient k bout de n’aimer que lui-m£me, n'a plus de trans¬
ports, son coeur glace ne palpite plus de joie, un doux attendrisse-
ment n’humecte jamais ses yeux, il ne jouit plus de rien.” This
type of “ enthusiasm ” assumes at times a Platonic coloring, as in
Nouvelle Hiloise, Pt. ii, Lettre xi. Plato, however, as Gomperz
points out (Griechische Denker, ii, p. 411), “would have utterly
despised the sentimentalism of Rousseau.”
52 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

self that Rousseau was to set forth in his two Discourses.

Mandeville is on the side of decorum, and yet he admits
that decorum is not only “artificial,” but is, as Rous¬
seau was to say later, only the “varnish of vice’’ and the
“mask of hypocrisy.” He affirms that vice in general is
nowhere more predominant than where arts and sci¬
ences flourish, and that we shall find innocence and
honesty nowhere more widely diffused than among the
most illiterate, the “ poor silly country people.” “Would
you banish fraud and luxury? Break down the printing-
presses and burn all the books in the Island, except those
at the Universities where they remain unmolested.”
What is being weakened by the realism of Mandeville,
as well as by the idealism of Shaftesbury, is the sense of
the inner life. And by the inner life, I mean the recog¬
nition in some form or other of a force in man that moves
in an opposite direction from the outer impressions and
expansive desires that together make up his ordinary or
temperamental self. The decisive victories of both ra¬
tionalistic and emotional ethics over the traditional
dualism were won in the eighteenth century. At the
same time, we must not forget that we have to do with
the final stages of a secular process. The political reflex
of this process is the passage from a Europe that was
unified in theory, and to some extent in practice, by the
Roman theocracy to a Europe made up of great terri¬
torial nationalities governed in their relations to one
another by international law. As conceived by Grotius,
international law rests largely upon naturalistic founda¬
tions. The publication of his work was followed in a few
years by recognition of the new Europe in the Peace of
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 53

Westphalia (1648). Within the bounds of each separate

nationality, the essential aspect of this secular process is
the passage from divine right to popular right, from the
sovereignty of God to the sovereignty of the people. In
the long period of transition, supernaturalist and natu¬
ralistic views are blended in almost every possible pro¬
portion. For example, Protestants, especially the Cal¬
vinists, and Catholics, especially the Jesuits, borrowed
naturalistic concepts such as a state of nature, natural
rights, and the social compact, but only that they might
affirm more effectively the principle of divine sover¬
eignty, with its theocratic implications, in the spiritual
order.
Some, to be sure, saw the danger of thus making secu¬
lar power seem to receive its sanction, not from above,
but from below. Thus Filmer says in his “Patriarcha”:
“Late writers have taken up too much upon trust from
the subtle schoolmen who, to be sure to thrust down the
king below the Pope, thought it the safest course to ad¬
vance the people above the king.” A doctrine that was
opposed to Jesuitical encroachments of this kind, and
played an important role in the rise of nationalism, was
that of the divine right of kings and of passive obedi¬
ence. The strict subordination of the spiritual to the
temporal power, urged by Erastus, had been encouraged
by Luther himself. And Luther’s own attitude was re¬
lated to that of mediaeval theorists like Occam, who had
sought to exalt the Emperor and depress the Pope. The
monarchs, however, to whom the Lutheran inclined to
give jurisdiction in matters religious (cujus regio, ejus
religio), were not like the Emperor universal; they ruled
54 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

by hereditary right over certain limited territories. The

theocratic state of Calvin again is related to the mediae¬
val theory that exalted the Pope at the expense of the
Emperor; but here also there is lacking the element of
universality. Practically both the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic state tend to run together the things of God
and the things of Caesar, and to leave the individual
without any civitas dei in which he may take refuge from
the secular power. There is, then, this justification for
the opinion of those who look upon Protestantism in
all its forms as only an incident in the rise of nation¬
alism.
A defence of divine right that should receive atten¬
tion as an example, though a very imperfect one, of an
important type of political thinking, is the work of Fil-
mer I have just mentioned: “Patriarcha, or the Natural
Power of Kings” (1680). The arguments in favor of
the patriarchal view of government have indeed never
been adequately set forth in the Occident. In spite of
all that has been urged by Aristotle and others, we must,
if we go by the actual experience of mankind, conclude
that the patriarchal conception has enormous elements
of strength. It has been the normal conception of great
portions of the human race over long periods of time.
Such a study as that of Fustel de Coulanges on the
Greek and Roman city-state, and its derivation from the
religion of the family, aids us to understand political and
social institutions that still survive in countries like
China and Japan. Unfortunately, Filmer does not ap¬
ply an adequate psychological analysis to the patri¬
archal conception and uncover its deep roots in the
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 55

actual facts of human nature. He is at once too natural¬

istic and too theological. By his very sub-title, he
proclaims that the patriarchal power is “natural,” and,
at the same time, he seeks by somewhat grotesque
speculations to prove that the actual power of kings is
based on their direct descent from Adam.
Filmer seems to have missed the point seriously in
seeking to show that the basis of patriarchal and royal
power is natural. A more powerful and consistent
champion of divine right is Bossuet in his “Politique
tiree de l’Ecriture Sainte” (1709). He asserts, indeed,
that all laws are founded on the first of all laws, that of
nature, conceived as a law of equity and right reason.
But in general he opposes to the oncoming naturalistic
tide a thoroughgoing supernaturalism. Men are born,
not free and equal, but subjects, first of all to their
parents. Parental authority itself is the image of that
of God, who is the only absolute sovereign. Parental
authority serves, in turn, as a model for that of the king.
The king’s power does not depend upon the consent and
acquiescence of his people. It is independent of the
Pope. But though absolute, it is not arbitrary; for it is
controlled from above. Bossuet exalts the monarch in
the secular order only to humble him in the sight of God
and to lay upon him the weight of an almost intolerable
responsibility. “Behold,” he says, “an immense people
brought together in a single person, behold this sacred,
paternal, and absolute power; behold the secret reason
which governs all this body of the State. You see the
image of God in kings and gain from them the idea of
royal majesty. And so, oh kings, exercise your power
56 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

boldly; for it is divine and salutary to mankind; but

exercise it with humility. It is laid upon you from with¬
out. At bottom it leaves you weak, it leaves you mor¬
tal, it leaves you sinful; and burdens you in God’s sight
with a heavier reckoning.” Kings, after all, he goes on
to say, are but gods of flesh and blood, of clay and dust.
Earthly grandeur may separate men for a moment, but
they are all made equal at the end by the common
catastrophe of death.
This exercise of the royal office in humble subordina¬
tion to God was scarcely achieved even by a Saint Louis.
As for Louis XIV, one is tempted to say that he took to
himself the first part of Bossuet’s doctrine (Vetat c'est
moi) and overlooked the humility. Bossuet, in asserting
the immediate derivation of the royal power from God,
goes back, like other champions of divine right, to the
mediaeval theorists of the Empire. But there was only
one Emperor whose sway was supposed to be universal,
whereas there were a number of kings equally absolute
in their pretensions, ruling by hereditary right over
great territorial nationalities, and clashing, not merely
in their secular ambitions, but also, as a result of the
Reformation, in their religion. Practically the rulers of
these nationalities were in the state of nature with
reference to one another, whatever one may conceive
the state of nature to be. Bossuet pushed his love of
unity to the point of encouraging religious persecution,
as manifested, for example, in the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes (1685). Yet his doctrine not only failed
to provide an adequate offset to a centrifugal national¬
ism, it seemed by its insistence on the liberties of the
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 57

French king and clergy (les libertes gallicanes) to make

against unity in the Church.
In asserting the Gallican liberties, Louis XIV and
Bossuet were setting themselves against the main trend
of the Church since the later Middle Ages. The fourth
article of the Declaration of the French clergy, made in
1682 and subscribed by Bossuet, declares that the judg¬
ment of the Pope is not definitive without the consent of
the Church. But this type of limited and constitutional
Catholicism had been compromised by the breakdown
of the conciliar movement. Every significant change
from that day to this has been in the direction of greater
papal centralization. The theorist of this ultramontane
type of Catholicism and the enemy of Bossuet and
Louis XIV is Joseph de Maistre. His book on the Pope
(1819) looks forward to the final trumph of the doctrine
of papal infallibility in the Vatican Council (1870). A
main element in Christianity from a fairly early period
is what one may term Roman imperialistic organization.
This element de Maistre develops into a thoroughgoing
papal imperialism. The supreme ruler by divine right is
the Pope. Temporal rulers, so far as they profess to be
Catholic, should recognize his hegemony. This concep¬
tion of rigid outer authority de Maistre proceeds to
establish on the ruins of every type of individualism. In
contrast to Bossuet, who was in the great central Chris¬
tian tradition, so much so that one is tempted to call him
the last of the fathers of the Church, de Maistre, though
a man of admirable character, reveals in his writings
little sense of the inner life, not much more, it might be
maintained, than the rationalists of the eighteenth cen-
58 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

tuty whom he was assailing. The subordination of the

true Christian is based on humility and charity. The
subordination at which de Maistre aims is primarily
social. The chief need of society is order, and order, as
de Maistre conceives it, must be achieved largely by
fear and repression. The ultimate support of the whole
social structure, as he tells us in a celebrated chapter, is
the executioner. He champions the agencies of the
Church that are most frankly ultramontane and anti-
individualistic — the Index, the Inquisition, and the
Jesuits.
Bossuet pushes the doctrine of the divine right of
kings about as far as it will go, and no one is ever likely
to go beyond de Maistre in asserting the divine right of
the Pope. The reply to the absolute and unlimited
sovereignty, whether of Pope or King, based on divine
right, was the assertion of the absolute and unlimited
sovereignty of the people, based on natural right. The
doctrine of popular sovereignty is found even in the
Middle Ages, notably in Marsilius of Padua, and at the
beginning of the seventeenth century is worked out
along rather radical lines by Althusius. Practically,
however, the most important precursor of Rousseau in
the development of this doctrine is Locke. The first of
his two “ Treatises of Government ” (1690) has lost its
interest along with the special form of the doctrine of
divine right that he sets out to refute, that of Filmer’s
“ Patriarcha ”; the second Treatise, however, remains a
chief landmark of political thinking. To understand
this work in its derivation, one needs to go back to the
contrast between nature and convention established
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 59

by the early Greek thinkers, and to the conception of a

law of nature that grew out of this contrast, largely
under Stoical influence, and became embodied in
Roman law; finally one needs to trace through the
centuries the process by which the Roman juristic con¬
ception finally became, in writers like Locke, the doc¬
trine of the rights of man. The doctrine of natural
rights, as maintained by Locke, looks forward to the
American Revolution, and, as modified by Rousseau,
to the French Revolution. Locke has to defend natural
right not merely against the partisans of royal preroga¬
tive, but also against Machiavellian realists like Hobbes.
For Hobbes, the state of nature is liberty, equality, and
war. He would, therefore, in the interests of peace have
the individual enter into a contract by which he re¬
nounces once and for all his liberty or unlimited sover¬
eignty over his own person, and enjoy equality under a
despot. For Locke, on the other hand, though he has an
occasional primitivistic touch, the state of nature is
liberty, equality, and reason. It is “a state of peace,
good-will, mutual assistance, and preservation.” 1 In
fact the law of nature is identical with the will of God 2
(or, as Pope was to say a little later, “The state of nature
was the reign of God”). Locke, indeed, so runs together
the spiritual and the temporal order that he speaks of an
“appeal to heaven” when he means an appeal to force.
He recognizes, however, certain disadvantages in the
state of nature, especially in its bearing upon the safety
of private property. If property is to be fully secured,
men need in addition to the natural law a positive law
1 Book ii, ch. in. 2 Ibid., ch. xi.
60 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

to be administered by impartial judges who require in

turn the force of an organized state to give their decisions
due execution. The first aim, therefore, of the contract
by which men substitute a settled government for the
state of nature, is to secure the common good, which is
taken to be identical with the protection of property.
The source of property itself, and this is a point of ex¬
treme importance to which I shall need to return later,
is manual labor. The will of the people, conceived as the
will of the majority, is to be supreme. This will, how¬
ever, is to be expressed not directly but through the
legislative, which as the organ of the popular will is to
dominate both the executive and the judiciary. Prac¬
tically, Locke’s treatise reflects the upshot of the revo¬
lution of 1688, the transfer, namely, of the final power
of the State from the King to Parliament. The legisla¬
tive is especially vigilant in its control over the executive
in all that relates to the common interest, that is, the
safety of property. (Taxation without representation is
tyranny).
Even a theorist of divine right like Bossuet admits the
danger of an uncontrolled executive. “Let us candidly
confess,” he says, “that there is no temptation equal to
that of power, nor aught more difficult than to refuse
yourself anything when men grant you everything, and
think only of forestalling or even of stimulating your de¬
sires.” As for Locke, he does not even deem it worth
while to reply to those who maintain that a ruler, though
not limited by men, may be limited by his responsibility
to what is above him. For him, a king is in a state of
nature not only with reference to other kings, but with
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 61

reference to his own subjects; and being thus unre¬

strained he is at the same time corrupted with flattery
and armed with power. Though Locke is thus on his
guard against an uncontrolled royal will, it is hard to see
that he has taken any precautions against the opposite
danger. However moderately he himself may interpret
the sovereignty of the people, it is not easy to discover
in his theory anything that will prevent this sovereignty
from developing into a new absolutism. The people
exercises not only legal control over its legislators, but
has the right, if they seem to be acting contrary to the
people’s interest, to rise up against them in insurrection.
In the final analysis, the only check to the evils of an
unlimited democracy will be found to be the recognition
in some form of the aristocratic principle. Such a recog¬
nition is entirely lacking in Locke. The very logic of
natural rights runs counter to the idea of deference and
subordination, at least on any other basis than that of
force. In the state of nature, says Locke all men are
equally kings, and subject to nobody; and this equality
does not suffer serious diminution as the result of the
social contract. Locke simply dodges the political prob¬
lem that seems so important to an Aristotle and a Con¬
fucius, namely, the problem of leadership. It is charac¬
teristic of the English that the radical and equalitarian
side of Locke should be slow to develop. The Revolu¬
tion of 1688, of which he is the theorist, gave the control
of government to an oligarchy that owed its power and
prestige to the survival of the traditional subordinations.
The difficulties of the Whig position, that of carrying on
government by an aristocracy that lacks doctrinal justi-
62 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

fication, became manifest in time. This aristocracy vir¬

tually abdicated at the time of the Reform Bill (1832).
The full results of the movement that was getting under
way in the time of Locke are becoming apparent in our
own day. The people, especially the people of the great
urban centres, no longer look up with respect to repre¬
sentatives who are themselves so imbued with the utili¬
tarian temper encouraged by Locke that they have per¬
haps ceased to be worthy of respect. If the aristocratic
principle continues to give way to the equalitarian de¬
nial of the need of leadership, parliamentary government
may ultimately become impossible.
It is Locke’s aim to deal with human nature in a more
empirical or experimental way than his philosophical
predecessors. At the same time he has a strongly ra¬
tionalistic side that reveals the Cartesian influence.
By their assertion of a “reason” in man that can prevail
unaided over the imagination and expansive desires,
both Locke and Descartes renew the Stoical position.
The counter-assertion of Pascal that unaided reason
cannot win any such easy victory, that on the contrary
“imagination rules everything,” seems nearer to the
observed facts, and, therefore, more truly experimental.
According to Locke, imagination becomes embodied in
customs and traditions that may from the point of view
of reason be dismissed as mere prejudice. By the oppo¬
sition that he thus establishes between reason and prej¬
udice, Locke becomes, along with Descartes, a main in¬
fluence on the period of European culture known as the
Enlightenment. Although no one perhaps did more for
Locke’s French and European influence in general than
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 63

Voltaire, in the field of political theory, on the other

hand, this influence is perhaps best studied in Mon¬
tesquieu.1 Like Locke, he stands for parliamentary con¬
trol of the executive, especially in all that relates to
taxation and the initiation of money bills. He tends,
however, to separate more sharply than Locke the legis¬
lative, the judiciary, and the executive, and to make the
judiciary and the executive more independent of the
legislative, in such wise that the different functions of
government may serve as a system of checks and bal¬
ances upon one another. As is well known, it was this
side of Montesquieu that was most influential on early
American political theory. At the same time, only an
unfriendly critic will see in the framers of the American
Constitution pure disciples of Montesquieu. They pos¬
sessed in a marked degree something that can scarcely
be claimed for Montesquieu—practical sagacity. Com¬
pared with the political views of a Machiavelli those
of Montesquieu have about them an atmosphere of un¬
reality; so much so that even the angelic Joubert said
that one might learn more of the art of government from
a page of Machiavelli than from a volume of Montes¬
quieu. Moreover, our own constitutional statesmen did
not for the most part share Montesquieu’s general philos¬
ophy. This philosophy as it appears in “L’Esprit des
Lois” (1748) suffers from certain inconsistencies, but on
the whole it shows, even when compared with that of
Locke, a noteworthy advance in the direction of a pure
naturalism. The theological has given way still further

1 See J. Dedieu: Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en

France.
64 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

to the sociological point of view, so much so that Mon¬

tesquieu has been regarded by some as the founder of
sociology. “He is the least religious spirit that ever
was,” says Faguet; and in truth he reveals an almost
total lack of sense of the values of the inner life. To
be genuinely religious or humanistic, one must assert
whether in the form of divine grace or of free moral
choice, a power in the heart of the individual that may
lift him above physical nature. In the three main forms
of government that he recognizes — monarchical, repub¬
lican, and despotic — Montesquieu gives little weight to
any such specifically human factor. Though he does lip-
service to Christianity, he leans towards determinism
and the empire of physical causes, putting special stress,
as is well known, on the relation between climate and
national character. His insistence, therefore, that laws
must not be regarded as anything absolute, but must co¬
incide in their general spirit with national character, is
very different from the Aristotelian emphasis on ethos.
For though Aristotle recognizes the influence of climate,
he is on the whole less concerned with what nature
makes of man than with what man makes of himself. In
Montesquieu’s view, even religion is largely a matter of
climate. Climate determines the parts of the world that
are to be Mohammedan or Christian,1 and within Chris¬
tianity itself those that are to be Protestant or Catholic.2
“Good sense” is likewise, it would seem, a matter of
climate.3 This naturalistic relativism implies a revolu¬
tion in the very basis of ethics. As a matter of fact,

1 Esprit des Lois, liv. xxiv, ch. 26. 2 Ibid., ch. 5.

3 Ibid., liv. xiv, ch. 3.
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 65

Montesquieu has the grace to warn us that he is not

using a word like virtue in the traditional meaning.
“What I call virtue in a republic/’ he says, “is not a
moral or Christian virtue, it is the love of country, that
is to say, the love of equality.” He develops admirably
the thesis that this republican love of equality must not
be pushed to a point where it becomes incompatible
with the necessary subordinations. The obvious reply
of a Bossuet would be that if subordination is to rest on
any other principle than force, it must imply the sub¬
mission of man’s ordinary will to some higher will, it
must in other words be ultimately rooted in humility.
To be sure, Montesquieu seems at times to recognize the
relation between republican virtue and religious control.
He says in a celebrated sentence: “Rome etait un vais-
seau tenu par deux ancres dans la tempete — la religion
et les moeurs.” With the decay of this traditional ethos,
luxury increased and liberty declined.1
Montesquieu conceives in an external and formalistic
fashion the honor that is the informing principle of
monarchy. It has little to do with virtue either as he
defines it or as it has been traditionally understood. His
treatment of this form of the aristocratic principle, how¬
ever faithfully it may reflect what aristocracy had ac¬
tually become in the age of Louis XV, can scarcely be
said to do justice to the implications of the maxim
noblesse oblige. In the humanistic poise that the gentle¬
man (honnete homme) sought to combine with the cult

1 Yet in another chapter — and this is a good sample of his

inconsistency — he adopts Mandeville’s arguments in favor of
luxury. (Ibid., liv. xix, ch. 9.)
66 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

of honor, he discovers little more than a veneer of polite¬

ness that dissimulates the scramble of courtiers for the
royal favor.
Since laws and governments, according to Montes¬
quieu, are relative, and relative chiefly to physical
causes, one might suppose that not much is to be gained
from human interference with the working of these
causes. As a matter of fact, there is another side of
Montesquieu that suggests that though man cannot
modify himself from within along humanistic or reli¬
gious lines, he may be modified from without not merely
by climate but by institutions; and that these institu¬
tions may be of a more or less progressive character. He
displays, in short, the usual confidence of the man of the
Enlightenment in the final triumph of reason over prej"
udice. His influence can be traced on those persons,
especially numerous towards the end of the eighteenth
century, who hoped to renovate society by an ingenious
manipulation of political machinery, and who had an
almost unlimited faith in the efficacy of paper constitu¬
tions.
I have just used the word progressive. As a matter of
fact, the idea of progress, which was to give its distinc¬
tive note to modern naturalism, was just taking definite
shape in the time of Montesquieu. Only the barest be¬
ginnings of this idea can be found in the naturalism,
whether Stoic or Epicurean, of ancient Greece and
Rome. The idea of progress has its ultimate source in
the first triumphs of scientific method in the Renais¬
sance. In its early English form, it is associated with the
Baconian influence and the founding of the Royal So-
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 67

ciety (1662), and tends to be practical and empirical.

In its early French form, it is associated with the Car¬
tesian influence, and tends to be more abstract and log¬
ical. The Baconian and Cartesian currents come to¬
gether in the eighteenth century, especially in France.
The result is an ever-growing confidence in human per¬
fectibility. The Abbd de Saint-Pierre is already a fairly
complete specimen of what one may term the pro¬
fessional philanthropist. Diderot and other Encyclo¬
paedists set out deliberately to substitute the Baconian
kingdom of man for the traditional kingdom of God.
At the same time, the new doctrine did not have all that
it needed if it was to develop into what has been, for
several generations past, the true religion of the Occi¬
dent — the religion of humanity. The movement thus
far had been predominantly rationalistic. Its main
achievement had been to develop, largely on Cartesian
lines, the idea of universal mechanism, and to oppose
nature, conceived as a system of constant and inflexible
laws, to the providential interference with natural law
that had been asserted, in some form or other, by the
older dualists. A Christian supernaturalist like Bossuet
was, therefore, justified from his own point of view in
putting at the very centre of his defence of religion
against naturalistic tendency the idea of Providence.
The substitution of the idea of law for Providence is not
in itself, from the point of view of the strict positivist, a
chimerical undertaking.1 But in that case one would
1 Buddha, for example, bestowed his final homage not upon
Providence in the Christian sense, but upon the Law (“ Dham-
ma”), a law, one scarcely need add, quite distinct from that of
physical nature.
68 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

have needed, if the truths of the inner life were to be

retained, to assert two laws — a law for man as well as a
law for thing. The whole point of the new movement,
however, was that it did nothing of the kind. It sought
to bring both the natural and the human order under
one law, and then, following the lead of Descartes, to
reduce this one law to mathematical and mechanical
formulae. To be sure, in the deistic movement, an im¬
portant intermediary stage in the passage from the older
dualism to modern monistic conceptions, the idea of
Providence is still retained after a fashion. This deistic
Providence, however, acts not immediately, as in true
Christianity, but mediately through the laws of nature,
which Providence was deemed, therefore, to have con¬
trived with a special view to man’s benefit. Hence the
emphasis that most deists put on the doctrine of final
causes, and their consternation at an event like the
Lisbon earthquake which scarcely seemed to square
with their theory of a Providence that worked for
man’s good through the natural order.
The deistic movement, and indeed, as I have already
said, the whole naturalistic movement from the Renais¬
sance down, had been thus far predominantly rationalis¬
tic. Now it has been a constant experience of man in all
ages that mere rationalism leaves him unsatisfied. Man
craves in some sense or other of the word an enthusiasm
that will lift him out of his merely rational self. Even
Voltaire, perhaps the outstanding figure of the Enlight¬
enment, declared that illusion is the queen of the human
heart. In the field of political thought, the conception of
the rights of man remained comparatively inert as long
 THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING 69

as these rights were derived from a hypothetical state of

nature merely by a process of abstract reasoning. “ Cold
reason,” as Rousseau declared, “has never done any¬
thing illustrious.” Rousseau had many precursors, as
appears from what I have already said about the Eng¬
lish background, yet it was he who more than any
other one person put behind the doctrine of the rights
of man the imaginative and emotional driving power it
still lacked, and at the same time supplied the missing
elements to the religion of humanity. Among those who
took up the defence of the traditional order against
Rousseau, Burke is easily first, because he too perceived
in his own way the truth that cold reason has never done
anything illustrious. He saw that the only conservatism
that counts is an imaginative conservatism. One may,
therefore, without being fanciful, regard the battle that
has been in progress in the field of political thought since
the end of the eighteenth century as being in its most
significant phase a battle between the spirit of Burke
and that of Rousseau. And this opposition between
Burke and Rousseau will itself be found to turn, in the
last analysis, on the opposition between two different
types of imagination.
 CHAPTER II
ROUSSEAU AND THE IDYLLIC IMAGINATION

The period that extends from the Renaissance to the

eighteenth century was, as I have indicated in my first
chapter, marked by the progressive emancipation of the
individual from outer authority and the supernatural
beliefs that this authority sought to impose. The indi¬
vidual did not use his new liberty to work out some
critical equivalent of traditional religion; on the con¬
trary he became increasingly naturalistic. At the
same time he often indulged in theories of government
that were at the opposite pole from those of Machia-
velli, the typical political naturalist. This is because
certain virtues were associated more and more with
“nature,” virtues that the past had deemed the hard-
won fruit not merely of humanistic but of religious dis¬
cipline. If the legitimacy of this association could be
established, the Aristotelian generalization with which I
started as to the necessary relation between ethos and
government would evidently have to be abandoned.
Before deserting Aristotle, however, we may do well to
consider whether some sophistry does not lurk in what
came to be the popular interpretation of the “state of
nature.”
The notion of a state of nature and of a law of nature
antecedent to positive law and organized society is, as
we have seen, nothing new. It emerges in classical antiq¬
uity, especially among the Stoics, and survives through-
ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 71

out the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the infiltra¬

tion of the Stoical influence into Roman law. It is re¬
inforced again, as I have said, by the direct return of the
Renaissance to the Stoical1 and other ancient sources.
Moreover, one may find as early as the Church Fathers
a tendency to identify the supposed state of nature with
the state of man before the Fall and then to give to this
state a communistic coloring, and at the same time to
associate with man’s lapse from innocence the rise of
private property.2 Though the law of nature was con¬
ceived to be in its own way divine, its authority was
after all not to be compared with that of the divine law
of which one secured knowledge through revelation. As
long as one held to this positive form of God’s law, one’s
assertion of a state of nature was sure to be tempered by
a lively conviction of the survival in man of the “old
Adam.” Hooker, for example, whose “Ecclesiastical
Polity” appeared in 1592, looks forward in many of his
ideas about natural law to Locke. But though asserting
this law he declares: “Laws politic, ordained for ex¬
ternal order and regimen among men, are never framed
as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to
be obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience
to the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless pre¬
suming man to be in regard of his depraved mind, little
better than a wild beast.” In the period between Hooker
and Locke, the conviction of man’s depravity undergoes
a notable diminution. Grotius already affirms that,
1 See L. Zanta, La Renaissance du stoicisme au xvi* sikcle.
2 The Stoical influence can be traced here also. See Seneca,
Epistles, xiv, 2. Cf. also The Social and Political Ideas of Some
Great Mediceval Thinkers (edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw). pp. 43 ff.
72 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

even if there were no God and no positive revelation,

man might be guided aright in matters political by the
law of nature conceived as a law of right reason. Along
with this glorification of reason, one should note as far
back as the sixteenth century an incipient glorification
of instinct that was later to culminate, in one of its most
characteristic expressions, in the cult of the noble savage.
It is only, however, with the early eighteenth century
that the glorification of instinct takes on so distinctly
emotional a cast as to affect the very basis of ethics.
Shaftesbury’s doctrine of the “moral sense” and the
instinctive goodness it implies had wide and immediate
popularity. For example, Sir John Hawkins says in
his “Life of Johnson”: “His [Fielding’s] morality, in
respect that it resolves virtue into good affections,
in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of
duty, is that of Lord Shaftesbury vulgarized. He was
the inventor of that cant-phrase, ‘ goodness of heart/
which is every day used as a substitute for probity,
and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a
dog.”
Not only Shaftesbury, the optimistic naturalist, but
the naturalistic cynic, Mandeville, prepared the way, as
I have already said, for the emotional ethics of Rous¬
seau. According to Rousseau, the state of nature is not
a state of reason. On the contrary, the man who thinks
is already highly sophisticated, or, in Rousseau’s phrase,
“a depraved animal.” According to him, man in the
state of nature is isolated and at the same time domi¬
nated by instinct. These isolated units will not, how¬
ever, as Hobbes averred, be so dominated by the instinct
ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 73

of self-love as to make war on one another. Natural man

has another instinct, namely, an instinctive dislike of
seeing his fellow creatures suffer, which is alone a suffi¬
cient counterpoise to the love of self. From the con¬
course and combination of these two principles — love
of self and instinctive pity — Rousseau seeks to derive
all the rules of natural right. “ Even the most outra¬
geous detractor of human virtue” (that is, Mandeville),
says Rousseau, “was forced to admit natural pity,
though he did not see that from this quality alone derive
all the social virtues — generosity, clemency, humanity,
benevolence, and friendship itself — that he seeks to
deny men.” Indeed, if one considers unsophisticated
man, man subject, that is, only to the primordial in¬
stincts of pity and love of self, one must conclude that
he is “ the most virtuous who offers the least resistance
to the simple impulses of nature.” According to Scho¬
penhauer,1 it was the glorious achievement of Rousseau
to transform morality by thus basing it upon pity. A re¬
sult of this achievement that should be noted is the mod¬
ification, apparent in the sentence I have just quoted,
in the meaning of such words as virtue. The more, in¬
deed, one studies the eighteenth century, the plainer it
becomes that all other modern revolutions were pre¬
ceded at about that time by a revolution in the diction¬
ary. For a fuller understanding of Rousseau’s recoining
of the word virtue, one needs to turn back for a moment
to the “First Discourse” (1750). He there asserts the
incompatibility between virtue and the refinement and
luxury that seem to him to result necessarily from a
1 Grundlage der Moral, f 19, 9.
74 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

cultivation of the arts and sciences. In his account of

the undermining of Rome and other great states by the
invasion of luxury, he uses by actual count the word
virtue forty-three times. But one is not to suppose that
in his solution of the problem of luxury that so preoc¬
cupied his age he is really seeking to recover the virtue
of a Fabricius or a Lycurgus or a Calvin. What he op¬
poses to luxury is rather a return to nature and the
simple life — and the simple life, as he conceives it, is
to be very simple indeed.1 His virtue is a glorification
of the instinctive and the subrational. So that Joubert
was justified from his own point of view in saying that
Rousseau had destroyed wisdom in men’s souls by talk¬
ing to them about virtue.
Though the virtue of the “First Discourse” is dis¬
tinctly primitivistic, it received an essential addition
in the “Second Discourse” by being associated with the
idea of pity. The state of nature for Hobbes, as we have
seen, meant liberty, equality, and war; for Locke, lib¬
erty, equality, and reason. On the contrary, says Rous¬
seau, both war and reason are the result of social sophis¬
tication. The true state of nature is liberty, equality,
and fraternal pity. By his refutation of Hobbes, and
his substitution of fraternity for reason, Rousseau
gave to naturalism the driving power it still lacked. It
thus became possible to develop it into a new evangel
that seemed to culminate, like the old Evangel, in love.
1 See, for example, Dernikre Reponse a M. Bordes: “Qu’ils pais-
sent meme, s’il le faut: j’aime encore mieux voir les hommes
brouter l’herbe dans les champs que s’entre-devorer dans les
villes. . . Osera-t-on prendre le parti de l’instinct contre la
raison? C’est pr6cisement ce que je demande.,,
ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 75

This conception of love in terms of expansive emotion

is, as I have already said, a sort of parody of Christian
charity.
In the state of nature all men are, it would seem,
equally capable of pity. But in actual society the em¬
phasis on pity leads to the setting up of a sort of in¬
verted hierarchy. Just as in Christianity a man’s spir¬
itual rank is determined by his nearness to God, which is
revealed in turn by the ardor of his charity, so in the
new evangel man is to be rated by his nearness to na¬
ture, which is revealed in turn by the warmth of his
commiseration. Now it is in the man of the plain people
that the lively native impulse is least sicklied o’er by the
pale cast of thought. “ Love had he found in huts where
poor men lie.” As one ascends in the social scale, love
diminishes, and as one approaches the top, it gives way
to its opposite. As for the rich, Rousseau compares them
to “ravening wolves, who having once tasted human
flesh, refuse every other food, and henceforth desire to
devour only men.”
Rousseau is, as a matter of fact, busy in creating a
new set of myths that have, in their control of the human
imagination, succeeded in no small measure to the old
theology. Just as in the old theology everything hinged
on man’s fall from God, so in Rousseau everything
hinges on man’s fall from nature. The first and decisive
step in this fall and the source of social evils was, ac¬
cording to Rousseau’s familiar account, the invention of
private property in the form of property in land. With
the invention of property, “equality disappeared.”
“Work became necessary, and the vast forests were
76 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

changed to smiling fields that had to be watered with

the sweat of men, in which slavery and wretchedness
were soon seen to spring up and grow with the crops.”
Misery, in short, is the result of industry.
What evidently underlies the mythology that Rous¬
seau is thus creating is a new dualism. The old dualism
put the conflict between good and evil in the breast of
the individual, with evil so predominant since the Fall
that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau this
conflict is transferred from the individual to society.
That there is some survival of the older dualism in Rous¬
seau is beyond question; but it is equally beyond ques¬
tion that the actual influence of his work has been almost
entirely associated with the new dualism. He himself
saw in this new dualism the essence of the apocalyptic
vision that came to him under the tree by the roadside
on his walk to Vincennes. The guiding principle of his
writings, he says, is to show that vice and error, stran¬
gers to man’s constitution, are introduced from without,
that they are due in short to his institutions. Now insti¬
tutions mean in practice those who administer them.
A small group at the top of the artificial hierarchy, kings
and priests and capitalists, sit on the lid, as it were, and
keep man’s native goodness (as in Shelley’s “Prome¬
theus Unbound”) from gushing forth torrentially. The
fault in any case is not “Nature’s”;

Nature! No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society.
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 77

Whence this strange dualism arose, “how George III

and Paley and Lord Eldon came to possess an existence
independent of Nature, and acquired the power of turn¬
ing all her good purposes to nought/’ is, as Leslie Ste¬
phen remarks of Shelley, “one of those questions which
we can hardly refrain from asking.” A similar question
arises regarding the dualism of Rousseau. Most people,
however, have not been inclined to subject the myth of
natural goodness to any such indiscreet scrutiny. It is
not only very flattering in itself; it seems to offer a con¬
venient avenue of escape from the theological nightmare.
Above all it flattered those at the bottom of the social
hierarchy. Christianity at its best has sought to make
the rich man humble, whereas the inevitable effect of
the Rousseauistic evangel is to make the poor man
proud, and at the same time to make him feel that he is
the victim of a conspiracy. The establishment of society
and laws made it possible to change “an adroit usurpa¬
tion into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few
ambitious persons subjected henceforth the whole of
human kind to toil, servitude, and wretchedness.” One
need scarcely be surprised that this and similar passages
of the “Second Discourse” should still be a direct source
of inspiration to the bomb-throwing anarchist.1 What
one hears throughout this treatise, as elsewhere in Rous¬
seau, is the voice of the angry and envious plebeian, who
in the name of love is actually fomenting hatred and
class warfare. “What was hardest to destroy in me,” we

1 For the testimony of a French magistrate on this point, see

L. Proal: “L’Anarchisme au xviiie siecle,” Revue philosophique,
vol. 82, pp. 135-60, 202-42.
78 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

read in “Emile,” “was a proud misanthropy, a certain

acrimony against the rich and happy of the world as
though they were so at my expense, as though their
alleged happiness had been usurped from mine.”
The crusader against social inequalities on Rousseau-
istic lines may easily become not merely an enthusiast
but a fanatic. This emancipation of feeling seems at
first sight the essential aspect of Rousseau’s interpreta¬
tion of nature. Instead of the rationalistic and mechani¬
cal nature of the Cartesian, nature is spontaneity, in the
sense of an expansive and even an explosive emotional¬
ism. “I threw reason overboard,” says Rousseau him¬
self, “and consulted nature, that is to say the inner
sentiment which directs my belief independently of my
reason.” But on closer examination one discovers that
there is in Rousseau something even more fundamental
than his emotionalism, and that is his special quality of
imagination. In order to make this point clear, we need
to consider with some care the contrast between the
natural and the artificial that he establishes in his
“Second Discourse.” His method in reaching this con¬
trast is similar in some respects to that of the modern
evolutionist. Instead of having us look forward to ends,
as Aristotle urges, if we are to understand man’s nature,
he would, like the evolutionist, have us grope our way
back to beginnings. The change from primitive to civi¬
lized man is presented as a slow development with certain
intermediary stages, each one of which Rousseau sup¬
poses to have consumed “thousands of centuries.” This
portrayal of the evolution of mankind as a whole through
various stages aided, one may note in passing, the efflo-
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 79

rescence in Germany of numerous philosophies of his¬

tory.1 Rousseau’s nature, however, is in one particular
violently at variance with the nature of most of the
philosophers of history and with that of all the evolu¬
tionists. Though the evolutionist is only too prone to
whisk us off into some prehistoric period where he is free
to indulge in airy hypothesis, he does not see in nature
at any stage of the evolutionary process a source of pity.
By his attribution of pity to the state of nature, Rous¬
seau has indeed gone far to justify the sentence with
which he opens his discussion of this state in the “ Sec¬
ond Discourse”: “Let us begin by setting aside all the
facts.” The key to Rousseau’s nature, and also to what
has passed for the ideal with innumerable Rousseauists,
is found in his declaration that, not being able to dis¬
cover men to his liking in the real world, he built up for
himself a “golden age of phantasy.” 2 His nature is in
short what I have described elsewhere as a projection of
the idyllic imagination.
Faguet complains that the image Rousseau has left on
the mind of the public is that of a gentleman up in a
cherry tree tossing down cherries to two maidens below
(incident of Mesdemoiselles Galley and Graffenried in
the “Confessions”). Perhaps the public is not so far
wrong after all as to Rousseau’s essential attitude. One
can scarcely go through Rousseau’s writings without
being struck by the number of variants he has given of
the pastoral theme. Let no one suppose that it is a small

1 See Richard Fester: Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichts-

philosophie.
2 Lettre a M. de Malesherbes, 26 janvier, 1762.
80 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

matter to be, like Rousseau, richly and spontaneously

imaginative in this idyllic fashion. Perhaps no human
trait is more universal than the longing for some golden
age or land of heart’s desire. This longing has not only
inspired a large proportion of the art and literature of
the world, but has found its way into philosophy and
religion. The idyllic element is unmistakably present in
the story of the Garden of Eden; the Song of Solomon is
described by Milton as a “divine pastoral”; the millen¬
nial yearnings of the early Christians are not unrelated
to the same type of imagination. The Krishna of the
Bhagavadgita is not in the least pastoral, but in the pic¬
ture that often serves as frontispiece to Indian editions
of this poem, Krishna appears with the pastoral flute
and kine, surrounded by the gopis or shepherdesses.
What concerns us here is the relation of this type of
imagination to modern political idealism. The agitator
makes his chief appeal to it when he stirs the multitude
by his pictures of the felicity that is to supervene upon
the destruction of the existing social order. The English
painter, Edward Lear, relates that in the year of revo¬
lution, 1848, he was staying in a Sicilian town. He left
the town for some weeks and locked up his pictures and
other things in a room, leaving the key with the hotel-
keeper. A revolution had just broken out when he re¬
turned, and he found the waiters full of Chianti and
patriotic fervor. He ventured to ask one of them for the
key of his room that he might get his clothes. The wait¬
er utterly refused to be led from his dreams of a golden
age to such details of daily life. “There isn’t any longer
any key or room or clothes,” he exclaimed indignantly.
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 81

“Everything is love and liberty. 0 che bella rivolu-

zione !” 1 Unfortunately when the real refuses to vanish
in favor of the ideal, it is easy to persuade the simple-
minded that the failure is due not to the ideal itself, but
to some conspiracy. In speaking of one of these childlike
disciples of Rousseau, Anatole France says that it was
his misfortune to have carried into the profession of cook
to which fate had condemned him an Elysian soul in¬
tended for the golden age. He had been led to the most
savage ferocity by the tenderest optimism. As Anatole
France adds, when one starts with the supposition that
men are naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends
by wishing to kill them all. What is remarkable about
the period since the eighteenth century is the extent to
which not merely the rank and file, but the leaders have
followed the lure of the idyllic imagination. Thus
Schiller exalts the idyll to the first places in literature,
and associates it with the ideal. Elsewhere I have tried
to show that the idyll does not deserve any such rank in
literature. It would seem even more open to suspicion
as a basis for political action. Lincoln writes to his
friend Speed: “ I have no doubt it is the peculiar mis¬
fortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium
far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize.”
Lincoln was in these Elysian yearnings, as in other re¬
spects, very human. He was not, however, Elysian in
his actual statesmanship.
Later in this book we shall study more in detail vari¬
ous persons who, unlike Lincoln, have carried over the
1 This story was a favorite of Tennyson’s. I abridge it from
Wilfrid Ward, Problems and Persons, pp. 204-05.
82 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

idyllic type of “vision” into the field of politics and

economics. All that I wish to show now is that, in the
case of Rousseau himself, even his sensibility is subject
to his imagination, inasmuch as this imagination con¬
jures up the Arcadian state that he terms “nature,”
towards which his emotions expand so freely. But to
present Rousseau merely as an idyllic and emotional
dreamer, it may be urged, is to forget that part of his
writings, the “Social Contract,” for instance, in which
he shows himself severely and coldly logical. The occa¬
sional severity of Rousseau’s logic one may grant, but its
coldness is another matter. Starting from the premise of
a fictitious state of nature, it leads to conclusions that
justify emotional revolt against everything established,
that are indeed enough to make “ the very stones of
Rome to rise and mutiny.” If the subjects of a despot,
for example (every king in Europe was a despot accord¬
ing to the logic of the “ Social Contract”), seem to enjoy
domestic tranquillity, it is merely, says Rousseau, the
tranquillity of the companions of Ulysses in the den of
the Cyclops, waiting their turn to be devoured. Rous¬
seau’s logic has been compared in its relation to his emo¬
tions to a henpecked husband, who keeps up a brave
outer show of independence while actually doing his
wife’s bidding. Moreover, another end is accomplished
by Rousseau’s display of logical rigor. The man at the
bottom of the existing social order is flattered by being
told that he is more virtuous, more fully possessed, in
other words, of the spontaneous goodness of the state of
nature than the man at the top. But, however ready he
may be to believe that he is superior in feeling, he does
ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 83

not after all like to look upon himself as incapable of

thought. The multitude, says Aristotle, cannot make
distinctions. Rousseau’s logic is so contrived as to give
to the multitude at least the illusion that it can make
distinctions. He owes no small part of his amazing influ¬
ence to his flattery of the popular head as well as of the
popular heart. As Taine writes in a letter to W. S. Lilly:
“What gives extraordinary power to the ideas of Rous¬
seau is above all the simplicity of the conception. As a
matter of fact, the political reasoning that it produces is
as easy as the rule of three. How are you to prove to this
man that he does not understand, that the notion of the
State is one of the most difficult to form, that political
reasoning is beyond his grasp? You would insult him.
He cannot admit even as possible a thing so prepos¬
terous: and his self-love is sufficient to blind his good
sense.”
Thus far I have been dealing with the Rousseau who
has actually moved the world — the Rousseau whose
feelings fly out towards the vision conjured up by his
imagination, and whose logic is in turn pressed into the
service of his feelings. One must, however, grant that
there is alongside of this Rousseau a very different Rous¬
seau. It is related that when he was in Strassburg a
father told him that he was educating his son strictly on
the principles of “Emile.” He replied: “So much the
worse for him.” Even if not strictly true, this anecdote
has a certain symbolical value. It is to be associated with
his saying that his heart and his head did not seem to
belong to the same individual. If his heart (to which, as
I have tried to show, his logic is subservient) is revolu-
84 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

tionary, his head is cautious. His replies to those who

sought counsel of him, as any one who has been through
his correspondence will testify, were frequently very
shrewd and sensible. As M. Lanson says, he applies his
boldest doctrines in a way to reassure conservatives and
satisfy opportunists.
The contrast between the two Rousseaus is indeed so
marked as to raise the question of his sincerity. As a
preliminary to a discussion of this point, one needs to
note that a special type of sincerity which seems to be
much in request these days is itself an outcome of the
Rousseauistic movement. It seems to be assumed in cer¬
tain quarters that almost any opinion is justified pro¬
vided it be held with sufficient emotional vehemence.
One cannot help reflecting that perhaps the best exam¬
ples of sincerity in this sense are to be found in insane
asylums; and that much of Rousseau’s sincerity, his
conviction for instance during his later years that he
was the victim of a universal conspiracy, was of this
order. Sincerity is indeed only one of a whole class of
virtues that are often taken to be primary when they are
in fact only virtues with reference to something more
fundamental. Thus many of our “liberals” conceive
that it is in itself a virtue to be forward-looking, whereas
it may be a vice, if what one is looking forward to should
turn out to be pernicious or chimerical. A similar re¬
mark applies to those who pique themselves on their
open-mindedness. It is well to open one’s mind, but
only as a preliminary to closing it, only as a preparation,
in short, for the supreme act of judgment and selection.
In much the same way, the value of sincerity can be
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 85

estimated only with reference to the previous question

of truth or error. What makes the Socratic group at
Athens and the scientific investigator to-day seem so
respectable, when compared with the emotionalist, is
that they ask, first of all, not whether a man is sincere,
but whether he is right or wrong. If one is right, it is of
course important, at least in the domain of moral values,
that he should be sincerely right.
It is hard to deny Rousseau the type of emotional
sincerity that I have just been discussing — a type that
in its milder form reminds one of what would be known
nowadays as the will to believe, and in its extreme form,
is not far removed from madness. At the same time,
Rousseau’s head could on occasion stand aloof and deal
rather Socratically with his heart. For example, he said
to Hume who had complimented him on the style and
eloquence of his books: “To tell the truth, I am not dis¬
pleased with myself in that particular: at the same time
I dread lest my writings are good for nothing at bottom,
and that all my theories are full of extravagance.” 1
It is not, however, the self-critical Rousseau of this
passage that need concern us, for the simple reason that
it is not this Rousseau who has moved the world. The
side of Rousseau that has moved the world, as M. Lan-
son continues, is the side that “ exasperates and inspires
revolt. . .; it is the mother of violence, the source of all
that is uncompromising. It launches the simple souls
who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the

1 Letter of Hume to Dr. Blair, 25 March, 1766. This letter was

written, it will be noticed, while Hume was still on friendly terms
with Rousseau.
86 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

desperate quest of the absolute, an absolute to be real¬

ized to-day by anarchy and to-morrow by social des¬
potism.” 1
Though the Rousseau who has been influential is
always Rousseau the extremist, he oscillates, as M.
Lanson says, between opposite extremes. From the un¬
flinching individualism of the “ Second Discourse,”
where man is conceived as a sort of isolated and un¬
related particle, he passes to the no less unflinching
collectivism of the “Social Contract.” He fluctuates
between extremes even in his collectivistic ideal. Thus
he writes to the Marquis de Mirabeau that he does not
see “any endurable mean between the most austere
democracy and the most perfect Hobbism.” You must
choose, he says, between making a man and making a
citizen. You cannot hope to make both. Hitherto, I
have been speaking for the most part of the virtue of
man in the state of nature as depicted in the “Second
Discourse.” It remains to speak of the “Social Con¬
tract,” and of the method there outlined for divesting
man as completely as possible of his natural virtue in
order that he may acquire the virtue of the citizen. In
what I have to say about the “Social Contract,” I shall
confine myself to the uncompromising main argument.
That there are other elements in the “Social Contract”
is beyond question. Rousseau affirms at times that the
principles of government are not absolute but relative;
that they are subject in their application to historical
circumstances and physical environment, notably
climate. But this relativistic Rousseau who reveals at
1 Annoles de la Societe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vm, p. 31.
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 87

times the influence of Montesquieu is, as I have said,

unimportant compared to the Rousseau who is strain¬
ing out towards the absolute and the unlimited. This
absolutism of Rousseau appears, as is well known,
most strikingly in his doctrine of popular sovereignty.
This doctrine he reasons out from first principles with
almost geometrical rigor. The first effect of this reason¬
ing is to make all existing governments seem illegiti¬
mate. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains.” The only free and legitimate government is
that founded upon a true social compact. On this basis,
it is possible to combine the advantages of organized
government with the liberty, equality, and fraternity
that man enjoys, not as the result of moral effort, but
as a free gift, in the state of nature. Only, under the
social contract, these virtues no longer reside in the
individual, but in the general will. All the clauses of
the social contract “reduce themselves to one: the
total alienation of every associate with all his rights”
(including his rights to property) “to the whole com¬
munity.” What guarantee is the individual to have that
the community will not abuse this unlimited control
that he has granted it over his person and property?
Though the State is for Rousseau as for Hobbes not
natural but artificial, he proceeds to develop the analogy
between this artificial body and the body of an actual
person. One of the most important sources of this ten¬
dency to set up an elaborate parallel between the indi¬
vidual and the State is Plato’s “Republic.” In Plato,
however, the parallel is used to establish a severe hier¬
archy in the State, in much the same way that the pow-
88 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

ers and faculties of the individual must work in due

order and subordination; whereas the informing spirit
of the Rousseauistic conception is the idea of equality.
The use that Rousseau makes of the parallel is to argue
that the community cannot will the harm of any of the
individuals that compose it any more than the single
person can will the harm of one of his own members.
On the side of theory, however, Rousseau’s chief argu¬
ment in favor of the disinterestedness of the general will
is that it has had transferred to it by the social contract
the spontaneous goodness that belongs to the will of the
individual in the state of nature. At this point, however,
Rousseau’s good sense intervenes. Granted that the
multitude from whom the general will emanates wishes
the right thing, it does not always see it. The people,
after all, needs guidance. Hence arises the necessity of
the Lawgiver; and Rousseau goes on to imagine some
person of almost superhuman sagacity, set apart from
other men, and under no suspicion of self-seeking, who
draws up an ideal code that is to direct the general will,
a code which actually enjoys credit with the people be¬
cause it seems to have religious sanction, in other words,
because the Lawgiver seems to speak not for himself,
but only as a channel of divine wisdom. One might sup¬
pose that the general will would be limited by the Law
thus imposed; that the Law would become a permanent
principle of control in the State, its higher self, as it
were, in opposition to its mere passing desires. But at
bottom, Rousseau does not want any effective check on
the reaching out of his logic and emotions towards the
unlimited; and so he finally transfers to the general will
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 89

the anarchical impressionism he has asserted for the in¬

dividual. The only clear result of his speculations about
the need of a Law and a Lawgiver was to encourage the
conceit of followers like Robespierre, who felt that they
had within them the making of a modern Lycurgus.
Practically the general will is lawless; it cannot bind
itself to obey its rulers, whom it regards as mere execu¬
tive officers, the people’s hired men as it were, revocable
at pleasure. It cannot bind itself to anything it has
willed in the past, or obligate itself in any way for the
future. An assembly of the sovereign people should in¬
variably begin by voting separately on the two follow¬
ing questions: “first, whether it pleases the sovereign
to preserve the present form of government; second,
whether it pleases the people to leave the administration
of it to those who are now in charge.” The sovereign
people cannot be represented by a parliament, as in
England. “At the moment a State gives itself repre¬
sentatives it no longer exists.” Sovereignty is absolute
and indivisible. “To limit it is to destroy it.” “The
sovereign people, by the very fact that it is, is always all
that it should be.” It has often been pointed out that
Rousseau transfers to the people the doctrine that the
king can do no wrong. But he does more than that.
The king, if not responsible to what is below him, is at
least responsible to what is above him — to God. But
the sovereign people is responsible to no one. It is God.
The contract that it makes is with itself, like that which,
according to the old theologians, was made in the coun¬
cil chamber of the Trinity. “By the mere pleasure of
God,” says Jonathan Edwards, “I mean his sovereign
90 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obliga¬

tion/J etc. The popular will is the successor of the divine
will, from which everything finally derived in the me¬
diaeval theocracy.
Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, being as it is natural¬
istic, is of course in its ultimate essence neither mediaeval
nor theocratic. His idea of a contract that the people
makes with itself, by which it arrogates to itself full
power, without any reciprocal obligation, is in im¬
portant respects original with Rousseau. uWe are en¬
tering,” he wrote in “Emile,” “on the era of crises and
the age of revolutions.” He not only made the prophecy,
but did more than any other one man to bring about its
fulfilment. By asserting a general will that is at once
absolute and shifting, he achieved the paradox of basing
government on permanent revolution. Perhaps he is
more closely related to Hobbes than to any previous
political thinker, especially if it be true, as Sainte-Beuve
says, that nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swell¬
ing. His state of nature and his sovereignty are merely
the state of nature and the sovereignty of Hobbes re¬
versed. In Rousseau the people can do anything it
pleases with its ruler, in Hobbes the ruler can do any¬
thing he pleases with the people. But though the State
of Hobbes has no higher self — the very idea of a higher
self is foreign to his materialistic philosophy — it has at
least a permanent self. The contract by which the peo¬
ple divests itself of its power in favor of its ruler is defini¬
tive. But Rousseau, as we have seen, will have no such
element of permanency. If he had conceived of the gen¬
eral will as the permanent will of the people that might
 ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 91

on occasion be in conflict with its ordinary will, his dis¬

tinction 1 between a disinterested volonte generate and a
volonte de tous> which may stand for nothing more than
the egoistic wills of individuals or groups, might have a
serious meaning. As it is, this distinction melts away
under close scrutiny. It is mystical in the bad sense.
On all ordinary occasions the general will means a
numerical majority at any particular moment. An in¬
dividual or a minority of individuals has no appeal from
the decision of this majority in its interpretation of the
general will. This is logical, inasmuch as the individual
has transferred to the general will the unlimited liberty
that he enjoyed in the state of nature. If any one is
outvoted, he can console himself by the reflection that
he was mistaken, that what he took to be the general
will was not this will. If his private opinion had won,
he would have been doing something contrary to his
true will and his true liberty. In exercising constraint
upon him, therefore, the majority is simply “forcing
him to be free.” By this device Rousseau gets rid of the
problem that has chiefly preoccupied political thinkers
in the English tradition — how, namely, to safeguard
the freedom of the individual or of minorities against a
triumphant and despotic majority.
This solution of the problem involves the setting up
of a new dualism — that between the individual in his
ordinary self and the individual as a citizen and member
1 Strictly enforced this distinction makes party government
impossible. It also points the way to the decision reached by the
States General in 1789 that the deputies should vote individually
and not as members of an order, a decision that meant practically
the triumph of the Third Estate over the clergy and nobility.
92 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

of the sovereign people conceived as his true self. But

though the first term of this dualism, the individual in
his ordinary self, may be subject to rigid control, the
second term of the dualism, the State as embodied in the
general will, is, let me repeat, subject to no control at
all. The liberty of the general will, like that of the in¬
dividual in the state of nature, can be limited, if at all,
as Rousseau says significantly, only by force.
Any one who traces the subject historically will ac¬
quire the conviction, as I have already said, that the
Christian religion founded something of which not even
a Plato or an Aristotle had any adequate notion — per¬
sonal liberty. By its separation of the things of God and
the things of Caesar, it established a domain of free con¬
science, in which the individual might take refuge from
the encroachments of the omnipotent State. It is plain
that Rousseau does not propose to leave the individual
any such refuge. The last chapter of the “ Social Con¬
tract ” is devoted to Civil Religion. This chapter
abounds in remarks of extraordinary shrewdness and
penetration (as, for instance, where he observes that the
Crusades were not truly Christian in spirit) and at the
same time, so far as its general conclusions are con¬
cerned, may be described in Rousseau’s own phrase as a
“sea of sophisms.” Rousseau distinguishes three types
of religion: first, organized and traditional Christianity,
especially the Christianity of the Catholic Church.
This type of religion is so evidently bad as scarcely to
merit serious refutation. “All institutions that put man
in contradiction with himself are worthless.” The obvi¬
ous reply of the older type of dualist would be that mar
ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 93

is in contradiction with himself, and that the Church

merely reflects a primordial fact of human nature. One
can no more grant that institutions per se are capable of
any such effect than one can admit Rousseau’s counter¬
assertion that, merely as a result of institutions, all the
members of a community may possess good sense, jus¬
tice, and integrity.1
The second religion that Rousseau recognizes is true
Christianity, a religion entirely of the heart, without
rites and ceremonies, and having much in common, as
he conceives it, with the fluid emotionalism of the senti¬
mental deist. True Christians are like those great
cosmopolitan spirits of whom Rousseau speaks in the
“Second Discourse,” who “transcend the imaginary
barriers that separate peoples, and like the sovereign
being who has created them, embrace the whole human
race in their benevolence.” The person, however, in
whom natural pity has thus blossomed into universal
benevolence is not necessarily either otherworldly or
humble, and Rousseau is shrewd enough to see that the
true Christian is both. He, therefore, proceeds to attack
not merely institutional Christianity but true Christi¬
anity. It also divides man against himself, and by giving
him a celestial fatherland weakens his allegiance to the
civitas terrena. Rousseau brings up questions of extra¬
ordinary complexity regarding the distinction between
a spiritual and a secular order, and the actual political
results of this distinction as worked out in Christianity,
questions that for their proper elucidation would require
a volume. The main point that concerns us here is his
1 Contrat Social, liv. iv, ch. in.
94 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

attack on humility, the underlying Christian virtue, on

the ground that it is incompatible with the full virtue
of the citizen. To be humble is to be submissive; so that
“true Christians are meant to be slaves.” One should,
therefore, discard humility in favor of patriotic pride, of
the kind that flourished in the great days of Rome and
Sparta.
Here again in his dealings with the relations of Church
and State, Rousseau reminds us of Hobbes. “Of all
Christian authors,” he himself says, “the philosopher
Hobbes is the only one who saw clearly the evil and the
remedy and ventured to propose bringing together the
two heads of the eagle,” thus subordinating everything
to political unity. But before Hobbes, Machiavelli, as I
have already remarked, had sought to discredit the idea
of a separate spiritual order, and also of Christian hu¬
mility itself, so that the State might be all in all. Quite
apart from Rousseau’s admiration for Machiavelli and
from any conscious discipleship, his view of the State
has more in common with the Machiavellian view than
one might at first suppose. Machiavelli is not, of course,
like Rousseau, an emotionalist, but is, in his main trend,
utilitarian. It is no accident that Francis Bacon, the
prophet of utilitarianism, should be, as Lord Acton
points out, his most distinguished English disciple. But
Rousseau too has a strongly utilitarian side. Indeed one
finds in him, as in the whole of our modern age, an end¬
less interplay of sentimental and utilitarian elements.
This utilitarian side of Rousseau appears in the third
form of religion he discusses in the “Social Contract.”
After rejecting both institutional Christianity and true
ROUSSEAU AND IDYLLIC IMAGINATION 95

Christianity, on the ground that they are anti-national,

he proposes as worthy of approval a religion which,
properly speaking, is not a religion at all, but a social
utility. The articles of its creed, which are determined
by the sovereign, are to be imposed not precisely as dog¬
mas, but as promoting sentiments of sociability. The
positive dogmas of this civil creed are, as Rousseau states
them, fairly substantial (e.g., the existence of God, the
future life, the happiness of the just and the punishment
of the wicked). If any one does not believe them he may
be banished from the State, not as impious but as un¬
sociable. “ If any one, after having recognized publicly
these same dogmas, conducts himself as though he did
not believe them, let him be punished with death.” The
civil religion is to have only one negative dogma — the
condemnation of intolerance. This is directed especially
against institutional Christians, but it is hard to see how
any one can escape this condemnation who holds in mat¬
ters religious to a definite standard of right and wrong,
quite apart from the omnipotent State and its supposed
utility.
Rousseau’s “civil religion” evidently looks forward
to such an event as Robespierre’s Festival of the Su¬
preme Being. Unfortunately, it also looks forward to
the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and to the guillo¬
tining as “fanatics” of many of the priests who refused
to forswear their allegiance to Rome. It is fair to add
that the “Social Contract” is only one source 1 of the
strife between clericals and anti-clericals that has been
so prominent in France since the Revolution as to
1 Cf. P.-M. Masson, La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau, hi, ch. v.
96 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

amount at times almost to civil war. In general we

should recollect that Rousseau was less an originator of
the ideas we have been discussing than the most im¬
portant single figure in a vast movement that had been
gaining head for generations. In the words of Madame
de Stael he invented nothing, but set everything on fire.
Burke, the chief antagonist of Rousseau, took serious
cognizance of this movement and of the enthusiasm it
inspired only when they had begun to translate them¬
selves into great historical events. It was Rousseau and
all he typified that he attacked in the French Revolution.
 CHAPTER III

BURKE AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

“Everybody knows/’ Burke writes of the members of

the French National Assembly, “that there is a great
dispute amongst their leaders, which of them is the best
resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble
him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into
their manners. Him they study; him they meditate;
him they turn over in all the time they can spare from
the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of
the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his
life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard
figure of perfection. To this man and this writer, as a
pattern to authors and to Frenchmen, the founderies of
Paris are now running for statues, with the kettles of
their poor and the bells of their churches.”
I have presented Rousseau in his essential influence as
the extremist and foe of compromise. In contrast to
Rousseau, Burke is usually and rightly supposed to em¬
body the spirit of moderation. Many of his utterances
on the French Revolution, however (the passage I have
just quoted may serve as a sample), are scarcely sugges¬
tive of moderation, and towards the end he becomes
positively violent. There is at least this much to be said
in justification of Burke, that in his writings on the Rev¬
olution, he is for the most part debating first principles,
and when it comes to first principles, the issue raised is
not one of moderation, but of truth or error. Burke was
98 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

no mere partisan of the status quo. He was not opposed

on principle to revolutions. He is perhaps open to the
charge of pushing too far his admiration for the Revolu¬
tion of 1688. His attitude towards the American Revo¬
lution was consistently one of compromise and in many
respects of sympathy. He did not stand in any undue
awe of those in authority. No one could on occasion call
them to a stricter accounting or show himself a more dis¬
interested champion of the victims of unjust power. He
recognized specifically the abuses of the Old Regime in
France, and was ready to admit the application to these
abuses of fairly drastic remedies. If he refused, there¬
fore, to compromise with the French Revolution, the
reason is to be sought less in the field of politics than in
that of general philosophy, and even of religion. He saw
that the Revolution did not, like other revolutions, seek
to redress certain specific grievances, but had universal
pretensions. France was to become the “Christ of na¬
tions ” and conduct a crusade for the political regenera¬
tion of mankind. This particular mixture of the things
of God and the things of Caesar seemed to him psycho¬
logically unsound, and in any case subversive of the ex¬
isting social order of Europe. The new revolutionary
evangel was the final outcome of the speculations that
had been going on for generations about a state of na¬
ture, natural rights, the social contract, and abstract
and unlimited sovereignty. Burke is the chief opponent
of this tendency towards what one may term meta¬
physical politics, especially as embodied in the doctrine
of the rights of man. “They are so taken up with the
rights of man,” he says of the members of this school,
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 99

“that they have totally forgotten his nature.” Under

cover of getting rid of prejudice they would strip man of
all the habits and concrete relationships and network of
historical circumstance in which he is actually impli¬
cated and finally leave him shivering “in all the naked¬
ness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” They
leave no limit to logic save despotism. In his attack on
the enemies of prejudice, by which was meant practi¬
cally everything that is traditional and prescriptive,
Burke has perhaps neglected unduly certain minor
though still important distinctions, especially the dis¬
tinction between those who were for getting rid of prej¬
udice in the name of reason, and those who, like Rous¬
seau, were for getting rid of it in the name of feeling.
The rationalists and the Rousseauists were actually
ready to guillotine one another in the Revolution, an
opposition prefigured in the feud between Rousseau and
various “philosophers,” notably Voltaire. Rousseau
was as ready as Burke, though on different grounds, as
I shall try to show presently, to protest against the
“solid darkness of this enlightened age.”
By the dismissal as mere prejudice of the traditional
forms that are in no small measure the funded experi¬
ence of any particular community, the State loses its
historical continuity, its permanent self, as it were, that
unites its present with its past and future. By an un¬
principled facility in changing the State such as is en¬
couraged by Rousseau’s impressionistic notion of the
general will, the generations of men can no more link
with one another than the flies of a summer. They are
disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality.
100 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

In point of fact, any political philosophy, whether that

of Hobbes or of Rousseau, which starts from the suppo¬
sition that men are naturally isolated units, and achieve
society only as the result of an artifice, is in its essence
violently individualistic. For this atomistic, mechanical
view of the State, Burke is usually supposed to have
substituted an organic, historical conception. Much of
his actual influence, in Germany 1 and elsewhere, has
certainly been along these lines. Yet this is far from
being the whole truth about Burke. A one-sided devo¬
tion to the organic, historical conception is itself an
outcome of the naturalistic movement. It may lead to
fatalistic acquiescence in traditional forms, and discour¬
age, not merely abstract rationalism, but a reasonable
adjustment of these forms to shifting circumstance. It
relates itself very readily to that side of the romantic
movement that exalts the unconscious at the expense of
moral choice and conscious deliberation. Once obscure
this capacity in the individual, which alone raises him
above phenomenal nature, and it will not be easy in the
long run to preserve his autonomy; he will tend, as so
often in German theory, to lose his independent will and
become a mere organ of the all-powerful State. Though
Taine, again, often professes to speak as a disciple of
Burke in his attacks on the French Revolution, it is not
easy to see a true follower in a philosopher who pro¬
claimed that vice and virtue are products like sugar
and vitriol.”
The truth is that Burke is in no sense a collectivist,
and still less, if possible, a determinist. If he had been
1 On Rehberg, Savigny, etc.
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 101

either, he would not have attained to that profound per¬

ception of true liberty in which he surpasses perhaps any
other political thinker, ancient or modern. For one who
believes in personal liberty in Burke’s sense, the final
emphasis is necessarily not on the State but on the indi¬
vidual. His individualism, however, is not, like that of
Rousseau, naturalistic, but humanistic and religious.
Only, in getting the standards by which the individual
may hope to surpass his ordinary self, and achieve hu¬
manism or religion, he would have him lean heavily on
prescription. Burke is anti-individualistic in that he
would not set the individual to trading on his own pri¬
vate stock of wit. He would have him respect the gen¬
eral sense, the accumulated experience of the past that
has become embodied in the habits and usages that the
superficial rationalist would dismiss as prejudice. If the
individual condemns the general sense, and trusts un¬
duly his private self, he will have no model; and a man’s
first need is to look up to a sound model and imitate it.
He may thus become exemplary in his turn. The prin¬
ciple of homage and service to what is above one has its
culmination and final justification in fealty to God, the
true sovereign and supreme exemplar. Burke’s concep¬
tion of the State may be described as a free and flexible
adaptation of genuinely Platonic and Christian ele¬
ments. “ We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly,
that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of
all good and all comfort.” “God willed the State.”
(Thus to conceive the highest in terms of will is Chris¬
tian.) “He willed its connection with the source and
original archetype of all perfection.” (The language is
102 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

here Platonic.) Not merely religion but the actual

church establishment is held by Englishmen to be es¬
sential to their State, as being indeed the very founda¬
tion of their constitution.
“ Society is indeed a contract,” though the basis of the
contract is not mere utility. The State is not to be re¬
garded as a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper
and coffee. It is not, as a contemporary pacifist has
maintained, the “pooled self-esteem” of the commu¬
nity, but rather its permanent ethical self. It is, there¬
fore, a partnership in all science and art and in every vir¬
tue and perfection. “As the ends of such a partnership
cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a
partnership not only between those who are living, but
between those who are living, those who are dead, and
those who are to be born.”
Though Burke thus uses the language of contract, it
is plain that he moves in a different world from all those,
including Locke, for whom the idea of contract meant
that man has certain rights as a free gift of nature and
anterior to the performance of his duties. Talk to the
child, says Rousseau, of something that will interest
him — talk to him of his rights, and not of his duties.1
To assert, as Burke does in the main, that one has only
concrete historical rights, acquired as the result of the
fulfilment of definite obligations, is evidently remote
from Rousseau’s assertion that a man enjoys certain
abstract rights simply because he has taken the trouble
to be born. The difference here is not merely between
Burke and Rousseau, but also between Burke and Locke.
1 Emile, liv. n.
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 103

The final superficiality of Locke is that he granted man

abstract natural rights anterior to his duties, and then
hoped that it would be possible to apply this doctrine
moderately. But it has been justly said that doctrines
of this kind are most effective in their extreme logical
form because it is in this form that they capture the
imagination. Now if the out-and-out radical is often
highly imaginative in the fashion that I have attributed
to Rousseau, the Whigs and the liberals who follow the
Whig tradition are rather open to the suspicion of
being deficient on the side of imagination. One cannot
help feeling, for instance, that if Macaulay had been
more imaginative, he would have shown less humani¬
tarian complacency in his essay on Bacon. Disraeli
again is said to have looked with disdain on J. S. Mill
because of his failure to perceive the role of the imagina¬
tion in human affairs, a lack that can scarcely be charged
against Disraeli himself, whatever one may think of the
quality of his imagination.
Now Burke is the exceptional Whig, in that he is not
only splendidly imaginative, but admits the supreme
role of the imagination rather more explicitly than is
common among either Christians or Platonists with
whom I have associated him. He saw how much of the
wisdom of life consists in an imaginative assumption of
the experience of the past in such fashion as to bring it
to bear as a living force upon the present. The very
model that one looks up to and imitates is an imaginative
creation. A man’s imagination may realize in his ances¬
tors a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar
practice of the hour; so that he may be enabled to rise
104 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

with the example to whose imitation he has aspired.

The forms of the past and the persons who administer
them count in Burke’s eyes chiefly as imaginative sym¬
bols. In the famous passage on Marie Antoinette one
almost forgets the living and suffering woman to see in
her with Burke a gorgeous symbol of the age of chivalry
yielding to the age of “sophisters, economists, and cal¬
culators.” There is in this sense truth in the taunt of
Tom Paine that Burke pities the plumage and forgets
the dying bird. All the decent drapery of life, Burke
complains of the new philosophy, is to be rudely torn
off. “All the super-added ideas, furnished from the
wardrobe of a moral imagination, . . . are to be ex¬
ploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”
The apostles of the rights of man were, according to
Burke, undermining the two principles on which every¬
thing that was truly civilized in the European order had
for ages depended: the spirit of religion and the spirit
of a gentleman. The nobility and the clergy, who were
the custodians of these principles and of the symbols
that embodied them and ministered to the moral imag¬
ination, had received in turn the support of the learned.
Burke warns the learned that in deserting their natural
protectors for Demos, they run the risk of being “ cast
into the mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish
multitude.”
Burke is in short a frank champion of aristocracy. It
is here especially, however, that he applies flexibly his
Christian-Platonic, and humanistic principles. He com¬
bines a soundly individualistic element with his cult of
the traditional order. He does not wish any static hier-
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 105

archy. He disapproves of any tendency to deal with

men in classes and groups, a tendency that the extreme
radical shares with the extreme reactionary. He would
have us estimate men, not by their hereditary rank, but
by their personal achievement. “ There is,” he says,
“no qualification for government but virtue or wisdom,
actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually
found, they have in whatever state, condition, profession
or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and
honor.” He recognizes, to be sure, that it is hard for the
manual worker to acquire such virtue and wisdom for the
reason that he lacks the necessary leisure. The ascent
of rare merit from the lower to the higher levels of soci¬
ety should, however, always be left open, even though
this merit be required to pass through a severe probation.
In the same fashion, Burke would admit innovations
in the existing social order only after a period of severe
probation. He is no partisan of an inert traditionalism.
His true leader or natural aristocrat, as he terms him,
has, in his adjustment of the contending claims of new
and old, much of the character of the “ trimmer” as
Halifax has described him. “By preserving the method
of nature in the conduct of the State, in what we improve
we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never
wholly obsolete.” “The disposition to preserve, and
ability to improve, taken together, would be my stan¬
dard of a statesman.” In such utterances Burke is of
course simply giving the theory of English liberty at its
best, a theory almost too familiar for restatement. In
his imaginative grasp of all that is involved in the task
of mediating between the permanent and the fluctuating
106 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

element in life, the Platonic art, as one may say, of see¬

ing the One in the Many, he has had few equals in the
field of political thinking.
Burke is, however, in one important respect highly
un-Platonic, and that is in his attitude towards the in¬
tellect. His distrust of what we should call nowadays
the intellectual may be variously explained. It is related
in some respects to one side, the weak side, one is bound
to add, of Christianity. “A certain intemperance of
intellect,” he writes, “is the disease of the time, and the
source of all its other diseases.” He saw so clearly the
dangers of this abuse that he was led at times, as the
Christian has at times been led, to look with suspicion
on intellect itself. And then he was familiar, as we are
all familiar, with persons who give no reasons at all, or
the wrong reasons, for doing the right thing, and with
other persons who give the most logical and ingenious
reasons for doing the wrong thing. The basis for right
conduct is not reasoning but experience, and experience
much wider than that of the individual, the secure pos¬
session of which can result only from the early acquisi¬
tion of right habits. Then, too, there is something speci¬
fically English in Burke’s disparagement of the intellect.
The Englishman, noting the results of the proneness of a
certain type of Frenchman to reason rigorously from
false or incomplete premises, comes to prefer his own
piecemeal good sense and proclivity for “muddling
through.” As Disraeli told a foreign visitor, the country
is governed not by logic but by Parliament. In much
the same way Bagehot in the course of a comparison be¬
tween the Englishman and the Frenchman in politics,
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 107

reaches the semi-humorous conclusion that “in real

sound stupidity the English are unrivalled.”
The anti-intellectual side of Burke reminds one at
times of the anti-intellectual side of Rousseau: when, for
instance, he speaks of “the happy effect of following na¬
ture, which is wisdom without reflection and above it.”
The resemblance is, however, only superficial. The wis¬
dom that Rousseau proclaimed was not above reflection
but below it. A distinction of this kind is rather meaning¬
less unless supported by careful psychological analysis.
Perhaps the first contrast between the superrational
and the subrational is that between awe and wonder.1
Rousseau is plainly an apostle of wonder, so much so that
he is probably the chief single influence in the “renascence
of wonder” that has resulted from the romantic move¬
ment. The romantic objection to intellect is that by its
precise analysis and tracing of cause and effect, it dimin¬
ishes wonder. Burke, on the other hand, is fearful lest an
indiscreet intellectual activity may undermine awe and
reverence. “We ought,” he says, “to venerate where
we are unable presently to understand.” As the best
means of securing veneration, Burke leans heavily upon
habit, whereas the romantics, from Rousseau to Walter
Pater, are no less clearly hostile to habit because it seems
to lead to a stereotyped world, a world without vividness
and surprise. To lay stress on veneration meant for
Burke, at least in the secular order, to lay stress on rank
and degree; whereas the outstanding trait perhaps of the
state of nature projected by Rousseau’s imagination,
in defiance of the actual facts of primitive life so far as
1 Cf. Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 49 f.
108 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

we know them, is that it is equalitarian. This trait is

common to his no-state and his all-state, his anarchistic
and his collectivistic Utopia. The world of the “Social
Contract/’ no less than that of the “Second Discourse,”
is a world without degree and subordination; a world in
which no one looks up to any one else or expects any
one to look up to him; a world in which no one (and this
seems to Rousseau very desirable) has either to com¬
mand or to obey. In his predominant emphasis on
equality,1 Rousseau speaks, to some extent at least, not
merely for himself but for France, especially the France
of the last two centuries. “Liberty,” says Mallet du
Pan, “a thing forever unintelligible to Frenchmen.” 2
Perhaps liberty has not been intelligible in its true es¬
sence to many persons anywhere. “The love, and even
the very idea, of genuine liberty,” Burke himself admits,
“is extremely rare.” If the basis of this genuine liberty
is, as Burke affirms, an act of subordination, it is simply
incompatible with Rousseauistic equality.
The act of subordination to any earthly authority is
justified only in case this authority is looking up to
something still higher; so that genuine liberty is rooted
in the virtue that also underlies genuine Christianity.

1 It would not be easy to find in an English author of anything

like the same intellectual distinction the equivalent of the follow¬
ing passage from Proudhon (CEuvres, ii, p. 91): “L’enthousiasme
qui nous possede, l’enthousiasme de l’6galit6, ... est une ivresse
plus forte que le vin, plus penetrante que l’amour: passion ou
fureur divine que le d61ire des L6onidas, des Saint Bernard et des
Michel-Ange n’egala jamais.”
2 Cf. E. Faguet, Politiques et moralistes, vol. i, p. 117: “II est k
peu pres impossible k un Frangais d’etre liberal, et le liberalisme
n’est pas frangais.” See also ibid., ill, p. 95.
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 109

“True humility, the basis of the Christian system, is

the low, but deep and firm foundation of all real virtue.
But this, as very painful in the practice and little impos¬
ing in the appearance,” he goes on to say of the French
revolutionists, “they have totally discarded.” They
have preferred to follow Rousseau, the great “professor
and founder of the philosophy of vanity.” Rousseau
himself said that he based his position on the “noblest
pride,” and pride is, even more than vanity, the signifi¬
cant opposite of humility. I have already spoken of
Rousseau’s depreciation of humility in favor of patri¬
otic pride. The problem of pride versus humility is, of
course, not primarily political at all. It is a problem of
the inner life. Rousseau undermined humility in the in¬
dividual by substituting the doctrine of natural good¬
ness for the older doctrine of man’s sinfulness and falli¬
bility. The forms and traditions, religious and political,
that Burke on the other hand defends, on the ground
that they are not arbitrary but are convenient sum¬
mings up of a vast body of past experience, give support
to the imagination of the individual; the imagination,
thus drawn back as it were to an ethical centre, supplies
in turn a standard with reference to which the individual
may set bounds to the lawless expansion of his natural
self (which includes his intellect as well as his emotions).
From a purely psychological point of view, Burke’s em¬
phasis on humility and on the imaginative symbols that
he deems necessary to secure it, reduces itself to an em¬
phasis on what one may term the centripetal element in
liberty. Rousseau, at least the Rousseau that has influ¬
enced the world, practically denies the need of any such
110 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

centripetal element in liberty, inasmuch as what will

emerge spontaneously on the disappearance of the tra¬
ditional controls is an expansive will to brotherhood.
If one rejects like Burke this gospel of “universal benev¬
olence/J it is hard not to conceive of liberty in Burke’s
fashion — namely, as a nice adjustment between the
taking on of inner control and the throwing off of outer
control. “Society,” he says, “cannot exist unless a con¬
trolling power upon will and appetite be placed some¬
where, and the less of it there is within, the more there
must be without.” This adjustment between inner and
outer control, which concerns primarily the individual,
is thus seen to determine at last the degree to which any
community is capable of political liberty. True states¬
manship is in this sense a humanistic mediation and not
an indolent oscillation between extremes. “To make a
government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat
of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To
give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to
guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a
free government — that is, to temper together these oppo¬
site elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent
work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a saga¬
cious, powerful, and combining mind.”
I have already said that Burke is very exceptional in
that he is a splendidly imaginative Whig. As a matter
of fact, most of the typical Whigs and liberals in the
Whig tradition, are, like Burke, partisans of liberty in
the sense of personal liberty and of moderation. They
do not, however, give their personal liberty and modera¬
tion the same basis of religion and humanistic control
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 111

On the contrary, they incline to be either rationalists or

emotionalists, which means practically that they found
their ethics either on the principle of utility, or else on
the new spirit of sympathy and service, or more com¬
monly on some compound of these main ingredients of
humanitarianism. The liberty of Burke, I have tried to
show, is not only religiously grounded, but involves in
its political application a genuine humanistic mediation.
The Whig compromise, on the other hand, is only too
often an attempt to compromise between views of life,
namely, the religious-humanistic and the utilitarian-
sentimental, which are in their essence incompatible.
Thus the liberalism of J. S. Mill is, compared with the
liberalism of Burke, open to the charge of being un¬
imaginative. Furthermore, from a strictly modern point
of view, it is open to the charge of being insufficiently
critical. For the liberty Mill desires is of the kind that
will result only from the traditional spiritual controls,
or from some adequate substitute, and his philosophy,
as I shall try to show more fully later, supplies neither.
Burke can scarcely be charged with the form of super¬
ficiality that consists in an attempt to mediate between
incompatible first principles. One may, however, feel
that he failed to recognize the full extent and gravity of
the clash between the new principles and the old; and
one may also find it hard to justify the obscurantist
element that enters into his defence of his own religious
and humanistic position. One might gather from Burke
that England was almost entirely made up of Christian
gentlemen ready to rally to the support of the majestic
edifice of traditional civilization, to all the decencies of
112 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

life based finally on the moral imagination, whereas the

“sophisters, economists, and calculators” who were de¬
stroying this edifice by their substitution for the moral
imagination of an abstract metaphysical reason were
almost entirely French. He does indeed refer to the
English deists, but only to dismiss them as obscure ec¬
centrics. The English intellectuals and radical thinkers
of his own time he waves aside with the utmost con¬
tempt, opposing to them not those who think more
keenly, but those who do not think at all. “ Because
half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field
ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of
great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British
oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine
that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants
of the field; that, of course, they are many in number;
or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriv¬
elled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome,
insects of the hour.”
In this passage we have the obscurantist Burke at his
weakest. The truth is that the little, meagre, hopping
insects of the hour were representatives of an interna¬
tional movement of vast scope, a movement destined
finally to prevail over the prejudice and prescription
that Burke was defending. Moreover, this movement
was largely, if not indeed primarily, of English origin.
“It is from England,” says Joubert, “that have issued
forth, like fogs, the metaphysical and political ideas
which have darkened everything.” It is hard to trace
the main currents of European life and thought from the
Renaissance, especially the rise of humanitarianism in
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 113

both its utilitarian and its sentimental aspects, and not

assent in large measure to the assertion of Joubert.
Burke’s conception of man and of the State with its
strong tinge of Platonic realism (in the older sense of
the word) and its final emphasis on humility, or sub¬
mission to the will of God, has important points of
contact with the mediaeval conception. Now, even be¬
fore Francis Bacon, men from the British Islands played
an important part in breaking down this realism. Duns
Scotus discredited reason in theology in favor of an
arbitrary divine will, and so released reason for use in
the secular order. William of Occam asserted a nomi¬
nalism that looks forward to our type of realism, a realism,
that is, not of the One but of the Many, and, therefore,
at the opposite pole from the mediaeval variety. Roger
Bacon is significant for the future both by his interest in
the physical order and by the experimental temper that
he displays in dealing with this order.
To come to a later period, the upshot of the civil con¬
vulsions of seventeenth-century England was to dimin¬
ish imaginative allegiance to the past. The main achieve¬
ment of Cromwell himself was, as his admirer Marvell
avowed, to “ruin the great work of Time.” As loyalty to
the great traditions declined, England concentrated on
the utilitarian effort of which Francis Bacon is the
prophet, and thus did more than any other country to
prepare and carry through the industrial revolution,
compared with which the French Revolution is only a
melodramatic incident.
If the Christian classical England that Burke took to
be truly representative has survived in a place like Ox-
114 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

ford, utilitarian England has got itself embodied in cities

like Birmingham, so that the opposition between the
two Englands, an opposition that is one of first princi¬
ples, has come to be written on the very face of the land¬
scape. The Englishman, however, does not proceed by
logical exclusions, and is capable of maintaining in more
or less friendly juxtaposition things that are ultimately
incompatible. Thus a young man receives a religious-
humanistic training at Oxford as a preparation for help¬
ing to administer the British Empire in India, an em¬
pire which is, in its origins, chiefly an outcome of the
utilitarian and commercially expansive England. The
kind of leadership that Burke desired, the leadership of
the true gentleman, still plays no small part in the affairs
of England and of the world. The Englishman whom he
conceives to be typical, who “fears God, looks up with
awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to
magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect
to nobility,” is still extant, but is considerably less typi¬
cal. Above all, his psychology is not that of the great
urban masses that owe their existence to the industrial
revolution. What Birmingham stands for has been
gaining steadily on what Oxford stands for, and that
even at Oxford itself. I have said that the only effective
conservatism is an imaginative conservatism. Now it
has not only become increasingly difficult to enter im¬
aginatively into certain traditional symbols, but in gen¬
eral the imagination has been drawn away more and
more from the element of unity in things to the element
of diversity. As a result of the type of progress that has
been proclaimed, everything good has come to be asso-
 BURKE AND MORAL IMAGINATION 115

ciated with novelty and change, with the piling up of

discovery on discovery. Life, thus viewed, no longer in¬
volves any reverence for some centre or oneness, but is
conceived as an infinite and indefinite expansion of won¬
der and curiosity. As a result of all this intoxication
with change, the world is moving, we are asked to be¬
lieve, towards some “ far-off divine event.” It is at this
point that the affinity appears between the utilitarian or
Baconian, and the emotional or Rousseauistic side of the
humanitarian movement. The far-off divine event is,
no less than Rousseau’s state of nature, a projection of
the idyllic imagination. The felicity of the divine event,
like that of the state of nature, is a felicity that can be
shown to involve no serious moral effort or self-disci¬
pline on the part of the individual. Rousseau himself put
his golden age in the past, but nothing is easier than to
be a Rousseauist, and at the same time, like the Baco¬
nian, put one’s golden age in the future. The differences
between Baconian and Rousseauist, and they are nu¬
merous, are, compared with this underlying similarity in
the quality of their “ vision,” unimportant. I remarked
at the outset that the modern political movement may
be regarded in its most significant aspect as a battle be¬
tween the spirit of Rousseau and that of Burke. What¬
ever the explanation, it is an indubitable fact that this
movement has been away from Burke and towards
Rousseau. “The star of Burke is manifestly fading,”
Lecky was able to write a number of years ago, “and a
great part of the teaching of the ‘ Contrat Social ’ is pass¬
ing into English politics.” Professor Vaughan, again,
the editor of the recent standard edition of Rousseau’s
116 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

political writings, remarked in his introduction, appar¬

ently without awakening any special contradiction or
surprise, that in the essentials of political wisdom Burke
is “immeasurably inferior to the man of whom he never
speaks but with scorn and loathing; to the despised the¬
orist, the metaphysical madman of Geneva.”
Burke will be cherished as long as any one survives in
the world who has a perception of the nature of true
liberty. It is evident, however, that if a true liberalism
is to be successfully defended under present circum¬
stances, it will not be altogether by Burke’s method.
The battle for prejudice and prescription and a “ wisdom
above reflection” has already been lost. It is no longer
possible to wave aside the modernists as the mere noisy
insects of an hour, or to oppose to an unsound activity
of intellect mere stolidity and imperviousness to thought
— the great cattle chewing their cud in the shadow of
the British oak. But before coming to the question of
method, we need to consider what the triumph of Rous¬
seau has actually meant in the history of modern Eu¬
rope, during and since the Great Revolution. A survey
of this kind will be found to involve a consideration of
the two chief political problems of the present time, the
problem of democracy and the problem of imperialism,
both in themselves and in their relation to one another.
 CHAPTER IV
DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM

In our recent crusade to make the world safe for democ¬

racy it was currently assumed that democracy is the
same as liberty and the opposite of imperialism. The
teachings of history are strangely different. Democracy
in the sense of direct and unlimited democracy is, as was
pointed out long ago by Aristotle, the death of liberty;
in virtue of its tyrannical temper, it is likewise, in the
broad sense in which I have been using the term, closely
akin to imperialism. Now the distinction of Rousseau
is, as we have seen, to have been the most uncompro¬
mising of all modern theorists of direct democracy.
How far have the actual results of Rousseauism justified
Aristotle rather than those who have anticipated from
the diffusion of the Rousseauistic evangel, a paradise of
liberty, equality, and fraternity? The commanding
position of Rousseau in the democratic movement is
at all events beyond question, though even here it is
possible to exaggerate. “Democracy,” says M. de
Vogii4, “has only one father — Rousseau. . . . The great
muddy stream which is submerging us flows from the
writings and the life of Rousseau like the Rhine and the
Po from the Alpine reservoirs which feed them perpetu¬
ally.” 1 It is interesting to place alongside of this and
similar passages which might be multiplied indefi-
1 Introduction d VIconographie de J.-J. Rousseau, i, pp. vii-viii.
118 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

nitely, passages 1 from German authorities, likewise

very numerous, to the effect that Rousseau is more than
any other person the father of their Kultur. Here, too,
one must allow for an element of exaggeration. Much in
Germany that is often ascribed to Rousseau may be
traced to English influences, the same influences that
acted on Rousseau himself.
Passages of the kind I have just cited seem to estab¬
lish a first connection between Kultur, which has come
to be regarded as in its essence imperialistic, and Rous-
seauistic democracy. Kultur, when closely scrutinized,
breaks up into two main elements — on the one hand,
scientific efficiency, and on the other, a nationalistic en¬
thusiasm to which this efficiency is made to minister.
The relationship to Rousseauism must evidently be
looked for first of all in the second of these elements, that
of nationalistic enthusiasm. One needs to recall here a
saying of Renan’s that goes back to the seventies of the
last century. “The sentiment of nationalities is not a
hundred years old in the world.” 2 Renan might have
said with about equal truth that international or cosmo¬
politan sentiment is likewise not a hundred years old.
Both sayings are approximately true, provided sufficient
emphasis is put on the word sentiment. One scarcely
needs to repeat that the Middle Ages were cosmopolitan,
and that a chief result of Protestantism was the develop¬
ment of the national idea, and that the national idea
was also promoted, though on different postulates, by

11 have cited some of these passages in Rousseau and Romanti¬

cism, p. 194 n.
1 Rtforme intellectuelle et morale, p. 194.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 119

Machiavelli. But with the eighteenth century, nation¬

alism and internationalism take on a more emotional
coloring. An underlying influence here is Rousseau’s rein¬
terpretation of “ virtue,” a reinterpretation that is itself,
as I have tried to show, the outgrowth of a considerable
previous movement. According to the new ethics, vir¬
tue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even
an intoxication. In its unmodified natural form, it has
its basis in pity which may finally develop into the vir¬
tue of the great cosmopolitan souls of whom he speaks
in the “Second Discourse,” who transcend national
frontiers and embrace the whole of the human race in
their benevolence. We are here at the headwaters of
the sentimental internationalism of the past century.
But Rousseau, as I have already said, distinguishes
sharply between the virtue of man simply as man and
the virtue of the citizen. When man is “denatured” by
entering the State, his virtue is still a sentiment and
even an intoxication, but is very far from being cosmo¬
politan. Rousseau oscillates between the two types of
virtue, that of the man and that of the citizen, and can
scarcely be said to have attempted a serious mediation
between them. According as he wants the one or the
other type of “virtue,” he devises different systems of
education. In “Emile,” for example, he sets out to
make a man, in the “Considerations on the Government
of Poland,” a citizen. The love of country and the love
of mankind are, he declares, incompatible passions.1
What is Rousseau’s own choice, one may ask, as between
an emotional nationalism and an emotional internation-
1 See Political Writings (Vaughan), n, p. 172.
120 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

alism? On this point no doubt is possible. The love of

country he takes to be the more beautiful passion. The
virtuous intoxication of the internationalist seems to
him pale and ineffectual compared with the virtuous in¬
toxication of the citizen; and herein history has cer¬
tainly confirmed him. The fact that Vivresse patriotique
may make the citizens of one country ruthless in their
dealings with the citizens of other countries seems to
him a matter of small moment.1 In his schemes for in-
breeding patriotic sentiment, he seems to be looking
forward to the type of nationalism that has actually
emerged during the last century, especially perhaps in
Germany. The question of war becomes acute if Eu¬
rope, and possibly the world, is thus to be made up of
states, each animated by what one is tempted to term a
frenzied nationalism, without any countervailing prin¬
ciple of unity. That the new nationalism is more potent
than the new internationalism was revealed in August,
1914, when millions of socialists, in response to the call
of country, marched away to the slaughter of their fellow
socialists in other lands. That Protestant unity has like¬
wise proved inadequate seems sufficiently clear from the
fact that the men of the two chief Protestant countries,
at the same time that they were blowing one another to
pieces with high explosives, sought to starve one an¬
other’s women and children en masse. The Papacy
again, representing the traditional unity of European
civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effect¬
ively the push of nationalism.

1 See the opening paragraphs of Emile (“Tout patriote est dur

aux Strangers,” etc.).
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 121

Furthermore, nationalities of the kind that have

grown up in modern Europe will not, as Rousseau points
out, be kept from fighting with one another by treaties
and alliances. He warns the Poles that among the Chris¬
tian nations, treaties and alliances are only scraps of
paper, though the Turks, he adds, show a little more
respect for their international obligations.
Rousseau had this order of problems forced upon his
attention when he made his “Abridgment” (1761) of
the Abb6 de Saint-Pierre’s “Project for Perpetual
Peace” (originally published in 1712-17) and wrote his
“Judgment” on the “Project” (published in 1782). The
Abb6 de Saint-Pierre sought to revive the plan for a
United States of Europe (le Grand Desseiri) that Sully
attributes to Henry IV. Rousseau shows much shrewd¬
ness in reviewing in connection with his editing of Saint-
Pierre the problem of peace and war in Europe from the
Middle Ages down. One institution, he admits, had
done much in the past to lessen political conflicts. It is
undeniable, he says, that Europe owes to Christianity
above all, even to-day, the species of union that has sur¬
vived among its members. He goes on to say, antici¬
pating Heine and following Hobbes, that Rome, having
suffered material defeat, sent her dogmas instead of her
legions into the provinces. To this spiritual Rome, me¬
diaeval and modern Europe has owed what small equiva¬
lent it has enjoyed of the Pax romana. The ultimate
binding element in the mediaeval order was subordina¬
tion to the divine will and its earthly representatives,
notably the Pope. The latter Middle Ages and the Re¬
naissance saw a weakening of this principle of union and
122 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

the rise of great territorial nationalities. According to

the school of Grotius, the relations of these nationalities
are to be regulated primarily not by will in any sense,
but by reason. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre, perhaps the
earliest complete French example of the professional
philanthropist, has a still more naive confidence in rea¬
son. He saw well enough, says Rousseau, how his
schemes would work if they were once established, but
was childish (and herein he resembled other “reform¬
ers ” down to the present day) in his notions of the means
for getting them established. His fundamental error,
Rousseau complains, was in thinking that men are gov¬
erned by their reason, when they are in reality governed
by their passions.1
For Rousseau the state of nature is not in any case a
state of reason. In his less idyllic moods, he inclines, so
far as the relation of nation to nation is concerned, to
agree with Hobbes that it is a state of war. As a remedy
he seems to favor some such application of the federa¬
tive principle as a league of nations or a league to enforce
peace. He shows, however, a much more lively sense of
the perils of such schemes than some of their modern ad¬
vocates. “It might do more harm at a stroke/’ he says
of a league to enforce peace, “than it could prevent for
centuries.” Though approving of the “Grand Dessein”
of Henry IV, he saw that the driving power behind this
scheme was neither Christian, in the mediaeval sense,
nor again, humanitarian, but imperialistic — the desire
to abase Spain and the House of Austria, and to exalt
France to the hegemony of Europe. Henry IV was pre-
1 Political Writings (Vaughan), i, p. 392 n.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 123

paring a war which was to end war, when his assassina¬

tion took place, and “banished forever the last hope of
the world.” Rousseau foresees that the states of Europe
are destined to ruin themselves by their military prepa¬
rations. He leaves us, in short, without any adequate
solution of a problem, that of the centrifugal nation¬
ality, which he himself was doing so much to intensify.
Though Rousseau can speak on occasion with positive
contempt of cosmopolitans, he can be shown to have ex¬
ercised his main influence on those who began by stand¬
ing, both nationally and internationally, for fraternity,
a fraternity that was to be ideally combined with liberty
and equality. We need to trace briefly the imperialistic
upshot of this evangel, especially in the French Revolu¬
tion, and then, turning away from the more peripheral
aspects of the relation between democracy and imperial¬
ism, to try to get at the root of the whole matter in the
psychology of the individual.
Rousseau, we have seen, seeks to discredit not merely
a particular aristocracy, but the aristocratic principle in
general. “The people,” he says, “constitute the human
race”: all that is not the people is parasitic and
“scarcely deserves to be counted were it not for the
harm it does.” Perhaps no doctrine has ever been more
cunningly devised to fill the poor man and the plebeian
with self-righteous pride, and at the same time to inflame
him with hatred and suspicion of those who enjoy any
social or economic superiority. It is a curious fact,
known to all students of the period, that those who per¬
haps did the most to promote Rousseauism, and in gen¬
eral the new philanthropy, were the members of the
124 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

privileged classes themselves. The causes of this strange

phenomenon are complex, but have been traced with
sufficient accuracy by Taine in his “Ancien Regime.”
The members of the French aristocracy, and that as far
back as Richelieu and Louis XIV, had largely ceased to
perform the work of an aristocracy. They had become
drawing-room butterflies and hangers-on at court. Now
the enemy of those who have ceased to work, in some
sense or other of the word, has always been ennui; and
in addition, the denizens of the drawing-room suffered
during the first half of the eighteenth century from ra¬
tionalistic dryness and an excess of artificial decorum.
They finally sought relief in a return to nature and the
simple life. An idyllic element had been present in the
life of the drawing-room from the start, as all know who
have studied the influence of d’Urfe’s “Astree” on the
Marquise de Rambouillet and her group; and this per¬
haps made the way easier for another form of pastoral-
ism. “The fops,” as Taine phrases it, “dreamt between
two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the
virgin forest.” Marie Antoinette milked her own cows
and lived the pastoral dream at the Petit Trianon.
Many of the nobles and higher clergy, won over to the
new enthusiasm, took oath to divest themselves of
all the privileges of rank in favor of the new equality
which was itself to be only a preliminary to the golden
dawn of brotherhood. The advent of this brotherhood
was actually celebrated in the Federation of the Champ
de Mars (1790) which was meant to symbolize the melt¬
ing of all Frenchmen together in a fraternal embrace.
Anacharsis Cloots, the “orator of humankind,” had
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 125

representatives of the different races and nations of

the Earth, each appropriately garbed, parade before the
National Assembly as the symbol of a still more univer¬
sal fraternity. “Never/’ says the Comte de Segur, “were
more delightful dreams followed by a more terrible
awakening.” Instead of universal brotherhood there was
a growing mania of suspicion. The malady of Rousseau
became epidemic, until, at the height of the Terror,
men were “suspect of being suspect.” The very persons
who had rushed into one another’s arms at the Feder¬
ation of the Champ de Mars began to guillotine one
another. In the number of those who thus perished was
the “orator of humankind.” Among the earliest victims
were the members of the privileged classes who had
been so zealous in promoting the new philanthropy, just
as the parlor socialists of our own day would be among
the first to suffer if the overturn they are preaching
should actually occur. As Chesterton says, if the social
revolution takes place, the streets will run red with the
blood of philanthropists.
If one wishes to enter into the psychology of the later
stages of the Revolution, one should devote special at¬
tention to avowed disciples of Rousseau like Robes¬
pierre. He adopts in a rather uncompromising form
Rousseau’s view of “virtue,” and so is led to set up an
“ideal” France over against the real France, and this
“ideal” France is largely a projection of what I have
termed the idyllic imagination. The opposition that he
established between the virtuous and the vicious is even
less an opposition between virtuous and vicious individ¬
uals than between whole classes of individuals. The
126 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

judging of men by their social grouping rather than by

their personal merits and demerits, that seemed to
Burke so iniquitous, has, as a matter of fact, been im¬
plicit in the logic of this movement from the French to
the Russian Revolution. Danton already says: “These
priests, these nobles are not guilty, but they must die,
because they are out of place, interfere with the move¬
ment of things, and will stand in the way of the future.”
Danton, so far as he was responsible for the September
Massacres, made some application of this revolutionary
logic. Leaders like Robespierre and Saint-Just, however,
developed it far more than Danton into a programme of
wholesale proscription. The actual France was too rich
and populous. Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready
to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to
them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in
order that they might adjust this actual France to the
Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more
than is commonly realized a bucolic episode.1 It lends
1 Cf. Chateaubriand, Memoires d’Outre-Tombe, n, pp. 12-14:
“Tandis que la tragedie rougissait les rues, la bergerie florissait
au theatre; il n’etait question que d’innocents pasteurs et de
virginales pastourelles: champs, ruisseaux, prairies, moutons,
colombes, dge d’or sous le chaume, revivaient aux soupirs du
pipeau devant les roucoulants Tircis et les naives tricoteuses qui
sortaient du spectacle de la guillotine. Si Sanson en avait eu le
temps, il aurait joue le role de Colin, et Mademoiselle Theroigne de
Mericourt celui de Babet. Les Conventionnels se piquaient d’etre
les plus benins des hommes: bons peres, bons fils, bons maris, ils
menaient promener les petits enfants; ils leur servaient de nour-
rices; ils pleuraient de tendresse a leurs simples jeux; ils prenaient
doucement dans leurs bras ces petits agneaux, afin de leur montrer
le dada des charrettes qui conduisaient les victimes au supplice.
Ils chantaient la nature, la paix, la piti6, la bienfaisance, la can*
deur, les vertus domestiques; ces b£ats de philanthropic faisaient
couper le cou a leurs voisins avec une extreme sensibility, pour le
plus grand bonheur de l’esp^ce humaine.”
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 127

color to the assertion that has been made that the last
stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.
In theory, Robespierre is, like Rousseau, rigidly equal-
itarian. He is not a real leader at all — only the people’s
“hired man.” But at critical moments, in the name of
an ideal general will, of which he professes to be only the
organ, he is ready to impose tyrannically his will on the
actual people. The net result of the Rousseauistic move¬
ment is thus not to get rid of leadership, but to produce
an inferior and even insane type of leadership, and in any
case leadership of a highly imperialistic type. This tri¬
umph of force can be shown to be the total outcome of
liberty, equality, and fraternity in the Rousseauistic
sense. Rousseau himself, as we have seen, would force
people to be free. The attempt to combine freedom with
equality led, and, according to Lord Acton, always will
lead, to terrorism. As for Jacobinical fraternity, it has
been summed up in the phrase: “Be my brother or I’ll
kill you.” Moreover, the clash of a leader like Robes¬
pierre is not only with enemies of the Revolution, but
with other more or less sincere revolutionary fanatics
whose imaginations are projecting different “ideals.”
The sole common denominator of leaders thus obstinate,
each in the pursuit of a separate dream, is force. The
movement had repudiated the traditional controls, and
so far as any new principle of cohesion was concerned,
had turned out to be violently centrifugal. The only
brotherhood the Jacobinical leaders had succeeded in
founding was, as Taine puts it, a brotherhood of Cains.
Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader
finally destined to emerge from the Revolution. As early
128 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

as 1790 Burke had predicted that the Revolution would

turn at last to the profit of some military adventurer.
The doctrine of popular sovereignty as developed from
the “Social Contract” had been found to encourage a
sort of chronic anarchy. Inasmuch as society cannot
go on without discipline of some kind, men were con¬
strained, in the absence of any other form of discipline,
to turn to discipline of the military type. In the army it
was still possible to find the orderly subordination and
loyalty to acknowledged merit that the Jacobins had, on
principle, been undermining in civil France. Bonaparte
is therefore no accident. He is the true heir and executor
of the Revolution. After his grenadiers had chased
members of the Cinq-Cents through the doors and out
of the windows of the Orangerie at Saint-Cloud (18
Brumaire), and when he had revealed himself more and
more nakedly as the imperialistic superman, it is not to
be supposed that the Jacobins as a body stood aloof.
What became apparent, on the contrary, was the affinity
that has always existed between an unlimited democracy
and the cult of ruthless power. No one crawled more
abjectly at the feet of Napoleon than some of the quon¬
dam Terrorists. “On the point of becoming barons and
counts, the Jacobins spoke only of the horrors of 1793,
of the necessity of punishing the proletarians and of re¬
pressing popular excesses. From day to day there was
taking place the transformation of republicans into im¬
perialists and of the tyranny of all into the despotism
of a single man.” 1
Chateaubriand’s disapproval of Napoleon was ineffec-
1 Chateaubriand. Memoires dfOutre-Tombe, ii, p. 243.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 129

tive, one may note in passing, because his head was not
in accord with his heart. He was in secret sympathy
with Napoleon because of a likeness that he recognized
between the Napoleonic quality of imagination and his
own. The imaginations of both men were, in a sense that
I have sought to define elsewhere, romantic: they were
straining, though along very different lines, out towards
the unlimited. Victor Hugo, again, denounced Napoleon
as the author of the 18 Brumaire, and at the same time
was so fascinated by him imaginatively, that he was one
of the chief artificers of the Napoleonic legend.
I have been trying to make clear the relation between
Rousseauistic democracy and imperialism in France
itself. The same relationship appears if we study the
Rousseauistic movement internationally. Perhaps no
movement since the beginning of the world has led to
such an inbreeding of national sentiment of the type
that in the larger states runs over very readily into im¬
perialistic ambition. I have said that the Revolution
almost from the start took on the character of a univer¬
sal crusade. The first principles it assumed made prac¬
tically all existing governments seem illegitimate. The
various peoples were invited to overthrow these govern¬
ments, based upon usurpation, and, having recovered
their original rights, to join with France in a glorious
fraternity. What followed is almost too familiar to need
repetition. Some of the governments whose legitimacy
was thus called into question took alarm and, having
entered into an alliance, invaded France.1 This foreign

1 Both monarchists and revolutionary idealists had of course

other motives in addition to those they professed. For this whole
130 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

menace moved France to the first great burst of national

enthusiasm in the modern sense. The cry of the revolu¬
tionary army — Vive la nation — heard by Goethe in
a pause of the cannonading of Valmy — was rightly
taken by him to mark the dawn of a new era.1 The be¬
ginnings of the very type of warfare we have recently
been witnessing in Europe, that is, the coming together
of whole nations for mutual massacre (la levee en masse),
go back to this period. The new national enthusiasm
supplied France with soldiers so numerous and so spir¬
ited that she not only repelled her invaders, but began
to invade other countries in turn, theoretically on a mis¬
sion of emancipation. In the actual stress of events,
however, the will to power turned out to be stronger
than the will to brotherhood, and what had begun as a
humanitarian crusade ended in Napoleon and imperial¬
istic aggression. This aggression awakened in turn the
new national sentiment in various countries, and did
more than all other agencies combined to prepare the
way for a powerful and united Germany.2 France
ceased to be the “Christ of nations” and became the
traitor to humankind universally denounced by the
disillusioned radicals of the time, especially after the
invasion of Switzerland (1798).3
period, see E. Bourgeois, Manuel historique de politique etrang&re,
II, pp. 1-184.
1 According to M. Chuquet, the remark of Goethe to which I
refer dates from 1820 and not from the evening of the battle (20
Sep., 1792). See article in Revue hebdomadaire, 18 D£c., 1915.
2 “La Revolution frangaise fut le fait generateur de l’idee de
l’unite allemande.” Renan, Reforme intellectuelle et morale, p. 130.
3 See Coleridge’s France: an Ode. For corresponding German
developments, see G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution,
passim.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 131

Any one who rejects the humanitarian theory of

brotherhood runs the risk of being accused of a lack
of fraternal feeling. The obvious reply of the person of
critical and experimental temper is that, if he rejects the
theory, it is precisely because he desires brotherhood.
After an experience of the theory that has already ex¬
tended over several generations, the world would seem
at times to have become a vast seething mass of hatred
and suspicion. What Carlyle wrote of the Revolution
has not ceased to be applicable: “Beneath this rose-
colored veil of universal benevolence is a dark, conten¬
tious, hell-on-earth.” One is finally led to the conviction
that the contrast between the ideal and the real in this
movement is not the ordinary contrast between the will¬
ingness of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh; that
on the contrary this particular ideal of union among men
actually promotes the reality of strife that it is supposed
to prevent. One might without being too fanciful estab¬
lish a sort of synchronism between the prevalence of
pacifistic schemes and the actual outbreak of war. The
propaganda of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre was followed by
the wars of Frederick the Great. The humanitarian
movement of the end of the eighteenth century, which
found expression in Kant’s treatise on Perpetual Peace,
was followed and attended by twenty years of the
bloodiest fighting the world has ever known. The paci¬
fist agitation of the early twentieth century, that found
outer expression in the Peace Palace at The Hague, was
succeeded by battle lines hundreds of miles long. The
late M. Boutroux, whom no one will accuse of being a
cynic, said to a reporter of the “Temps” in 1912 that
132 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

from the amount of peace talk abroad, he inferred that

the future was likely to be “supremely warlike and
bloody.’’ In the matter of war and peace, as elsewhere,
the humanitarian, to be sure, has an ever-ready explana¬
tion for all the failures of his theory to work: it would, he
insists, have worked beautifully if it had not been for
this or that conspiracy. Nothing short of the suicide of
the planet would avail to convince certain humanitari¬
ans that anything is wrong with their theory — and
even then, the last surviving humanitarian would no
doubt continue to moan “conspiracy.”
From a strictly psychological point of view, the move¬
ment we are studying had not only produced all its
characteristic fruits over a hundred years ago, but also
its two outstanding and truly significant personalities —
Rousseau and Napoleon. If there had been no Rous¬
seau, Napoleon is reported to have said, there would
have been no Revolution, and without the Revolution,
I should have been impossible. Now Rousseau may be
regarded as being more than any other one person the
humanitarian Messiah. Napoleon, for his part, may be
defined, in Hardy’s phrase, as the Christ of War. So
that the humanitarian Messiah set in motion forces that
led by a process that I have attempted to sketch in rough
general outline to the rise of a Christ of War.
A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement,
on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been
its preoccupation with the lot of the masses. “All in¬
stitutions,” says Condorcet, for example, “ought to
have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral
amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.”
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 133

But on the utilitarian no less than on the sentimental

side of the movement, the contrast between the ideal
and the real is so flagrant as to suggest some central
omission in humanitarian psychology. If the Rousseau-
ist set up an ideal of universal brotherhood that led ac¬
tually to universal conscription, the utilitarian for his
part has put prime emphasis on material organization
and efficiency and so, with the aid of physical science,
has gradually built up an enormous mass of interlocking
machinery which was, in theory, to serve humanity and
promote the greatest good of the greatest number, but
has in practice been pressed into the service of the will
to power of individuals and social groups and nationali¬
ties. As a result of the coming together of the various
factors I have enumerated, war has become almost in¬
conceivably maleficent. The chief victims have been the
very masses whom both Rousseauist and Baconian have
professed themselves so eager to benefit. The clashes
between states and coalitions of states have, under exist¬
ing conditions, become clashes between Frankenstein
monsters. One should recollect that the Frankenstein
monster was not, as is commonly supposed, a soulless
monster. On the contrary, as depicted by Mrs. Shelley,
he is, in the Rousseauistic sense, a beautiful soul — pos¬
sibly as a result of having learned to read from works
like the “ Sorrows of Werther.” 1 He becomes ruthless
only when the beauty of his soul and his yearnings for
sympathy are unappreciated by others and he is forced
back into psychic solitude. Here again the last stage of
sentimentalism is homicidal mania.
1 See Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, ch. 15.
134 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

The whole Occident, and increasingly, indeed, the

whole world, is now faced with a similar problem as to
the quality of the “soul” that animates the vast mech¬
anism of material efficiency, to the building up of which
the Occident has for several generations past been de¬
voting its main effort. Is this “soul” a Rousseauistic or
a genuinely ethical “soul”? One is tempted to define
the civilization (or what we are pleased to term such)
that has been emerging with the decline of the tradi¬
tional controls as a mixture of altruism and high explo¬
sives. If anything is amiss with the altruism, the results
may prove to be rather serious. The idealists affirm
either that man is so lovely in his natural self that he
needs no control at all, or else that he can be induced to
exercise the necessary control with reference to the good
of his fellows. Everything hinges, in either case, on the
presence in the natural man of an element of love or will
to service that is of itself a sufficient counterpoise to the
natural man’s will to power. Here is the dividing line
between egoists and altruists, and not merely in the
appeal to utility. The principle of the greatest good of
the greatest number is, as has been pointed out, asserted
by Machiavelli himself.1
Now the facts in this debate as to the relative strength
in the natural man of the will to brotherhood and the
will to power seem, on an impartial survey, to favor the
Machiavellians rather than the “idealists.” Those who
so pride themselves on being forward-looking should
have a special cult for Machiavelli. He has claims to be
1 See Mandragola, Act 3, Scene 4. The application of the prin¬
ciple in this particular passage is, however, ironical.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 135

regarded as the most successful of all the forward-look¬

ers. In the phrase of Gervinus, “he guessed the spirit of
modern history.” The last war has been correctly de¬
scribed as a “return of Machiavelli.” But with the prog¬
ress that science has made, and is constantly making in
“improving the mystery of murder,” so that it is already
possible apparently to destroy great cities in a few min¬
utes from the air, it should be evident even to the most
obtuse that we cannot afford to allow Machiavelli to
return. One or two more such returns on a large scale
will, under existing conditions, mean the end of white
civilization, and possibly of the white race itself. A gross
and palpable error of the era that is just closing has been
its confusion of mechanical and material progress with
moral progress. Physical science is excellent in its own
place, but when supreme moral issues are involved, it is,
as has been rightly remarked, only a multiplying device.1
If there is rightness at the centre, it will no doubt multi¬
ply the rightness. If, on the other hand, there is any
central error, the peripheral repercussion, with men
bound together as they are at present, will be terrific.
With the development of inventions like the radio and
the wireless telephone, the whole world is becoming, in
a very literal sense, a whispering-gallery. It is hardly
necessary to dilate on what is likely to follow if the words
that are whispered are words of hatred and suspicion.
An increasing material union among men who remain
spiritually centrifugal means a return of Machiavelli,

1 This point has been well made by Mr. J. Middleton Murry

in his essay on The Nature of Civilization (The Evolution of an
Intellectual, p. 168).
136 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

a triumph in other words of the law of cunning and the

law of force, on a scale to which the past has seen no par¬
allel. Superlatives are dangerous things, but one is per¬
haps justified in describing the present situation as one
of unexampled gravity.
In dealing with democracy and the special type of
fraternity it has preached, as related to imperialism, I
have thus far been confining myself for the most part to
the national and international phases of this relation¬
ship. It is time to fulfil my promise, and, working in
from the periphery towards the centre, seek to get at the
root of the whole matter in the psychology of the indi¬
vidual. For behind all imperialism is ultimately the
imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ulti¬
mately the peaceful individual.
I have already made a distinction of the first impor¬
tance for the study of the question of war or peace in
terms of the individual, and that is the distinction be¬
tween the traditional Christian conception of liberty,
which implies spiritual subordination, and the Rous-
seauistic conception which, whether we take it in the no¬
state of the “Second Discourse” or the all-state of the
“Social Contract,” is resolutely equalitarian. At the
end of his “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley has por¬
trayed in the very spirit of the “Second Discourse” the
paradise that is to result from the abolition of the tradi¬
tional subordinations and inequalities:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 137

But on any attempt to carry out this programme, the

enormous irony and contradiction at the very heart of
this movement becomes manifest. It leads one to break
down standards in the real world in favor of purely
chimerical ideals. For what actually follows the attempt
to establish equalitarian liberty, we need to turn from
Shelley to Shakespeare:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy:.

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite.

This last line reminds one of a remark of Jeremy

Taylor that, in the absence of ethical control, “men
know no good but to please a wild, indetermined, in¬
finite appetite.” The word infinite adds an essential idea.
Other animals have appetite, but within certain definite
bounds, whereas man is, either in the good or bad sense,
the infinite animal. Machiavelli is very metaphorical
when he speaks of his prince as combining the virtues of
the lion and the fox. The lion and the fox do not put
forth their power or cunning beyond what is needed for
the satisfaction of their actual physical wants. They do
not strive to set up a vulpine or leonine empire over
other animals. One cannot truthfully say of them, as
Carlyle says of his boot-black, that, if given half the uni¬
verse, they will soon be quarrelling with the owner of
the other half. To be sure, as Swift remarks,
Now and then
Beasts may degen’rate into men.
138 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

But, as a rule, the man who is infinite after the fashion

of Carlyle’s boot-black is in a fair way to become not
beastly, but fiendish. As a result of his infinitude, man
is almost necessarily either better or worse than other
animals. His prime need is not, as in the case of other
animals, to satisfy certain limited physical wants, but
to keep in good conceit with himself. Now it is of the
essence of conceit, a word which, as once used, was syn¬
onymous with imagination in general, and as now used
is nearly related to the egocentric type of imagination,
to strain out towards the unlimited. This conceit is, it is
to be feared, closely associated in unregenerate man with
envy and jealousy of any one whose conceit seems to set
up rival pretensions to his own. Conceit also determines
largely man’s attitude towards the truth. Truth accord¬
ing to the natural law he welcomes because it ministers
to his power or comfort and in any case piques his won¬
der and curiosity. Spiritual truth is less welcome be¬
cause it diminishes his conceit. Truth in this sense, as
Goethe says, is less congenial to human nature than er¬
ror, because it imposes limitations, whereas error does
not. Tell the average person that some one is planning
to get into wireless communication with Mars, or to
shoot a rocket at the moon, and he is all respectful in¬
terest and attention at once. Tell him, on the contrary,
that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to
walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will
be indifferent, or even actively resentful.
Man’s conceit, and the tendency towards unlimited
expansion that it gives to the impulses of the natural
man, is of various types. Perhaps as good a classifica-
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 139

tion as any of the main types is that of the three lusts

distinguished by traditional Christianity — the lust of
knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.
It is interesting to study the lust of power as it has ap¬
peared in the conquerors and great military adventurers
of history. Saint-Evremond has made some penetrating
observations on this form of imperialistic psj^chology in
his “Dissertation on the word Vast.” The vastness that
the great dominators have displayed in their projects
and ambitions is due, as he points out, to the quality of
their imaginations. The outward straining of the imag¬
ination towards the unlimited Saint-Evremond takes to
be the weakness and not the strength of a Pyrrhus, an
Alexander and a Richelieu. It is a pity that Saint-Evre¬
mond was not able to extend his scrutiny to a Napoleon.
Napoleon plainly displayed two entirely different types
of “vision”: in dealing with the natural order, in plan¬
ning a battle, for instance, he showed himself capable of
a tremendous concentration upon the facts; but in his
political ambitions, where factors of a more purely hu¬
man order came into play, he revealed an inability to
limit his imagination that was destined sooner or later
to result in disaster. The coming together of the two
kinds of vision I have just defined gives a type with
which we have become very familiar, not only in our
political and military, but in our commercial leaders —
that of the efficient megalomaniac. A surprising num¬
ber of these leaders have been, in intention at least,
supermen, and little Napoleons.
Assuming that Napoleon’s imagination is of the
general type that Saint-Evremond ascribes to various
140 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

great dominators of the past, we still have to explain, if

we are to understand the triumph of the imperialistic
push for power over Rousseauistic idealism, why a Na¬
poleon so captivates the imagination of other men; for
this sort of leader would evidently be helpless unless he
had many accomplices. The Rousseauist, I have said,
breaks down traditional controls without setting up new
ones. What emerges in the many men who have as a
result lapsed to the naturalistic level is not the will to
brotherhood, but the will to power; so that in this sense
the Rousseauist is actually promoting what he is in
theory seeking to prevent. For what follows we need to
make an application of Freudian psychology to a libido
even more fundamental perhaps than the libido with
which the Freudians themselves have thus far been
chiefly concerned — namely, the libido dominandi. In
a naturalistic era, the average man finds himself more or
less in the state of Carlyle’s boot-black, but is at the
same time hampered on every side and kept from ex¬
panding freely along the lines of power, and is thus
diminished in his conceit of himself. He suffers from re¬
pressed and thwarted desire. But what he is unable to
get directly, he may secure vicariously. At this point
one begins to perceive the meaning of Hardy’s descrip¬
tion of Napoleon as the Christ of War. The spell that
Napoleon exercised was not merely over the former
Jacobins of whom Chateaubriand speaks, but over the
French masses. Let one reflect on the way these masses
rallied to him on the return from Elba, and that, too,
after he had wrought them almost incalculable evil:
Bien, dit-on, qu’il nous ait nui,
Le peuple encore le r6v£re, etc.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 141
I have said that to look on the State of Burke with its
ethical leadership as merely “pooled self-esteem” is mis¬
leading. The phrase has a certain relevancy, however,
when applied to the State that is under Napoleonic
leadership. The intrusion of this imperialistic element is
strong not only in all secular establishments, but also in
the churches of the world, if only because these churches,
however immaculate they may be in theory, are ad¬
ministered by human beings. It is not easy to overlook
this element in the Papacy, even though one does not
go so far as to say roundly with Tyrrell: “Rome cares
nothing for religion — only for power.” The very divin¬
ities that men have set up often impress one as being in
a considerable measure their pooled self-esteem. “We
are glad,” as Dryden says, “to have God on our side to
maul our enemies, when we cannot do the work our¬
selves.” Jonathan Edwards has genuine religious ele¬
vation; but the Jehovah in whose “fierceness” he
plainly rejoices, and who tramples sinners under his feet
until their blood is “sprinkled on his garments,” might
lead some to dismiss Edwards as a theological imperial¬
ist. A more unmistakable example is that of certain
members of the group of Fundamentalists that has re¬
cently been dividing the Baptist denomination, who
have depicted Christ in his second coming in colors that
make Nero and Caligula seem respectable. One scarcely
need dilate on the fact that Christ was in his first coming
a deep disappointment to the Jewish populace; the Mes¬
siah they had hoped for was far nearer to Napoleon than
to the Messiah they actually received.
It goes without saying that the imperialistic element
142 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

I have noted in religious beliefs, as well as in those who

administer them, is not the whole story. Above all, it is
not the whole story in the case of Christianity. Chris¬
tianity has actually done much to curb the expansive
lusts of the human heart, and among its other lusts, the
lust for power. As Dante puts it, “men wandering wild
in their bestiality,” have need of a twofold control: “ that
of the highest Pontiff to lead them according to revela¬
tion to eternal life, and that of the Emperor to lead them
according to the traditions of philosophy to temporal
felicity.”1 Of course the reality never coincided exactly
with Dante’s ideal. From his tremendous diatribes
against the self-seeking rulers of his time, one might infer
that Europe then was almost as mad as it certainly is
to-day. At the same time Christianity in its mediaeval
form actually did secure for Europe no small degree of
spiritual unity and cohesion, and even when there was
disunion, it was not rendered infinitely maleficent, as
it is now, by the concomitant circumstance that those
who were spiritually at variance were bound up to¬
gether materially.
Now I scarcely need repeat what I have said here and
elsewhere that the loss of this older European unity was
due to the rise of what one may describe, in the most
general sense, as the critical spirit, which has in turn
been identical with the spirit of individualism. To be
modern has meant practically to be increasingly positive
and critical, to refuse to receive anything on an author¬
ity “anterior, exterior, and superior” to the individual.
With those who still cling to the principle of outer au-
1 De Monarchia, hi, ch. xvi.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 143

thority I have no quarrel. I am not primarily concerned

with them. I am myself a thoroughgoing individualist,
writing for those who are, like myself, irrevocably com¬
mitted to the modern experiment. In fact, so far as I
object to the moderns at all, it is because they have not
been sufficiently modern, or, what amounts to the same
thing, have not been sufficiently experimental. In the
field of the natural law, those who have gone in for
modernity evidently satisfy my test in no small meas¬
ure. The substitution of positive observation for what
seemed to a Bacon, for instance, the apriorism and ver¬
bal subtleties and servile leaning upon authority of the
schoolmen has actually led to the fruits anticipated.
But the apostles of modernity have not been content
merely to minister to man’s power and utility. They
have also professed to have a substitute for the spiritual
unity of the older order, and here, when tried experi¬
mentally, that is, according to their own principles, they
have, I have tried to show, failed disastrously. The re¬
sults of the material success and spiritual failure of the
modern movement are before us. It is becoming obvi¬
ous to every one that the power of Occidental man has
run very much ahead of his wisdom. The outlook might
be more cheerful if there were any signs that Occidental
man is seeking seriously to make up his deficiency on
the side of wisdom. On the contrary, he is reaching out
almost automatically for more and more power. If he
succeeds in releasing the stores of energy that are locked
up in the atom — and this seems to be the most recent
ambition of our physicists — his final exploit may be
to blow himself off the planet. We are told that our
144 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

means of destruction are growing so terrible that no one

will venture to use them — the same argument that was
heard before the War. But at the same time that we
are heaping up these means of destruction, the break¬
down of the traditional controls combined with the
failure thus far to supply any adequate substitute, is
creating fools and madmen who will not hesitate to use
them.
It would sometimes seem, indeed, that what wisdom
we still have is a survival. One can at least understand
the point of view of those who decide to stand in the
ancient ways and to assume towards much of what is
deemed progressive nowadays an attitude frankly reac¬
tionary. One may even catch the point of view of the
ultramontane Catholic, as set forth by Pius IX in the
eightieth article of the Syllabus (1864): “If any one says
that the Pope can and should be reconciled and make
terms with progress, with liberalism and modernist civil¬
ization, let him be anathema.”
It is, however, possible to admit that some vital ele¬
ment dropped out in the passage from the mediaeval to
the modern era, or, what amounts to the same thing,
from outer authority to individualism, and still remain
a modern. But in that case one should make clear that
to be a thoroughgoing modern is not such a simple mat¬
ter as is sometimes assumed. I am myself fond of in¬
sisting that man is subject not to one, but to two laws;
and that to be completely modern, one must be positive
and critical, not merely according to the natural, but also
according to the human law. Those who have piqued
themselves on modernity have thus far been for the most
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 145

part persons who have been more or less critical accord¬

ing to the natural law, and then have pieced out their in¬
complete survey of the facts by various rationalistic de¬
vices, or else by idyllic imagining. In the realm of the
human law, the nineteenth century, so far as it stood for
a radical break with tradition, was, on the one hand, an
age of rationalism, on the other, an age of romantic
dreaming. He who has broken with traditions in this
fashion should, in my judgment, be called, not a modern
but a modernist. The term modern should be reserved
for the person who is seeking to be critical according to
both the human and the natural law. Any one who at¬
tempts such a task will find it necessary to give a much
wider meaning to the word experiment than has of late
been usual: it should be extended to cover not merely
the kind of experimenting that goes on in a laboratory,
but also the experimenting with various philosophies of
life that has gone on in the remote as well as in the near
past. To be sure the man who turns nowadays to the
past for instruction is likely to be regarded as more or
less a reactionary. A more familiar type is that of the
progressive who has repudiated the past, barely tolerates
the present, and is at home imaginatively only in that
vast, windy abode, the future. Yet Goethe speaks not
as a reactionary, but as a person of keenly experimental
temper, when he says that we should oppose to the
“aberrations of the hour the masses of universal his¬
tory.” As a result of the toil of innumerable investi¬
gators, these masses of universal history are becoming
fairly accessible to us from the era of the Fighting
States in ancient China (third century b.c.) to the era of
146 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

the fighting states in contemporary Europe. But one

must grant that there are great, if not insurmountable
difficulties in turning to account these records of the
past, and in building up from them standards with which
to judge the “aberrations of the hour.” The obvious
difficulty is the element of truth contained in the saying
that history never repeats itself. If this were the whole
truth, if history were only a whirl of unrelated happen¬
ings that did not exhibit the workings of any central
human law, one would have a right to dismiss any
attempt to judge the present in the light of past ex¬
perience with the dictum of Henry Ford or some more
elegant equivalent: “History is bunk.” But though it is
true that history never repeats itself, it is about equally
true that history is always repeating itself; and this
is a part of the paradox of life itself which does not give
us here an element of oneness, and there an element
of change, but a oneness that is always changing. This
implication of unity in diversity is the scandal of reason,
and philosophers have, for the most part, ever since the
Greeks, been seeking with the aid of reason to abstract
the unity from the diversity, or else, by similar ration¬
alizing processes, to stress the diversity at the expense
of the unity. Practically all the philosophers who now
have the “cry” belong, it is scarcely necessary to add,
to the latter class. But the complete positivist will
insist that wisdom is found in mediation between the
constant and the variable factors in human experience.
His objection to the unity that the Rousseauist proposes
to establish among men through the diffusion of love and
sympathy is that it is illusory. If it were only possible
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 147

to oppose to this unreal unity, a mere chimera of the

romantic imagination, some firm and fast unity, purged
of illusion with the aid of reason, and tucked away once
for all into formulae, our problem would be very easy.
The man who faces life as it actually is, however, will
not admit that it is possible thus to eliminate the ele¬
ment of illusion. To recognize this element is not to be
oneself an illusionist, but on the contrary a keen ob¬
server. It is in the role that they attribute to illusion
that the wisdom of the great poets, of a Shakespeare or
a Sophocles, for example, is most manifest. I have tried
to show elsewhere 1 how closely related this problem of
illusion is to the problem of the imagination. The final
contrast is not between reason or judgment and mere
illusion, but between the imagination that is disciplined
to what abides in the midst of the changeful and the
illusory, and the imagination that is more or less free to
wander wild in some “ empire of chimeras.”
The true vision of the disciplined imagination is need¬
ful if one is to profit by experience, a task that becomes
increasingly difficult according as the experience in¬
volved is one’s own experience or that of one’s contem¬
poraries or that of the near or remote past. Vision of
this type would seem to be depressingly rare, and yet
without it men run the risk, and that often when they
are most filled with the conceit of their own progressive¬
ness, of simply “ committing the oldest sins the newest
kind of ways.” Experience, we are told, keeps a hard
school, but fools will learn in no other; it is a rather wise
fool, one is sometimes inclined to think, who can learn
1 See Introduction to Rousseau and Romanticism.
148 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

even from his own experience, not to speak of the ex¬

perience of others.
But to return to our more immediate topic: evidently
the type of vision that can bring to bear the experience
of the remoter past upon our democratic-imperialistic
era is not easy to attain, but seems very necessary if one
is to appeal to history at all. For one has to go rather far
back to find any close parallel to our present imbroglio.
Various persons have pointed out the analogy between
the Great War and its psychological background and
the period of the Peloponnesian War in Greece; and this
analogy is helpful provided it be used with sufficient
caution. The period of the Peloponnesian War was, like
our own, a period of commercial and imperialistic ex¬
pansion; and this expansion was accompanied, espe¬
cially at Athens, by an increasing trend towards an
equalitarian democracy.1 Like our own age, it was an
age of “intellectuals” who were repudiating the tradi¬
tional disciplines, largely in virtue of the opposition they
had established between nature and convention. If nega¬
tively this cult of nature meant revolt against every¬
thing prescriptive and established, positive^ it meant,
on the one hand, admiration for the superman, and on
the other, sympathy for the weak, though this latter
element was far less marked in ancient than in modern
naturalism. It is hard to study the sophists of that time
without being reminded of our own philosophers of the
flux, or, in the phrase of Aristophanes, votaries of the
1 The typical democratic-imperialistic statesman of this age is
Pericles. For a sense of the dangers of the policy of Athenian ex¬
pansion and also of the importance of union among the Greeks,
one has to turn to conservatives of the type of Cimon.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 149

God Whirl. Persons were not lacking in ancient Athens

who saw the perils of this anarchical individualism.
Some, like Aristophanes, were simply for getting back to
the “good old times,” and refused to distinguish between
Socrates and an ordinary sophist. Socrates, however, it
is hardly necessary to say, along with Plato and Aristotle
and lesser disciples, was in reality seeking to build up, in
lieu of the crumbling traditional standards, standards
more in accord with the critical spirit. The Socratic
effort was on the whole a failure, especially in the politi¬
cal field. The causes of this failure are complex. I will
presently point out what seem to me serious omissions
in the Socratic philosophy itself: and then, too, it may be
maintained without paradox that Occidental civiliza¬
tion is still suffering from the failure, even from the time
of the wily Odysseus, of the Greek character to measure
up to the Greek mind.1 If the Hellenes could only get
together, says Aristotle, they might hold their own
against the world. Unfortunately, they could never get
together. Even when a political tradition that was in its
essence identical with religion still bound together the
citizens of the various city-states, these states were
largely centrifugal as regards one another for the very
reason that each state had different gods. With the
breakdown of these politico-religious traditions and the
failure to work out on Socratic or other lines some
equivalent for the spiritual controls they supplied, the
citizens of each city-state tended to become centrifugal

1 Cicero, whom no one will accuse of being an enemy of the

Greeks, has a passage on this subject that may be regarded as
definitive. See his Oratio pro L. Valerio Flacco, iv.
150 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

not only with reference to the citizens of other city-

states, but with reference to one another. There fol¬
lowed all the abominable incidents of class-war. At
Miletus, for example, the poor got the upper hand and
forced the rich to flee from the city. But afterwards,
regretting that they had not been able to kill them, they
took their children, gathered them together in barns,
and had them trampled under the feet of oxen. The
rich afterwards returned to the city and became masters
again. They took in their turn the children of the poor,
covered them with pitch, and burned them alive.1 This
is the kind of thing of which our modern world has
already had a substantial first instalment from the
French to the Russian Revolution. The decadent
Greeks, like those who are preaching a class-war in our
own day, employed many fine phrases, but the law that
actually tended to prevail was the law of force. This
force was finally supplied, as frequently happens in such
cases, from without, first by Macedon and then by
Rome. On this final submission to an imperialistic
autocrat, the decadent Greek consoled himself for what
would have seemed to a Greek of the great period a
deep degradation by the somewhat shabby fiction that
he was submitting, not to a man, but to a god.
Any summary of the kind I have been attempting is
necessarily very misleading. Nothing will take the
place of a first-hand knowledge of the sources, above all
of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides. Any one can con¬
vince himself of the startling relevancy to existing con¬
ditions of Aristotle’s “Politics” in particular, especially
1 See Athenaeus, xii, 26.
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 151

now that we have begun in this country to slip our con¬

stitutional moorings and to drift towards a direct or un¬
limited democracy. There are passages that are as mod¬
em as the morning newspaper, and at least a hundred
times more sensible. Rome later ran through a some¬
what similar cycle: a constitutional republic resting
ultimately on religious control gradually gave way with
the weakening of this control to an equalitarian democ¬
racy which in turn passed over with the usual incidents
of class-war into a decadent imperialism. The imperial¬
istic upshot of an unbridled individualism might also be
illustrated from the crumbling of the feudal system in
ancient China and the resulting era of the Fighting
States to which I have already alluded. Some of the phi¬
losophy of this time, that of Mei-ti,1 for example, exhibits
a mingling of utilitarian and sentimental elements which
is closer, perhaps, to our contemporary humanitarianism
than anything to be found in Greece or Rome. Towards
the end, when everything had been tried, including the
balance of power, universal brotherhood, and a “league
of nations,” and after the perpetration of horrors un¬
speakable, no one apparently had any more illusions:
the only question was which imperialistic leader should
first succeed in imposing his will on all the others.

1 A German translation of Mei-ti (with a laudatory introduc¬

tion) has recently been published by Alfred Forke. It should be
noted that jen, the virtue on which the Confucian puts his final
emphasis, though usually rendered by “ benevolence ” or some such
term, is something very different from altruism. This should be
plain from the uncompromising hostility of Mencius to Mei-ti.
The exaltation of jen is simply the Confucian way of affirming
that love is the fulfilment of the law. Inasmuch as jen manifests
itself on the humanistic rather than on the religious level, the
152 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

Evidently the outlook for our Western civilization, if

it reaches this last stage of the imperialistic cycle through
which it is now apparently running, is not cheerful, espe¬
cially in view of the progress that physical science is con¬
stantly making in “ improving the mystery of murder.”
North America, and to a considerable degree, South
America, it is scarcely necessary to say, belong to the
same cultural group as the states of western Europe.
All the states of this group are now exhibiting in various
forms and varying degrees the symptoms of an unduly
centrifugal individualism. The outside world, that fre¬
quently has the last word under these circumstances,
may, in view of the present facilities of communication,
be taken to include all the rest of mankind, especially
the great rival cultures of Asia. Now the more power¬
ful states of the cultural group I have just defined are
not only imperialistic in their attitude towards one an¬
other, but also supremely imperialistic in their attitude
towards the outlying peoples and cultures. It is hard to
see that the states that are supposed to be democrati¬
cally ruled are very different in this matter from the rest.
As early as 1790 Mirabeau warned the French enthusi¬
asts that “free peoples are more eager for war, and de¬
mocracies more the slaves of their passions than the most
absolute autocracies.” This is true in the obvious politi¬
cal sense not only in Europe, but in other parts of the
world. Republican France, for example, has been reach¬
ing out eagerly for an African and Asiatic empire. But
there is a type of imperialistic expansion even more
nearest Western equivalent is probably the treatment of friend¬
ship by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (Books vm-ix).
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 153

important, perhaps, than this obvious political kind, and

frequently leading up to it, and that is the imperialistic
expansion of the commercialist. It has been said that
trade follows the flag, but an even more significant truth
is that the flag tends to follow trade: let one consider the
origins of the British Empire in India. It is hardly neces¬
sary at this day to refute the notion held by so many
liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that
trade is in itself a pacific agency. Commercial interests
lead to clashes and dangerous rivalries between Euro¬
pean nations, not merely in Europe itself, but in other
parts of the world. Thus a chief aspect of imperialism at
the present time is the international scramble for oil.
One may read in a recent issue of a responsible French
publication that “for the success of their projects, Lord
Cowdray and Lord Curzon are capable of fomenting
revolutions in Mexico, of sowing civil war in Asia, and,
in order to crush a rival, of setting fire to Europe and the
World! Their imperialism is a universal danger, but is
not lacking in grandeur.” 1 In my view the leaders of
contemporary England are not quite so Machiavellian,
but the view I have just cited is widely held in France,
and scarcely leads to the confidence that is the necessary
basis of harmonious relations between France and Eng¬
land This issue of oil might even under certain circum¬
stances lead to severe tension between England and
America.
It is becoming more and more evident that the chief
problem raised by all this imperialistic expansion is that
of the relations between Asia and the Occident. There
1 See La Vie des peuples, Tome vii, p. 195.
154 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

are possibilities in the present situation that may lead to

the real world war, that between the East and West, a
war to which the recent European struggle is likely to
seem in retrospect but a faint prelude. It does not on the
face of it appear probable that Europeans can hope in
the long run to enjoy the luxury of slaughtering one an¬
other by the most recent and refined methods of scien¬
tific efficiency and at the same time inflict their imperial¬
ism and racial swagger on about nine hundred millions
of Asiatics; especially as Asiatics have an opportunity
of observing the imperialistic rivalries and almost in¬
curable divisions of European powers, not only in Eu¬
rope, but on the soil of Asia itself. The possibilities of
which I have spoken may not develop in a day. But
then, as Confucius remarks, “the man who does not take
far views will have near troubles,” and it is surely time
to attempt this long-range view of our relations with the
Orient, especially perhaps with the land of Confucius
himself.
Now the Asiatic problem, when considered from the
political point of view, breaks up into various minor
problems. There is, for example, the problem of the
Near East which has been gravely mismanaged, largely,
it would seem, as the result of the inability of England
and France to come to a decent understanding. There is
again the problem of India. There is also the problem of
the United States in its relations with the Far East, with
the possibility in the offing of a gigantic struggle for the
empire of the Pacific. One encounters here the portent
of Japan, an Asiatic power that is learning to play the
imperialistic game along the most approved Occidental
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 155

lines, that is even learning to adapt to its own uses the

humanitarian-imperialistic cant of the “white man’s
burden,” and is beginning to speak of China as “Japan’s
burden.”
Finally, most important of all, perhaps, there is the
problem of Russia, a country geographically astride of
Europe and Asia, and psychologically, so far as a great
part of its population is concerned, at least as Asiatic as
it is European. With the extermination or impoverish¬
ment of its upper classes, the psychic gap between Rus¬
sia and western Europe is becoming more accentuated.
The Bolshevist Revolution, which can be shown to de¬
rive in its underlying principles from the great French
Revolution, has been even more virulently imperialistic
than French Jacobinism. Russia is likely to remain for
some time to come a fertile field of imperialistic intrigue,
not only on the part of Russians, but also of Germans
and Japanese, and perhaps of Turks, with the whole
Moslem world in the background. Just as certain Greeks
were ready to ally themselves with the extra-Hellenic
world against other Greeks, so Germany in her desire to
get even might be tempted to join with these extra-
European forces, even though such action on her part
would amount to a betrayal of the vital interests of the
cultural group to which she herself belongs.
Considerations of this kind are, however, highly spec¬
ulative at best, even though the person who indulges in
them has a competency in the political field to which I
make no claim. It is, as a matter of fact, no part of my
method to deal directly with the political problem. This
method is, in intention at least, purely psychological.
156 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

When one approaches psychologically the question of

Europe versus Asia, and takes a sufficiently long-range
view, a striking fact forces itself on one’s attention: the
principle of true spiritual cohesion among men that the
Graeco-Roman world was unable to supply — for the
Stoical attempt to achieve such a principle was on the
whole a failure—came at last from a faith of Oriental
origin — namely, Christianity. Cardinal Newman re¬
lates in his “Apologia” that what turned him as much
as any one thing to Catholicism was a Latin maxim
which affirms that the whole world is sound in its judg¬
ments (Securus judicat orbis terrarum). Now, strictly
speaking, this maxim seems less favorable to the Catho¬
lic and his ultimate appeal to outer authority than to
the man who seeks to deal with life experimentally. If
one uses the maxim in this positive spirit, one has to in¬
sist, first of all, that the Asiatic experience that led to
the rise of Christianity is only part of the total experi¬
ence of Asia. To regard Europe and a small portion of
Asia as together constituting the orbis terrarum is merely
a form of our Occidental conceit and arrogance. It is to
leave out of one’s survey the experience of about half of
the human race. In this age of universal and facile com¬
munication, it would seem especially desirable to bring
together the two halves of human experience. A chief
obstacle to the right interpretation of the experience
of the Far East has been the fact that those who have
undertaken the task have suffered not only from inade¬
quate knowledge, but have also frequently worn theo¬
logical blinders. A more serious form of narrowness
to-day is that of the man who judges the total experience
 DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM 157

of the world, both East and West, from the point of view
of a merely mechanical progress. An estimate of this to¬
tal experience that is based on adequate knowledge, and
is at the same time free from dogmatic preoccupations of
any kind, will, I believe, flash a vivid light on the pre¬
dicament into which we have been led by our one-sided
naturalism. It will aid us to a purely psychological defi¬
nition of the vital factor that has plainly tended to drop
out in the passage from mediaeval to modern Europe. It
will thus help us to recover and maintain this vital fac¬
tor not merely in the form of “old prejudices and un¬
reasoned habits” — the attempt to do so is, I said,
the weakness of the method of Burke — but in a posi¬
tive and critical form, a form, in other words, in closer
accord with the modem spirit.
 CHAPTER V
EUROPE AND ASIA

Writers of books of criticism during the neo-classical

period were fond of refining on the idea of decorum; at
times they developed this idea on what one may term a
continental scale and contrasted the decorous or typical
European with the decorous or typical Asiatic. Specula¬
tions of this kind are not as fantastic as they at first
sight appear. One may not only become aware of some
underlying divergence in the temper of the Asiatic as
compared with that of the European, but, to some ex¬
tent, formulate it. In speaking, however, of Asia it is
even more important than in speaking of Europe to
make clear that one has in mind primarily civilized Asia,
and civilized Asia at the top of its achievement. The
hordes of barbaric or semi-barbaric Asia have not only
menaced or actually overrun Europe in the past (as they
may very well do again in the future), but have also been
from remote times the scourge of civilized Asia. In an¬
cient Judaea the memory of these wild northern riders
lingered in the legends of Gog and Magog. The great
Wall of China is a sort of visible symbol of the separa¬
tion between the two Asias. On the one hand is the Asia
of Attila and Tamerlane and Genghis Khan; on the
other, the Asia of Christ and Buddha and Confucius.
The mention of Christ and Buddha (of Confucius as a
typical Asiatic I shall have more to say presently) is
 EUROPE AND ASIA 159

hardly necessary to remind us that it is the distinction of

Asia as compared with Europe and other parts of the
world to have been the mother of religions; so that if one
were to work out a critical and experimental definition
of religion (and my method requires nothing less), one
might be put on the track of what is specifically Asiatic
in the Asiatic attitude towards life. Of course, historical
Christianity is far from being a purely Asiatic faith. It
contains important elements drawn from Greek phi¬
losophy — Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoical, Neoplatonic;
also a strong Roman element, especially what I have
described as Roman imperialistic organization, not to
speak of sacramental magic and elements drawn from
the mystery cults, which are of mixed origin but still
largely Greek. What elements in Christianity may be
referred back to the Founder? We have Christ’s own
authorization for dealing with this question experimen¬
tally (“ By their fruits ye shall know them ”). Now Bacon
and the utilitarians have also preached a gospel of fruits,
but the fruits that Christ has in mind are plainly not of
the Baconian type. They are the fruits of the spirit, and
what these fruits are, Saint Paul has told us once for all:
“Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness,
faith, mildness, self-control.” The equivalent of this list
in its total emphasis will not be found in any European
cult or philosophy that antedates Christianity. It is
possible, however, to find the equivalent in the older
religious thought of Asia. About the middle of the third
century before Christ, the Buddhist ruler of India,
Asoka, had a very similar list of virtues carved in stone
at various points throughout his vast empire: “Com-
160 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

passion, liberality, truth, purity, gentleness, peace, joy¬

ousness, saintliness, self-control.” 1 Thus Buddhism and
Christianity, which often seem to be almost hopelessly
at variance when approached from the point of view of
dogma, confirm one another in this striking fashion
when studied experimentally and in their fruits.
If we wish to define religion adequately, we need per¬
haps to take a further step and inquire which of the vari¬
ous fruits of the spirit enumerated by Saint Paul and
Asoka is most central in the truly religious life. This
central virtue seems to have been overlooked by
Matthew Arnold in a definition of religion that has at
least the merit of being experimental: “Religion is,” he
says, “morality touched by emotion.” Though religion
normally leads through morality and, at least in its
earlier stages, is very much mixed up with emotion, the
final emphasis, if we are to believe the great religious
leaders themselves, is elsewhere. “ My peace I give unto
you,” said Christ on his final parting with his disciples.
“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,
and I will give you rest.” Buddha conceives of the fulfil¬
ment of religion in very similar fashion: “His thought is
quiet, quiet are his word and deed, when he has ob¬
tained freedom by true wisdom, when he has thus be¬
come a quiet man.” 2 And what is the pathway to this
1 The question arises as to the influence of the older religion on
Christianity. Much has been asserted on this subject and little
or nothing proved. All we know positively is that Asoka sent
out missionaries to Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, Macedonia and Epirus.
As to the results of this missionary effort we are not informed. A
translation of the different inscriptions will be found in Asoka by
Vincent A. Smith (2nd ed., 1909).
2 Dhammapada, v. 96.
 EUROPE AND ASIA 161

peace? Dante has caught the inmost spirit of Chris¬

tianity in his reply to this question: “In his will is our
peace.” This idea that man needs to submit his ordi¬
nary self to a higher or divine will is essential not merely
to Christianity, but to all genuine religion. Moham¬
med is at one here with Buddha and Christ. The very
word Islam means submission.
In India, though the same preoccupation with the will
has prevailed, the will to which man subordinates his
ordinary self is often conceived, not as a divinity that
transcends him, but as his own higher self. Buddha
eliminates many things that are accounted essential in
other faiths, including Christianity, but this opposition
between man’s higher or ethical will and his natural self
or expansive desires he does not eliminate. On the con¬
trary, more than any other religious teacher, he plants
himself on the naked psychological fact of this opposi¬
tion; so that Buddhism, in its original form, is the most
critical, or, if one prefer, the least mythological of
religions.
It is important to note that much of the doctrine that
has flourished in India has not been sharply dualistic
like that of Buddha or any other genuine religious
teacher, but has had a more or less marked pantheistic
leaning. This leaning appears in a number of the Hindus
who are now professing to interpret India to the outside
world. For example, Rabindranath Tagore has enjoyed
no small degree of credit as an interpreter of India, not
merely in the Occident, but in the Orient itself. He has
the merit of seeing the importance of the whole question
of East versus West, and in his criticism of the West
162 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

often shows on the negative side no small degree of

perspicacity. The man of the West, he says, has special¬
ized in power and mechanical efficiency and so has been
enabled to make himself the bully of the planet; but it
is established in the nature of things that bullies shall
come to grief. This view of the Occident has not only
found adherents in China and Japan, but something
veiy similar to it is being muttered at the present time
by Mohammedan mullahs from Delhi to Tangiers. The
facts, it is scarcely necessary to say, are not quite so
simple. The success of the English in maintaining a hold
on India is not based entirely on mechanical efficiency
and still less on philanthropy or a supposed eagerness to
assume the white man’s burden. It has been due in part
to the division among the Hindus themselves; but it is
also in no small measure a triumph of character, of the
sane moral realism that has made of the English the best
ruling race, perhaps, that the world has yet seen.
A federation of the states of Europe, Tagore goes on
to say, would, under existing circumstances, be only a
federation of steam-boilers. The remedy is to get rid of
the analysis that has built up this nightmare of mechan¬
ical efficiency and put in its place the principle of love.1
It is here that the affinity of Tagore appears, not with
the ancient sages of his own land, as he would have us
believe, but with our Rousseauistic dreamers. One may
oppose to the effeminacy of a Tagore or a Bergson and to
all those, in either East or West, who seek to attain
“vision” at the expense of analysis, the example of
Buddha who has claims to be regarded as the ultimate
1 See his book on Nationalism, passim.
 EUROPE AND ASIA 163

Oriental. For Buddha supreme “vision” coincided with

a supreme act of analysis.1
I have been trying to show that at the centre of the
great religious faiths of Asiatic origin is the idea of a
higher will that is felt in its relation to man’s ordinary
will or expansive desires as a power of vital control. The
recognition of this will, however conceived — whether
one say with Christ, “Thy will be done,” or with
Buddha, “Self is the lord of self; who else can be the
lord?” — is the source of awe and humility. The sub¬
mission to this higher will is in its consummation peace.
At first sight Confucius seems very unlike other great
Asiatic teachers. His interests, as I have already said,
are humanistic rather than religious. The points of
contact between his doctrine and that of Aristotle, the
most important Occidental humanist, are numerous and
striking. One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is
such a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of
normal human experience, this wisdom is, on the reli¬
gious level, found in Buddha and Christ and, on the hu¬
manistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These teach¬
ers may be regarded both in themselves and in their
influence as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual
history of mankind. Not only the experience of the
world since their time, but much of its previous experi¬
ence may be properly associated with them.2 One may

1 The tracing of the so-called “chain of dependent origination. ”

2 Of Confucius, for example, the late Professor Chavannes of
the College de France says: “He was, as it were, five hundred years
before our era, the national conscience which gave precision and
corroboration to the profound ideas of which the classic books
of remote antiquity reveal to us the first outlines. ... He went
164 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

note as an interesting analogy that just as Saint Thomas

Aquinas sought to combine the wisdom of Aristotle with
that of Christ in his Sum of Theology, so about the same
time Chu Hsi mingled Buddhist with Confucian ele¬
ments in his great commentary.
Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in
their doctrine of the mean, one should hasten to add that
in their total attitude towards life they reveal the
characteristic difference between the European and the
Asiatic temper. The interests of Aristotle were far from
being exclusively humanistic. He is supposed to have
spent the happiest years of his life on the islands about
the iEgean, observing the fish and marine life and pre¬
paring the material for the biological treatises that won
the admiration of Darwin.1 It is perhaps not easy to
combine such a far-ranging intellectual curiosity as that
of Aristotle with the humility so emphasized by Confu¬
cius and other Oriental teachers. Aristotle has had an
influence great almost beyond reckoning, not merely on
Christian, but on Jewish and Mohammedan religious
thought; and yet one would feel something subtly incon-

about proclaiming the necessity of conforming to the moral idea

that China had slowly conceived in the course of the centuries;
the men of his time refused to obey him because they found it too
difficult to give up their comforts or their interests; they felt,
nevertheless, that his voice had a more than human authority;
they were moved and stirred to the depths of their being when
they were touched by the potent spirit coming from the distant
past which summoned up in them the truths glimpsed by their
fathers.” Quelques Idees morales des Chinois (lecture originally
given at the Sorbonne and published in Bulletin de la Socitte
autour du Monde, Janvier-Mai, 1918, pp. 47 ff.).
1 See article on Aristotle by D. W. Thompson in The Legacy of
Greece, p. 144.
 EUROPE AND ASIA 165

gruous in a temple to Aristotle. One does not need to be

a Confucian to feel that a temple to Confucius would not
be similarly incongruous. He was not, like Aristotle, a
master of them that know, but a master of them that
will. He was strong at the point where every man knows
in the secret of his heart that he is weak. The decorum
or principle of inner control that he would impose
upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of will.
He is no obscurantist, yet the role of reason in its rela¬
tion to will is, as he views it, secondary and instru¬
mental. If we turn from Aristotle to Socrates, whose
interests were, like those of Confucius, almost exclu¬
sively ethical, a similar contrast between the Oriental
and Occidental temper appears. The Socratic con¬
ception of virtue encourages a primary emphasis on
mind. Moreover, the Occident, having emancipated it¬
self from the Oriental assertion of the primacy of will in
its Christian form, has been devoting itself more and
more since the Renaissance, not to the Socratic thesis
that knowledge is virtue, but to the Baconian thesis that
knowledge is power.
Few would deny that humility has decreased with the
decline of traditional religion. The very word humility,
as M. Faguet remarks, may in a not distant future be
relegated to the dictionary of archaisms. The word, so
far as it survives at all, is often used incorrectly.1 It is
sometimes employed, for example, to describe the defer¬
ence that the man of science should display towards the
mystery and infinitude of nature, or again as a synonym

1 Hume has a discussion of humility in animals! (Treatise oj

Human Nature, Book n, Part i, Sect, xii.)
166 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

for the modesty or even, it may be, meanness of spirit

that a man shows in comparing himself to other men.
It is well that one should not be puffed up in one’s deal¬
ings with either nature or other men, but humility be¬
longs to another and, as Pascal insists, supernatural
order. The assertion of Burke that humility thus under¬
stood is the root of all the other virtues involves first
principles and so is not subject to mediation or com¬
promise. It must either be accepted as true or rejected
as false. If any one accepts the assertion as true (as I
myself do), the question then arises why humility has
suffered such an eclipse in the Occident. The obvious
reply is that it has been associated in the past with cer¬
tain doctrines, notably the doctrine of the Fall and that
of divine grace, and that these doctrines have tended to
be undermined by the growth of the critical spirit. The
individual has refused more and more to submit to the
outer authority, whether that of Revelation or of the
Church, from which these doctrines derived their ulti¬
mate sanction; and his humility has declined, one is
tempted to say, in almost exact ratio to his growth in
self-reliance. If any one wishes to be a true modem, if
he refuses in other words to submit to authority merely
as such, he is confronted with a serious problem: it is
plainly not easy to be at once humble and self-reliant.
The very doctrine of self-reliance has, from the point of
view of humility, a singularly clouded record in the Occi¬
dent, and that from the time of the ancient Greeks to
the present day. No one would ever associate humility
with the Cynics who were among the first to proclaim
self-reliance (<autarkeia). The Stoics again favored
 EUROPE AND ASIA 167

self-reliance. According to Pascal, they were guilty of

“ diabolical pride” in their first assumptions. Even
though this phrase be too strong, especially as applied
to certain Stoics, e.g., Marcus Aurelius, it is hardly pos¬
sible to cite the Stoics in general as examples of meek¬
ness and lowliness of spirit.
If one comes to modern apostles of self-reliance, one
thinks first of all perhaps of Rousseau and his defence of
the doctrine in “Emile.” As to the degree of his humil¬
ity, one should be sufficiently enlightened by the first
page of the “Confessions.” Nor can it be maintained
that Emerson, the chief American champion of self-
reliance, is conspicuously humble.1
If we are to grasp the problem involved in the attempt
to be at once humble and self-reliant, we need to go back
to the ancient individualism that Rousseau and Emer¬
son in some respects revive and seek to get at the causes
of its final failure. The Stoic bases his optimism prima¬
rily, we soon discover, not, like Rousseau, on faith in his
instincts, but on faith in reason. To know the right
thing is about tantamount to doing it. Reason and will
thus tend to become identical. The Stoics themselves
conceived that in this matter they were simply following
in the footsteps of Socrates. The whole question is, as a
matter of fact, closely allied to the Platonic and Socratic
identification of knowledge and virtue; and this again
brings up the great point at issue between European and
Asiatic as to the relation of intellect and will. The chief

1 Mr. Brownell goes so far as to say that it would be impossible

to have less humility than Emerson {American Prose Masters,
p. 176).
168 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

religious teachers of Asia have, I have already said, as¬

serted in some form or other a higher will to which man
must submit in his natural self (and in Asiatic psychol¬
ogy intellect belongs to the natural self), if he is to enter
the pathway of peace. A comparison between Plato and
Buddha might help to elucidate this contrast between
East and West. Buddha like Plato sought to bring to¬
gether philosophy and religion; but even so he put far
less emphasis on the role of mind than Plato. The list of
“unthinkables” he drew up is almost equivalent to a
denial that life can in any deep sense of the word be
known at all. It cannot be maintained that the mind
(mano) of the Buddhist coincides exactly with the
Platonic mind (nous). It is, nevertheless, significant
that “mind” is for the Buddhist an organ of the flux,
whereas Plato exalts “mind” to the first place. It is a
less grievous error, according to Buddha, to look on one’s
body as permanent than to harbor a similar conceit
about one’s “mind.” A Buddhist might regard as the
underlying error of Occidental philosophy the tendency
that goes at least as far back as Parmenides to identify
thought with being.1 Why should so chimerical a crea¬
ture as man identify either thought or any other part of
himself with being? As Pindar says, “What are we,
what are we not? Man is but the dream of a shadow.”
Pindar apparently feared lest he might flatter unduly
man’s conceit of his own permanence if he had called
him even the shadow of a dream. To suppose that one
can transcend the element of impermanence, whether in
oneself or the outer world, merely through reason in any
1 See Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, i, p. 117.
 EUROPE AND ASIA 169

sense of the word, is to forget that “illusion is an integral

part of reality.” The person who confides unduly in
“reason” is also prone to set up some static “absolute”;
while those who seek to get rid of the absolute in favor
of flux and relativity tend at the same time to get rid of
standards. Both absolutists and relativists are guilty of
an intellectual sophistication of the facts, inasmuch as
in life as it is actually experienced, unity and multiplicity
are indissolubly blended.
The Buddhist (to return to our comparison of East
and West) seems at first sight to belong with the apos¬
tles of the flux. As a matter of fact, comparisons have
been made between Buddha and Bergson on the ground
that they are both “philosophers of becoming.” We
are justified on other grounds than that of their dis¬
tance in time and space in finding the collocation of
these names startling. Bergson positively revels in
change and naturalistic expansiveness and avows ex¬
plicitly, as we have seen, that his philosophy of elan vital
leads straight to imperialism. Buddha for his part is at
least as much concerned as Plato with escaping from the
flux and, so far from being imperialistic, is turned, to the
exclusion of everything else, towards what in his own
phrase makes for “tranquillity, knowledge, supreme wis¬
dom, and Nirvana.” This combination of a philosophy
of the flux with religious peace and humility is unlike
anything we have seen in the Occident and should be a
warning that in dealing with Buddha we need to proceed
with extreme circumspection. One may at least form
some conjecture as to the point at which Buddha di¬
verges from philosophers in the Western tradition. As a
170 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

thoroughgoing individualist, he is forced to grapple with

the problem of the One and the Many; if there is no
principle of unity in things with which to measure the
manifoldness and change, the individual is left without
standards and so falls necessarily into an anarchical im¬
pressionism. Now Buddha like a true Asiatic discovers
this unifying principle, not in intellect, but in will.
Though he assigns an important role to intellect, since
he is himself highly analytical, this role is after all sec¬
ondary and instrumental. Any attempt to deal with life
directly in terms of the intellect involves in some form
the attempt to put the ocean in a cup. Life reveals its
secret, he seems to say, only to the man who acts; and of
all forms of action the most difficult is inner action. The
first step in understanding not merely Buddha but
Christ is to see that they were both primarily men of ac¬
tion in the sense in which the Asiatic in his great mo¬
ments has understood action. Buddha is for reducing
theory to a minimum. The least speculative of our Wes¬
tern philosophers would probably have seemed to him
still far too speculative. He has succeeded in compress¬
ing the wisdom of the ages into a sentence: “To refrain
from all evil, to achieve the good, to purify one’s own
heart, this is the teaching of the Awakened.” 1 The
Buddhist commentary is interesting: When you repeat
the words, they seem to mean nothing, but when you try
to put them into practice, you find they mean every¬
thing.
Some of the difficulties inherent in any attempt to
treat the problem of the One and the Many primarily as
1 Eight words in the Pali original. See Dhammapada, v. 186.
 EUROPE AND ASIA 171

a problem of knowledge appear in the Platonic theory

of ideas. It is a matter of positive perception that there
is an element of oneness in all the particular objects that
belong to some class. There is, for example, an element
of oneness in all particular horses; and this oneness is
in Platonic parlance the idea or heavenly archetype of
the horse. Unfortunately, if one does not get beyond
this stage, the oneness remains a mere abstraction and
finally a mere word—and human nature craves the con¬
crete. The attempt to deal intellectually with the rela¬
tion of the unity to the manifoldness would seem to lead
to difficulties of the kind Plato has himself set forth in
the second part of his “Parmenides.” This problem as
to how to escape from mere abstraction appears in the
case of the chief idea of all — that of the good or of God
which also coincides with what is most exalted in man.
The word that stands for the idea of the good is the word
par excellence, the logos. One can follow to some ex¬
tent the process by which the Greek conception of the
logos was transmitted through intermediaries like Philo
Judaeus to the author of the Fourth Gospel. The speci¬
fically Asiatic element in the Christian solution of the
problem of the logos is the subordination, either implicit
or explicit, of the divine reason to the divine will. By
an act of this will, the gap between a wisdom that is ab¬
stract and general and the individual and particular is
bridged over at last; the Word is made flesh. The human
craving for the concrete is satisfied at the essential point.
The truth of the incarnation, to put the matter on purely
psychological grounds, is one that we have all experi¬
enced in a less superlative form: the final reply to all the
172 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

doubts that torment the human heart is not some theory

of conduct, however perfect, but the man of character.
Pontius Pilate spoke as a European when he inquired,
“What is truth?” On another occasion Christ gave the
Asiatic reply: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
In this emphasis on personality Christianity is confirmed
by the most positive observation. Wherein Christianity
transcends positive observation is in its tremendous pro¬
jection of personality, divine and human, into the region
of the infinite and the eternal.
I have of course in this whole discussion been simpli¬
fying a subject of immense difficulty and complexity at
the risk of doing injustice to Plato and the other mem¬
bers of the Socratic group. I am not unaware of the al¬
most inexhaustible store of wisdom in Plato. He must
still be one of the chief aids of those who wish to achieve
religious insight without an undue sacrifice of the criti¬
cal spirit. Yet it is difficult not to have certain doubts
about the Platonic and Socratic identification of knowl¬
edge and virtue. This identification is not superficial
precisely — men like Plato and Socrates are never super¬
ficial. Knowledge may conceivably become so perfect
that to act contrary to it would be like putting one's
hand into the fire. Moreover, when one has struggled
out of any maze of error, it will always seem in the retro¬
spect that the error was due even less to a defect of will
than to ignorance. Nevertheless, the Socratic thesis runs
counter in certain respects to universal experience. Not
only do people do what they know to be wrong, but they
often take a perverse satisfaction in doing it, as Ovid,1
1 “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.” “Nitimur in
vetitum semper, cupimusque negata.”
 EUROPE AND ASIA 173
anticipating the delectatio morosa of the theologians, was
one of the first to point out. Our problem, let us remind
ourselves, is to be at once self-reliant and humble. But
it will not be found easy to preserve humility and at the
same time to grant, after the fashion of Greek philoso¬
phy, the primacy to mind. All other forms of pride are
as nothing compared with the pride of intellect; and the
pride of intellect itself is most manifest in the attempt to
know good and evil. So much psychological truth is, it
would seem, to be found in the myth of the Fall.
Perhaps my meaning may be best elucidated by study¬
ing ,the Socratic movement in its fruits (and in this
movement I include the Platonic and in no small degree
the Aristotelian influence). Since Plato worked prima¬
rily on the religious level, one would have expected the
fruits of religion to appear in the Platonic Academy.
The Academy produced a number of distinguished in¬
tellectuals who inclined on the whole towards scepti¬
cism. It is, of course, possible to build up faith on a
sceptical basis as Socrates himself seems to have done;
but it can scarcely be maintained that the successors of
Plato in the Academy achieved either this or any other
type of faith. In any case the contrast is striking be¬
tween the Academy and the Order founded by Buddha.
Any one who studies the old records can acquire the con¬
viction that this Order contained many men of faith,
men who brought forth the very fruits of the spirit that
have been so admirably defined by Saint Paul, and so
deserve to be regarded as saints.
The truth is that the Greeks, on their emancipation
from traditional standards, slipped rather rapidly into
174 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

mere rationalism, and mere rationalism, whether in the

Stoical or Epicurean form, showed its usual inability to
control the expansive lusts of the human heart. Stoicism
sought to achieve a principle of union among men that
would have universal validity; it sought, in other words,
to do the work of a religion. It saw this universal prin¬
ciple in reason, and proclaimed at the same time that
to live according to reason was to live according to
nature. Man’s reason, the Stoic assumed, could prevail
unaided over his outer impressions and expansive de¬
sires. That important aspects, not merely of the So-
cratic, but of the Platonic and Aristotelian teaching,
tended to be obscured in later Graeco-Roman thought
is beyond question. At the same time, in assuming that
right will follows upon right knowledge, the Stoic, as I
have already said, conceived that he was a true Socratic;
if herein he missed the true Socratic spirit, one is forced
to conclude that this spirit was rather easy to miss.
Stoicism was in general a paradoxical movement; it af¬
firmed that the material order alone is real and then put
supreme emphasis on a “virtue” that the material order
does not give. In other words it sought to attain and to
some extent actually did attain on monistic postulates
the fruits that are normally associated with a genuinely
dualistic philosophy. In spite of its many merits and
partial successes, Stoicism was on the whole a failure;
and the same must be said of the whole Greek attempt
to deal critically with the problem of conduct, to work
out, in other words, a sound type of individualism. This
failure of Greek philosophy was due, I have suggested,
to the fact that it is not quite adequate in its treatment
 EUROPE AND ASIA 175

of the closely allied problems of the imagination and the

higher or ethical will. Any one who believes that “ illu¬
sion is an integral part of reality,” and who also holds
with the Asiatic that, if humility is to be secured, will
must take precedence of mind, is forced to conclude that
the danger of Greek philosophy was from the start a
certain obstinate intellectualism.
Christianity supplied what was lacking in Greek phi¬
losophy. It set up doctrines that humbled reason and
at the same time it created symbols that controlled
man’s imagination and through the imagination his will.
On the basis supplied by this Oriental faith, it was
possible to reconstruct European civilization after the
Graeco-Roman collapse and in the midst of the havoc of
the barbarian invasions. But this work of regeneration
was accomplished in no small degree at the expense of
the critical spirit. It resulted in the triumph of an au¬
thority “anterior, exterior, and superior” to the indi¬
vidual. If the Greek confidence in reason proved in some
respects fallacious, there are also, it must be admitted,
dangers and difficulties in the worship of will in all its
forms. On the danger of will-worship in its Nietzschean
form it is scarcely necessary to dilate. But even the
Oriental cult of the ethical will is beset with pitfalls.
The Hindu ascetic who lies on a bed of spikes or holds
his arm in the air until it withers away is exercising will
in the Oriental sense, but he can scarcely be said to be
exercising it intelligently. When the higher will again
is conceived as a divine will that has been revealed once
for all in words of literal and plenary inspiration, one has
the drawbacks and difficulties that are most manifest,
176 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

perhaps, in Mohammedanism. The effect is to force hu¬

man life into a rigid and definitive mould. It is not safe
to overlook the element of flux and relativity in favor of
absolute will any more than it is to overlook it in favor
of absolute reason. The Mohammedan has his own way
of forgetting that illusion is an integral part of reality.
Moreover, when will is conceived as absolute and irre¬
sponsible and at the same time as transcendant, the in¬
dividual is made humble, indeed, but he is so far from
being made self-reliant that he is prone to fall into the
Oriental form of fatalism.
We need to consider in the interests of our present sub¬
ject not merely the difficulties of the Oriental worship of
will in general, but of this worship as practised by Chris¬
tians in particular — above all, the form that appears in
the doctrine of grace. Saint Augustine, it is scarcely
necessary to say, did more than any other one man to
develop the Pauline teaching on this subject; and Saint
Augustine was destined, here as elsewhere, to exercise an
influence great almost beyond reckoning on mediaeval
and later Christianity. Now Saint Augustine is con¬
sidered with some truth the Christian Plato. The su¬
preme contrast for him as for Plato is that between fluxa
et caduca, on the one hand, and, on the other, certa et
ceterna. A further comparison of the two men will, how¬
ever, reveal a profound shifting of emphasis as regards
the relative importance of intellect and will. Saint Au¬
gustine’s desire, as he tells us, is to know only two things
— God and the soul. (Deum et animam scire cupio. Ni-
hilne plus? nihil omnino.) God is envisaged primarily,
not as mind, but as will. The soul of man is also reduced
 EUROPE AND ASIA 177

in its essential aspect to will (nihil aliud habeo quam

voluntatem). The human will is, however, hopelessly
alienated from the divine will by the Fall. The gap be¬
tween the two can be traversed only by a miracle of
grace, a miracle that itself depends on the miracle of the
redemption. Man not only needs the mediation of Christ
if his will is to be brought into harmony with the divine
will, but also of the Church and the Sacraments and the
elaborate priestly hierarchy that is required to adminis¬
ter them. So far from right will following upon right
knowledge, as Plato thought, fallen man delights in evil
for its own sake. What was so delicious upon his tongue,
says Saint Augustine in speaking of the pears that he
stole when a boy, was not the flavor of the pears them¬
selves, but of his sin. Moreover, this perversity of will
sprang originally from the intellect and its pride: man
wished to be as a God, knowing good and evil. The in¬
tellect was thus not only put in its proper subordinate
place, but brought under positive suspicion. The way
was opened for obscurantism. Man was humbled and his
will regenerated, but more or less, as I have said, at the
expense of the critical spirit. The historical explanation
of this uncritical element in Christianity is no doubt
that, more than most other doctrines, it worked its way
up from the bottom of society towards the top. At all
events, men were asked to believe a thing because it was
absurd,1 and ignorance was declared to be the mother of
devotion. The Church was enabled to carry on all the

1 The phrase Credo quia absurdum does not actually occur in

the famous fifth chapter of Tertullian’s De Came Christi, but
sums up correctly the total sense of the chapter.
178 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

more effectively its work of regeneration, it might be

argued, from the fact that men had ceased to be self-
reliant and above all had ceased like the Socratic Greek to
rely on the intellect. “Is righteousness, then, the daugh¬
ter of ignorance? ” Rousseau inquires. “Are science and
virtue incompatible?” The history of the Occident, it
must be confessed, raises some doubt on this point. The
so-called Dark Ages, says Lord Acton with some exag¬
geration, were spiritually full of light.1 On the other hand,
the intellectually “ enlightened ” eighteenth century was,
as Burke complains, spiritually full of darkness.
The beginnings of “ Enlightenment ” in the eighteenth-
century sense go back to the Middle Ages themselves —
at least as far back as the thirteenth century. A signifi¬
cant coincidence is that between this incipient emanci¬
pation of intellect and the founding of the Inquisition.
The real emancipation of intellect got fairly under way
with the Renaissance. Men were becoming self-reliant
again and in almost the same measure were losing hu¬
mility. They were inclining once more, like the ancient
Greeks, to look on life primarily as a problem of knowl¬
edge. Only the knowledge that they sought increasingly

1 “Then followed the ages which are not unjustly called the
Dark Ages, in which were laid the foundations of all the happiness
that has been since enjoyed, and of all the greatness that has been
achieved by men. ... It was not an age of conspicuous saints,
but sanctity was at no time so general. The holy men of the first
centuries shine with an intense brilliancy from the midst of the
surrounding corruption. Legions of saints — individually for the
most part obscure, because of the atmosphere of light around
them — throng the five illiterate centuries, from the close of the
great dogmatic controversies to the rise of a new theology and
the commencement of new interests with Hildebrand, Anselm,
and Bernard.” (History of Freedom, p. 200.)
 EUROPE AND ASIA 179

was not the ethical knowledge at which Socrates aimed,

but knowledge of the natural order. Ethical knowledge
seemed to have become indissolubly associated with in¬
comprehensible dogmas. An acute conflict was inevi¬
table, often in the heart of the same individual, between
the old humility and the new spirit of intellectual in¬
quiry. Let us consider the case of Pascal, an eminent
scientific investigator and also a religious writer at once
profound and poignant. He recommends a full applica¬
tion of the critical and experimental spirit to the natural
order, but in all that transcends the natural order he
would have the critical spirit abdicate before a twofold
outer authority — that of Revelation and the Church.1
Spiritual truth he identifies with dogmas that are most
repugnant to reason — for example, infant damnation.2
To be sure, all the nobility of man is in reason, but this
nobility is not in itself of much avail, inasmuch as rea¬
son is the sport and plaything of the imagination. Here,
I have already noted, is a supreme clash between Chris¬
tian psychology and that of the Stoic, who holds that it
is possible for reason to triumph over the imagination.
If reason is thus the plaything of the imagination,
either the Stoical or any other form of self-reliance is
vain. Man’s only hope is in arbitrary will in the form of
divine grace. To the sudden illumination of grace Pascal
gives the name “heart.” “The heart has reasons of
which the reason knows nothing.” Will in the form of
grace is thus at odds with reason which is in turn at odds
with imagination; whereas, if one is to be a sound indi-

1 See his Fragment d’un Traits du vide.

2 Pensees, 434.
180 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

vidualist, it may be that reason and imagination need to

cooperate in the service of the power in man that I have
defined as the ethical will.
It is not to be inferred from what I have said that
Pascal has ceased to have value for the individualist.
Many of the arguments that he urges in favor of humil¬
ity and against the pride of intellect are still valid for
the simple reason that they are not dogmatic, but keenly
psychological. Why should man be proud, seeing that
he is, as Pascal shows, caught between two infinites, one
of smallness and one of magnitude, and is equally unable
to grasp either, so that the essence of things eludes him
and must ever elude him. If at any time he thinks he has
found a firm foundation on which to rear a tower that
will reach even to the infinite, this foundation suddenly
fails him and “the earth yawns open even to the abyss.”
Lacking some such firm foundation, man has no assur¬
ance that his knowledge is real knowledge or anything
more than a dream within a dream. But there is some¬
thing still more humbling to man than his ignorance, and
that is the inability of unaided reason to control effec¬
tively his outer impressions and expansive desires. Surely
realistic observation is here on the side of Pascal rather
than of the Stoics. Man’s peculiar blindness arises from
the fact that he does not wish to be limited in his domi¬
nant desire, whatever that desire may be. He wishes to
be free to pursue his folly, as Erasmus would say, and
finally discovers the limits established in the nature of
things by the somewhat painful process of colliding with
them. This human proclivity is so universal, and yet
the punishment visited upon it is so harsh, that one’s
 EUROPE AND ASIA 181
final impression is that of a certain treachery in life it¬
self. Under the circumstances one does not need to be a
Jansenist, or even perhaps a Christian, to see certain
merits in the older plan of working out one’s salvation in
fear and trembling as compared with our modern plan
of “ living dangerously,” or, what amounts to the same
thing, of turning away from awe and humility in favor
of an endless reaching out of wonder and curiosity.
Man’s expansive conceit, as the Greek saw, produces
insolent excess (hybris) and this begets blindness (ate)
which in turn brings on Nemesis. Expansive conceit
tempered by Nemesis — this is a definition of an es¬
sential aspect of human nature that finds considerable
support in the facts of history. Man never rushes for¬
ward so confidently, it would sometimes seem, as when
he is on the very brink of the abyss. The malady of
Europe on the eve of the Great War was not so much
ignorance as blindness in the Greek sense. A clear per¬
ception of the workings of Nemesis is what gives distinc¬
tion to the great Greek poets, even to Euripides, the
least ethical of them:

Gold and Fair-fortune, with Power the victorious

Harnessed beside them, in folly vainglorious
Hurry man to his doom:
Law he outpaceth, and lawlessness lasheth
To speed; nor his heart doth incline
To take heed to the end — lo, his car sudden-crasheth
Shattered in gloom!1

A consideration of man’s ignorance and blindness as

they are revealed on a vast scale in the facts of history
1 The Madness of Hercules, 744 ff., translated by A. S. Way.
182 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

gives a positive basis to humility. One comes to feel that

the great religious teachers may be right after all in their
insistence that man needs to subordinate himself to some
higher will; above all that it is needful that his intellect
should recognize some such control. The peril that re¬
sults from intellectual unrestraint (libido sciendi) is per¬
haps the most fundamental of all. “What must be the
face-to-face antagonist,” asks Cardinal Newman, “by
which to withstand and baffle . .. the all-corroding, all¬
dissolving energy of the intellect?” Cardinal Newman
has at all events asked the essential question, whatever
one may think of his own solution of it. Unfortunately,
in getting rid of the pride of intellect the Christian has
often tended to get rid of the intellect itself or at least
to depreciate it unduly.1 Hence the obscurantist vein
that I have already noted in Christianity. To use the
intellect to the utmost and at the same time to keep it in
its proper subordinate place is a task that seems thus far
to have been beyond the capacity of Occidental man.
The warfare between a reason that presumes unduly
and a faith that has got itself more or less identified with
credulity may turn out to be the true disease of Western
culture from the Greeks to the present day. This strife
between the head and the heart has left its marks even
on the forms of language. Thus, to take a few examples,

1 One may illustrate from Cardinal Newman himself: “What is

intellect itself,” he asks, “but a fruit of the Fall, not found in
paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the ut¬
most but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible
with the regenerate mind? . . . Reason is God’s gift, and so are
passions. . . . Eve was tempted to follow passion and reason, and
she fell.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, v, p. 112.)
 EUROPE AND ASIA 183
to be a person of “strong mind” (esprit fort) was about
equivalent in older French usage to being an atheist; to
be “blessed,” on the other hand, was to be a “block¬
head” (benet, from benedidus). An “innocent,” again, is
an idiot, in contradistinction, no doubt, to the person
who is said to be as “bright as the devil.” The English
“silly” is the same word etymologically as the German
“holy” (selig).
When Rousseau said that his heart and his head did
not seem to belong to the same individual, he simply
introduced a new and, as I shall try to show presently,
worse form of obscurantism. In its Rousseauistic form
the conflict between head and heart has continued to
our own day. Philosophers, who are under no suspicion
of being Christians, still assume that there is a more or
less complete opposition between intellect and intuition,
so that to be vital in the Bergsonian sense is about the
same as being anti-intellectual.1
The more significant contrast, however, still remains
that between the partisan of grace and the man who, in
some form or other, asserts the primacy of mind. It can
be shown that the doctrine of grace was the keystone of
the whole edifice of European society in its mediaeval
form. It is not as clear as one might wish that European
civilization can survive the collapse of this doctrine.
In any case the problem for the individualist who be¬
lieves that it is not enough to be self-reliant, but that one
should also be humble, is to discover some equivalent for
grace. It is here that we may find it profitable to take

1 “L’intelligence est caract6ris6e par une incomprehension

naturelle de la Vie.” (Bergson, Evolution creatrice, p. 179.)
184 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

into account the total experience of Asia. While no sen¬

sible person would claim for the Far East a general ethi¬
cal superiority over the West, the Far East has at least
enjoyed a comparative immunity from that great dis¬
ease of Occidental culture — the warfare between reason
and faith. Buddha and Confucius both managed to com¬
bine humility with self-reliance and a cultivation of the
critical spirit. They may, therefore, be of help to those
who wish to restore to their lives on modern lines the
element for which Asia has stood in the past, who be¬
lieve that without some such restoration the Occident
is in danger of going mad with the lust of speed and
power. In describing the element of peace as the Asiatic
element, I do not mean to set up any geographic or
other fatalism. China, for example, may under pressure
from the Occident have an industrial revolution (Han¬
kow is already taking on the aspect of an Oriental
Pittsburgh) and this revolution is likely to be accom¬
panied by a more or less rapid crumbling of her tradi¬
tional ethos with the attendant danger of a lapse into
sheer moral chaos. The Occident, on the other hand,
may not only reaffirm the truths of the ethical will, but
may reaffirm these truths in some appropriately modem
way and with an emphasis distinctly different from any¬
thing that has been seen in the Orient. In dealing with
this topic we can best take our point of departure from
the fact that all who profess to be modem are, in some
sense or other of the word, liberals. If there has been any
vital omission in the passage from old to new, this omis¬
sion is likely to be most visible in one’s definition of
liberty. Lord Acton was planning to begin his “History
 EUROPE AND ASIA 185

of Liberty ” with a hundred such definitions. It is not

certain that any one of the hundred would exactly have
met our present requirement, which is to secure in
some thoroughly critical fashion what I have termed the
centripetal element in liberty. If one fails in this task,
one ceases to be a complete modern and becomes a mere
modernist. The modernist is wont to assume that the
really important conflict is that between liberals, on the
one hand, and reactionaries, on the other; a more im¬
portant conflict, however, may turn out to be that be¬
tween true and false liberals.
 CHAPTER VI
TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS

The choice to which the modern man will finally be re¬

duced, it has been said, is that of being a Bolshevist or a
Jesuit. In that case (assuming that by Jesuit is meant
the ultramontane Catholic) there does not seem to be
much room for hesitation. Ultramontane Catholicism
does not, like Bolshevism, strike at the very root of
civilization. In fact, under certain conditions that are
already partly in sight, the Catholic Church may per¬
haps be the only institution left in the Occident that can
be counted on to uphold civilized standards. It may also
be possible, however, to be a thoroughgoing modern and
at the same time civilized. Before considering this pos¬
sibility more in detail, it will be helpful to trace the proc¬
ess by which the present situation has grown up, a situ¬
ation that seems, at least superficially, to impose the
extreme choice I have just mentioned.
In tracing this process everything will be found to
hinge ultimately on the idea of liberty in its relation to
the principle of control. Under the old order, spiritual
control, I have said, had its final source and sanction in
the doctrine of grace. We need, therefore, to follow to
some extent the fortunes of this doctrine as affected by
the progressive emancipation, since the Renaissance, of
the individual from outer authority and by the con¬
comitant growth of naturalistic tendencies. Certain
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 187

groups within the Church itself, notably the Jansenists,

sought to revive, in opposition to the incipient natural¬
istic movement, the doctrine of grace in its full Augus-
tinian rigor. This doctrine originally marked the veiy
apex of Christian otherworldliness, wThereas, at the time
of the Jansenist revival, men were turning more and
more resolutely to this world. Saint-Evremond esti¬
mates that there were not ten men in France who could
satisfy the Jansenist test of holiness. All other French¬
men the Jansenists seemed to consign to outer darkness.
In standing for a more moderate interpretation of grace
the Catholic Church simply showed its good sense. What
was more dubious was its tendency to substitute for the
inner dependence of man on God that the Jansenist de¬
sired, his outer dependence on the priest. My present
subject does not require me to consider the truth of the
charge that the Church, in the effort to induce the indi¬
vidual to submit to its authority, dissimulated unduly
the austerity of Christian doctrine; that, in short, it gave
countenance to a casuistical relaxation, the upshot of
which was, in Bossuet’s phrase, to put “ cushions under
the elbows of sinners.” All I need to point out here is
that the reply of the Church to individualistic tenden¬
cies of every kind has been an ever-increasing papal
centralization. It may be said of the ultramontane
Catholic, as of the extreme partisan of grace, though in a
very different sense, that he has simply repudiated self-
reliance.
If one wishes to understand the types of individualism
to which ultramontane Catholicism is such an uncom¬
promising answer, one needs to study also the doctrine
188 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

of grace in its relation to the Protestant Reformation.

Both Luther and Calvin, it is scarcely necessary to say,
put prime emphasis on this doctrine, though not quite
the same emphasis. Now the Reformation is, by its
underlying postulates, a critical movement; it sought to
recover the authentic Christian doctrine that seemed to
it to have been perverted by the Roman theocracy. It
urged the individual to take a critical attitude towards
this theocracy, or, what amounts to the same thing, it
urged him to exercise the right of private judgment,
which is only another way of encouraging him to be self-
dependent and self-reliant. But the Protestant was in¬
volved in peculiar difficulties as soon as he set out to be
self-reliant and at the same time to defend the doctrine
of grace; for the doctrine, in the Pauline and Augustinian
form that a Luther and a Calvin sought to revive, was
the very negation of self-reliance; it was designed to
make man feel his utter and helpless dependence on the
divine will. If a man is to be self-reliant, two things, it
should seem, are necessary: he must have sound stand¬
ards and must then be free to act on them. To secure
the standards he needs intellect and to act on them he
needs will. Luther, for his part, wishes to be an individu¬
alist and at the same time to follow the early Christian
obscurantists in flouting the intellect and denying the
freedom of the will. Since the “covenant of work” was
abrogated by the Fall, man’s will is in helpless bondage
to sin,1 so that God alone is capable of any salutary
working; man’s only hope, therefore, is in the covenant
of grace and the scheme of redemption. To hold any
1 See Luther's De servo arbitrio (1526).
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 189

other view is subversive of humility. Luthers extreme

hostility to work is, of course, due also to the identifica¬
tion of work with the performance of rites and cere¬
monies, especially in connection with penance (satis-
factio opens).
Luther and the other reformers had by their separa¬
tion from the Church cut themselves off more or less
from the traditional symbols by which the truths of
humility and of the higher will were interpreted to the
imagination; so that, in their defence of these truths,
they were thrown back, almost in spite of themselves, on
reason. Erasmus with his fine psychological tact felt in
the Reformation, almost from the outset, an element of
intellectual presumption. If the impression that Calvin
produces in his preaching of man's utter dependence on
the divine will is not precisely that of humility, one sus¬
pects that the explanation is that he presumes to know
too much about that will. Jonathan Edwards, again, in
his anxiety to justify rationally God's absolute and ar¬
bitrary will, finally seems to have insinuated himself as a
fourth into the council chamber of the Trinity.
It is fair to say that the difficulty that confronted a
Calvin and an Edwards and has led to at least a partial
breakdown of Protestantism is no slight one: it must
confront in some measure any one who seeks to combine
a free play of the critical spirit with the acceptance of
traditional Christianity. If one starts, as the traditional
Christian has been wont to start, with the hypothesis of
an omnipotent God with “ foreknowledge absolute," the
question almost inevitably arises why such a being has
permitted evil at all. Furthermore, strict logic would
190 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

seem to impose the conclusion that this being has

doomed a multitude of his creatures to everlasting tor¬
ments simply for doing what, in the last analysis, he
himself has willed.1 In short, the critical crux at the
heart of historical Christianity is how to reconcile God’s
omnipotence and omniscience with his justice and
mercy. The portion of the world that piques itself on its
modernity has simply turned its back on this theological
nightmare. Unfortunately, in getting rid of the night¬
mare, it has also tended to get rid of the inner life, of the
truth, namely, that man needs in his natural self (which
includes the intellect) to look up to some higher will in
awe and humility. With the decline of the inner life,
there has been a weakening of control over the expansive
lusts of the natural man — whether the lust of knowledge
or the lust of sensation or the lust of power.
In the development I have been following, the idea of
work in the spiritual sense is either very much subordi¬
nated to grace or else is more or less identified with the
performance of rites and ceremonies.2 We need to trace
at this point the rise of a very different doctrine of work.
The last scholastics, notably Duns Scotus, inclined to
divorce religious truth from reason and to identify it
with absolute, arbitrary will and unintelligible theologi¬
cal mysteries. A man like Francis Bacon takes theo-
1 “Dieu non seulement a prevu la chute du premier homme et
en elle la ruine de toute sa poster!te, mais il l’a ainsi voulu.” (Cal¬
vin, Inst, chret., liv. hi, ch. xxm, par. 7.) Melancthon declares in
his Commentary on Epistle to Romans (1525) that “God works all
things. ... He is the author of the treason of Judas as well as
of the conversion of Paul.”
2 The Church was supposed to be able to work efficaciously in
this sense because of the grace that had been delegated to it.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 191

logians of this type at their word and, after a more or

less sincere obeisance to a spiritual truth that is im¬
measurably beyond man’s grasp, he turns an intellect
that is left without other occupation to a study of the
natural order. He aims to establish upon this order a
philosophy, not of vain words, but of works and fruits.
The Baconian conception of work can be followed down
through the utilitarian movement. It appears, for ex¬
ample, in an extreme form in Locke’s second “Treatise
of Government.” Work is practically identified by
Locke with physical effort and is made the sole legiti¬
mate source of property. Adam Smith tends to a very
similar conception of work in its relation to property.
In thus reducing the idea of work to its lowest terms, the
orthodox political economy opened the way for political
economy of the unorthodox type. Karl Marx was espe¬
cially influenced in his definition of work by Ricardo.
Why should not the man who, on the showing of the
orthodox political economists themselves, does the real
work, get all the reward? Why should he turn over such
a large part of this reward to that mere idler and para¬
site, the capitalist? Though the orthodox economist
makes work in an unduly restricted sense the source of
wealth, he does not, to do him justice, fall, like the Marx¬
ian, into the further fallacy of identifying work with
value. That, he insists, is largely determined by the law
of supply and demand and by competition. The ex¬
treme Marxian not only takes a purely quantitative
view of work, so much so that he tends, as has been said,
to put the work of a Raphael and that of a common sign
painter on the same level, but in evaluating the product
192 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

of work he aims to eliminate the competitive element.

Recent Marxians have come to take a somewhat less
quantitative view of work, but the fallacies that result
from a total or partial suppression of competition are
built into the very foundations of socialism.
One should note at this point that in their views as to
the nature of work there is much underlying agreement
between the Rousseauist and the Baconian. Rousseau
himself tends to reduce work to the lowest terms and to
identify it with manual labor. All who do not work in
this outward and visible sense are, it would seem, hang¬
ers-on and parasites and not worthy to live.1 The at¬
tempt to apply the utilitarian-sentimental conception of
work and at the same time to eliminate competition has
resulted in Russia in a ruthless despotism, on the one
hand, and in a degrading servitude, on the other.
A conception of work that means practically a return
to barbarism evidently suffers from some serious flaw.
The man who wishes to be at once modem and civilized
will not oppose to the Baconian or Rousseauistic one¬
sidedness a mere appeal to the past, but a more accurate
definition. Aristotle was, according to Bacon, the “vile
plaything of words.” As a matter of fact, the surest way
to become the vile plaything of words is, like both Bacon
and Rousseau, to look on visible and concrete objects as
“real” and on words, in contrast with these objects, as
unreal. Words, especially abstract words, have such an
important relation to reality because they control the

1 “Un rentier que l’Etat paie pour ne rien faire ne diff&re gu£re
& mes yeux d’un brigand qui vit aux dSpens des passants,” etc.,
Emile, Livre m.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 193

imagination which in turn determines action and so

“governs mankind.” The way to escape from the tyr¬
anny of words is not to dismiss them as unreal in favor
of objects of sense, but to submit them to a searching
Socratic dialectic. The only way, for instance, not to be
the dupe of the general term “work” is to divide or
“dichotomize” it Socratically and so become aware of
the different meanings of which it is susceptible. The
fallacies involved in a purely quantitative definition of
work are almost too gross to need refuting. As Mencius
remarked long ago, it is both proper and inevitable that
the man who works with his mind should hold sway over
the man who works only with his hands. As a result of
the concentrated mental effort of the gifted few, an
effort displayed either in invention or else in organiza¬
tion and management, the common laborer may to-day
enjoy comforts that were out of the reach even of the
opulent only two or three generations ago. If the laborer
wishes to add to these comforts or even to keep them, he
should not listen to the agitator who seeks to stir up his
envy of every form of superiority. He should be the
first to recognize that exceptional capacity should re¬
ceive exceptional rewards.
The laborer, to be sure, has a grievance: this griev¬
ance is that those who have been set over him have
concentrated so exclusively in their mental working on
the material order. The real problem is to subordinate
to some adequate end the enormous mass of machinery
of power and comfort that has been the fruit of working
of the utilitarian type; and here a specifically ethical
type of working is needful. Now this specifically ethical
194 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

working has been associated traditionally in the Occi¬

dent with the doctrine of grace; for man to substitute
his work for that of God seemed to be subversive of
humility. Yet thus to emphasize God’s working led, I
have tried to show, to an impossible theological di¬
lemma; so that men tended, in getting rid of the di¬
lemma, to get rid of the true work of the spirit in favor
of a merely Baconian working. The problem would
seem to be to recover the truths of grace in some individ¬
ualistic form. We may be aided in this task by turning
for a moment to the Far-Eastern teacher who com¬
bined humility with the ultimate degree of spiritual self-
reliance. The word karma (work) has come to have in
the Occident a sort of mystical glamour. But it is well
to remember that this word is employed by Buddha
himself in the most business-like fashion. The man who
wishes, he says, to be a carpenter must do the work of
a carpenter; the man who wishes to be a king must do
the work of a king; the man who wishes to be a saint
must do the work of a saint. One simply passes, as one
mounts in the scale, from an outer to an inner working.
The individual is to impose progressively his ethical will,
affirmed as an immediate fact of consciousness, upon his
outgoing desires. He is to perform this work of the spirit
with a view to his own happiness, or, what amounts to
the same thing in the eyes of the Buddhist, with a view
to his own peace. “By rousing himself,” says Buddha,
“by strenuousness, by restraint and control, the wise
man may make for himself an island which no flood can
overwhelm.” The supreme contrast in this faith is al¬
ways that between the spiritually strenuous person and
the spiritual idler.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 195
Though probably no other teacher of the past has
dealt with the idea of work so thoroughly as Buddha, the
Buddhist emphasis does not seem just what we need
to-day. Buddha was, like Christ, very otherworldly.
The work in which he was primarily interested was of
the type that leads to saintliness. It may show a lack
of imagination on my part, but I cannot imagine my
contemporaries in the role of saints. Perhaps no age
was ever more lacking in otherworldliness or showed a
greater incomprehension of religion. We have converted
Buddha into a sort of heavy-eyed pessimistic dreamer,
and, following Rousseau, have sentimentalized the
figure of Christ. It might be well, therefore, for us to
undertake something more within our capacity than
religion. In general, for one person who has even an
inkling of the nature of a genuinely religious working
and of the strenuous peace at which religion aims, at
least a hundred persons can be found who can grasp to
some extent the type of work that has its fruition in the
mediatory or humanistic virtues. Now humanism must,
like religion, rest on the recognition, in some form or
other, of the inner life, or, what amounts to the same
thing, on the opposition between a law of the spirit and
a law of the members. It must also, like religion, sub¬
ordinate intellect to the ethical will and so put its ulti¬
mate emphasis on humility. In this matter of humility
the Western humanist has something to learn, as I have
already hinted, from Confucian China.
Though religion and the best type of humanism are
at one in stressing humility, they diverge widely in their
attitude towards the expansive desires. In its pursuit
196 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

of the otherworldly virtue of peace, religion tends to

renounce these desires completely, whereas humanism
would simply moderate and harmonize them with a
view to living to the best advantage in this world. As a
result of his particular confusion of the things of God
and the things of Caesar, the humanitarian would have
us set up peace as a primary good in the secular order.
He hopes to secure this peace by some form of machin¬
ery (such as a league of nations) or else by an appeal
to emotion. “ Peace is my passion,” exclaimed the ex¬
pansive Thomas Jefferson. But the person who turns
peace into a passion is not entering upon the pathway
of peace either within himself or in the outer world. It
is possible to show that the pacifist is not only a material¬
ist, but a very objectionable type of materialist. In the
name of the fairest of virtues, he is actually engaged in
breaking down ethical standards. It is a matter of com¬
mon sense and everyday experience that there can be no
peace with the unrighteous and the unrighteous always
have been and are extremely numerous. As another in¬
stance of the humanitarian confusion of values, one may
cite the assertion of Woodrow Wilson that a nation may
be “too proud to fight.” An individual may be too
humble to fight, but a nation that is too proud to fight
may, in a world like this, be too proud to survive as a
nation. The virtue that sums up all other virtues in the
secular order is, as every thinker worthy of the name has
always seen, not peace but justice. Now any one who
deals positively with the idea of justice will almost in¬
evitably be led to define it: To every man according
to his works; and the adequacy of this definition will
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 197

depend in turn on the adequacy of one’s definition of

work.
The humanitarians, I have pointed out, from Bacon
down, are extraordinarily superficial in their definition
of work. Even when they do not fall into the cruder
quantitative fallacies, they conceive of work in terms of
the natural law and of the outer world and not in terms
of the inner life.1 They do not take account of that form
of work which consists in the superimposition of the
ethical will upon the natural self and its expansive de¬
sires. The very notion of this form of work has, I have
said, tended to disappear with the decline of the doctrine
of grace.
If we grant, then, that what is needed just now is a
revival of the ethical will on the secular level, where it is
felt as a will to justice, rather than on the religious level,
where it is felt as a will to peace, and if we grant further
that justice, positively defined, consists in giving to
every man according to his works, let us seek to restore
to the idea of work the elements that have been omitted
by the humanitarians. We may be aided in such a res¬
toration by Greek philosophy, even though we do not

1 The writer of some verses in an Ohio newspaper, after com¬

plaining of the failure of the millennium to arrive in spite of the
efforts of “many scores of dreamers, poets, orators and schemers,”
concludes as follows:
And so I hold it is not treason
To advance a simple reason
For the sorry lack of progress we decry.
It is this: instead of working
On himself, each man is shirking,
And trying to reform some other guy.

The author of this doggerel is nearer to the wisdom of the ages

than some of our college presidents.
198 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

agree with the tendency of the Socratic group to identify

right reason and right will. The Platonic definition of
justice as doing one’s own work or minding one’s own
business has perhaps never been surpassed. It brings
one straight back to the truths of the inner life. Justice
results when every part of a man is performing its proper
function and especially when his higher self is perform¬
ing its proper function of coordinating and controlling
the inferior parts of his nature. An echo of this Platonic
conception is found in the Senecan definition of justice:
Animus quodam modo se habeas. Justice in the outer
world must, in the last analysis, be only a reflection of
the harmony and proportionateness that have resulted
in certain individuals from the working of the spirit
upon itself.
Aristotle’s view of justice has much in common with
the Platonic view. In defining justice he starts, not from
society, but from the individual who limits desires that
are in themselves insatiable and imposes upon them the
law of measure. A State in which such individuals are
sufficiently numerous to set the tone is a just State.
Justice, whether retributive or distributive, must be
proportionate in its rewards and penalties, and it can be
thus proportionate only by taking account of the higher
form of working. The disciplining of the expansive de¬
sires to the law of measure which constitutes this higher
form of working must, to be effective, begin early and
become habitual. The necessary basis, therefore, of an
ethical type of State is an ethical type of education.
Aristotle makes not only justice but happiness depend
on what he calls “energizing according to virtue.” He
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 199

finally carries his conception of work from the human¬

istic to the religious level, from mediation to meditation
or the life of “vision,” defining God himself as pure act.
It has seemed to some that the activity the individual
displays in the life of vision is so disassociated from the
activity that he displays in his relations with his fellow
men as to encourage the ascetic excess of the Middle
Ages. The altruist, indeed, would maintain that both
the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of justice, en¬
couraging a man as they do to put his own work before
the world’s work, are selfish and anti-social. A man
should renounce self and give himself up to sympathy
and service. But there is something, we should remind
the altruist, that the world needs even more than our
service, and that is our example. “Example,” as Burke
says, “is the school of mankind; it will learn at no other.”
Now a man becomes exemplary only as the result of
either a religious or a humanistic working. The man who
works religiously helps the world, one is tempted to
affirm, by the very act of renouncing it. He sets his fel¬
low men the most important of all examples — that of
unworldliness. If Buddha has dealt profoundly with the
form of work by which one becomes exemplary on the
religious level, Confucius has shown, even more ade¬
quately, perhaps, than Aristotle, the benefits that accrue
to society and civilization from a humanistic working.
Confucius has summed up his teaching in a sentence:
Loyalty to oneself and charity towards one’s neighbor.
The altruist might accept this formula provided he were
allowed to give the first place to the charity towards
one’s neighbor. But to do so is entirely un-Confucian.
200 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

The individual must first of all look up to something

higher than either himself or his neighbor in order that
he may be worthy to be looked up to in turn. Of his ideal
ruler, Shun, Confucius says: “Shun was one who did
nothing, yet governed well. For what, in effect, did he
do? Religiously self-observant, he sat gravely on his
throne, and that is all.” All that Confucius means to
affirm by this passage is the superiority of inner over
outer action (of which, as we learn from other passages,
his monarch was also capable). Shun was, in short,
minding his own business in the Platonic sense, and such
was the persuasiveness of his example that others were
led to do likewise; whereas, with the present trend
towards “social justice,” the time is rapidly approach¬
ing when everybody will be minding everybody else’s
business. For the conscience that is felt as a still small
voice and that is the basis of real justice, we have substi¬
tuted a social conscience that operates rather through a
megaphone. The busybody, for the first time perhaps in
the history of the world, has been taken at his own esti¬
mate of himself. We are in fact, as some one remarked,
living in the Meddle Ages; inasmuch as the meddling is
itself only an outcome of our confused definition of jus¬
tice, the cynic might suggest, as an even more correct
description of the time, the Muddle Ages.
Perhaps, indeed, the meddling and the muddling are
not quite so widespread as one is at times tempted to
suppose. There are probably still a few persons left who
realize the importance of minding their own business,
even though not in the full Platonic or Confucian sense.
There is probably an element of exaggeration in a recent
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 201

assertion that to the question, “Am I my brother’s

keeper?” the whole American people had replied in an
“ecstatic affirmative.” One should note in passing the
intolerable dilution of the principle of obligation that is
implied in extending to men indiscriminately what one
owes to one’s own brother. At all events, no small issues
are involved in the question whether one should start
with an expansive eagerness to do something for hu¬
manity or with loyalty to one’s self. There may be some¬
thing after all in the Confucian idea that if a man only
sets himself right, the rightness will extend to his family
first of all, and finally in widening circles to the whole
community.
One’s definition of work and of justice in terms of
work will be found to be inseparably bound up with one’s
definition of liberty. The only true freedom is freedom
to work. All the evidence goes to show that there is no
safety in the nature of things for the idler and that the
most perilous of all forms of idling is spiritual idling.
The failure to take account of the subtler forms of work¬
ing is what vitiates the attempts of the utilitarian to
define liberty — for example, the attempt of J. S. Mill.
If a man is only careful not to injure his fellow men, he
should then, according to Mill, be free to cultivate his
idiosyncrasy. One cannot grant in the first place that
any such sharp division between the altruistic and the
self-regarding elements in human nature is possible;
and even if one did grant it, one should have to insist
that the self-regarding virtues are the most important
even from the point of view of society; for it is only by
the exercise of these virtues that one becomes exem-
202 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

plary and so, as I have tried to show, truly helpful to

others.
If society should in its own interests encourage those
who work with their minds as compared with those who
work with their hands, how much more should it give
recognition to those who are engaged in a genuinely
ethical working. It is in fact the quality of a man’s work
that should determine his place in the hierarchy that
every civilized society requires. In short, from the posi¬
tive point of view, work is the only justification of aris¬
tocracy. “By work,” says Buddha, “a man is noble, by
work he is an outcast.”1 The principle, though sound, is
not, one must confess, altogether easy to apply. Though
justice require that every man receive according to the
quantity and the quality of his work, there is in this com¬
petition a manifest inequality from the start. One man
has an innate capacity that another cannot acquire by
any amount of effort. God, according to the Platonic
myth, has mingled lead with the nature of some and
with the nature of others silver and gold. Stress unduly
the initial differences between men and one will tend to
fall into some system of caste, as Plato himself tends to
do, or else one will incline to fatalism, whether natural¬
istic or predestinarian. On the other hand, deny these
differences in favor of some equalitarian theory and one
runs counter to the most palpable facts. Genuine justice
seems to demand that men should be judged, not by
their intentions or their endeavors, but by their actual
performance; that in short the natural aristocrat, as
Burke terms him, should receive his due reward, whether
1 Sutta-Nipdta, v. 135.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 203

one attribute his superiority, with the man of science, to

heredity, or, with the Christian, to grace, or, with the
Buddhist, to his past working.
One’s view of work and of the rewards that it deserves
will determine necessarily one’s attitude towards prop¬
erty. From the point of view of civilization, it is of the
highest moment that certain individuals should in every
community be relieved from the necessity of working
with their hands in order that they may engage in the
higher forms of working and so qualify for leadership.
If the civilization is to be genuine, it must have men of
leisure in the full Aristotelian sense. Those who in any
particular community are allowed to enjoy property
that is not the fruit of their own outer and visible toil
cannot, therefore, afford to be idlers and parasites. An
aristocratic or leading class, however the aristocratic
principle is conceived, must, if it hopes in the long run
to preserve its property and privileges, be in some degree
exemplary. It is only too clear that the members of the
French aristocracy of the Old Regime failed, in spite of
many honorable exceptions, to measure up to this test.
Some have argued from the revelations of recent writers
like Colonel Repington and Mrs. Asquith that the Eng¬
lish aristocracy is also growing degenerate. People will
not consent in the long run to look up to those who are
not themselves looking up to something higher than
their ordinary selves. A leading class that has become
Epicurean and self-indulgent is lost. Above all it cannot
afford to give the first place to material goods. One may,
indeed, lay down the principle that, if property as a
means to an end is the necessary basis of civilization,
204 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

property as an end in itself is materialism. In view of

the natural insatiableness of the human spirit, no ex¬
ample is more necessary than that of the man who is
setting limits to his desire for worldly possessions. The
only remedy for economic inequality, as Aristotle says,
is “to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire
more”;1 this remedy is not in mechanical schemes for
dividing up property; “for it is not the possessions but
the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.” 2
The equalization of desire in the Aristotelian sense re¬
quires on the part of individuals a genuinely ethical or
humanistic working. To proclaim equality on some
basis that requires no such working will result ironically.
For example, this country committed itself in the Dec¬
laration of Independence to the doctrine of natural
equality. The type of individualism that was thus
encouraged has led to monstrous inequalities and, with
the decline of traditional standards, to the rise of a
raw plutocracy. A man who amasses a billion dollars
is scarcely exemplary in the Aristotelian sense, even
though he then proceeds to lay out half a billion upon
philanthropy. The remedy for such a failure of the man
at the top to curb his desires does not lie, as the agitator
would have us believe, in inflaming the desires of the
man at the bottom; nor again in substituting for real
justice some phantasmagoria of social justice. As a
result of such a substitution, one will presently be turn¬
ing from the punishment of the individual offender to an
attack on the institution of property itself; and a war on
capital will speedily degenerate, as it always has in the
1 Politics, 1267b 2 Ibid., 1266b.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 205

past, into a war on thrift and industry in favor of lazi¬

ness and incompetence, and finally into schemes of con¬
fiscation that profess to be idealistic and are in fact sub¬
versive of common honesty. Above all, social justice is
likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression of
competition. Without competition it is impossible that
the ends of true justice should be fulfilled — namely,
that every man should receive according to his works.
The principle of competition is, as Hesiod pointed out
long ago, built into the very roots of the world;1 there is
something in the nature of things that calls for a real
victory and a real defeat. Competition is necessary to
rouse man from his native indolence; without it life loses
its zest and savor. Only, as Hesiod goes on to say, there
are two types of competition — the one that leads to
bloody war and the other that is the mother of enter¬
prise and high achievement. He does not perhaps make
as clear as he might how one may have the sound rivalry
and, at the same time, avoid the type that degenerates
into pernicious strife. But surely the reply to this ques¬
tion is found in such sentences of Aristotle as those I
have just been quoting. The remedy for the evils of
competition is found in the moderation and magnanimity
of the strong and the successful, and not in any sickly
sentimentalizing over the lot of the underdog. The mood
of unrest and insurgency is so rife to-day as to suggest
that our leaders, instead of thus controlling themselves,
are guilty of an extreme psychic unrestraint.
One should note a certain confusion on the part of the
advocates of social justice as to the nature of capital.
1 See beginning of Works and Days.
206 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

Dr. Johnson is reported to have said at the sale of

Thrale’s brewery: “We are not here to sell a parcel of
boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich
beyond the dreams of avarice.” The realizing of the
potentiality depended, of course, on the ability of the
management, and this ability was not only a part, but
the essential part, of the capital of the brewery. It is
being assumed at present that the capital invested in
our railways may be measured by what one may term
their junk value. As a result of this and similar fallacies,
both the owners and managers of the railways have been
so treated of recent years as to discourage enterprise in
this field of industry. It seems easy to convince the pub¬
lic that the railways are suffering from watered stock
when what they are really suffering from is watered
labor. If our apostles of service and social justice have
their way, that considerable portion of the savings of the
middle class that is now invested in the railways, either
directly or indirectly through the insurance companies
and savings banks, may undergo partial or total con¬
fiscation.
Every form of social justice, indeed, tends to confisca¬
tion and confiscation, when practised on a large scale,
undermines moral standards and, in so far, substitutes
for real justice the law of cunning and the law of force.
To be on one’s guard against these perils of social jus¬
tice, one needs that cooperation of keen analysis and
imagination that can alone produce genuine vision;
whereas a great number of persons are weak in analysis,
and idyllic rather than ethical in their imagining. Not
being able, as a result, to get at underlying causes, they
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 207

are prone to doctor symptoms and to resort to what

Burke calls “ tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious
facilities.” The apparent good turns out to be evil in its
secondary consequences, and the apparent evil turns out
to be the necessary condition of some good. Things of¬
ten change their aspect, not once but several times, when
thus traced in their ultimate effects. The ordinary
laboring man, for instance, may not be able to see that
the “levy upon capital,” for which he is urged to vote
in the name of social justice, will finally recoil upon him¬
self. It is not yet clear that it is going to be possible to
combine universal suffrage with the degree of safety for
the institution of property that genuine justice and
genuine civilization both require. Taxation without
representation was the main grievance of the American
revolutionists; but that is precisely what an important
section of the community has to submit to to-day. Can
those who tax in the name of the sovereign people be
counted on to tax more equitably than those who alleged
the royal prerogative?
Among all the forms of dishonesty that assume the
idealistic mask, perhaps none is more diabolically effec¬
tive in unsettling the bases of civilized fife than those
that involve a tampering with the monetary standard.
If property stands for work in some sense or other of the
word, and if money is the conventional symbol of prop¬
erty, the ends of justice tend to be subverted if this
symbol fluctuates wildly; thrift and foresight become
meaningless; no man can be sure that he will receive
according to his works. Inflation of the currency
amounts in practice to an odious form of confiscation,
208 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

whether it is supposed, as in Germany, to promote na¬

tional interests or, as in Russia, to advance internation¬
alism. The radical, it has been pointed out, often errs in
confounding money with property and in supposing that
a division of money would be the same as a division of
actual wealth. Though money is only a conventional
token, the nature of this token is, nevertheless, not a
matter of indifference. The reason for the gold standard
is simple: gold involves in its production an amount of
work equal approximately to the work involved in pro¬
ducing the various commodities for which it may be
exchanged. If for any reason gold is produced more
abundantly and with less effort, or if the reverse takes
place, the monetary standard fluctuates; and this is an
evil, but a trifling evil (human nature being what it is),
compared with that which results from the substitution
for gold of paper or some other medium of exchange
that when, tested in terms of work, has little intrinsic
value.
The modern man is as a matter of fact being whip-
sawed between two contradictory tendencies. On the
one hand, he is being involved nationally and interna¬
tionally in an ever more complex network of material
relationships which rest in turn on an extraordinarily
delicate mechanism of credit and exchange. On the
other hand, the various idealistic schemes that are being
put forward as a substitute for common honesty, or,
again, the schemes, whether economic or political, that
are openly imperialistic, are undermining the confidence
that is the necessary basis of credit and exchange: so
that the whole elaborate structure that has been reared
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 209

by the industrial revolution is in danger of collapse.

The political economists who promoted this revolution
were, according to Carlyle, in favor of making cash pay¬
ment the sole nexus between man and man. Cash pay¬
ment, however, cannot serve as a nexus between men
who are spiritually centrifugal. In various parts of
eastern Europe, men have already become so suspicious
of cash payment that they have been forced to revert in
their economic contacts to barter.
The evils I have been enumerating derive in no small
degree from the one-sided notion of work that has pre¬
vailed in the utilitarian movement. The interests of
property itself require that at least some members of a
community should work in a very different sense, that
they should limit in short their own acquisitive instincts
and so serve society by setting it a good example. It
does not follow that the best way to secure such work
from a man is to urge upon him the interests of society.
Leslie Stephen, himself a utilitarian, says that “the doc¬
trine that each man can only care for his own happiness
is terribly plausible, and fits in admirably with individ¬
ualism.” It does indeed; so much so that the wisest
way of reaching the individual may be to point out to
him, not how his conduct will affect the happiness of
others, but how it will affect his own happiness. Only
in that case one must be careful to define happiness, not
like the utilitarian and the Epicurean, in terms of
pleasure, but like an Aristotle or a Buddha, in terms of
work. One may apply this method not merely to the
reining in of the acquisitive instincts, but to the control
of the instinct of sex. Sexual unrestraint has wrought
210 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

and is wreaking fearful havoc to society. The resultant

diseases are, even more than alcoholism, a menace to
the future of the white race. To approach the subject
from another angle, there is an undoubted connection
between a certain type of centrifugal and self-indulgent
individualism and an unduly declining birth-rate. The
French and also the Americans of native descent are, if
we are to trust statistics, in danger of withering from
the earth. Where the population is increasing, it is, we
are told, at the expense of quality. The stocks to which
the past has looked for its leaders are dying out and the
inferior or even degenerate breeds are multiplying.
The humanitarian remedies for evils of this order seem
especially doubtful. Such schemes for regulating the
relations of sex as have been put forward by the be¬
lievers in eugenics are likely to lead to a tyranny at
once grotesque and ineffectual. On the other hand, the
evidence is slight that the individual can be induced to
control himself on such general grounds as the good of
country or the good of humanity or the good of the
white race menaced by “the rising tide of color.” Re¬
ligion may be right after all in dealing with the whole
question of sex in terms of the inner life. According to
a French moralist, man is made up in his natural self of
a little vanity and a little voluptuousness. The Christian
would substitute chastity and humility. Though the
humanist would moderate rather than deny entirely the
most imperious form of the libido sentiendi, he agrees
with the Christian in starting with the struggle between
vital impulse and vital control. He would have the in¬
dividual exercise the control not primarily for the good
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 211

of society, but for his own good. Nowhere indeed is the

opposition between pleasure and happiness more visible
than in matters of sex.
The more one considers our modern emancipation,
the more it becomes clear that it has been at the expense
of what I have termed the centripetal element in liberty;
and without this centripetal element or ethical will any
genuine working of the spirit becomes impossible. How,
one may ask, have men been able to deceive themselves
as to the gravity of the error? One way in which they
have deceived themselves, it may be replied, has been
to offer work according to the natural law as a substi¬
tute for work according to the human law. As good an
example as any is that of Faust who is supposed to make
up for moral delinquencies by reclaiming marshlands
from the sea. Carlyle, who professes to be a follower of
Goethe, is even more defective in his idea of work. In¬
stead of the Socratic “Know thyself/’ he would adopt
as his gospel: “Know thy work and do it.” 1 Thus to
disparage the effort at self-knowledge because man, as
Carlyle goes on to say, is in the abstract and metaphysi¬
cal sense unknowable, is simply, under existing con¬
ditions, to discredit the inner life in favor of a mere
outer working. Work when conceived in this one-sided
fashion degenerates into mere efficiency. Carlyle, as a
matter of fact, exalts not only the efficiency of the “ cap¬
tain of industry” (a phrase that he apparently origi¬
nated), but the military efficiency of a Frederick the
Great or even of a Dr. Francia. In spite of his desperate
efforts to prove to himself and others the contrary, he,
1 Past and Present, ch. xi (beginning).
212 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

therefore, tends in his philosophy to be imperialistic

rather than genuinely ethical. His “hero” is at the very
least a first cousin of the Nietzschean superman; they
both have an authentic descent from the “original
genius” of the eighteenth century.
A point worth considering is the position not merely
of the “captain” but of the private in the modem army
of industry. It is true that, like the rest of us, this
private must find his happiness in work or not at all.
One may, however, raise the question whether he may
be expected to find his happiness in the type of efficiency
that has been developed by the industrial revolution.
This efficiency has been achieved by an endless subdivi¬
sion of effort until the individual worker has tended to
become a mere cog in a gigantic machine. He works
with only an infinitesimal portion of himself. At times,
indeed, he can scarcely be said to work at all; the ma¬
chine does the working and seems to lead a less auto¬
matic life than the person who tends it. A workman in
one of Henry Ford’s factories is reported to have replied,
when asked his name, that he was “bolt No. 29.” A
multitude of men are thus mechanized in order that the
captain of industry may be “vital” and “dynamic,” or,
what amounts to the same thing as the words are now
used, may live in a state of psychic unrestraint. For one
may affirm with some confidence that a man who thinks
it worth while to pile up an income said to be greater
than that of J. D. Rockefeller is not engaged in a very
energetic humanistic or religious working. If the ordi¬
nary industrial private follows the example of the “ cap¬
tain” and sets out to be “vital” and “dynamic” in his
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 213

turn, either in his own person or through his unions and

their leaders, the result will be chaos; for he will thus
disturb the nice adjustment of parts on which the suc¬
cessful functioning of the whole mechanism depends.
I am not, indeed, affirming that the multiplication of
machines is an unmixed evil. This multiplication has
made it possible for one man to do work that would
formerly have required a dozen or even a hundred men,
and so has lifted a load of drudgery from the shoulders
of many and opened up to them the opportunities of
leisure. “No man/’ says Aristotle, “can practise virtue
who is living the life of a mechanic or laborer.” But the
laborer now has opportunities such as have never before
existed to become something more. Unfortunately, as
we all know, he is not using his relief from drudgery to
enjoy leisure in the Aristotelian sense, but to seek amuse¬
ments, in which he is almost as much subordinated to
machines as he is in his working moments (automobiles,
phonographs, moving pictures and the like). Perhaps
the fault is not so much in the laborer himself as in the
pattern that is being offered him by the man “higher
up.”
The very unexemplary type of individualism I have
been discussing can be shown to derive not only from the
utilitarian conception of life in general, but from the
political economy of the school of Adam Smith in par¬
ticular. Let the State stand aside, says Adam Smith,
and give the individual free swing (laisser faire). He will
not abuse this freedom, for he will be guided by an en¬
lightened self-interest. Now the doctrine of enlightened
self-interest is not in itself superficial. It has been held
214 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

by really profound thinkers like Aristotle and Buddha.

But the self that these thinkers have in mind is not the
self that makes the pursuit of wealth its first aim, but
the ethical self that exercises control over this acquisi¬
tive self. Leave the acquisitive self without this control
and the right kind of competition will degenerate into
the wrong kind, the ruthless kind which was actually
encouraged by the Manchester School of economics and
in which mill operatives become mere “cannon-fodder’7
in the industrial warfare. Nor will competition of this
sort have a sufficient counterpoise in sympathy or altru¬
ism. The efficiency of sympathy as a substitute for the
ethical will is at all events the crucial issue in this whole
movement. Everything will be found to hinge ulti¬
mately on this point in our current gospel of “service,”
a gospel in which most men seem to believe as unques-
tioningly nowadays as they once did in the Trinity. Yet
the foundations of this gospel can be shown, on strictly
psychological grounds, to be highly precarious.
In the first place the idea of “service” as now under¬
stood is not Christian. The Christian serves not man
but God, and this service, as we learn from the Prayer
Book, is “ perfect freedom.” Service in the humanitarian
sense has, on the other hand, important points of con¬
tact with Stoicism. The Stoic sought, like the humani¬
tarian, to regulate his conduct with reference to the
general welfare of mankind. Important differences need,
however, to be noted between the humanitarian and the
Stoic. The Stoic did not hold at all or held only in very
rudimentary form the doctrine of progress; he did not
think of men in the mass as moving forward almost
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 215

automatically towards “a far-off divine event.” Prog¬

ress of this automatic type, when subjected to severe
psychological scrutiny, will be found to resolve itself
either into a delight in change for its own sake or a de¬
light in change for the sake of power and comfort. The
confusion between moral and material progress that the
utilitarian has promoted can be shown to involve a tam¬
pering with general terms similar to that which I have
already noted in speaking of Rousseau and the senti¬
mentalists. Disraeli says that the English-speaking peo¬
ples have been unable to distinguish between comfort
and civilization. The word comfort itself is an excellent
example of the illegitimate transfer of a general term
from one scheme of values to another. “ Blessed are
they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” The
American of the present day wishes to get his comfort
without any preliminary mourning.
As a result of the confusion between moral and ma¬
terial progress the modern man has developed an inor¬
dinate confidence in organization and efficiency and in
general in machinery as a means for the attainment of
ethical ends. If he is told that civilization is in danger,
his first instinct is to appoint a committee to save civili¬
zation. The League of Nations is itself only a super¬
committee.
Progress in the utilitarian sense is, however, an even
less essential element in the idealistic creed than sym¬
pathy. In this matter of sympathy one must note again
a difference between the Stoic and the humanitarian.
If, on the one hand, the Stoic had less confidence in
machinery than the humanitarian, he was, on the other
216 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

hand, less emotionally expansive. Interesting questions

of this kind come up, as I have already noted, in dealing
with Shaftesbury and his influence. The Stoical deriva¬
tion of one whole side of Shaftesbury’s philosophy is so
manifest that some have sought to present him as a pure
disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But the fact
remains that the Stoics were not sentimentalists and that
Shaftesbury can be shown to be a main source of senti¬
mentalism in England and even more perhaps in Ger¬
many. The right reason of the Stoics is indeed already
taking on an emotional coloring in an English precursor
of Shaftesbury like Cumberland. In their tendency to
identify happiness and pleasure the utilitarians remind
us less of the Stoics than of the Epicureans. The Epi¬
curean “ataraxy,” however, did not any more than the
Stoic “apathy” encourage effusiveness; neither Stoic
nor Epicurean was prone to “let his feelings run in soft
luxurious flow” and then call the result “virtue.” Of
Rousseau’s exaltation of impulsive pity as a sufficient
offset to egoistic impulse and the source of all the other
virtues, I have already spoken. Of almost equal im¬
portance is Hume’s assertion, professedly on strictly
psychological grounds, of an element of sympathy in the
natural man, anterior to reason and independent of self-
love. Sympathy becomes in turn the basis of Hume’s
definition of justice. The just man for Hume is not the
man who minds his own business in the Platonic sense,
but the altruist.1
1 Justice is, according to Hume, an “artificial” virtue; its im¬
mediate source is an enlightened self-interest. Its ultimate source,
like that of all the other virtues, is “an extensive sympathy with
mankind."
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 217

The crucial question, of course, is not whether a man

in his spontaneous and natural self will sympathize with
another’s pleasure, but whether he will sympathize with
another’s pain,1 at least to a degree that will be an ade¬
quate counterpoise to egoistic impulse. The confidence
of the eighteenth-century moralist on this point is al¬
ready beginning to seem to us singularly naive. Rous¬
seau, it will be remembered, not only attempts to rear
the whole edifice of ethics on the basis of man’s innate
pitifulness, but asserts that this quality increases in
almost direct ratio as one descends in the social scale
and so gets closer to “nature.” When asked why, if the
plain people were so pitiful, they crowded eagerly to see
men broken on the wheel, he replied that pity is such a
delicious emotion that they did not wish to miss any
opportunity of experiencing it! It was no doubt for this
reason that Chateaubriand’s house porter, as he nar¬
rates, regretted Robespierre and the spectacles in the
Place Louis XV, where women mounted the guillotine
who had “ necks as white as chicken’s flesh.” For a sim¬
ilar reason doubtless the Spanish populace frequents the
bull-ring and the ancient Roman populace flocked to the
gladiatorial arena. The truth is that the psychology of
the plain people in matters of this kind is not ethical at
all, but Epicurean. It is pleasant, as the Epicurean
Lucretius pointed out some time ago, to witness an¬
other’s dire peril of shipwreck from a safe position on
the shore. In much the same way, the misery of the
world, when properly dished up in the headlines, merely

1 “Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep
alone.”
218 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

serves to give the ordinary citizen an agreeable fillip at

his breakfast table. With the help of the sensational
press, the men of to-day are indeed constantly lined up
on the shore, witnessing an endless series of shipwrecks.
The outstanding trait, in short, of a populace that is
“ natural” in Rousseau’s sense is its irresponsible quest
of thrills. The success of the whole attempt to base
ethics directly on the emotions has been due in no small
measure to the fact that it seemed to offer an equivalent,
not only for Christian charity, but for grace, a grace that
did not, like the old variety, involve humility and the
conviction of sin; inasmuch as the man who transgresses
does so, not through any survival of the “old Adam” in
him, but because of society and its institutions. The
man who has not fallen from the grace of nature into
social sophistication is spontaneously virtuous. “Heav¬
en’s rich instincts in him grew,” says Lowell of a beauti¬
ful soul of this kind, “as effortless as woodland nooks
send violets up and paint them blue.” The difference
between the new and the old grace is here obvious: the
old grace involved a working, even though the recipient
of it maintained that not he but God did the working.
The fact of the working was in any case indubitable, so
much so that it often imposed a severe and even ascetic
control upon the natural man. Goodness by the grace of
nature, on the other hand, does not require on the part
of the recipient anything more than a “wise passiveness.”
Another striking contrast between Christian love and
grace and the parody of these doctrines by the Rous-
seauist should be noted. The love and grace of the Chris¬
tian lead to sharp exclusions and discriminations;
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 219
whereas the Rousseauist tends to blur all distinctions in
pantheistic revery. Contrast the “vision” of a Dante,
for example, with its clear-cut scale of moral values from
the peak of heaven to the pit of hell with the “vision”
of a Walt Whitman in which not merely men and
women, good, bad, and indifferent, but “elder, mullein,
and poke-weed” are all viewed on the same level in vir¬
tue of what the pantheist calls love. Dante speaks of the
“highest love” that built the walls of hell. We shudder
at the mediaeval grimness. The opposite and more dan¬
gerous extreme is to lavish what Bossuet calls a “mur¬
derous pity” upon human nature and, under cover of
promoting love, to be ready to subvert justice.
An unselective love joined to a “wise passiveness”
and a return to “nature” might, indeed, be justified if,
as their votaries maintain, they tend to draw men to a
common centre; but it can be shown that this commun¬
ion is achieved, not in the real world, but in dreamland.
Let us consider from this point of view the “simple life”
that Rousseau and other primitivists have proposed as
a remedy for the luxury and self-indulgence that have
tended to increase with the breakdown of traditional
standards. True simplicity of life must, it would seem,
be attained by the limitation of desire; whereas the lux¬
urious life is one in which, as Montesquieu says, “the
desires have become immense.” Now the “nature” of
the primitivist can be shown to be only a nostalgia of the
romantic imagination so that the attempt to return to
it not only expands desire instead of limiting it, but
makes it infinite and indeterminate. Rousseau speaks
of that “devouring but barren fire with which from
220 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

my childhood up I have felt myself vainly consumed.”

Chateaubriand makes his Ren6 actually flee from
European civilization to the American wilderness and
take an Indian bride. Ren6 speaks for Chateaubriand
himself when he writes to her: “There issue forth from
this heart flames . . . which might devour creation with¬
out being satisfied.,, Chateaubriand posed as the cham¬
pion of Christianity. Yet nothing is more certain than
that Christian love makes for peace and communion,
whereas nostalgic “love” of the type Chateaubriand has
just described makes for restlessness and solitude. The
ironical contrast between the ideal and the real appears
even more clearly, perhaps, in Shelley than in Chateau¬
briand, inasmuch as Shelley did not, like Chateaubriand,
pose as a traditionalist, but came out uncompromisingly
for the new ethics. “The great secret of morals,” he
says, “is love.” A characteristic note of his poetry, on
the other hand, perhaps the most characteristic note is
that of an acute spiritual isolation.
Many of the partisans of the new liberty, a liberty
based, not upon work (in the sense of inner control), but
upon “love” in the sense of expansive emotion, were
severely disillusioned by the French Revolution.
Chateaubriand is himself one of the best types of the
disillusioned Rousseauist. In his “Essay on Revolu¬
tions” he still looks upon romantic nostalgia as the true
badge of the superior spirit, though he admits that the
aspiration towards the “infinite” that it inspires is
especially prevalent in epochs of moral decline. As a
result of this nostalgia, at all events, man is never satis¬
fied with what he has. He shatters one political form
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 221

after another from sheer satiety and ennui. The move¬

ment of mankind is not steadily forward in a straight
line, as the apostles of perfectibility maintain, but cir¬
cular, like that of a squirrel in a cage. From the point of
view of the lover of liberty society is hopeless. “ If it is
political truth we are looking for, it is easy to find. Here
a despotic minister gags me and casts me into the depths
of a dungeon where I remain for twenty years with¬
out knowing why: having escaped from the Bastille, I
plunge indignantly into democracy; an anthropophagus
awaits me there at the foot of the guillotine.” As we
should say nowadays, overthrow the Czar and the Bol¬
shevist has you by the throat.
Is there, then, no such thing as liberty? “Yes, there
is a delicious, a celestial liberty, that of nature.” Let a
man betake himself to the “religious forest.” In very
similar fashion, Coleridge, after discovering that the
French Revolution, theoretically a crusade for universal
brotherhood, was imperialistic in its essence, abandoned
hope of finding liberty among men. If a man wishes to
find true liberty, he says in substance, let him go out and
listen to what the wild waves are saying. Liberty is not
to be found in any human form. But if one “shoots his
being through earth, sea, and air” and “possesses all
things with in tensest love,” liberty will be revealed to
him.1
1 See France: an Ode (1798), Part v. The beginnings of this
part of the poem is pure Burke:
The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! etc.

After striking this Burkian note, Coleridge proceeds to fall into

sheer pantheistic bewilderment.
222 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

It may be, however, that a man should look for true

liberty neither in society nor in nature, but in himself —
his ethical self; and the ethical self is experienced, not
as an expansive emotion, but as an inner control. Lib¬
erty is associated, therefore, not primarily with “love,”
but with work. “It is work,” as Buddha says, and not
love, as the Western sentimentalist would have it, “that
makes the world go round.” 1 The man who works ethi¬
cally grows more at one with himself and at the same
time tends to enter into communion, not indeed with
mankind at large, but with those who are submitting to
a similar ethical discipline, and so are, in Confucian
phrase, moving towards the “universal centre.” So that
even from the point of view of the man who desires love,
the great secret of morals is work. Love is the fulfilment
of the law and not, as the sentimentalist would have us
believe, a substitute for it. The psychological truth at
the basis of the Christian doctrine of charity is that
men cannot come together expansively and on the level
of their ordinary selves. The attempt to do so results,
as we have seen in the case of a Rousseau and a Shelley,
in an extreme psychic isolation.
Rousseau says that he founded “an indomitable spirit
of liberty” on an “indolence that is beyond belief.”
True liberty, it is hardly necessary to say, cannot be
founded on indolence; it is something that must be won
by high-handed struggle, a struggle that takes place
primarily in oneself and not in the outer world. Possibly
the ultimate distinction between the true and the false
liberal, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that between
1 Sutta-Nipdta, v. 654.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 223

the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer. If true liberty

is to survive, it is important that ethical idling should
not usurp the credit due only to ethical effort. This
usurpation takes place if we accept the programme of
those who would substitute expansive emotion for the
activity of the higher will. In the real world, as I have
tried to show, the results of an expansion of this kind are
not fraternal but imperialistic.
The confusion between true and false liberals, between
the ethically strenuous and the ethically indolent, has
also been promoted by the doctrine of natural rights. A
liberty that is asserted as an abstract right, something
anterior to the fulfilment of any definite obligation, will
always, so far as the inner life is concerned, be a lazy
liberty. From this point of view, all other “natural”
rights are in a way summed up in the title of a book
written by a grandson of Karl Marx: “The Right to
Idleness.” We have heard asserted in our own time
the abstract right of whole populations to self-determi¬
nation as something anterior to their degree of moral
development. To put forward a supposed right of this
kind as a part of a programme for world peace is to sink
to the ultimate depth of humanitarian self-deception.
To be sure, the dogma of natural rights, though it
still controls the popular imagination, has been dis¬
avowed by the political theorists themselves. Unfor¬
tunately, some of these theorists, while disavowing the
dogma, have retained the underlying fallacy. For ex¬
ample, Mr. Harold J. Laski says that, though we no
longer believe in the rights of man in any abstract and
metaphysical sense, we still accept them as a convenient
224 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

expression of the truth that what men want corresponds

in a rough way to what they need.1 The first and very
elementary step in any effective knowledge of human
nature, a step that “liberals” of the type of Mr. Laski
have failed to take, is the discovery of the lack of coin¬
cidence between man’s wants and his needs. What man
needs, if we are to believe the Lord’s Prayer, is bread
and wisdom. What man, at least Roman man, wanted
about the time this prayer was uttered, was bread and
the circus. The gap between man’s wants and his needs
has not diminished greatly, if at all, since Roman times.
Whatever we may think of Christian theology, the
Christian insight remains true that man suffers from a
divided will: he needs to follow the law of the spirit and
wants to follow the law of the members, so that he is a
thoroughly paradoxical creature, for the most part at
war with his own happiness.
Our endeavor at the present time, I have said, should
be to deal with the law of the spirit positively and so be
able to meet on their own ground those who have pro¬
fessed to be positive and are not. Let us take a glance
from this point of view at the professional philosophers.
Hume, for example, set up as a pure positivist: he was
in favor of getting rid of all apriorism and planting him¬
self on what Bergson calls the “ immediate data of con¬
sciousness.” Strictly speaking, indeed, mere rationalism
died with Hume. Unfortunately, Kant galvanized the
corpse. His “pure reason” does not, as the reason of
Descartes and the other great system-builders of the
seventeenth century was supposed to do, give reality,
1 Political Thought from Locke to Bentham, p. 270.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 225

but only empty categories. In opposition to this pure

reason Kant sets up a practical reason that is led to
make certain affirmations that cannot be shown to cor¬
respond with the “thing-in-itself.” By the divorce that
is thus established between practice and reality, the way
is opened for pragmatism which, instead of testing util¬
ity by truth, would test truth by utility; likewise for the
closely allied theory of “useful fiction” and other philo¬
sophical vagaries of recent times.
Let us return from the insubstantial transcendence of
Kant to Hume and his claim to be purely experimental.
This claim cannot be allowed for two reasons: first, as I
have already remarked, he asserts something that can¬
not be experimentally established — namely, an element
of spontaneous sympathy in the natural man, strong
enough to cope unaided with egoistic impulse. Secondly,
he fails to assert something that is, nevertheless, one of
the “immediate data of consciousness” — namely, an
ethical will that is felt as a power of control over the
natural man and his expansive desires. Deny this
ethical will and the inner life disappears; assert it and
one may dispense with numerous other assertions, or at
least give them minor emphasis. Many other things are
true, no doubt, in addition to wrhat one may affirm posi¬
tively; and “extra-beliefs” are in any case inevitable.
It is desirable, however, under existing circumstances,
to get at humanistic or religious truth with the minimum
of metaphysical or theological complications. It is not
even clear that, in order to preserve the integrity of the
inner life, one needs to set up a world of entities, es¬
sences, or “ideas” above the flux. Much of the loftiest
226 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

spirituality of the Occident has been associated with this

Platonic idealism. On the other hand, the early Buddhists
saw in a somewhat similar doctrine in India an obstacle
rather than an aid to the achievement of the fruits of
religion.
Kant, again, has from a strictly experimental point of
view, gone too far in asserting “God, freedom, immor¬
tality ”; and at the same time, from another point of
view, he has not gone far enough, for the freedom of his
“categorical imperative” is primarily a freedom to do,
and not, like that of the ethical will, a freedom to refrain
from doing. The first step surely is to plant oneself on
the psychological fact of an opposition between a law of
the spirit and a law of the members, a living and present
fact that one neglects at one’s peril in favor of what
may seem superficially more useful and agreeable. Some
persons, it may be urged, are conscious of no such oppo¬
sition in themselves. Some persons are also color-blind,
and spiritual vision is subject to even more infirmities
than physical vision.
The higher will in the dualism I have been sketching
has, as I have tried to show, been very much bound up
historically with the doctrine of grace and has tended to
be obscured with the decline of this doctrine. It would be
possible to go through the chief modern philosophers one
after the other from Descartes down and show that they
are least satisfactory in their treatment of the will.1 Any
one who wishes to recover the true dualism must begin
by exalting the ethical will to the first place. Any at¬
tempt to give the primacy to “reason” in any sense of
1 See Appendix A.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 227

the word will result in the loss of humility and lead to a

revival, in some form, of the Stoical error. One must in
this matter not only side with the Christian against the
Stoic, but in general with the Asiatic against the Euro¬
pean intellectual. It does not follow because one gives
the first place to will that one is to identify it with the
absolute or, like Schopenhauer, with the “ thing-in-itself ”;
for this is to fall from positive psychological observation
into metaphysics; nor, because one insists that intellect
is, as compared with will, secondary, need one conclude
with Wordsworth and other romantic obscurantists that
it is therefore “false.”
To give the first place to the higher will is only another
way of declaring that life is an act of faith. One may
discover on positive grounds a deep meaning in the old
Christian tenet that we do not know in order that we
may believe, but we believe in order that we may know.
What follows almost inevitably when the intellect ceases
to be the servant of the higher will and sets up as an in¬
dependent power is a lapse into the metaphysical illu¬
sion — the illusion of having confined the ocean in a cup.
The most familiar form of this illusion in recent times is
that of the pure mechanist or determinist. If the de-
terminist is told in the words of the poet that “our wills
are ours, we know not how; our wills are ours to make
them thine,” he answers in substance that our wills are
not ours and that he knows how. But his knowledge on
this point is only a conceit of knowledge. He is trying
with finite faculties to grasp factors that are at bottom
infinite, or, what amounts to the same thing, trying to
subject the higher element in human nature to the lower.
228 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

The proper reply to the determinist is not to appeal to

some dogma or other, but to experience. The decisive
word here has been uttered by Dr. Johnson, who has
claims to be regarded as the most sensible person of
recent times: “All theory,” he says, “is against the
freedom of the will, all experience for it.” Plant oneself
firmly on this fact of experience and the way is open
at one essential point for a return to common sense.
We escape at once from the vast web of intellectual and
emotional sophistry in which the naturalistic moralists
have sought to enmesh us. The answer to the enigma
of life, so far as there is any, is not for the man who
sets up some metaphysical theory, but for the man who,
in some sense or other of the word, acts. Now to act
according to the ethical will is, so far as the natural
man is concerned, to pull back, limit, and select. This
supremely human act of selection the rationalistic
naturalist would turn over to physical nature. The
emotional naturalist, refusing to be mechanized along
either Cartesian or Darwinian lines, emphasizes his vital
uniqueness, his spontaneous and temperamental “me,”
and its right to get itself uttered. The natural will that
is thus released from control is conceived by Nietzsche
as a will to power, and this would seem to have some
relation to the facts. On the other hand, the notion of a
Rousseau or a Whitman, that “liberty” of this type is
compatible with fraternity, is very far from being
experimental.
A French writer, M. L6on Daudet, has won a certain
notoriety by applying to the nineteenth century the
epithet “stupid.” If the century deserves the epithet
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 229

at all, it is surely because of the aspect of it that I

have just been discussing. The determinist tends to
mechanize man and deny him genuine moral choice. The
partisans of romantic spontaneity from Rousseau to
Bergson have hoped to escape from this naturalistic
fatalism by setting up some cosmic urge or elan vital
as a substitute for moral effort. Yet a multitude of men
during the past century, who acquiesced in either one or
the other of these two main forms of ethical passiveness,
held at the same time a firm faith in “progress.” They
were drifting, to be sure, but drifting towards a “far-off
divine event,” usually conceived as a paradise of peace
and brotherhood. But if it is a question of drifting,
there is only one direction in which one can drift and
that is towards barbarism. Civilization is something
that must be deliberately willed; it is not something that
gushes up spontaneously from the depths of the uncon¬
scious. Furthermore, it is something that must be willed
first of all by the individual in his own heart. Men who
have thus willed civilization have never been any too
numerous; so that civilization always has been and, in
the very nature of the case, always must remain some¬
thing precarious. In the words of Rivarol, barbarism is
always as close to the most refined civilization as rust
is to the most highly polished steel.
As a result of the denial or dissimulation of the forms
of inner action on which civilization finally depends, the
naturalistic era in which we are living has been espe¬
cially rich in dubious moralists, from the “beautiful
souls” of the eighteenth century to the Freudians and
behaviorists of our own day. If the behaviorist deserves
230 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

censure for seeing only matter and material causes, the

tendency that appears in Berkeleyan idealists and, in
much cruder form, in the exponents of various brands of
“new thought,” to deny matter in favor of what they
conceive to be spirit is also open to grave objection. As
a result of this denial, they tend to lose their sense of the
reality of the “civil war in the cave,” and so to fall into
materialism from the other side. The Freudian corrup¬
tion of ethics illustrates interestingly another main
naturalistic fallacy. Because outer and mechanical
repression of desire may work injury, it is insinuated
that the repression of desire is bad per se. If one says
that what is needed is not outer control but inner con¬
trol, even philosophers of some standing will reply that
inner control or the ethical will is only the brake on per¬
sonality; and that a vehicle cannot, after all, be pro¬
pelled by its brake. The metaphor, however, is utterly
misleading; the ethical will is nothing external and
mechanical like a brake. The man who imposes this will
upon the outgoing desires is moving away from what is
peripheral in himself to what is central, to what is indeed
at the very centre. The humanist would not go beyond
disciplining the “ lusts ” of the natural man to the law of
measure. However, if one goes still further and “ dies ”
entirely to the natural self and its impulses, what fol¬
lows, if we are to believe the great religious teachers, is
not mere emptiness, but the peace that passeth under¬
standing.
The man who does not impose either religious or
humanistic control upon his ordinary self does not
usually avow that he is a mere materialist. The ethical
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 231
problem would be comparatively simple if he did. The
egocentric individualist is, however, prone to give fine
names to his own unrestraint. As Plato says, he will
call insolence breeding, anarchy liberty, and waste mag¬
nificence; and may even go to the point of deifying his
own impulses. There are times when one must reply in
the affirmative to the question of Virgil “ whether each
man’s god is but his own fell desire.” There is a sense in
which one must agree with the scoffer that an honest
God is the noblest work of man. We recognize readily
that the God whom the Kaiser and many Germans
worshipped during the War was only a projection into
the religious realm of their own will to power. We are
loath, however, to admit any equivalent of this imperial¬
istic error in the champions of democracy. And yet it is
not difficult to point out such an equivalent, for ex¬
ample, in the humanitarian illusionist, Victor Hugo.
Monckton Milnes relates that when he called on Hugo
at Paris, “he was shown into a large room, with women
and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at
one end throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his
voice solemnly and said: ‘Quant a moi, je crois en
Dieu.’ Silence followed. Then a woman responded as if
in deep meditation: ‘Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit
en Dieu.’ ” 1 The sublimity diminishes somewhat when
one observes to what an extent the God in whom Hugo
believes reflects his ordinary self so that he is thus en¬
abled to worship this self on a sort of cosmic scale. A
man also frequently calls what is at bottom only an hy-

11 take the anecdote from The Education of Henry Adams,

p. 143.
232 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

postasis of his ordinary self in its dominant desire either

progress or justice. Thus Mr. Samuel Gompers com¬
plained that the New York Assembly of 1919 did not
pass a single “progressive or forward-looking act.” We
all know what this means. The far-off divine event
towards which the whole creation moves is for Mr.
Gompers the domination of the laboring class, with the
understanding that the laboring class itself is to be
dominated by Mr. Gompers or his kind. As a result of
the cowardice of our politicians, this more or less divine
event has at times not seemed so far off as one might
wish. The attempt to bestow the word justice on per¬
sonal or class interests is too familiar to need illustration.
We are dealing here with the most ancient and still
the most successful form of camouflage. During the
War, the French did not fail to quote a passage of Tacitus
to the general effect that the Germans give fine names
to what is at bottom only their own lawlessness and love
of plunder. But there is in this trait nothing specifically
German. The barbaric Briton, the same Tacitus nar¬
rates, complained of his Roman conquerors that “they
make a desolation and call it peace.” This human pro¬
clivity, though universal, is especially marked in periods
of individualistic emancipation. It is especially at such
a period that one needs to remind oneself with Hobbes
that words are the counters of wise men and the coin of
fools, and that one is not to suppose, on hearing a fine
phrase, that it coincides necessarily with a fine thing.
We are put here on the track of the true office of the in¬
tellect in such a period. To set out like Rousseau to be
an individualist and at the same time to disparage in-
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 233

tellect is to enter upon the pathway of madness. In

direct ratio, indeed, to the completeness of one’s break
with the past must be the keenness of one’s discrimina¬
tion. Otherwise one runs the risk of setting up as an
“ideal” and decking out with fair phrases some unsub¬
stantial dream — the mere ballooning out of the im¬
agination into the void.
The imagination must, to be sure, be supreme, but it
should be an imagination disciplined to the facts. If the
imagination is not present, the facts will not be unified;
they will remain inert and isolated. But the intellect
must also be present — and by intellect I mean the
power in man that analyzes and discriminates and traces
causes and effects; for this power alone can determine
whether the unity the imagination has established
among the facts is real or whether it exists rather only
in some “realm of chimeras.” The genuine man of sci¬
ence is not, on the one hand, a metaphysical theorist nor,
on the other, a mere fact-grubber. His eminence is
measured by the gift he possesses for true vision in
connection with some field of facts on which he has long
been fixing his attention. What may have come to him
originally in a flash of intuition he is careful to check up
and test experimentally by every means in his power;
and at this stage he is not synthetic but analytic. His
success is due to the correct relation he has established
between the part of himself that perceives, the part that
conceives, and the part that discriminates.
Now the true humanist deals with his facts in a some¬
what similar fashion: only the facts on which he is fixing
his attention are of an entirely different order. His
234 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

imagination is disciplined to law, but this law is not the

“law for thing.” He is tracing cause and effect, but
these causal sequences are not the ones that occur in
physical nature. Because there is in us, in Lowell’s
phrase, something that refuses to be “Benthamized,”
the romantic idealist looks with suspicion on a cause-
and-effect philosophy and the keen analysis by which it
can be established; but any other than a cause-and-
effect philosophy is likely to fall into sheer unreality;
inasmuch as reality means practically the reality of law,
and law in turn means that as a matter of positive ob¬
servation there is a constant association between cer¬
tain phenomena either in time or space — an associa¬
tion that exists quite apart from the desires or opinions
of the individual. If there is not a human law that is
thus objective, so that the person who violates it exposes
himself to certain consequences in much the same way
that the person who puts his finger into the fire exposes
himself to certain consequences, then the human law is
not worth going in search of. A sceptic of the type of
Hume would affirm, indeed, that the very idea of cause
and effect is not objective but subjective, that it arises
from man’s “propensity to feign.” But even if we go to
the extreme of scepticism and look on life merely as a
“dream whose shapes return,” it remains true that these
returning shapes bear a certain constant relationship to
one another; so that they are susceptible of study from
the point of view of the only problem that finally mat¬
ters— the problem of happiness or unhappiness. Of
cause and effect in any abstract and metaphysical sense,
the critical humanist is willing to avow his ignorance;
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 235

just as the true man of science admits that he cannot

grasp the ultimate essence behind the phenomenal
relationships he is busy in tracing.
The foregoing analysis, if it is correct, suggests that
the type of material progress on which the Occident has
been expending its main effort for some time past, so far
from promoting moral progress, is likely rather to make
against it. This type of progress has resulted from
imaginative concentration on facts of an entirely differ¬
ent order from those of the moral law. The keen ana¬
lytical discrimination in the service of actual percep¬
tion that gives reality — such reality as man has access
to — has become the more and more exclusive mo¬
nopoly of the man of science or of the utilitarian who
has been organizing scientific discovery into a vast ma¬
chinery of material efficiency. In the mean while, in the
distinctively human realm, the imagination has been
left more or less free to roam at large. It has set up a
unity, as I remarked at the outset, that has not been
sufficiently tested from the point of view of its reality.
The unity that the humanitarian hopes to achieve
among men hinges almost entirely, I have tried to show,
on the idea of “service.” Men are to be brought to¬
gether, one finds on analyzing this idea of service, by
means that are either rationalistic and mechanical or
else emotional. In either case, the humanitarian as¬
sumes that men can meet expansively and on the level
of their ordinary selves. But if this notion of union
should prove to be illusory, if men can really come to¬
gether only in humble obeisance to something set above
their ordinary selves, it follows that the great temple to
236 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

humanity that has been in process of erection for several

generations past is the modern equivalent of the Tower
of Babel; and so we should not be surprised if it is being
stricken with a confusion of tongues.
With the progressive weakening of traditional stand¬
ards, the inability of the humanitarian to supply any
adequate substitute is becoming apparent. The whole
of the Occident seems to be at an impasse. The mere
rationalist and the mere emotionalist are about equally
bankrupt. It may be that our only hope is a return to
the truths of the inner life. If we ourselves are unable to
see the need of such a return, it is perhaps because we
have reached the stage of the decadent Romans who,
according to Livy, were unable to endure the evils from
which they were suffering and also the remedies for those
evils.
The loss of the truths of the inner life in their tradi¬
tional form has involved, I have tried to show, a pro¬
found alteration in the idea of liberty. Liberty has come
more and more to be conceived expansively, not as
a process of concentration, as a submission or adjust¬
ment to a higher will. My whole argument thus far has
been that we should seek to recover in some critical
form the centripetal element in liberty that the modern¬
ist has allowed to drop out and so become thorough¬
going and complete moderns. It is a matter of no small
importance in any case to be defective in one’s definition
of liberty; for any defect here will be reflected in one’s
definitions of peace and justice; and the outlook for a
society which has defective notions of peace and justice
cannot be regarded as very promising.
 TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS 237

A good deal of the confusion about liberty, as I have

endeavored to show, has been promoted by the panthe¬
istic dreamers who have sought a substitute for the grace
of God in the grace of nature, and so have obscured the
distinction between the man for whom liberty is an
ethical working and the man who, like Rousseau, seeks
to found an indomitable spirit of liberty on an indolence
that is beyond belief. The pure traditionalist, the
Catholic, for example, not only avoids a particular con¬
fusion of this kind, but is in general relieved of the task
of defining liberty that is imposed upon the individual¬
ist. The Church will supply him with his definition:
liberty, he will be told, is submission to the will of God;
and the Church will not only supply him with the gen¬
eral principle, but also give him guidance in the in¬
numerable “cases” that arise in the application of it.
Inasmuch as the Pope is infallible (since 1870), at least
in religion and morals, submission to the will of God
tends to coincide practically, though not of course in
theory, with submission to the Pope.
Though the sound individualist must also have
standards, it is plain that he cannot get at them in this
way — not, namely, by leaning on outer authority, but
rather by the cooperation of intellect and imagination I
have tried to describe. The standards he has thus se¬
cured he will proceed to press into the service of the
ethical will. A programme of this kind, in which im¬
agination, intellect, and will cooperate, instead of flying
asunder, as they tend to do in Pascal, for example, is, it
must be confessed, easier to outline than to accomplish.
Yet it is hard to see that our modem experiment can be
238 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

carried through safely on any other terms. If this ex¬

periment shows signs of breaking down, the explanation
is surely that it has failed thus far to achieve adequate
equivalents for the traditional controls. Instead of
setting up genuine standards and then selecting with
reference to them, the man who professes to be modem
has turned selection over to “nature” and sought to
substitute for the working of the ethical will a diffuse,
unselective sympathy. This tendency to put on sym¬
pathy a burden that it cannot bear and at the same time
to sacrifice a truly human hierarchy and scale of values
to the principle of equality has been especially marked
in the democratic movement, nowhere more so perhaps
than in our American democracy. It remains, therefore,
to discuss democracy in its relation to standards. I shall
attempt in the course of this discussion to elucidate still
further, with the aid of a Socratic dialectic, my distinc¬
tion between the true and the false liberal.
 CHAPTER VII
DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS

Judged by any quantitative test, the American achieve¬

ment is impressive. We have ninety per cent of the
motors of the world and control seventy-five per cent of
its oil; we produce sixty per cent of the world’s steel,
seventy per cent of its copper, and eighty per cent of its
telephones and typewriters. This and similar statistical
proof of our material preeminence, which would have
made a Greek apprehensive of Nemesis, seems to inspire
in many Americans an almost lyrical complacency.
They are not only quantitative in their estimates of our
present accomplishment, but even more so if possible
in what they anticipate for the future. Now that we
have fifteen million automobiles they feel, with Mr.
Henry Ford, that we can have no higher ambition than
to expand this number to thirty million. Our present
output of fifty million tons of steel a year is, according
to Mr. Schwab, a mere trifle compared with our probable
output of twenty years hence. In short, an age that is
already immersed in things to an unexampled degree is
merely to prepare the way for an age still more material
in its preoccupations and still more subservient to ma¬
chinery. This, we are told, is progress. To a person with
a proportionate view of life it might seem rather to be
full-blown commercial insolence.
The reasons for the quantitative view of life that pre-
240 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

vails in America are far from being purely political.

This view has resulted in a large measure from the com¬
ing together of scientific discovery with the opening up
of a new continent. It has been possible with the aid of
science to accomplish in a hundred years what even the
optimistic Thomas Jefferson thought might take a
thousand. The explanation, it has been said, of much
that is obscure to us in the Chinese may be summed up
in the words “lack of elbow-room.” We in this country,
on the other hand, have received a peculiar psychic twist
from the fact that we have had endless elbow-room. A
chief danger both to ourselves and others is that we shall
continue to have a frontier psychology long after we
have ceased to have a frontier. For a frontier psychol¬
ogy is expansive, and expansiveness, I have tried to
show, is, at least in its political manifestations, always
imperialistic.
If quantitatively the American achievement is im¬
pressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.
What must one think of a country, asks one of our for¬
eign critics, whose most popular orator is W. J. Bryan,
whose favorite actor is Charlie Chaplin, whose most
widely read novelist is Harold Bell Wright, whose best-
known evangelist is Billy Sunday, and whose representa¬
tive journalist is William Randolph Hearst? What one
must evidently think of such a country, even after allow¬
ing liberally for overstatement, is that it lacks standards.
Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of
standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or
an inversion of standards. As an example of the inver¬
sion of standards we may take the bricklayer who, being
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 241

able to lay two thousand bricks a day, is reduced by

union rules to laying five hundred. There is confusion
of standards, again, when we are so impressed by
Mr. Henry Ford’s abilities as organizer and master
mechanic that we listen seriously to his views on money;
or when, simply because Mr. Edison has shown inven¬
tive genius along certain fines, we receive him as an
authority on education. One is reminded of the story of
the French butcher who, having need of legal aid, finally,
after looking over a number of lawyers, selected the
fattest one.
The problem of standards, though not identical with
the problem of democracy, touches it at many points and
is not therefore the problem of any one country. Euro¬
peans, indeed, like to look upon the crudity and chaotic
impressionism of people who are no longer guided by
standards as something specifically American. “ Amer¬
ica,” says the “Saturday Review,” “is the country of
unbalanced minds, of provincial policies and of hysteri¬
cal Utopias.” The deference for standards has, how¬
ever, been diminished by a certain type of democracy in
many other countries besides America. The resulting
vulgarity and triviality are more or less visible in all of
these countries; — for example, if we are to believe
Lord Bryce, in New Zealand. If we in America are per¬
haps preeminent in lack of distinction, it is because of
the very completeness of our emancipation from the
past. Goethe’s warning as to the retarding effect of the
commonplace is well known (IFas uns alle bandigt, das
Gemeine). His explanation of what makes for the com¬
monplace is less familiar: “Enjoyment,” he says, “makes
242 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

common.” (Geniessen macht gemein.) Since every man

desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether
he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoy¬
ment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have at¬
tempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his
temperamental self with reference to some standard. In
short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal
sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may,
indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and con¬
version. Along which of these two main paths are most
of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which
we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence?
The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of
himself: “I am an Epicurean.” 1 It cannot be gainsaid
that an increasing number of our young people are, in
this respect at least, good Jeffersonians. The phrase that
reflects most clearly their philosophy of life is perhaps
“ good time.” One might suppose that many of them see
this phrase written in great blazing letters on the very
face of the firmament. As “Punch” remarked, the
United States is not a country, but a picnic. When the
element of conversion with reference to a standard is
eliminated from fife, what remains is the irresponsible
quest of thrills. The utilitarian and industrial side of the
modern movement comes into play at this point. Com¬
mercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon every¬
thing (including the irresponsible quest of thrills); so
that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is
sometimes tempted to define it practically as standard¬
ized and commercialized melodrama. This definition
1 Works (Ford ed.), x, p. 143.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 243

will be found to fit many aspects of our national life

besides the moving-picture industry. The tendency to
steep and saturate ourselves in the impression of the
moment without reference to any permanent pattern of
human experience is even more marked, perhaps, in our
newspapers and magazines. It was said of the inhab¬
itants of a certain ancient Greek city that, though they
were not fools, they did just the things that fools would
do. It is hard to take a glance at one of our news-stands
without reflecting that, though we may not be fools, we
are reading just the things that fools would read. Our
daily press in particular is given over to the most child¬
ish sensationalism. “The Americans are an excellent
people/7 Matthew Arnold wrote from Boston in 1883,
“but their press seems to me an awful symptom.77 This
symptom was not so awful then as now; for that was
before the day of the scarehead and the comic supple¬
ment. The American reading his Sunday paper in a
state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol
of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world
has yet seen. Whole forests are being ground into pulp
daily to minister to our triviality.
One is inclined, indeed, to ask, in certain moods,
whether the net result of the movement that has been
sweeping the Occident for several generations may not
be a huge mass of standardized mediocrity; and whether
in this country in particular we are not in danger of pro¬
ducing in the name of democracy one of the most trifling
brands of the human species that the world has yet seen.
To be sure, it may be urged that, though we may suffer
loss of distinction as a result of the democratic drift, by
244 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

way of compensation a great many average people will,

in the Jeffersonian sense at least, be made “happy.” If
we are to judge by history, however, what supervenes
upon the decline of standards and the disappearance of
leaders who embody them is not some equalitarian
paradise, but inferior types of leadership. We have al¬
ready been reminded by certain developments in this
country of Byron's definition of democracy as an “aris¬
tocracy of blackguards.” At the very moment when we
were most vociferous about making the world safe for
democracy the citizens of New York City refused to
reelect an honest man as their mayor and put in his
place a tool of Tammany, an action followed in due
course by a “crime wave”; whereupon they returned
the tool of Tammany by an increased majority. The
industrial revolution has tended to produce every¬
where great urban masses that seem to be increasingly
careless of ethical standards. In the case of our Ameri¬
can cities, the problem of securing some degree of moral
cohesion is further complicated by the presence of
numerous aliens of widely divergent racial stocks and
cultural backgrounds.1 In addition our population is
not only about half urban, but we cannot be said, like
most other countries, to have any peasantry or yeo¬
manry. Those Americans who actually dwell in the
country are more and more urban in their psychology.
The whole situation is so unusual as to suggest doubts
even from a purely biological point of view. “As I
1 For example, 41 per cent of the residents of New York City
are actually foreign-born; if we add those whose father or mother
or both were born abroad, the more or less foreign element in its
population amounts to 80 per cent.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 245

watch the American nation speeding gaily, with invin¬

cible optimism down the road to destruction,” says
Professor William McDougall, an observer of the bio¬
logical type, “I seem to be contemplating the greatest
tragedy in the history of mankind.”
We are assured, indeed, that the highly heterogeneous
elements that enter into our population will, like various
instruments in an orchestra, merely result in a richer
harmony; they will, one may reply, provided that, like
an orchestra, they be properly led. Otherwise the out¬
come may be an unexampled cacophony. This question
of leadership is not primarily biological, but moral.
Leaders may vary in quality from the man who is so
loyal to sound standards that he inspires right conduct
in others by the sheer rightness of his example, to the
man who stands for nothing higher than the law of cun¬
ning and the law of force, and so is, in the sense I have
sought to define, imperialistic. If democracy means
simply the attempt to eliminate the qualitative and
selective principle in favor of some general will, based in
turn on a theory of natural rights, it may prove to be
only a form of the vertigo of the abyss. As I have tried
to show in dealing with the influence of Rousseau on the
French Revolution, it will result practically, not in
equality, but in a sort of inverted aristocracy. One’s
choice may be, not between a democracy that is prop¬
erly led and a democracy that hopes to find the equiva¬
lent of standards and leadership in the appeal to a
numerical majority, that indulges in other words in
a sort of quantitative impressionism, but between a
democracy that is properly led and a decadent imperial-
246 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

ism. One should, therefore, in the interests of democ¬

racy itself seek to substitute the doctrine of the right
man for the doctrine of the rights of man.
The opposition between traditional standards and an
equalitarian democracy based on the supposed rights of
man has played an important part in our own political
history, and has meant practically the opposition be¬
tween two types of leadership. The “quality” in the
older sense of the word suffered its first decisive defeat
in 1829 when Washington was invaded by the hungry
hordes of Andrew Jackson. The imperialism latent in
this type of democracy appears in the Jacksonian
maxim: “To the victors belong the spoils.” In his
theory of democracy Jackson had, of course, much in
common with Thomas Jefferson. If we go back, indeed,
to the beginnings of our institutions, we find that
America stood from the start for two different views of
government that have their origin in different views of
liberty and ultimately of human nature. The view that
is set forth in the Declaration of Independence assumes
that man has certain abstract rights; it has therefore
important points of contact with the French revolu¬
tionary “idealism.” The view that inspired our Con¬
stitution, on the other hand, has much in common with
that of Burke. If the first of these political philosophies
is properly associated with Jefferson, the second has its
most distinguished representative in Washington. The
Jeffersonian liberal has faith in the goodness of the
natural man, and so tends to overlook the need of a
veto power either in the individual or in the State. The
liberals of whom I have taken Washington to be the
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 247

type are less expansive in their attitude towards the

natural man. Just as man has a higher self that acts
restrictively on his ordinary self, so, they hold, the State
should have a higher or permanent self, appropriately
embodied in institutions, that should set bounds to its
ordinary self as expressed by the popular will at any par¬
ticular moment. The contrast that I am establishing is,
of course, that between a constitutional and a direct
democracy. There is an opposition of first principles
between those who maintain that the popular will should
prevail, but only after it has been purified of what is
merely impulsive and ephemeral, and those who main¬
tain that this will should prevail immediately and un¬
restrictedly. The American experiment in democracy
has, therefore, from the outset been ambiguous, and
will remain so until the irrepressible conflict between
a Washingtonian and a Jeffersonian liberty has been
fought to a conclusion. The liberal of the type of Wash¬
ington has always been very much concerned with what
one may term the unionist aspect of liberty. This cen¬
tral preoccupation is summed up in the phrase of
Webster: Liberty and union, one and inseparable. The
liberty of the Jeffersonian, on the other hand, makes
against ethical union like every liberty that rests on the
assertion of abstract rights. Jefferson himself proclaimed
not only human rights, but also state rights.1 Later the
doctrine of state rights was developed with logical
rigor by Calhoun, whereas the doctrine of human rights
was carried through no less uncompromisingly by the
1 He drafted, for example, the so-called Kentucky Resolutions
(November, 1799).
248 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

abolitionists. The result was two opposing camps of

extremists and fire-eaters; so that the whole question of
union, instead of being settled on ethical lines, had to be
submitted to the arbitrament of force.
The man who has grasped the full import of the con¬
flict between the liberty of the unionist and that of the
Jeffersonian has been put in possession of the key that
unlocks American history. The conflict between the
two conceptions is not, indeed, always clear-cut in par¬
ticular individuals. There is much in Jefferson himself
that contradicts what I have been saying about Jeffer¬
son. A chief business of criticism, however, is to dis¬
tinguish, in spite of peripheral overlappings, between
things that are at the centre different. For example, to
link together in a common admiration Jefferson and
John Marshall, our most eminent unionist after Wash¬
ington himself, is proof of lack of critical discrimination
rather than of piety towards the fathers. Jefferson and
Marshall knew perfectly that they stood for incom¬
patible things,1 and it is important that we should know
it also. “Marshall,” says John Quincy Adams in his
Diary, “has cemented the Union which the crafty and
quixotic democracy of Jefferson had a perpetual tend¬
ency to dissolve.”
By his preoccupation with the question of the union,
Lincoln became the true successor of Washington and
Marshall. In making of Lincoln the great emancipator
instead of the great unionist, in spite of his own most
1 A similar opposition existed, of course, between Jefferson and
Alexander Hamilton. The Life of Hamilton, by F. S. Oliver, is to
be commended for the clearness of the insight it displays into
the nature of this opposition.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 249

specific declarations on this point, we are simply creat¬

ing a Lincoln myth, as we have already created a Wash¬
ington myth.1 We are sometimes told that the good
democrat needs merely to be like Lincoln. But to be
like Lincoln one must know what Lincoln was like.
This is not only a task for the critic, but, in view of
the Lincoln myth, a more difficult task than is com¬
monly supposed. It is especially easy to sentimentalize
Lincoln because he had a strongly marked vein of sen¬
timentalism. Nevertheless, in spite of the peripheral
overlappings between the democracy of Lincoln and
that of Jefferson2 or even between that of Lincoln and
Walt Whitman, one should insist on the central differ¬
ence. One has only to read, for example, the Second
Inaugural along with the “Song of Myself” if one wishes
to become aware of the gap that separates religious
humility from romantic egotism. We should be careful
again, in spite of peripheral overlappings, not to con¬
found the democracy of Lincoln with that of Roosevelt.
What we feel at the very centre in Roosevelt is the
dynamic rush of an imperialistic personality. What we
feel at the very centre in Lincoln, on the other hand, is
an element of judicial control; and in close relation to
this control a profound conception of the role of the
courts in maintaining free institutions. The man who
has studied the real Lincoln does not find it easy to im¬
agine him advocating the recall of judicial decisions.
The Jeffersonian liberal is, as a rule, much more osten-
1 A specially influential book in the creation of this myth was
the Life of Washington (1800), by “Parson’' Weems.
2 Lincoln actually defended himself against the charge of hav¬
ing spoken disparagingly of Jefferson. See Works (Nicolay and
Hay ed.), vi, p. 60.
250 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

tatiously fraternal than the liberal in the other tradition.

Yet he is usually inferior in human warmth and geniality
to the unionist. Washington and Marshall and Lincoln
at their best combined practical sagacity with a central
benignity and unselfishness. Jefferson, on the other
hand, though perhaps our most accomplished politician,
did not show himself especially sagacious in dealing with
specific emergencies. Furthermore, it is hard to read his
“Anas” and reflect on the circumstances of its composi¬
tion without concluding that what was central in his
personality was not benignity and unselfishness but
vindictiveness.
Statesmen who deserve the praise I have bestowed on
our unionist leaders are, as every student of history
knows, extremely rare. The type of constitutional lib¬
erty that we owe to these men before all others is one
of the greatest blessings that has ever been vouchsafed to
any people. And yet we are in danger of losing it. The
Eighteenth Amendment is striking proof of our loss of
grasp, not only on the principles that underlie our own
Constitution, but that must underlie any constitution,
as such, in opposition to mere legislative enactment.
Our present drift away from constitutional freedom
can be understood only with reference to the progressive
crumbling of traditional standards and the rise of a
naturalistic philosophy that, in its treatment of specifi¬
cally human problems, has been either sentimental or
utilitarian. The significant changes in our own national
temper in particular are finally due to the fact that
Protestant Christianity, especially in the Puritanic
form, has been giving way to humanitarianism. The
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 251

point is worth making because the persons who have

favored prohibition and other similar “reforms” have
been attacked as Puritans. Genuine Puritanism was,
however, a religion of the inner life. Our unionist leaders,
Washington, Marshall, and Lincoln, though not nar¬
rowly orthodox, were still religious in the traditional
sense. The struggle between good and evil, as they saw
it, was still primarily not in society, but in the individual.
Their conscious dependence on a higher or divine will
could not fail to be reflected in their notion of liberty.
Jefferson, on the contrary, associated his liberty, not
with God, but with “nature.” He admired, as is well
known, the liberty of the American Indian.1 He was
for diminishing to the utmost the role of government,
but not for increasing the inner control that must, ac¬
cording to Burke, be in strict ratio to the relaxation of
outer control. When evil actually appears, the Jeffer¬
sonian cannot appeal to the principle of inner control;
he is not willing again to admit that the sole alternative
to this type of control is force; and so he is led into what
seems at first sight a paradoxical denial of his own prin¬
ciples: he has recourse to legislation. It should be clear
at all events that our present attempt to substitute
social control for self-control is Jeffersonian rather than
Puritanical. So far as we are true children of the Puri¬
tans, we may accept the contrast established by Pro¬
fessor Stuart P. Sherman 2 between our own point of
view and that of the German: “The ideal of the German

1 See Works (Ford ed.), in, p. 195.

2 American and Allied Ideals (War Information Series, No.
12), p. 9.
252 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

is external control and ‘inner freedom’; the Government

looks after his conduct and he looks after his liberty.
The ideal of the American is external freedom and inner
control; the individual looks after his conduct and the
Government looks after his liberty. Thus Verboten in
Germany is pronounced by the Government and en¬
forced by the police. In America Verboten is pronounced
by public opinion and enforced by the individual com
science. In this light it should appear that Puritanism,
our national principle of concentration, is the indispen¬
sable check on democracy, our national principle of ex¬
pansion. I use the word Puritanism in the sense given to
it by German and German-American critics: the inner
check upon the expansion of natural impulse .”
Professor Sherman’s contrast has been true in the past
and still has some truth — at least enough for the pur¬
poses of war-time propaganda. But what about our
main drift at present? It is plainly away from the point
of view that Professor Sherman ascribes to the Puritan 1
and towards the point of view that he ascribes to the
German. “The inner check upon the expansion of
natural impulse” is precisely the missing element in the
Jeffersonian philosophy. The Jeffersonian has therefore
been led to deal with the problem of evil, not vitally and
in terms of the inner life, but mechanically. Like the
1 Strange things have been happening to the Puritan conscience
of late even in the most authentic descendants of the Puritans.
Thus Henry Adams inserts in a hymn to the Virgin a hymn to the
dynamo. The whole conception has little relation to mediaeval
Christianity and none at all to Puritanism. It is, however, closely
related to the tendency of the nineteenth century to see in a sym¬
pathy that is emancipated from justice the proper corrective of a
power that is pursued without regard to the law of measure.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 253

Jesuit he has fallen from law into legalism. It has been

estimated that for one Verboten sign in Germany we
already have a dozen in this country; only, having set
up our Verboten sign, we get even by not observing it.
Thus prohibition is pronounced by the Government,
largely repudiated by the individual conscience, and
enforced (very imperfectly) by the police. The multi¬
tude 1 of laws we are passing is one of many proofs that
we are growing increasingly lawless.
There are, to be sure, peripheral overlappings between
the point of view of the Puritan and that of the human¬
itarian legalist. The Puritan inclined from the start to
be meddlesome, as any one who has studied the ac¬
tivities of Calvin at Geneva will testify. But even here
one may ask whether the decisive arguments by which
we have been induced to submit to the meddling of the
prohibitionist were not utilitarian rather than puritan¬
ical. “Booze,” says Mr. Henry Ford, “had to go out
when modern industry and the motor car came in.”
The truth may be that we are prepared to make any
1 It is estimated that 62,014 statutes were passed by our na¬
tional and state legislatures in the period 1909-13. Some of these
laws — for example, those regulating finger-bowls and the length
of sheets in hotels — remind one of the minute prescriptions in¬
dulged in by the ancient city-states at their worst. Cf. Fustel de
Coulanges, La Cite antique, p. 266: “L’Etat exergait sa tyrannie
jusque dans les plus petites choses; 4 Locres, la loi ddfendait aux
hommes de boire du vin pur; k Rome, a Milet, k Marseille, elle
le d6fendait aux femmes. II etait ordinaire que le costume ffit
fix6 invariablement par les lois de chaque cit6; la legislation de
Sparte r^glait la coiffure des femmes, et celle d’Ath&nes leur
interdisait d’emporter en voyage plus de trois robes. A Rhodes
la loi defendait de se raser la barbe; 4 Byzance, elle punissait
d’une amende celui qui poss6dait chez soi un rasoir; k Sparte,
au contraire, elle exigeait qu’on se rasat la moustache.”
254 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

sacrifice to the Moloch of efficiency, including, appar¬

ently, that of our federal Constitution.
The persons who have been carrying on of late a
campaign against the Puritans like to look on themselves
as “intellectuals.” But if the primary function of the
intellect is to make accurate distinctions, it is plain that
they do not deserve the title. For in dealing with this
whole subject they have fallen into a twofold confusion.
So far as they identify with Puritanism the defence of
the principle of control in human nature, they are sim¬
ply attacking under that name the wisdom of the ages
and all its authentic representatives in both East and
West. To bestow, on the other hand, the name of Puri¬
tans on the humanitarian legalists who are now sapping
our spiritual virility is to pay them an extravagant and
undeserved compliment. Let us take as a sample of the
attacks on the Puritans that of Mr. Theodore Dreiser,
culminating in the grotesque assertion regarding the
United States: “No country has such a peculiar, such a
seemingly fierce determination to make the Ten Com¬
mandments work.” We are murdering one another at
the rate of about ten thousand a year (with very few
capital convictions)1 and are in general showing our¬
selves more criminally inclined than any other nation
that is reputed to be civilized.2 The explanation is that
1 In 1885 there were 1808 homicides in the United States with
108 executions; in 1910, 8,975 homicides with 104 executions.
2 “In 1918 Chicago had 22 robberies for every one robbery in
London and 14 robberies for every one robbery in England and
Wales. . . . Cities like St. Louis and Detroit, in their statistics
of robbery and assault with intent to rob, frequently show annual
totals varying from three times to five times greater than the
number of such crimes reported for the whole of Great Britain.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 255

we are trying to make, not the Ten Commandments,

but humanitarianism work — and it is not working. If
our courts are so ineffective in punishing crime, a chief
reason is that they do not have the support of public
opinion, and this is because the public is so largely com¬
posed of people who have set up sympathy for the under¬
dog as a substitute for all the other virtues, or else
of people who hold that the criminal is the product
of his environment and so is not morally responsible.
Here as elsewhere there is a cooperation between
those who mechanize life and those who sentimental¬
ize it.
The belief in moral responsibility must be based on a
belief in the possibility of an inner working of some kind
with reference to standards. The utilitarian, as I have
sought to show, has put his main emphasis on outer
working. The consequence of this emphasis, coinciding
as it has with the multiplication of machines, has been
the substitution of standardization for standards. The
type of efficiency that our master commercialists pursue
requires that a multitude of men should be deprived of
their specifically human attributes, and become mere
cogs in some vast machine. At the present rate even
the grocer in a remote country town will soon not be
left as much initiative as is needed to fix the price of a
pound of butter.

Liverpool is about one and a third times larger than Cleveland,

and yet in 1919 Cleveland reported 31 robberies for every one
reported in Liverpool.” (Raymond B. Fosdick, Crime in America
and the Police, 1920, p. 18.) Mr. Fosdick ascribes our imperfect
administration of justice to out legalism (p. 48) and our senti¬
mentalism (p. 44).
256 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

Standardization is, however, a less serious menace to

standards than what are currently known as “ideals.”
The person who breaks down standards in the name of
ideals does not seem to be impelled by base commercial
motives, but to be animated, on the contrary, by the
purest commiseration for the lowly and the oppressed.
We must have the courage to submit this humanitarian
zeal to a close scrutiny. We may perhaps best start with
the familiar dictum that America is only another name
for opportunity. Opportunity to do what? To engage
in a scramble for money and material success, until the
multimillionaire emerges as the characteristic product
of a country dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal? According to Napoleon, the French
Revolution was also only another name for opportunity
(la carriere ouverte aux talents). Some of our commercial
supermen have evidently been making use of their
opportunity in a very Napoleonic fashion. In any case,
opportunity has meaning only with reference to some
true standard. The sentimentalist, instead of setting up
some such standard by way of protest against the wrong
type of superiority, inclines rather to bestow an un-
selective sympathy on those who have been left behind
in the race for economic advantage. Even when less
materialistic in his outlook, he is prone to dodge the
question of justice. He does not ask whether a man is
an underdog because he has already had his opportunity
and failed to use it, whether, in short, the man that he
takes to be a victim of the social order is not rather a
victim of his own misconduct1 or at least of his own in-
1 “This is a chain of galley-slaves,” cried Sancho, “who are
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 257

dolence and inattention. He thus exposes himself to the

penalties visited on those who set out to be kinder than
the moral law.
At bottom the point of view of the “uplifter” is so
popular because it nourishes spiritual complacency; it
enables a man to look on himself as “up” and on some
one else as “down.” But there is psychological if not
theological truth in the assertion of Jonathan Edwards
that complacent people are a “particular smoke” in
God’s nostrils. A man needs to look, not down, but up
to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to
make him feel that he is himself spiritually the under¬
dog. The man who thus looks up is becoming worthy
to be looked up to in turn, and, to this extent, quali¬
fying for leadership. Leadership of this type, one may
add, may prove to be, in the long run, the only ef¬
fectual counterpoise to that of the imperialistic super¬
man.
No amount of devotion to society and its supposed
interests can take the place of this inner obeisance of
the spirit to standards. The humanitarian would seem
to be caught here in a vicious circle. If he turns from
the inner life to serve his fellow men, he becomes a busy¬
body. If he sets out again to become exemplary pri¬
marily with a view to the benefit of others, he becomes
going to the galleys.” ... “Be it how it may,” replied Don
Quixote, “these people, since they are being taken, go by force
and not of their own will. . . . Here comes in the exercise of my
office, to redress outrages and to succor and aid the afflicted.”
“Let your worship reflect,” said Sancho, “that justice, which is
the King’s self, does no violence or wrong to such people, but
chastises them in punishment of their crimes.” (Don Quixote,
Part i, ch. xxii.)
258 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

a prig. Nothing will avail short of humility. Humility,

as Burke saw, is the ultimate root of the justice that
should prevail in the secular order, as well as of the vir¬
tues that are specifically religious. The modern problem,
I have been insisting, is to secure leaders with an alle¬
giance to standards, now that the traditional order with
which Burke associated his standards and leadership
has been so seriously shaken. Those who have broken
with the traditional beliefs have thus far shown them¬
selves singularly ineffective in dealing with this prob¬
lem of leadership, even when they have admitted the
need of leaders at all. The persons who have piqued
themselves especially on being positive have looked
for leadership to the exponents of physical science.
Auguste Comte, for example, not only regarded men of
science as the true modern priesthood, but actually
disparaged moral effort on the part of the individual.
I scarcely need to repeat here what I have said elsewhere
— that the net result of a merely scientific “progress”
is to produce efficient megalomaniacs. Physical science,
excellent in its proper place, is, when exalted out of
this place, the ugliest and most maleficent idol before
which man has as yet consented to prostrate himself.
If the essence of genuine science is to face loyally all the
facts as they present themselves without dogmatic pre¬
possessions, one is justified in asking whether the man
who forgets that physical science is, in Tennyson’s
phrase, the second, not the first, is genuinely scien¬
tific; whether the very sharpest discrimination does
not need to be established between science and utili¬
tarianism. Aristotle, for example, was a true man of
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 259

science; he was not a utilitarian.1 Francis Bacon, on

the other hand, is the prophet of the whole utilitarian
movement, but one may doubt his eminence as a man
of science. Quite apart from the fact that he failed
to make important scientific discoveries, one may ques¬
tion the validity of the Baconian method. His fail¬
ure to do justice to deduction as part of a sound scien¬
tific method has often been noted. A more serious
defect is his failure to recognize the role of the imagi¬
nation, or, what amounts to the same thing, the role
of exceptional genius in the making of scientific discov¬
eries.2
One cannot grant that an aristocracy of scientific in¬
tellectuals or indeed any aristocracy of intellect is what
we need. This would mean practically to encourage the
libido sciendi and so to put pride in the place of humility.
Still less acceptable would be an aristocracy of artists;
as the word art has come to be understood in recent
times, this would mean an aristocracy of aesthetes who
would attempt to base their selection on the libido sen-
tiendi. The Nietzschean attempt, again, to found the
aristocratic and selective principle on the sheer expan¬
sion of the will to power (libido dominandi) would lead in
practice to horrible violence and finally to the death of
civilization. The attempts that were made during the
1 “To be always seeking after the useful does not become free
and exalted souls’’ (Politics, 1338b.)
2 To suppose, as Bacon did, not only that nature is exhaustible,
but that it may be exhausted by the accumulated observations
of a number of essentially commonplace specialists is to be wrong
at the centre. Cf. Novum Organum, Book i, Aphorism cxxii:
“ My way of discovering sciences goes far to level men’s wits, and
leaves but little to individual excellence.”
260 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

past century to establish a scale of values with reference

to the three main lusts of the human heart often took on
a mystical coloring. Man likes to think that he has God
as an ally of his expansive conceit, whatever this conceit
may chance to be. When, indeed, one has passed in re¬
view the various mysticisms of the modem movement,
as they are set forth, for example, in the volumes of
M. Seilliere, one is reminded of the saying of Bossuet:
“True mysticism is so rare and unessential and false
mysticism is so common and dangerous that one cannot
oppose it too firmly.”
If one discovers frequently a pseudo-mystical element
in the claims to leadership of the aesthetes, the supermen
and the scientific intellectuals, this element is even more
visible in those who would, in the name of democracy,
dispense with leadership altogether. Thus Walt Whit¬
man, as we have seen, would put no check on his “spon¬
taneous me”; he would have every one else indulge his
“idiocrasy ” to the same degree, be a “genius,” in short,
in the full romantic sense of the term. A liberty thus
anarchical is to lead to equality and fraternity. If one
tells the democrat of this type that his programme is
contrary to common sense and the facts of experience,
he is wont to take refuge in mystical “vision.” One
needs in effect to be very mystical to suppose that men
can come together by flying off each on his tempera¬
mental tangent. Whitman does not admit the need of
the leader who looks up humbly to some standard and
so becomes worthy to be looked up to in turn. The only
leadership he contemplates apparently is that of the
ideal democratic bard who flatters the people’s pride and
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 261
chants the divine average.1 He represents in an extreme
form the substitution for vital control of expansive emo¬
tion under the name of love. Pride and self-assertion,
when tempered by love, will not, he holds, endanger the
principle of union.2 The Union, though “ always swarm¬
ing with blatherers, is yet,” he says, “always sure and
impregnable.” The records of the past are not reassur¬
ing as to the maintenance of ethical union in a commu¬
nity that is swarming with “blatherers.” At all events,
the offset to the blatherers will be found, not in any
divine average, but in the true leader — the “still
strong man in a blatant land.” We come here to another
opposition that is one of first principles and is not there¬
fore subject to mediation or compromise — the oppo¬
sition, namely, between the doctrine of the saving
remnant and that of the divine average. If one deals
with human nature realistically one may find here and
there a person who is worthy of respect and occasionally
one who is worthy of reverence. Any one, on the other
hand, who puts his faith in the divinity of the average is
destined, if we are to trust the records of history, to pass
through disillusion to a final despair. We are reaching
the stage of disillusion in this country at the present
moment. According to the author of “ Main Street,” the
1 “The American demands a poetry . . . that will place in the
van and hold up at all hazards the banner of the divine pride of
man in himself (the radical foundation of the new religion). Long
enough have the People been listening to poems in which common
humanity, deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging
superiors. But America listens to no such poem. Erect, inflated,
and fully self-esteeming be the chant; and then America will listen
with pleased ears.” (Democratic Vistas.)
2 “. . . the American Soul, with equal hemispheres, one Love,
one Dilation or Pride.”
262 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

average is not divine but trivial; according to the author

of the “Spoon River Anthology,” it is positively hideous.
It can scarcely be gainsaid that contemporary America
offers an opening for satire. A great many people are
gradually drifting into materialism and often cherishing
the conceit at the same time that they are radiant ideal¬
ists. But satire, to be worth while, must be constructive.
The opposite of the trivial is the distinguished; and one
can determine what is distinguished only with reference
to standards. To see Main Street on a background of
standards would be decidedly helpful; but standards are
precisely what our so-called realists lack. They are
themselves a part of the disease that they are attempting
to define.
The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the
whole question of standards and leadership because of
his unbounded faith in the plain people. How far is this
appeal to the plain people justified and how far is it
merely demagogic? There is undoubted truth in the say¬
ing that there is somebody who knows more than any¬
body, and that is everybody. Only one must allow
everybody sufficient time to sift the evidence and add
that, even so, everybody does not know very much.
Burke told the electors of Bristol that he was not flatter¬
ing their opinions of the moment, but uttering the views
that both they and he must have five years thence.
Even in this triumph of the sober judgment of the peo¬
ple over its passing impression, the role of the true
leader should not be underestimated. Thus in the year
1795 the plain people of America were eager to give the
fraternal accolade to the French Jacobins. The great
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 263

and wise Washington opposed an alliance that would

almost certainly have been disastrous, and as a result
he had heaped upon him by journals like the “Aurora,”
the forerunner of our modern “journals of opinion,”
epithets that, as he himself complained, would not have
been deserved by a common pickpocket. In a com¬
paratively short time Washington and his group were
seen to be right, and those who seemed to be the spokes¬
men of the plain people were seen to be wrong. It is not
clear that one can have much faith even in the sober
second thought of a community that has no enlightened
minority. A Haytian statesman, for example, might
not gain much in appealing from Haytian opinion of to¬
day to Haytian opinion of five years hence. The demo¬
cratic idealist does not, however, mean as a rule by an
appeal to the plain people an appeal to its sober second
thought. He means rather the immediate putting into
effect of the will of a numerical majority. Like the man
in the comic song the people is supposed to “want what
it wants when it wants it.” Our American drift for a
number of years has unquestionably been towards a
democracy of this radical type, as is evident from the
increasing vogue of the initiative, referendum, and recall
(whether of judges or judicial decisions) as well as from
popular primaries and the direct election of Senators.
The feeling that the people should act directly on all
measures has led to the appearance in certain States of
ballots thirty feet long! Yet the notion that wisdom
resides in a popular majority at any particular moment
should be the most completely exploded of all fallacies.
If the plain people at Jerusalem had registered their will
264 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

with the aid of the most improved type of ballot box,

there is no evidence that they would have preferred
Christ to Barabbas. In view of the size of the jury that
condemned Socrates, one may affirm confidently that
he was the victim of a “great and solemn referendum.”
On the other hand, the plain people can be shown to
have taken a special delight in Nero. But the plain peo¬
ple, it will be replied, has been educated and enlightened.
The intelligence tests applied in connection with the
selective draft indicate that the average mental age of
our male voters is about fourteen.1 The intelligence
testers are, to be sure, under some suspicion as to the
quality of their own intelligence. A more convincing
proof of the low mentality of our population is found,
perhaps, in the fact that the Hearst publications have
twenty-five million readers.
“There is nothing,” says Goethe, “more odious than
the majority; for it consists of a few powerful leaders,
a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and sub¬
servient weaklings, and a mass of men who trudge after
them without in the least knowing their own minds.”
If there is any truth in this analysis the majority in a
radical democracy often rules only in name. No move¬
ment, indeed, illustrates more clearly than the suppos¬
edly democratic movement the way in which the will of
highly organized and resolute minorities may prevail
over the will of the inert and unorganized mass. Even
though the mass does not consent to “trudge” after the
minority, it is at an increasing disadvantage in its at-

1 For a tabulation of these tests see vol. xv of the Memoirs of

the National Academy of Sciences.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 265

tempts to resist it. Physical science is on the side of the

tyrannical minority. The ordinary citizen cannot have
a machine gun by his fireside or a “tank” in his back
yard. The most recent type of revolutionary idealist,
though his chief concern is still to bestow benefit on the
people, does not, to do him justice, hope to achieve this
benefit through the majority, but rather through the
direct action of organized minorities. He feels that he is
justified in cramming his nostrum down the throat of the
people, if necessary by force.
The radical of this type is coming round to the doc¬
trine of the saving remnant and recognizing in his own
way that everything finally hinges on the quality of the
leadership. His views, however, as to this quality differ
strangely from the traditional views. One must admit
that, whatever theories of leadership may have been
held traditionally, actual leadership has never been any
too good. One scarcely suspects, as John Selden re¬
marked, “what a little foolery governs the world.”
Moreover, the folly which has prevailed at the top of so¬
ciety, and that from the time of the Trojan War, has ever
been faithfully reflected in the rank and file (<Quidquid
delirant reges —). One who surveys the past is at times
tempted to acquiesce in the gloomy judgment of Dry den:
“No government has ever been or ever can be wherein
time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.
The persons are only changed, but the same juggling in
state, the same hypocrisy in religion, the same self-
interest and mismanagement will remain forever. Blood
and money will be lavished in all ages only for the pre¬
ferment of new faces with old consciences.” One should
266 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

note, however, a difference between the bad leadership

of the past and that of the modern revolutionary era.
The leaders of the past have most frequently been bad
in violation of the principles they professed, whereas it
is when a Robespierre or a Lenin sets out to apply his
principles that the man who is interested in the survival
of civilization has reason to tremble.
Dryden’s passage seems to suggest that what is really
needed is not new faces with old consciences, but a trans¬
formation of conscience itself. It is precisely such a
transformation that a revolutionary idealist like Robes¬
pierre hopes to effect. For the corrupt conscience of the
old type of aristocratic leader he would substitute a
social conscience. The popular will that is inspired by
this conscience is so immaculate, as we have seen, that
it may safely be put in the place not merely of the royal
but of the divine will. I have already tried to show that
a leader who sets out to be only the organ of a ‘‘general
will” or “divine average,” that is conceived at times as
essentially reasonable and at other times as essentially
fraternal, will actually become imperialistic. It may be
well at this point to submit this democratic idealism to
still further analysis with special reference to its prob¬
able effect on our own international relations. The tend¬
ency for some time past has been to treat international
law, not theoretically as an embodiment of reason, but
positively as an embodiment of will.1 In that case, if
1 In Le Droit international 'public positif (1920), i, pp. 77 ff.,
J. de Louter has traced historically the opposition between those
who base international law on “jus naturale,” conceived as uni¬
versal reason, and those who incline rather to see in it an expres¬
sion of will (“jus voluntarium”).
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 267

international law is to reflect any improvement in the

relations between states, it must be shown that the sub¬
stitution of the popular will for the divine will has ac¬
tually tended to promote ethical union among men even
across national frontiers. If we analyze realistically
the popular will, we find that it means the will of a mul¬
titude of men who are more and more emancipated from
traditional standards and more and more given over to
what I have termed the irresponsible quest of thrills.
These thrills are, as we all know, supplied by sensa¬
tional newspapers and in international affairs involve
transitions, often disconcertingly sudden, from pacifism
to jingoism. Any one who can recollect the period im¬
mediately preceding our conflict with Spain will be
sufficiently aware of the role that this type of journalism
may play in precipitating war. Let us ask ourselves
again whether the chances of a clash between America
and Japan are likely to diminish if Japan becomes more
democratic, if, in other words, the popular will is sub¬
stituted for the will of a small group of “ elder states¬
men.” Any one who knows what the Japanese sensa¬
tional press has already done to foment suspicion
against America is justified in harboring doubts on this
point.
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to con¬
clude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself,
but imperialistic in its practice. The idealism and the
imperialism, indeed, are in pretty direct ratio to one an¬
other. For example, to be fraternal in Walt Whitman’s
sense is to be boundlessly expansive, and a boundless
expansiveness, is, in a world like this, incompatible with
268 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

peace. Whitman imagines the United States as expand¬

ing until it absorbs Canada and Mexico and dominates
both the Atlantic and the Pacific — a programme that
would almost certainly involve us in war with the whole
world. If we go, not by what Americans feel about them¬
selves, but by what they have actually done, one must
conclude that we have shown ourselves thus far a con¬
sistently expansive, in other words, a consistently im¬
perialistic, people.1 We have merely been expanding, it
may be replied, to our natural frontiers; but we are
already in the Philippines, and manifestly in danger of
becoming involved in Asiatic adventures. Japan, a
country with fifty-seven million inhabitants (increasing
at the rate of about six hundred thousand a year), on a
group of islands not as large as the State of California,
only seventeen per cent of which is arable, has at least
a plausible pretext for reaching out beyond her natural
frontiers. But for us, with our almost limitless and still
largely undeveloped resources, to risk the horrors of war
under modern conditions for anything we are likely to
gain from expanding eastward, would be an extreme ex¬
ample of sheer restlessness of spirit and of an intemper¬
ate commercialism. It is a part of our psychology that
each main incident in our national history should take
on a highly idealistic coloring. For example, we were on
the verge of a conflict with Mexico a few years ago as the
result of an unwarranted meddling with her sover¬
eignty. President Wilson at once described the incipi¬
ent struggle as a war of “service.” Cicero says that

1 This consistent imperialism has been traced by H. H. Powers

in his volume: America among the Nations.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 269

Rome gained the mastery of the world by coming to the

aid of her allies. In the same way it may be said some
day of us that, as the result of a series of outbursts of
idealism, we changed from a federal republic to a highly
centralized and bureaucratic empire. We are willing to
admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for
ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most disin¬
terested motives. We have not as yet set up, like revolu¬
tionary France, as the Christ of Nations, but during the
late war we liked to look on ourselves as at least the
Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards
himself as an idealist at the same time that the foreigner
looks on him as a dollar-chaser, the explanation may be
due partly to the fact that the American judges himself
by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner judges him
by what he does.
This is not, of course, the whole truth. Besides our
tradition of idealism there is our unionist tradition based
on a sane moral realism. “It is a maxim,” says Wash¬
ington, “founded on the universal experience of man¬
kind, that no nation is to be trusted further than it is
bound by its interests; and no president, statesman or
politician will venture to depart from it.” All realistic
observation confirms Washington. Those who are in¬
spired by his spirit believe that we should be nationally
prepared, and then that we should mind our own busi¬
ness. The tendency of our idealists, on the other hand,
is to be unprepared and then to engage in more or less
general meddling. A third attitude may be distinguished
that may properly be associated with Roosevelt. The
follower of Roosevelt wants preparedness, only he can-
270 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

not, like the follower of Washington, be counted on to

mind his own business. The humanitarian would, of
course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his
programme of world service. Unfortunately, it is more
difficult than he supposes to engage in such a programme
without getting involved in a programme of world em¬
pire. The term sentimental imperialism may be applied
to certain incidents in ancient Roman history.1 Some
of the motives that we professed for entering the Great
War remind one curiously of the motives that men like
Flamininus professed for going to the rescue of Greece.
Cicero, writing over a century later and only a few
months before his assassination by the emissaries of the
Triumvirs, said that he himself had once thought that
Rome stood for world service rather than for world em¬
pire, but that he had been bitterly disillusioned. He
proceeds to denounce Julius Caesar, the imperialistic
leader par excellence, as a demon in human form who did
evil for its own sake. But Caesar had at least the merit
of seeing that the Roman ethos was changing, that as
the result of the breakdown of religious restraint (for
which Stoical “service” was not an adequate substi¬
tute), the Romans were rapidly becoming unfit for
republican institutions.
Some persons, indeed, are inclined to go beyond par¬
ticular comparisons of this kind and develop a general
parallel between decadent Rome and modern America.
Such a parallel is always very incomplete and must
be used with great caution. We need, in the first

1 See Tenney Frank’s Roman Imperialism, especially ch. vm

(‘‘ Sentimental Politics ”).
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 271

place, to define with some precision what we mean by

decadence. The term is often used vaguely by persons
who are suffering from what one may call the illusion of
the “good old times.”1 Livy is surely a bit idyllic when
he exclaims: “Where will you now find in one man this
modesty and uprightness and loftiness of spirit that then
belonged to a whole people?” Yet if one compares the
Rome of the Republic with the Rome of the Empire one
is conscious of a real decline. The Senate that had
seemed to Cineas, the adviser of Pyrrhus, an assem¬
bly of demigods, had become by the time of Tiberius
a gathering rather of cringing sycophants. Horace was
uttering only the sober truth when he proclaimed the
progressive degeneracy of the Romans of his time.2 The
most significant symptom of this degeneracy seemed to
Horace and other shrewd observers to be the relaxation
of the bonds of the family.
Are we witnessing a similar moral deliquescence in
this country, and, if so, how far has it gone? One of our
foreign critics asserts that we have already reached the
“Heliogabalus stage” — which is absurd. But at the
same time it is not to be denied that the naturalistic
notion of liberty has undermined in no small measure
the two chief unifying influences of the past — the
Church and the family. The decline in the discipline of
the family has been fairly recent. Persons are still living

1 As the rural philosopher remarked: “Things ain’t what they

used to be — in fact they never was.”
2 iEtas parentum peior avis tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.
Carminum, Lib. in, 6.
272 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

who can remember the conditions that prevailed in the

Puritan household.1 The process of emancipation from
the older restraint has not usually presented itself as a
lapse into mere materialism. Idealism in the current
sense of that term has tended to take the place of tradi¬
tional religion. The descendants of the Puritans have
gone in for commercialism, to be sure, especially since
the Civil War, but it has been commercialism tempered
by humanitarian crusading. As I have pointed out, the
humanitarian does not, like the genuine Puritan, seek to
get at evil in the heart of the individual, so that he is
finally forced to resort to outer regulation. The egoistic
impulses that are not controlled at their source tend to
prevail over an ineffectual altruism in the relations of
man with man and class with class. The special mark of
materialism, which is to regard property, not as a means
to an end, but as an end in itself, is more and more visi¬
ble. The conservative nowadays is interested in con¬
serving property for its own sake and not, like Burke, in
conserving it because it is an almost indispensable sup¬
port of personal liberty, a genuinely spiritual thing. As
for the progressive, his preoccupation with property and
what he conceives to be its just distribution amounts to
a morbid obsession. Orderly party government will
become increasingly difficult if we continue to move in
this direction, and we shall finally be menaced by class
war, if, indeed, we are not menaced by it already. Every
student of history is aware of the significance of this

1 Professor G. H. Palmer has written from his own memories

an article on “ The Puritan Home.” {Atlantic Monthly, Novem¬
ber, 1921.)
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 273

particular symptom in a democracy. One may sum up

what appears to be our total trend at present by saying
that we are moving through an orgy of humanitarian
legalism towards a decadent imperialism.
The important offsetting influence is our great union¬
ist tradition. One should not, however, underestimate
the difficulties in the way of maintaining this tradition.
The idea that the State should have a permanent or
higher self that is felt as a veto power upon its ordinary
self rests ultimately upon the assertion of a similar dual¬
ism in the individual. We have seen that this assertion
has in the Occident been inextricably bound up with
certain Christian beliefs that have been weakened by
the naturalistic movement. We are brought back here
to the problem with which we have been confronted
so often in the course of the present argument, how,
namely, to get modern equivalents for the traditional
beliefs, above all some fresh basis for the affirmation of
a frein vital or centripetal element in liberty. What the
men of the French Revolution wanted, according to
Joubert, was not religious liberty, but irreligious liberty.
In that case, the French modernist retorts bitterly, you
would have us give up revolutionary liberty and become
Jesuits. Similarly, if one points out to an American
modernist the inanity of his idealism as a substitute for
the traditional controls, he will at once accuse you of
wishing to revert to Puritanism. Strictly speaking, how¬
ever, one does not need to revert to anything. It is
a part of my own method to put Confucius behind
Aristotle and Buddha behind Christ. The best, how¬
ever, that even these great teachers can do for us is to
274 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

help us to discover what is already present in ourselves.1

From this point of view they are well-nigh indispen¬
sable.
Let us begin, therefore, by ridding our minds of unreal
alternatives. If we in America are not content with a
stodgy commercialism, it does not follow that we need,
on the one hand, to return to Puritanism, or, on the
other, to become “liberals” in the style of “The New
Republic”; nor, again, need we evolve under the guid¬
ance of Mr. H. L. Mencken into second-rate Nietz-
scheans. We do need, however, if we are to gain any
hold on the present situation, to develop a little moral
gravity and intellectual seriousness. We shall then see
that the strength of the traditional doctrines, as com¬
pared with the modernist position, is the comparative
honesty with which they face the fact of evil. We shall
see that we need to restore to human nature in some
critical and experimental fashion the “old Adam” that
the idealists have been so busy eliminating. A resto¬
ration of this kind ought not to lead merely to a lapse
from naturalistic optimism into naturalistic pessimism;
nothing is easier than such a lapse and nothing at bottom
is more futile. Both attitudes are about equally fatal¬
istic and so undermine moral responsibility. A survey
of the facts would suggest that man is morally responsi¬
ble, but that he is always trying to dodge this responsi¬
bility; that what he suffers from, in short, is not fate in
any sense of the word, but spiritual supineness. There
may be truth in the saying that the devil’s other name

1 Cf. Pascal, Pensees, 64: “Ce n’est pas dans Montaigne, mais
dans moi que je trouve tout ce que j’y vois.”
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 275

is inertia. Nothing is more curious than to trace histori¬

cally the way in which some great teaching like that of
Christ or Buddha has been gradually twisted until man
has adjusted it more or less completely to his ancient
indolence. Several centuries ago there was a sect of
Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships;
shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy
Way which at once gained great popularity and tended
to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese
Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares
it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow,
indeed, very clearly the process by which Buddhist
doctrine descended gradually from the austere and al¬
most inaccessible height on which it had been placed by
its founder to the level of the prayer mill. It was an¬
nounced in the press not long ago that as a final improve¬
ment some of the prayer mills in Thibet are to be oper¬
ated by electricity. The man who hopes to save society
by turning the crank of a legislative mill or who sets
up as a “socio-religious engineer” may call himself a
Christian, but he is probably as remote from the true
spirit of Jesus as some Eastern votary of the Easy Way
is from the true spirit of Buddha.
The essence of man’s spiritual indolence, as I have
already pointed out, is that he does not wish to look up
to standards and discipline himself with reference to
them. He wishes rather to expand freely along the lines
of his dominant desire. He grasps eagerly at everything
that seems to favor this desire and so tends, as the say¬
ing is, to keep him in good conceit with himself. Disraeli
discovered, we are told, that the best way to get on with
276 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

Queen Victoria was to flatter her and not to be afraid of

overdoing the flattery, but “to lay it on with a trowel.”
Demos, as was pointed out long ago, craves flattery like
any other monarch, and in his theory of popular sov¬
ereignty Rousseau has, it must be admitted, laid this
flattery on with a trowel. In general, his notion that evil
is not in man himself, but in his institutions, has en¬
joyed immense popularity, not because it is true, but
because it is flattering.
Observations of the kind I have been making are likely
to lay one open to the charge of cynicism. One needs,
however, to cultivate a wholesome cynicism as the only
way of avoiding the unwholesome kind — that of the
disillusioned sentimentalist. When I speak of a whole¬
some cynicism, I mean that of Aristotle who says that
“most men do evil when they have an opportunity,” or
that of Bossuet, expressing the moderate Christian view,
when he speaks of “the prodigious malignity of the
human heart always inclined to do evil.” There is no
harm in cynicism provided the cynic does not think of
himself as viewing human nature from the outside and
from some superior pinnacle. In the sense I have just
defined, cynicism, indeed, has many points in common
with religious humility.
Let us pursue then our realistic analysis without fear
of the charge of cynicism. Man would not succumb so
easily to flattery if he did not begin by flattering him¬
self; his self-flattery is closely related in turn to his moral
indolence. I have said that the whole of life may be
summed up in the words diversion and conversion. But
man does not want conversion, the adjustment in other
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 277

words of his natural will to some higher will, because of

the moral effort it implies. In this sense he is the ever¬
lasting trifler. But, though he wishes diversion, he is
loath at the same time to admit that he is missing the
fruits of conversion. He wills the ends, because they are
plainly desirable, but he does not will the means because
they are difficult and disciplinary. In short, he harbors
incompatible desires and so listens eagerly to those who
encourage him to think that it is possible to have the
good thing without paying the appointed price.
Two main modes in which men are thus flattered may
be distinguished. First, in an age of authority and ac¬
cepted standards, they are induced to substitute for
the reality of spiritual discipline some ingenious art of
going through the motions. An extreme example is that
of the fashionable lady described by Boileau who (with
the aid of her spiritual director) had convinced herself
that she could enjoy all the pleasures of hell on the way
to paradise. What concerns us now, however, is not the
mode of flattery that is based on exaggerated respect for
outer authority, but the other main mode that flourishes
in an age of individualism. The cushions that, according
to Bossuet, the Jesuits put under the sinner’s elbows are
as nothing compared to the cushions that the sinner puts
under his own elbows when left to himself. In a period
like the present every man is his own Jesuit.1 Rous¬
seau’s sycophancy of human nature proved to be par¬
ticularly suited to the requirements of the individualistic

1 Cf. Confucius: “Alas! I have never met a man who could see
his own faults and arraign himself at the bar of his own con¬
science.”
278 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

era. By his sophistry of feeling he satisfied in a new and

fetching fashion man’s permanent desire, especially in
the realm of moral values, to have his cake and eat it too.
The self-flattery that encourages the huddling together
of incompatible desires has never been pushed further
than in this movement. When one considers, for in¬
stance, the multitude of those who have hoped to com¬
bine peace and brotherhood with a return to nature, one
is forced to conclude that an outstanding human trait
is a prodigious and pathetic gullibility.
The chief corrective of gullibility is, in an age of in¬
dividualistic emancipation, a full and free play of the
critical spirit. The more critical one becomes at such a
time, the more likely one is to achieve standards and
avoid empty conceits. Now to criticize is literally to
discriminate. The student of both the natural and the
human law needs to be very discriminating; one should
note, however, an important difference between them.
The discrimination of the man of science is exercised
primarily upon physical phenomena, that of the human¬
ist primarily upon words. “ The beginning of genuine
culture,” Socrates is reported to have said, “is the
scrutiny of general terms.” 1 Socrates himself was so ac¬
complished in this type of scrutiny that he still deserves
to be the master of those who are aiming at criticism. I
have said that the hope of civilization lies not in the di¬
vine average, but in the saving remnant. It is plain that
in an age like the present, which is critical in every sense
of the word, the remnant must be highly Socratic.
Discrimination of the humanistic type is especially
1 See Epictetus, Dissert, i, 17.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 279

needed in the field of political theory and practice.

Confucius, when asked what would be his first concern
if the reins of government were put into his hands, re¬
plied that his first concern would be to define his terms
and make words correspond with things. If our modern
revolutionaries have suffered disillusions of almost un¬
paralleled severity, it is too often because they have
given their imagination to words, without making sure
that these words corresponded with things; and so they
have felt that they were bound for the promised land
when they were in reality only swimming in a sea of
conceit. “The fruit of dreamy hoping is, waking, blank
despair.” The disenchantment of Hazlitt with the
French Revolution is typical of that of innumerable
other “idealists.” “The French Revolution,” he says,
“was the only match that ever took place between
philosophy and experience; and, waking from the trance
of theory to the sense of reality, we hear the words
truth, reason, virtue, liberty with the same indifference or
contempt that the cynic, who has married a jilt or a
termagant, listens to the rhapsodies of lovers.”
The reason that the Rousseauist often alleges for his
attacks on the analytical intellect, the necessary instru¬
ment of a Socratic dialectic, is that it destroys unity.
His disparagement of analysis may be due, however,
even less to his love of unity than to his dislike of effort.
It may be that, like Rousseau himself, he is seeking to
give to indolence the dignity of a philosophical occu¬
pation.1 If it is a strenuous thing to concentrate im-

1 Cf. Joubert on the writings of Rousseau: ‘‘Laparesse y prend

l’attitude d'une occupation philosophique.”
280 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

aginatively on the facts of the natural order, the con¬

centration on the facts of the human order that enables
one to use one’s terms correctly is even more strenuous.
What a monstrous inequality, said Lincoln, to pay an
honest laborer seventy cents a day for digging coal and
a President seventy dollars a day for digging abstrac¬
tions ! The argument that Lincoln thus puts forth ironi¬
cally, a follower of Karl Marx would be capable of em¬
ploying seriously. But if the President does honest
work, if he digs his abstractions properly, instead of
substituting some art of going through the motions, he
must display the utmost contention of spirit. There
have been moments in recent years when a President of
this kind would have been worth to the country many
times seventy dollars a day. Did the idealistic abstrac¬
tions, one must make bold to ask, that Mr. Woodrow
Wilson poured forth so profusely when President, satisfy
the Socratic and Confucian test — did they correspond
with things? The late Mr. Walter H. Page concluded,
after unusual opportunities of observation, that Mr.
Wilson was 11 not a leader, but rather a stubborn
phrase-maker.” Fine words, according to the homely
adage, butter no parsnips. They may, however, it would
seem, put a man in the White House. Mr. Wilson, it
should be remembered, was not only an ex-college presi¬
dent himself, but in his main policies he had the eager
support of practically the whole corporation of college
presidents. If Mr. Page’s estimate of Mr. Wilson should
prove to be correct, it would follow that our American
remnant — and college presidents should surely belong
to the remnant — is not sufficiently critical. The ques-
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 281

tion is one of some gravity, if it be true, as I said at the

outset, that democracy will in the long run have to be
judged, like any other form of government, by the
quality of its leadership, and if it be true, furthermore,
that under existing conditions we must get our standards
and our leadership along Socratic rather than traditional
lines. “What the Americans most urgently require,”
said Matthew Arnold, “is a steady exhibition of cool
and sane criticism.” That is precisely what they require
and what they have never had.
If we had a Socratic remnant one of its chief concerns
would be to give a civilized content to the catch-words
that finally govern the popular imagination. The sophist
and the demagogue flourish in an atmosphere of vague
and inaccurate definition. With the aid of the Socratic
critic, on the other hand, Demos might have some
chance of distinguishing between its friends and its
flatterers — something that Demos has hitherto been
singularly unable to do. Let one consider those who
have posed with some success as the people’s friends
from Cleon of Athens to Marat; and from Marat to
William Randolph Hearst. It would sometimes seem,
indeed, that the people might do very well were it not
for its “ friends.” The demagogue has been justified only
too often in his assumption that men may be led, not by
their noses, but by their ears as tenderly as asses are.
The records of the past reveal that the multitude has
frequently been persuaded by a mirage of words that
the ship of state was steering a straight course for
Eldorado, when it was in reality drifting on a lee-shore;
and the multitude has not been apprized of the peril
until it was within the very sound of the breakers.
282 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

It is only too evident that we are not coping ade¬

quately with this special problem of democracy; that we
are, on the contrary, in danger of combining the strength
of giants with the critical intelligence of children. Mil¬
lions of Americans were ready not so very long ago to
hail William Jennings Bryan as a “peerless leader.”
Other millions are ready apparently to bestow a similar
salute on Henry Ford — in spite of the almost incredible
exhibition he made of himself with his “Peace Ship.”
If our Socratic critics were sufficiently numerous, the
followers of such leaders would finally become conscious
of something in the air that was keen, crisp, and danger¬
ous; they might finally be forced to ask themselves
whether the ideals with which they were being beguiled
really mean anything, or at all events anything more
than the masking in fine phrases of the desire to get one’s
hand into the other citizen’s pocket. The devil, as is
well known, is a comparatively harmless person unless
he is allowed to disguise himself as an angel of light. An
unvarnished materialism is in short less to be feared than
sham spirituality. Sham spirituality is especially pro¬
moted by the blurring of distinctions, which is itself
promoted by a tampering with general terms. A dia¬
lectical scrutiny of such terms is therefore indispensable
if one is to determine whether what a man takes to be
his idealism is merely some windy inflation of the spirit,
or whether it has support in the facts of human ex¬
perience.
I have already made some application of the Socratic
method to idealism, a term that has come to be almost
synonymous with humanitarianism. I have pointed out.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 283

for instance, how the utilitarian has corrupted the word

comfort and the sentimentalist the word virtue. The
idealist may, indeed, retort that I have myself admitted
that certain elements essential to salvation are omitted
in the Socratic scheme of things, and that for these ele¬
ments we need to turn from Socrates to Christ; and he
will proceed to identify the gospel of Christ with his
own gospel of sympathy and service. Humanitarian
idealism unquestionably owes much of its prestige, per¬
haps its main prestige, to the fact that it has thus asso¬
ciated itself with Christianity. I have sought to show,
however, on strictly psychological grounds, that hu¬
manitarian service does not involve, in either its utili¬
tarian or its sentimental form, the truths of the inner
life and that it cannot therefore be properly derived from
Christ. The transformation, indeed, of this great master
of the inner life into a master of “uplift” must seem to
austere Christians, if there are any left, a sort of second
crucifixion. In substituting the love of man for the love
of God the humanitarian is working in a vicious circle,
for unless man has in him the equivalent of the love of
God he is not lovely. Furthermore, it is important that
man should not only love but fear the right things. The
question was recently raised at Paris why medical men
were tending to usurp the influence that formerly be¬
longed to the clergy. The obvious reply is that men
once lived in the fear of God, whereas now they live in
the fear of microbes. It is difficult to see how one can
get on humanitarian lines the equivalent of the truth
that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Perhaps there is no better way of dealing with the
284 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

humanitarian movement than to take one’s point of

departure in certain sayings of Jesus and at the same
time so to protect them by a Socratic dialectic as to
bring out their true meaning. For the present desider¬
atum, it may be, is not to renounce Socrates 1 in favor
of Christ, but rather to bring Socrates to the support of
Christ.
Three sayings of Jesus would seem especially relevant,
if we wish to bring out the contrast between his inspired
and imaginative good sense and humanitarianism: (1)
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and
unto God the things that are God’s.” (2) “By their
fruits ye shall know them.” (3) One should build one’s
house upon the rock.
I have already glanced at a violation of the first of
these maxims — that, namely, which has taken place in
connection with the humanitarian attempt to abolish
war even at the expense of justice, and the closely re¬
lated attempt to convert the prince of peace into a
prince of pacifism. Americans often fear that the Roman
Catholic Church may use the machinery of democracy
to its own ends; and in parts of the country where
Catholic voters are in the majority such apprehensions
— for example, the apprehension regarding the Catholic
domination of the schools — may not be entirely with¬
out foundation. It was not, however, a Catholic but a
Protestant who recently felt it necessary to recall to his
fellow believers that the kingdom of heaven is within us

1 In his Life of Christ Papini not only attacks Socrates specifi¬

cally, but bases his whole point of view on an abdication of the
critical spirit.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 285

and not at Washington. The Protestant churches seem

to be turning more and more to social service, which
means that they have been substituting for the truths
of the inner life various causes and movements and re¬
forms and crusades. If W. J. Bryan had been born fifty
years earlier he would very likely have been a religious
revivalist; the religion of the revivalist was still in a
fashion a religion of the inner life. Bryan’s protest, how¬
ever, in connection with his crusade for free silver,
against the crucifixion of the people on a cross of gold,
not only involves an unusually mawkish mixture of the
things of God and the things of Caesar, but might have
led to political action that, so far from being religious,
would have been subversive of common honesty.
One should face frankly the question whether the
crusading spirit is in any of its manifestations genuinely
Christian. The missionary spirit, the purely spiritual
appeal from man to man, is unquestionably Christian.
By the crusading spirit I mean, on the other hand, the
attempt to achieve spiritual ends collectively through
the machinery of the secular order. If one takes a long-
range view, the question is one that should be of special
interest to Frenchmen, for France has been more than
any other country the crusading nation. It has been
said that the religious crusading of the Middle Ages in
which France played the leading part showed that
Europe was already sloughing off genuine Christianity.
The contrast is striking in any case between the Christi¬
anity of this period and that of the first centuries. The
more or less legendary account of the Theban Legion
that was ready to fight bravely for the Emperor when
286 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

he kept within the temporal domain, but allowed itself

to be martyred to the last man unresistingly rather than
worship him as a God, reflects accurately enough the
attitude of the early Christian. The ruthless massacre
that marked the first entrance of the crusaders into
Jerusalem (15 July, 1099) is sufficient proof that they
did not maintain any such distinction between the
spiritual and the temporal order.1 It seems hardly
necessary to ask which of the two, the crusader or the
member of the Theban Legion, was nearer in spirit to
the Founder. By his confusion of the things of God with
the things of Caesar the crusader was in danger of substi¬
tuting a will to power for the will to peace that is at the
heart of genuine Christianity.2 The emergence of the
will to power is even more obvious in the humanita¬
rian crusader, as I attempted to show in my study of
the Rousseauistic side of the French Revolution. The
revolutionary formula, “liberty, equality, fraternity,”
is in itself only a portentous patter of words.3 These
words may, no doubt, be so defined both separately and

1 “It was an easier thing to consecrate the fighting instinct

than to curb it. . . . [The crusader] might butcher all day till he
waded ankle deep in blood and then at nightfall kneel sobbing
for very joy at the altar of the Sepulchre — for was he not red
from the winepress of the Lord? One can readily understand the
popularity of the Crusades when one reflects that they permitted
men to get to the other world by fighting hard on earth and al¬
lowed them to gain the fruits of asceticism by the way of hedon¬
ism.” (Article on “Crusades,” by Ernest Barker, in eleventh
edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
2 The predominance of the imperialistic over the religious motif
is especially conspicuous in the fourth Crusade (1202-04).
3 Fitzjames Stephen has submitted this formula to a drastic
analysis in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. This book contains also
a refutation of Mill’s essay on Liberty.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 287

in their relation to one another as to have a genuinely

religious meaning. Understood in the fashion of
Rousseau, that is, as summing up the supposed results
of a return to “ nature,” they encouraged one of the most
virulent forms of imperialism. The French themselves
are growing more and more doubtful about the “ideal¬
istic” side of their Revolution (it goes without saying
that the Revolution had other sides). They are growing
more realistic in temper.1 The great problem for them
as for all of us is, that, on being disillusioned regarding
this type of idealism, they should not become merely
Machiavellian realists.
At all events, France can no longer be looked upon as
the crusading nation. It is becoming the dangerous
privilege of the United States to display more of the
crusading temper than any other country in both its
domestic and its foreign policies. Yet if one may prop¬
erly question the religious crusading of which the French
were once so fond {Gesta Dei per Francos), how much
more properly may one question the activities of our
“uplifters” {Gesta humanitatis per Americanos). We
are being deprived gradually of our liberties on the
ground that the sacrifice is necessary to the good of
society. If we attend carefully to the psychology of the
persons who manifest such an eagerness to serve us, we
shall find that they are even more eager to control us.
What one discovers, for example, under the altruistic
professions of the leaders of a typical organization for

1 This tendency was noted by various observers even before the

war, for example, by J. E. C. Bodley in his essay The Decay of
Idealism in France (1912).
288 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

humanitarian crusading, like the Anti-Saloon League,

is a growing will to power and even an incipient terror¬
ism. Let one consider again Mr. Woodrow Wilson,
who, more than any other recent American, sought to
extend our idealism beyond our national frontiers. In
the pursuit of his scheme for world service, he was led
to make light of the constitutional checks on his author¬
ity and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited
power. If we refused to take his humanitarian crusading
seriously we were warned that we should “ break the
heart of the world.” If the tough old world had ever had
a heart in the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken
long ago. The truth is that this language, at once ab¬
stract and sentimental, reveals a temper at the opposite
pole from that of the genuine statesman. He was inflex¬
ible and uncompromising in the defence of his “ ideal,”
the League of Nations, which, as a corrective of the push
for power on the national scale, is under the suspicion of
being only a humanitarian chimera. At the same time
he was only too ready to yield to the push for power of
the labor unions (Adamson Act), a form of the instinct
of domination so full of menace to free institutions that,
rather than submit to it, a genuine statesman would
have died in his tracks. One may contrast profitably the
way in which Mr. Wilson faced this issue with the way
in which Grover Cleveland, perhaps the last of our Presi¬
dents who was unmistakably in our great tradition,
faced the issue of free silver.
The particular confusion of the things of God and the
things of Caesar promoted by Mr. Wilson and the other
“idealists” needs to have brought to bear on it the
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 289

second of the sayings of Jesus that I have cited (“By

their fruits ye shall know them,,). The idealists so
plainly fail to meet the test of fruits that they are taking
refuge more and more, especially since the war, in their
good intentions. The cynic might, indeed, complain
that they already have hell paved at least twice over
with their good intentions. We can no more grant that
good intentions are enough in dealing with men than we
can grant that they suffice a chemist who is handling
high explosives. Under certain conditions, human na¬
ture itself may become one of the highest of high ex¬
plosives. Above all, no person in a position of political
responsibility can afford to let any “ideal” come be¬
tween him and a keen inspection of the facts. It is only
too evident that this true vision was found before the
war in imperialists of the type of Lord Roberts rather
than in liberals of the type of Asquith and Grey. It does
not follow that the realism that one should oppose to
the “idealists” need be of a merely imperialistic type;
it may be a complete moral realism. The moral realist
will not allow himself to be whisked off into any cloud-
cuckoo-land in the name of the ideal. He will pay no
more attention to the fine phrases in which an ideal of
this kind is clothed than he would to the whistling of the
wind around a corner. The idealist will, therefore,
denounce him as “hard.” His hardness is in any case
quite unlike that of the Machiavellian realist. If the
moral realist seems hard to the idealist, this is because
of his refusal to shift, in the name of sympathy or social
justice or on any other ground, the struggle between
good and evil from the individual to society. If we
290 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

restore the moral struggle to the individual, we are

brought back at once to the assertion in some form or
other of the truths of the inner life. The question that
may properly be raised at present is not whether this or
that cause or movement or reform is breaking down, but
whether humanitarian crusading in general as a substi¬
tute for the inner life is not breaking down. The failure
of humanitarianism might be even more manifest than
it is were it not for the survival — and that even in the
humanitarians themselves — of habits that derive from
an entirely different view of life. The ethos of a com¬
munity does not disappear in a day, even when the con¬
victions that sustain it have been undermined. This
slow decline of an ethos adds to the difficulty of judging
any particular doctrine by its fruits. These fruits are
often slow to appear. For example, no one has been
more successful in breaking down American educational
tradition in favor of humanitarian conceptions than
President Eliot, who is himself an unusually fine product
of the Puritan discipline.1 He has owed his great influ¬
ence largely to the fact that many men are sensitive to a
dignified and impressive personality, whereas very few
men are capable of weighing the ultimate tendencies of
ideas. One might have more confidence in the elective
system if it could be counted on to produce President
Eliots.
Though the traditional habits survive the traditional
1 If one wishes to measure the wideness of the gap between
President Eliot’s doctrine and that of the Puritans, let him read
together Jonathan Edwards’s sermon on “A divine and super¬
natural Light,” a bit of quintessential Puritanism, and “Five
American Contributions to Civilization.”
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 291

beliefs, they do not survive them indefinitely. With the

progressive weakening, not merely of the Puritan ethos,
but of the Christian ethos of the Occident in general, it
may become harder and harder to justify humanitarian-
ism experimentally. This movement has from Bacon’s
time stood for fruits and, in all that concerns man’s
power and material comfort and utility, it has as a mat¬
ter of fact been superlatively fruitful. But it has also
professed to give the fruits of the spirit — for example,
peace and brotherhood — and here its failure is so con¬
spicuous as to lead one to suspect some basic unsound¬
ness.
At this point the third saying of Jesus that I have
quoted comes into play — the saying as to the impor¬
tance of building on the rock. The storm has come and
it is not clear that our modern house is thus firmly
established. The impression one has is rather that of
an immense and glittering superstructure on insecure
foundations.
The basis on which the whole structure of the new
ethics has been reared is, as we have seen, the assump¬
tion that the significant struggle between good and evil
is not in the individual but in society. If we wish once
more to build securely, we may have to recover in some
form the idea of “the civil war in the cave.” If one ad¬
mits this “war,” one may admit at the same time the
need of the work of the spirit, if one is to bring forth the
fruits of the spirit. If one denies this war, one transfers
the work to the outer world or substitutes for it a sym¬
pathy that involves neither an inner nor an outer work¬
ing. A main problem of ethics, according to Cicero, is
292 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

to prevent a divorce between the honorable (honestum)

and the useful (utile). If these terms are not sophisti¬
cated, he says, the honorable and the useful will be
found to be identical. But such a sophistication has
taken place as a result of the emphasis on an outer
rather than on an inner working about which I have
already had so much to say in this volume. The fruitful
has thus come to be identified with the useful and finally
(in a narrow and doctrinal sense) with the utilitarian.
The whole problem has assumed a gravity that it did
not have in the time of Cicero because of the way in
which we have got ourselves implicated, by our one¬
sided pursuit of utility, in an immense mass of inter¬
locking machinery.
One needs, however, if one is to recover a firm basis
for the spiritual life, to get behind even the word work.
The sophistication of this word would not have been
possible had it not been for the previous sophistication
of the word nature. This word should receive the first
attention of any one who is seeking to defend on Socratic
lines either humanistic or religious truth. Apply a suffi¬
ciently penetrating dialectic to the word nature, one is
sometimes tempted to think, and the sophist will be put
out of action at the start. The juggling with this word
can be traced from the ancient Greek who said that the
distinction between the honorable and the shameful has
no root in nature, but is merely a matter of convention,
to Renan who said that “nature does not care for
chastity.” This juggling has always been the main
source of an unsound individualism. The contrast
between the natural and the artificial that has flourished
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 293

since the eighteenth century and underlies the romantic

movement is especially inadmissible. “Art,” as Burke
says, “is man’s nature.” I have already referred to
Diderot’s dismissal of the opposition between a law of
the spirit and a law of the members as “artificial,” and
have said that the proper reply to such sophistry is not
to take refuge in theology, but to insist upon this oppo¬
sition as one of the “immediate data of consciousness”;
that we shall thus get experimentally the basis we re¬
quire if we are to do the work of the spirit and bring
forth its fruits. A confusion like that of Diderot is so
serious that the defining of the one word “nature”
would justify a dialectical battle along Socratic lines the
like of which has never been seen in the history of the
world. When it was over, the field of conflict would be
covered thick with dead and dying reputations; for there
can be no doubt that many of the leaders of the present
time have fallen into the naturalistic error.
On one’s definition of work, which itself depends on
one’s definition of nature, will depend in turn one’s
definition of liberty. One is free to work and not to
idle. Only when liberty is properly defined according not
merely to the degree, but to the quality of one’s working,
is it possible to achieve a sound definition of justice (To
every man according to his works). One’s definition of
justice again will be found to involve one’s definition of
peace in the secular order: for men can live at peace with
one another only in so far as they are just. As for reli¬
gious peace, it is not subject to definition. In the scrip¬
tural phrase, it passeth understanding.
Above all, if one is to achieve a sound philosophy of
294 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

will, there must be no blurring of the distinction be¬

tween the spiritually inert and the spiritually energetic.
The point is one that should be of special interest to
Americans. The European has tended in his typical
moments, and that from the time of the Greeks, to be an
intellectual. There are signs, on the other hand, that if
America ever achieves a philosophy of its own, it will be
rather a philosophy of will. We have been called the
“people of action.’7 Under the circumstances it is a
matter of some moment both for ourselves and for the
rest of the world whether we are to be strenuous in a
completely human or in a merely Rooseveltian sense.
One may grant, indeed, that in a world like this the
Rooseveltian imperialist is a safer guide than the Jeffer¬
sonian or Wilsonian “‘idealist.” But there is no reason
why one should accept either horn of this dilemma. The
most effective way of dealing with the Jeffersonian
idealism is to submit to a Socratic dialectic the theory
of natural rights that underlies it. This theory rests on
the sophistical contrast between the natural and the
artificial of which I have just spoken, a contrast that
encourages a total or partial suppression of the true
dualism of the spirit and of the special quality of work¬
ing it involves. With this weakening of the inner life
it becomes possible to assert a lazy or, what amounts to
the same thing, an anarchical liberty. For true liberty
is not liberty to do as one likes, but liberty to adjust
oneself, in some sense of that word, to law. “The Abbe
Coigniard,” says Anatole France, “would not have
signed a line of the declaration of the rights of man be¬
cause of the excessive and unjust discrimination it
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 295

establishes between man and the gorilla.” The true

objection to the declaration of the rights of man is the
exact opposite of the one stated by M. France: it does
not establish a sufficiently wide gap between man and
the gorilla. This gap can be maintained only if one in¬
sists that genuine liberty is the reward of ethical effort;
it tends to disappear if one presents liberty as a free
gift of “nature.”
It may, indeed, be urged that the theory of natural
rights, though false, may yet be justified as a “useful
fiction,” that it has often shown itself an effective
weapon of attack on the iniquities of the existing social
order. One may doubt, however, the utility of the fic¬
tion, for what it tends to oppose to the existing order is
not a better order but anarchy. No doubt the estab¬
lished order of any particular time and place that the
partisan of “rights” would dismiss as conventional and
artificial is, compared with true and perfect order, only
a shadow; but such as it is, it cannot be lightly aban¬
doned in favor of some “ideal” that, when critically
examined, may turn out to be only a mirage on the
brink of a precipice. The “unwritten laws of heaven” 1
of which the great humanist Sophocles speaks are felt in
their relation to the written law, not as a right, but as a
stricter obligation.
The tendency of the doctrine of natural rights to

1 The passage of the Antigone (w. 450 ff.) needs to be associ¬

ated with the passage of the (Edipus (vv. 863 ff.): “. .. laws that
in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the
father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget them, nor
shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is mighty
in them and groweth not old.”
296 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

weaken the sense of obligation, and so to undermine

genuine liberty, may be studied in connection with its
influence on the common law which has prevailed among
the English-speaking peoples. The spirit of this law at
its best is that of a wholesome moral realism. Under the
influence of the school of rights the equity that is often
in conflict with strict law was more or less identified
with a supposed law of “nature.” 1 This identification
encouraged an unsound individualism. The proper
remedy for an unsound individualism is a sound indi¬
vidualism, an individualism that starts, not from rights,
but from duties. The actual reply to the unrestraint of
the individual has been another doctrine of rights, the
rights of society, which are sometimes conceived almost
as metaphysically as the older doctrine of the rights of
man. The representatives of this school of legal think¬
ing tend to identify equity with the principle of social
utility. Judges have already appeared who have so
solicited the strict letter of the law in favor of what they
deemed to be socially expedient as to fall into a veri¬
table confusion of the legislative and judicial functions.
Unfortunately those who represent society at any par¬
ticular moment and who are supposed to overflow with a
will to service will be found by the realistic observer (in
so far at least as they are mere humanitarian crusaders
in whom there is no survival of the traditional controls)

1 See ch. iv (“The Rights of Man”) in The Spirit of the Com¬

mon Law (1921), by Roscoe Pound. Professor Pound is in sym¬
pathy with the second tendency to which I refer — the tendency
towards what he terms the “socialization of justice.” His point of
view is closely related to that of the German Jhering, who ma.v
himself be defined as a sort of collectivistic Bentham.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 297

to be developing, under cover of their altruism, a will to

power. On the pretext of social utility they are ready to
deprive the individual of every last scrap and vestige of
his freedom and finally to subject him to despotic outer
control. No one, as Americans of the present day are
only too well aware, is more reckless in his attacks on
personal liberty than the apostle of “service.” He is
prone in his furtherance of his schemes of “uplift” not
only to ascribe unlimited sovereignty to society as
against the individual, but to look on himself as endowed
with a major portion of it, to develop a temper, in short,
that is plainly tyrannical.
We seem, indeed, to be witnessing in a different form
the emergency faced by the early Christians. The time
may come again, if indeed it has not come already, when
men will be justified in asserting true freedom, even, it
may be, at the cost of their lives, against the monstrous
encroachments of the materialistic state.1 The collectiv-

1 “ Individuals and families, associations and dependences were

so much material that the sovereign power consumed for its own
purposes. What the slave was in the hands of his master, the
citizen was in the hands of the community. The most sacred
obligations vanished before the public advantage. The passen¬
gers existed for the sake of the ship. By their disregard for private
interests, and for the moral welfare and improvement of the
people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital elements on
which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by the decay
of families and the depopulation of the country. They survive not
in their institutions but in their ideas, and by their ideas, espe¬
cially on the art of government, they are —

The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule

Our spirits from their urns.

To them, indeed, may be tracked nearly all the errors that ar«
undermining political society — communism, utilitarianism, the
298 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

istic ideal suffers, often in an exaggerated form, from

the underlying error of laisser faire against which it is so
largely a protest. It does not reveal an adequate sense
of the nature of obligation and of the special type of
effort it imposes. As a result of its shallowness in dealing
with the idea of work, it is in danger of substituting for
real justice the phantasmagoria of social justice. Some
of the inequalities that the collectivist attacks are no
doubt the result of the unethical competition promoted
by laisser faire. But the remedy for these inequalities
is surely not the pursuit of such chimeras as social or
economic equality, at the risk of sacrificing the one
form of equality that is valuable—equality before the
law.
Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible
with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working
with reference to standards, the right subordination, in
other words, of man’s ordinary will to a higher will.
There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality
and humility. Historically humility has been secured
more or less at the expense of the intellect. I have my¬
self been trying to show that it is possible to defend
humility, and in general the truths of the inner life, by a
critical method and m this sense to put Socrates in the
service of Christ. The question of method is, in any
case, all-important if one is to heal the feud between the
head and the heart that has subsisted in the Occident
in various forms from Graeco-Roman times. Intellect,

confusion between tyranny and authority, and between lawless¬

ness and freedom.” (Lord Acton: History of Freedom and Other
Essays, p. 17.)
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 299

though finally subordinate to will, is indispensable in

direct ratio to the completeness of one's break with
traditional standards. It is then needed to test from the
point of view of reality the unity achieved by the
imagination and so to supply new standards with
reference to which the higher will may exercise its power
of veto on the impulses and expansive desires. When
will and intellect and imagination have been brought
into right relation with one another, one arrives at last
at the problem of the emotions, to which the Rousseau-
ist, in his misplaced thirst of immediacy, gives the first
place. To have standards means practically to select
and reject; and this again means that one must disci¬
pline one's feelings or affections, to use the older word,
to some ethical centre. If the discipline is to be effective,
so that a man will like and dislike the right things, it is
as a rule necessary that it should become a matter of
habit, and that almost from infancy. One cannot wait
until the child has reached the so-called age of reason,
until, in short, he is in a position to do his own selecting,
for in the mean while he may have become the victim
of bad habits. This is the true prison house that is in
danger of closing on the growing boy. Habit must,
therefore, as Aristotle says, precede reason. Certain
other ideas closely connected with the idea of habit,
need to receive attention at this point. The ethos of a
community is derived in fact, as it is etymologically,
from habit. If a community is to transmit certain habits
to its young, it must normally come to some kind of
agreement as to what habits are desirable; it must in the
literal meaning of that word achieve a convention.
300 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

Here is a chief difference between the true and the false

liberal. It has been said of our modernists that they
have only one convention and that is that there shall be
no more conventions. An individualism that is thus
purely temperamental is incompatible with the survival
of civilization. What is civilized in most people is pre¬
cisely that part of them which is conventional. It is, to
be sure, difficult to have a convention without falling
into mere conventionalism, two things that the modern¬
ist confounds; but then everything that is worth while
is difficult.
The combining of convention with a due respect for
the liberty of the individual involves, it must be ad¬
mitted, adjustments of the utmost delicacy. Two ex¬
tremes are about equally undesirable: first, the conven¬
tion may be so rigid and minute as to leave little scope
for the initiative of the individual. This formalistic
extreme was reached, if Occidental opinion be correct,
in the China of the past, and also in the older French
convention that Rousseau attacked. At the opposite
pole is the person who is spontaneous after the fashion
encouraged by Rousseau and who, in getting rid of con¬
ventions, has also got rid of standards and abandoned
himself to the mere flux of his impressions. The problem
of standards would be simple if all we had to do was
to oppose to this anarchical “ liberty ” a sound set of
general principles. But so far as actual conduct is con¬
cerned, life resolves itself into a series of particular
emergencies, and it is not always easy to bridge the gap
between these emergencies or concrete cases and the
general principle. It has been held in the Occident, at
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 301

least from the time of Aristotle, and in the Orient, at

least from the time of Confucius, that one should be
guided in one’s application of the general principle by
the law of measure. The person who thus mediates suc¬
cessfully seems, in the phrase of Pascal, to combine in
himself opposite virtues and to occupy all the space
between them. As a general principle, for example,
courage is excellent, but unless it be tempered in the
concrete instance by prudence, it will degenerate into
rashness. According to Bossuet, “Good maxims pushed
to an extreme are utterly ruinous.” (Les bonnes max-
imes outrees perdent tout.) But who is to decide what is
the moderate and what the extreme application of a
good maxim? The casuist or legalist would not only lay
down the general principle, but try to deal exhaustively
with all the cases that may arise in the application of
it, in such wise as to deprive the individual, so far as
possible, of his autonomy. The cases are, however, in¬
exhaustible, inasmuch as life is, in Bergson’s phrase, a
perpetual gushing forth of novelties. A Jesuitical case¬
book or the equivalent is after all a clumsy substitute
for the living intuition of the individual in determining
the right balance to strike between the abiding prin¬
ciple and the novel emergency. While insisting, there¬
fore, on the need of a convention, one should strive to
hold this convention flexibly, imaginatively, and, as it
were, progressively. Without a convention of some kind
it is hard to see how the experience of the past can be
brought to bear on the present. The unconventional
person is assuming that either he or his age is so unique
that all this past experience has become obsolete. This
302 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

very illusion has, to be sure, been fostered in many by

the rapid advance of the physical sciences.
So much experience has accumulated in both the East
and the West that it should seem possible for those who
are seeking to maintain standards and to fight an
anarchical impressionism, to come together, not only as
to their general principles, but as to the main cases that
arise in the application of them. This convention, if it is
to be effective, must, as I have already suggested, be
transmitted in the form of habits to the young. This is
only another way of saying that the civilization of a
community and ultimately the government of which it
is capable is closely related to the type of education on
which it has agreed. (One should include in education
the discipline that children receive in the family). “The
best laws,” says Aristotle, “will be of no avail unless the
young are trained by habit and education in the spirit
of the constitution.” 1 Aristotle complains that this
great principle was being violated in his time. Is it being
observed in ours? It will be interesting in any case to
make a specific application of the Aristotelian dictum
to our American education in its relation to American
government. Assuming that what we wish to preserve
is a federal and constitutional democracy, are we train¬
ing up a class of leaders whose ethos is in intimate ac¬
cord with this type of government? The older type of
American college reflected faithfully enough the con¬
vention of its time. The classical element in its curricu¬
lum was appropriately subordinated to the religious
element, inasmuch as the leadership at which it aimed
1 Politics, 1310a. Cf. also ibid., 1337a.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 303

was to be lodged primarily in the clergy. It would have

been possible to interpret more vitally our older educa¬
tional convention, to give it the broadening it certainly
needed and to adapt it to changed conditions. The
new education (I am speaking, of course, of the main
trend) can scarcely be said to have developed in this
fashion from the old. It suggests rather a radical break
with our traditional ethos. The old education was, in
intention at least, a training for wisdom and character.
The new education has been summed up by President
Eliot in the phrase: training for service and power. We
are all coming together more and more in this idea of
service. But, though service is supplying us in a way
with a convention, it is not, in either the humanistic or
the religious sense, supplying us with standards. In the
current sense of the word it tends rather to undermine
standards, if it be true, as I have tried to show, that it
involves an assumption hard to justify on strictly psy¬
chological grounds — the assumption that men can
come together expansively and on the level of their
ordinary selves. The older education was based on the
belief that men need to be disciplined to some ethical
centre. The sentimental humanitarian opposes to a
definite curriculum which aims at some such humanistic
or religious discipline the right of the individual to
develop freely his bent or temperamental proclivity.
The standard or common measure is compromised by
the assertion of this supposed right, and in about the
same measure the effort and spirit of emulation that the
standard stimulates disappears. The very word curricu¬
lum implies a running together. Under the new educa-
304 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

tional dispensation, students, instead of running to¬

gether, tend to lounge separately. Interest is transferred
from the classroom to the athletic field, where there is a
standard of a kind and, with reference to this standard,
something that human nature craves — real victory or
real defeat. The sentimentalist also plays into the hands
of the utilitarian, who likewise sets up a standard with
reference to which one may strive and achieve success or
failure. Anything that thus has a definite aim tends to
prevail over anything that, like a college of liberal arts
under the elective system, is comparatively aimless.
One cannot admit the argument sometimes heard that,
because the older education had a definite end, it was
therefore vocational in the same sense as the schools of
business administration, for example, that have been
developing so portentously of late in our educational
centres. The older education aimed to produce leaders
and, as it perceived, the basis of leadership is not com¬
mercial or industrial efficiency, but wisdom. Those who
have been substituting the cult of efficiency for the older
liberal training are, of course, profuse in their profes¬
sions of service either to country or to mankind at
large. The question I have been raising throughout this
volume, however, is whether anything so purely ex¬
pansive as service, in the humanitarian sense, can sup¬
ply an adequate counterpoise to the pursuit of unethical
power, whether the proper counterpoise is not to be
sought rather in the cultivation of the principle of vital
control, first of all in the individual and finally in the
State.
I have said that one's attitude towards the principle
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 305

of control will determine one’s definition of liberty, and

that the Jeffersonians inclining, as they did, to the new
myth of man’s natural goodness, looked askance, not
merely at the traditional restraints, but at everything
that interfered with a purely expansive freedom.
Jefferson himself saw to some extent the implications of
his general position for education in particular. He is,
for example, one of the authentic precursors of the elec¬
tive system.1 The education that the Jeffersonian liberty
has tended to supplant set up a standard that limited
the supposed right of the individual to self-expression as
well as the inbreeding of special aptitudes in the inter¬
ests of efficiency; it was not, in short, either sentimental
or utilitarian. There is a real relation between the older
educational standard that thus acted restrictively on
the mere temperament of the individual and the older
political standard embodied in institutions like the Con¬
stitution, Senate, and Supreme Court, that serve as a
check on the ordinary or impulsive will of the people.
It follows from all I have said that the new education
does not meet the Aristotelian requirement: it is not in
intimate correspondence with our form of government.
If the veto power disappears from our education there
is no reason to anticipate that it will long survive in the
State. The spirit of the leaders will not be that which
should preside over a constitutional democracy.
1 See Herbert B. Adams: Thomas Jefferson and the University
of Virginia (1888), especially ch. ix (“The University of Vir¬
ginia and Harvard College”)* Cf. also letter of Jefferson to
George Ticknor, 16 July, 1823. Superficially, Jefferson was
friendly to classical study; his underlying philosophical tendency
(of which his encyclopaedic inclusiveness and encouragement of
specialization are only symptoms) was unfavorable to it.
306 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

The best of our elder statesmen, though they opposed

a standard to the mere flux of popular impulse and made
sure that the standard was appropriately embodied in
institutions, did not associate their standard with any
theory of the absolute. Herein they showed their sa¬
gacity. One cannot separate too carefully the cause of
standards from that of the absolute. Standards are a
matter of observation and common sense, the absolute
is only a metaphysical conceit. In political thinking this
conceit has led to various theories of unlimited sover¬
eignty. Judged by their fruits all these theories are,
according to John Adams, “equally arbitrary, cruel,
bloody, and in every respect diabolical.” They can be
shown, at all events, to be hard to reconcile with a
proper respect for personal liberty.1 It is a fortunate
circumstance that the very word sovereignty does not
occur in our Constitution. The men who made this Con¬
stitution were for granting a certain limited power here
and another limited power somewhere else, and abso¬
lute power nowhere. The best scheme of government
they conceived to be a system of checks and balances.
They did not, however, look on the partial powers they
bestowed as being on the same level. They were aware
that true liberty requires a hierarchy and a subordina¬
tion, that there must be something central in a state to
which final appeal may be made in case of conflict. The
complaint has, indeed, been made that they left certain
ambiguities in the articles of union that had finally to
be clarified on the battle-field. If they had been more
explicit, however, it is not probable that they would
1 See Appendix B.
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 307
have been able to establish a union at all. They were
confronted with the difficult task of gaining recognition
for the centripetal element in government in the face
of the most centrifugal doctrine the world has ever
known — the doctrine that encourages men to put their
rights before their duties.
John Marshall deserves special praise for the clearness
with which he saw that the final centre of control in the
type of government that was being founded, if control
was to have an ethical basis and not be another name
for force, must be vested in the judiciary, particularly
in the Supreme Court. This court, especially in its most
important function, that of interpreting the Constitu¬
tion, must, he perceived, embody more than any other
institution the higher or permanent self of the State.
With a sound and independent judiciary, above all with
a sound and independent supreme bench, liberty and
democracy may after all be able to coexist. Many people
are aware that personal liberty and the security of pri¬
vate property, which is almost inseparable from it, are
closely bound up with the fortunes of the Supreme
Court. Their ideas are, however, often vague as to the
nature of the menace that overhangs our highest tribu¬
nal. We are familiar with the rant of Gompers and his
kind against the courts; we also know what to expect
from the radical press. We are not surprised, for exam¬
ple, when a socialistic periodical, published at Girard,
Kansas, devotes a special issue of five million copies to
an assault on the federal judiciary. A menace that is
perhaps more serious than this open hostility may be
defined as a sort of “boring from within.” This phrase
308 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

seems to fit the professors in our law schools who are

departing from the traditional standards of the law in
favor of “social justice.” Social justice, it is well to
remind these “forward-looking” professors, means in
practice class justice, class justice means class war and
class war, if we are to go by all the experience of the past
and present, means hell.
The inadequacy of social justice with its tendency to
undermine the moral responsibility of the individual and
at the same time to obscure the need of standards and
leadership may be made clearer if we consider for a mo¬
ment the problem of government with the utmost degree
of realism. Thus considered, government is power.
Whether the power is to be ethical or unethical, whether
in other words it is subordinated to true justice, must
depend finally on the quality of will displayed by the
men who administer it. For what counts practically is
not justice in the abstract, but the just man. The just
man is he whose various capacities (including the intel¬
lect) are acting in right relation to one another under the
hegemony of the higher will. We are brought back here
to the problem of the remnant. Those who strive for the
inner proportion that is reflected in the outer world as
justice have always been few. The remark of Aristotle
that “most men would rather live in a disorderly than
in a sober manner” remains true, at least in the subtler
psychic sense. Though one agree with Aristotle as to the
ethical unsoundness of the majority, it does not follow
that the ethical State is impossible. Human nature, and
this is its most encouraging trait, is sensitive to a right
example. It is hard, indeed, to set bounds to the persua-
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 309

siveness of a right example, provided only it be right

enough. The ethical State is possible in which an im¬
portant minority is ethically energetic and is thus be¬
coming at once just and exemplary. Such a minority
will also tend to solve the problem of union. The soul of
the unjust man is, according to Aristotle, torn by every
manner of faction.1 The just man, on the contrary, is he
who, as the result of his moral choices based on due
deliberation, choices in which he is moved primarily by
a regard for his own happiness, has quelled the unruly
impulses of his lower nature and so attained to some
degree of unity with himself. At the same time he will
find that he is moving towards a common centre with
others who have been carrying through a similar task of
self-conquest. A State that is controlled by men who
have become just as the result of minding their own busi¬
ness in the Platonic sense will be a just State that will
also mind its own business; it will be of service to other
States, not by meddling in their affairs on either com¬
mercial or “idealistic” grounds, but by setting them a
good example. A State of this kind may hope to find a
basis of understanding with any other State that is also
ethically controlled. The hope of cooperation with a
State that has an unethical leadership is chimerical.
The value of political thinking is therefore in direct
ratio to its adequacy in dealing with the problem of
leadership. The unit to which all things must finally be
referred is not the State or humanity or any other ab¬
straction, but the man of character. Compared with this

1 Eth. Nic. 1166b.

310 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

ultimate human reality, every other reality is only a

shadow in the mist.1
It follows from what I have said that ethical union,
whether in the single man or among different men or on
the national or international scale, is attainable so far as
it is attainable at all, not by expansive emotion nor by
any form of machinery or organization (in the current
sense of the word), but only by the pathway of the inner
life. Some persons will remain spiritually anarchical in
spite of educational opportunity, others will acquire at
least the rudiments of ethical discipline, whereas still
others, a small minority, if we are to judge by past ex¬
perience, will show themselves capable of the more diffi¬
cult stages of self-conquest that will fit them for leader¬
ship. Our traditional education with all its defects did
something to produce leaders of this ethical type, whereas
the utilitarian-sentimental education which has been
tending to supplant it is, as I have been trying to show,
lacking in the essentials of the inner life and so is not
likely to produce either religious or humanistic leaders.
Most Americans of the present day will, indeed, feel that
they have refuted sufficiently all that I have said, if they
simply utter the word “service.” One may suspect,
however, that the popularity of the gospel of service is
due to the fact that it is flattering to unregenerate hu¬
man nature. It is pleasant to think that one may dis¬
pense with awre and reverence and the inner obeisance of

1 Cf. Confucius: “The moral man, by living a life of simple

truth and earnestness, alone can help to bring peace and order in
the world.” “When the men are there, good government will
flourish, but when the men are gone, good government deca} s
and becomes extinct.”
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 311
the spirit to standards, provided one be eager to do
something for humanity. “The highest worship of
God,” as Benjamin Franklin assures us blandly, “is
service to man.” If it can be shown experimentally —
and a certain amount of evidence on this point has ac¬
cumulated since the time of Franklin — that service in
this sense is not enough to chain up the naked lusts of
the human heart, one must conclude that the supreme
exemplar of American shrewdness and practicality did
not, in the utterance I have just cited, show himself suf¬
ficiently shrewd and practical. The gospel of service is
at all events going to receive a thorough trial, if nowhere
else, then in America. We are rapidly becoming a na¬
tion of humanitarian crusaders. The present reign of
legalism is the most palpable outcome of this crusading.
It is growing only too evident, however, that the drift
towards license is being accelerated rather than arrested
by the multiplication of laws. If we do not develop a
sounder type of vision than that of our “uplifters” and
“forward-lookers,” the history of free institutions in this
country is likely to be short, and, on the whole, discred¬
itable. Surely the first step is to perceive that the alter¬
native to a constitutional liberty is not a legalistic mil¬
lennium, but a triumph of anarchy followed by a tri¬
umph of force. The time may come, with the growth of
a false liberalism, when a predominant element in our
population, having grown more and more impatient of
the ballot box and representative government, of con¬
stitutional limitations and judicial control, will display
a growing eagerness for “direct action.” This is the
propitious moment for the imperialistic leader. Though
312 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

the triumph of any type of imperialistic leader is a

disaster, especially in a country like our own that has
known the blessings of liberty under the law, neverthe¬
less there is a choice even here. Circumstances may arise
when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the
American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed
to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.
Such an emergency is not to be anticipated, however,
unless we drift even further than we have thus far from
the principles that underlie our unionist tradition. The
maintenance of this tradition is indissolubly bound up
with the maintenance of standards. The democratic
contention that everybody should have a chance is ex¬
cellent provided it mean that everybody is to have a
chance to measure up to high standards. If the demo¬
cratic extension of opportunity is, on the other hand,
made a pretext for lowering standards, democracy is, in
so far, incompatible with civilization. One might be
more confident of the outcome of the struggle between a
true and a false liberalism that has been under way since
the founding of the Republic, if the problem of stand¬
ards was being dealt with more adequately in our
education, above all in our higher education. The tend¬
ency here, however, is, as I have noted, to discard
standards in favor of “ideals”; and ideals, as currently
understood, recognize very imperfectly, if at all, that
man needs to be disciplined to a law of his own, dis¬
tinct from the law of physical nature. One might
view this idealistic development with more equanim¬
ity if one were convinced with Professor John Dewey
that the growing child exudes spontaneously a will to
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 313

service.1 If we look, however, on this form of sponta¬

neity as a romantic myth, we shall be forced to conclude
that we have been permitting Professor Dewey and his
kind to have an influence on our education that amounts
in the aggregate to a national calamity; that with the
progress of ideals of this kind our higher education in
particular is, from the point of view of a genuinely lib¬
eral training, in danger of becoming a vast whir of ma¬
chinery in the void; finally, that, in the interest of our
experiment in free institutions, we need educational
leaders who will have less to say of service and more
to say of culture and civilization, and who will so use
these words as to show that they have some inkling of
their true meaning.
This book has been written to no purpose unless I
have made plain that the problem of standards and
leadership is by no means merely American. The Amer¬
ican situation can be understood only with reference
to the larger background — the slow yielding in the
whole of the Occident of traditional standards, human¬
istic and religious, to naturalism. I have defined in its
main aspects the movement that has supervened upon
this emancipation from the past as Baconian, Rous-
seauistic, and Machiavellian; in other words, as utili¬
tarian, sentimental, and imperialistic. The individualist
should, however, make a better use of his liberty; the
less traditional he becomes, the more he should strive to
get at standards positively and critically. The result of

1 See his Moral Principles in Education, p. 22: “The child is

bom with a natural desire to give out, to do, to serve.” (My
italics.)
314 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

such a striving would, I have tried to show, be a move¬

ment that might be best defined as Socratic, Aristo¬
telian, and Christian, that would, in short, put prime
emphasis in its different stages on definition, habit, and
humility. What has actually been witnessed in the Oc¬
cident, as a result of the failure to work out critical
equivalents of traditional standards, has been a series
of violent oscillations between a humanitarian idealism
and a Machiavellian realism. Humanitarian idealism
is still firmly entrenched in this country, especially in
academic circles, where it seems to be held more confi¬
dently, one is almost tempted to say more smugly, with
each succeeding year. Europeans, on the other hand,
have suffered certain essential disillusions. It is becom¬
ing increasingly difficult for them to believe that the
idealists have discovered any effective counterpoise to
the push for power. “We are much beholden/’ says
Bacon, “ to Machiavel and others that wrote what men
do, and not what they ought to do.” The gap between
what men do and what they ought to do is turning out
to be even wider under the humanitarian dispensation
than under that of mediaeval Christianity.
Yet the Machiavellian solution is in itself impossible.
If the Occident does not get beyond this type of realism,
it will simply reenact all the pagan stupidities and has¬
ten once more to the pagan doom. Moreover, the latter
stages of the naturalistic dissolution of civilization with
which we are menaced are, thanks to scientific “prog¬
ress,” likely to be marked by incidents of almost incon¬
ceivable horror. The danger of power without wisdom,
of a constantly increasing material organization com-
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 315

bined with an ever-growing spiritual anarchy, is already

so manifest that unless there is a serious search for a
remedy we may conclude that the instinct for self-
preservation that is supposed to inhere in mankind is a
myth. Surely the first step will be to put in his proper
subordinate place the man of science with his poison
gases1 and high explosives, and that without a particle
of obscurantism. The tendency of physical science to
bring the whole of human nature under a single law can
be shown to be at the bottom of some of the most dan¬
gerous fallacies of the present time — for example, the
socialistic dream of “scientific” politics. “Thus the
whole of society,” says Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, “its
organization, its institutions, its activities, is brought
within the sway of natural law, not merely on its de¬
scriptive and historical side, but on its experimental
side, and administration and legislation become arts
pursued in the same way as the chemist works in his
laboratory.” 2 The man of science is flattered in the
conceit of his own importance by this inordinate exalta¬
tion of the “law for thing.” Yet he should, in the in¬
terest of science itself, reject the whole point of view as
pseudo-scientific; for science needs the support of civil¬
ization and the chief force that is now making against
civilization is, next perhaps to emotional unrestraint,
pseudo-science.
Mr. MacDonald and his kind almost invariably look
1 The statement has been made by those who should be in a
position to know that poison gases have recently been invented
at least a thousand times more deadly than any employed during
the war.
* The Socialist Movement, p. 90.
316 DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP

upon themselves as “idealists.” This should serve to

remind us that the terms idealism and realism as now
employed, however much they may clash superficially,
have at least this much in common: they are both rooted
in a naturalistic philosophy. Any one who transcends
this philosophy ceases in about the same measure to be
either a humanitarian idealist or a Machiavellian realist.
He becomes aware of a quality of will that distinguishes
man from physical nature and is yet natural in the sense
that it is a matter of immediate perception and not of
outer authority. I have said that the neglect of this
quality of will by both utilitarians and sentimentalists
has encouraged a sophistical definition of liberty; that
this type of liberty has owed its appeal to its flattery
of spiritual indolence, perhaps the most fundamental
human trait that is open to direct observation. Any one
who has once perceived this trait in himself and others,
and followed it out in even a few of its almost innumer¬
able ramifications, will be in no danger of overlooking
the old Adam after the fashion of the “idealists.” The
insistence on the putting aside of spiritual indolence and
the exercise of the higher will is found in every genuinely
spiritual doctrine, above all in genuine Christianity.
Traditionally the Christian has associated his liberty and
his faith in a higher will with grace. “Where the Spirit
of the Lord is, there is liberty.” I myself have been
trying to come at this necessary truth, not in terms of
grace, but in terms of work, and that on the humanistic
rather than on the religious level. I am not so arrogant
as to deny the validity of other ways of affirming the
higher will, or to dismiss as obsolete the traditional forms
 DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS 317

through which this will has been interpreted to the

imagination. I am attempting a contribution, I cannot
remind the reader too often, to a specific problem — to
the distinction, namely, between a sound and an un¬
sound individualism. My argument should appeal
primarily, so far as it appeals to any one, to those who,
as a result of having broken with the traditional forms
on grounds insufficiently critical, are in danger of losing
the truths of the higher will entirely; who are mere
modernists at a time when there is a supreme need of
thoroughgoing and complete moderns.

THE END
 APPENDIX A

THEORIES OF THE WILL

I append with some hesitation a few notes on the more tech¬
nical aspects of a question the proper treatment of which
would require a volume. The whole problem of the will is
inextricably bound up with that of dualism. The true dual¬
ism I take to be the contrast in man between two wills, one of
which is felt as vital impulse (elan vital) and the other as vital
control {frein vital). The crucial point would seem to be the
proper place of intellect in its relation to the higher will. It is
hard, on the one hand, to be reasonable without becoming
rationalistic, and, on the other, to have faith without falling
into credulity. The Christian form of the difficulty grew up in
connection with the Pauline opposition between a law of the
spirit and a law of the members; if the law of the spirit is
to exercise its control effectually, it needs, according to the
Christian, a greater or lesser degree of divine cooperation.
So that if one wishes to get at a Christian’s views of man’s will
the best method is frequently to ascertain his views of God’s
will.
One of the first to proclaim the superiority of the divine will
over the divine mind was Origen. The most important of
Christian voluntarists is, however, Saint Augustine. He as¬
serts the primacy of will in both man and God and on psycho¬
logical as well as on theological grounds. One of the argu¬
ments that he employs was influential on later voluntarists like
Duns Scotus.1 Will, says Augustine, reveals itself above all in
the act of attention or concentration; it therefore takes preced¬
ence of intellect because it selects the field of facts or order of
1 The work of Wilhelm Kahl, Die Lehre vom Primat des Willens bei
Augustinus, Duns Scotus und Descartesf is a useful repertory of mate¬
rial for the whole subject.
320 APPENDIX
perceptions to which the intellect attends and of which it
acquires knowledge.1
With the influence of Aristotle from the latter part of the
twelfth century on, there was a tendency to revert to Greek
intellectualism and to reverse the Augustinian position in
regard to will. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, not only
grants a superior dignity to man’s intellect as compared with
his will,2 3 4 but holds that the divine will is subordinate to the
divine wisdom. It is hardly necessary to add that Saint Thomas
is far from being a pure rationalist: man’s intellect, though su¬
perior to his will, is infinitely transcended by the divine will.
To be sure the working of God’s will as it had been affirmed
traditionally with the support of Revelation had been felt from
the outset, especially in connection with the more extreme
forms of the doctrine of grace, to be a stumbling block to
man’s reason. The central preoccupation of the scholastic
philosophy may indeed be said to have been the reconciliation
of faith in this sense with reason.* This great effort culminated
in Saint Thomas in whose system reason and faith seem to
cooperate harmoniously. Theological truth, he maintained,
though beyond reason, is not contrary to it.
The outstanding trait of the later scholasticism is the tend¬
ency of reason and faith once more to separate and to appear
as irreconcilable. The “realist,” Duns Scotus, develops the
thesis that “will is superior to intellect”4 (Voluntas est superior
1 See his De Trinitate for this and other subtle psychological ob¬
servations on the will.
2 P. H. Wicksteed has collected passages from Saint Thomas in
illustration of the relation between intellect and will in his Reactions
between Dogma and Philosophy, pp. 582-620.
3 For this struggle between faith and reason during the scholastic
period see La Philosophic au moyen dge, par E. Gilson (the point of
view is on the whole that of a scientific intellectual); also History of
Mediaeval Philosophy, by M. de Wulf (the point of view is Catholic).
4 According to M. Gilson (op. cit., ii, pp. 83-84), “ Duns Scot reven-
dique les droits du Dieu chr6tien et les defend instinctivement contre
la contamination de la pens6e hell6nique.” In view of Arabian influ¬
ence on Duns Scotus, one may perhaps go further and say that in his
treatment of the will an Asiatic is arrayed against a European psy¬
chology.
 APPENDIX 321

intelledu;) in both man and God. The nominalist, William of

Occam, affirms in a still more uncompromising fashion that
God’s will is absolute and arbitrary. God does not will a thing
because it is just, but it is just because he wills it. Theology
may not hope to find support in reason. It must be accepted
on the authority of Revelation and the Church.
This last stage of scholasticism is the point of departure for
various movements that seem at first sight to have very little
in common — for example, Lutheranism and Jansenism as
well as the philosophies of Bacon and Descartes. The Jansen-
ist and Lutheran exalt God’s will at the expense of reason by
an extreme interpretation of grace. Descartes and Bacon, on
the other hand, are interested, though in very different ways,
in the use that may be made of reason in the natural order.
They continue to pay more or less sincere homage to religion
conceived as indissolubly bound up with incomprehensible the¬
ological mysteries. It is especially important to ascertain
Descartes’s conception of the will in view of his position as the
father of modern philosophy. We need to discriminate sharply
between his conceptions of man’s will and God’s will. God’s
will he holds to be absolute and arbitrary and to this extent he
reminds us of Duns Scotus.1 His ultimate temper, however, is
not that of the Christian voluntarist, inasmuch as he is inter¬
ested above all in working out a mechanical law for phenome¬
nal nature. His attitude towards God’s will is to be explained
in two ways: first by his extreme caution, not to say timidity;
with the fate of Galileo fresh in mind he was almost morbidly
apprehensive of becoming embroiled with the theologians. He
was moved in the second place, according to M. Gilson,2 by
the desire to get rid of final causes in the interest of his own
mechanistic hypothesis.
According to Descartes himself what he meant by his
Cogito ergo sum was that one should start from the immediate
1 M. Gilson, however, disagrees with Kahl as to the nearness of
Descartes’s conception of the divine will to that of Duns Scotus. See
his work. La Doctrine carlteienne de la liberty et la thiologie, pp. 128-49.
2 Op. cit., ch. hi; also p. 210.
322 APPENDIX
data of consciousness.1 Practically he relegates the higher will
to God (as understood by the theologians) and gives the first
place among these data to mind or reason. He proceeds to set
up a sharp dualism between mind and matter conceived as
separate substances. As for man’s will, it is according to
Descartes in itself infinite and to that extent reminds us of the
divine will.2 On closer scrutiny, however, this infinite liberty
of the will turns out to be only a liberty to err. The will
escapes from error only in so far as it is determined by reason.3
In his tendency thus to make right will depend upon right
reason, as well as in his practical ethics,4 Descartes reminds us
strongly of the Stoics.
By “ reason,” it is scarcely necessary to add, Descartes means
logical and mathematical reason. The only ideas that should
determine the will and that one can follow without danger
of error are clear and distinct ideas. No tendency is more
marked in the Cartesian system than to conceive as it were
mathematically of the truth and reality of both the human
and the natural order. An extreme example of the same tend¬
ency is the geometrical form that Spinoza gives to his “Eth¬
ics.” Descartes would make of God himself a “clear” idea
and demonstrate him in almost geometrical fashion.5 He thus
contradicts the universal experience of mankind which is that
the truths on which the inner life depends are not clear in the
logical or any other sense. These truths are rather a matter of
elusive intuition.
Perhaps the first person to assert intuition against the ab¬
stract reasoning of Descartes was Pascal. A whole order of
truths, to employ Pascal’s own distinction, can be attained, not
by Vesprit de geometrie, but only by Vesprit de finesse. To the
rationalistic God of Descartes he opposes Dieu sensible au
coeur. “Heart” means practically “grace,” and grace Pascal
1 Principes de la philosophic, Livre i, 9.
2 Meditations metaphysiques, iv (Du vrai et du faux). 3 Ibid.
* See especially his Lettres & la princesse Elizabeth.
6 “. . . par consequent il est pour le moins aussi certain que Dieu
... est ou existe, qu’aucune demonstration de geometrie le saurait
etre.” (Discours de la Mtthode.)
 APPENDIX 323

associates with what was rapidly becoming an impossible the¬

ology. What is conspicuous indeed in the whole transition
from the mediaeval to the modern period is the failure to dis¬
engage the truths of the higher will from theology and to deal
with them experimentally as “immediate data of conscious¬
ness.” On the contrary, as the result of the endless disputes of
Jansenists with Jesuits, of Catholics with Protestants, and of
the various Protestant sects with one another, these truths
became involved in a mass of almost incredible theological
subtleties. The final reply to these subtleties was Voltaire.
Especially significant is his article “Grace” in the “Diction-
naire philosophique,” the third section of which concludes as
follows: “Ah! supralapsaires, infralapsaires, gratuits, suf-
fisants, efficaciens, jans6nistes, molinistes, devenez enfin
hommes et ne troublez plus la terre pour des sottises si absurdes
et si abominables.”
With the virtual substitution by Descartes of “reason” for
what is truly transcendent in man, namely the higher will, the
genuine dualism is compromised and the way opened for
monistic developments. The tendency towards a rationalistic
pantheism is manifest in Spinoza who reveals in many respects
the Cartesian influence. Spinoza inclines to get rid of the
Cartesian dualism between mind and matter by denying to
mind any superiority of substance.1 Man is in nature not as
one empire in another empire but as a part in a whole. Man
must adjust his will to the divine will, to be sure, but God is
declared to be the same as “nature.” When one has made an
identification of this kind, it will not be possible by any num¬
ber of subsidiary distinctions — for example, by setting up a
sort of dualism in the cosmic process itself in the form of a
natura naturans and a natura naturata — to maintain a sound
doctrine of the will and to avoid pantheistic confusion. The
God or “nature” to which Spinoza would have man conform
his will is closely related to reason of a distinctly Cartesian
type; so that to adjust one’s will to God or nature is equivalent

1 See Ethics, n, Prop. 7, scholium.

324 APPENDIX
to adjusting it to reason. Reason and will are indeed for
Spinoza identical.1 Here as elsewhere Spinoza revives more
completely perhaps than any other modern philosopher of the
first rank the Stoical position.
Quite apart from Spinoza the followers of Descartes 2 tended
to suppress the dualism between mind and matter in favor of
universal mechanism. Descartes himself had seen in animals
only automata; the temptation proved irresistible to look on
man in the same way.3 A parallel tendency was that of the
English empiricists and utilitarians to deny that mind is tran¬
scendent, to assert that there is “nothing in the intellect that
was not previously in the senses.” At the same time they fail
to recognize a quality of will in man that sets him above the
natural order and so incline strongly towards a naturalistic
determinism. The denial of the freedom of the will is especially
complete in Hobbes and Hume.4 Philosophy in its main trend
from Descartes to Hume seemed to exalt analysis at the ex¬
pense of synthesis and to be ready to sacrifice spontaneity to
mechanism. Of the world as envisaged by Hume in particular
one might say with Mephistopheles: “Fehlt leider! nur das
geistige Band! ” Among those who sought to restore unity and
freedom to philosophy, the most important is Immanuel Kant.
In the matter of the will, he asserts that in the “noumenal”
realm, the realm of the “thing-in-itself,” man is perfectly free;
as a phenomenon among other phenomena, on the contrary,
1 ‘‘Voluntas et intellectus unum et idem sunt.” (Ethics, n, Prop.
49, corollary). In Ethics, in, Prop. 9, scholium, a different view of the
will appears; it is there identified with impulse, possibly, as has been
conjectured, under the influence of Hobbes.
21 am dealing with the main influence. Certain Cartesians like
Geulincx developed in connection with the doctrine known as “Occa¬
sionalism” a sense of man’s dependence on the divine will that re¬
minds one of mediaeval humility.
3 La Mettrie, a disciple of the Cartesian Boerhaave, published
L' Homme-machine in 1747.
4 See Free Will and Four English Philosophers (Hobbes, Locke,
Hume and Mill), by the Reverend Joseph Rickaby, S. J. Father
Rickaby is of course a traditionalist, but makes remarks (see, for ex¬
ample, p. 205) that are decidedly perspicacious even from a strictly
psychological point of view.
 APPENDIX 325
man is, he admits, as thoroughly determined as Hume had
maintained. The question arises as to the value of this purely
“ noumenal” liberty in the actual emergencies of life. Huxley
remarks apropos of this Kantian conception of the will:
“Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient in the sense of
humor; or they would surely abstain from advancing proposi¬
tions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are
disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare shams, naked
but not ashamed.” 1 The professional metaphysician often be¬
trays an even more serious lack than that of a sense of humor
— a lack, namely, of common sense. This lack appears in
Huxley’s own attitude towards the will when compared, let us
say, with that of Dr. Johnson.
Kant’s views regarding the “categorical imperative,” as ex¬
pounded in his “ Critique of Practical Reason,” seem especially
open to objection from the point of view of common sense.
The categorical imperative is conceived as something a priori,
not as based on experience. It is not a living intuition of a will
that is set above the cosmic process (which includes a man’s
natural self) and that acts upon this cosmic process restric-
tively and selectively. It is rather a rigid metaphysical abstrac¬
tion that operates without reference to the happiness of the
individual2 or the special circumstances to which he needs to
adjust himself.3 Moreover, it is, as I have pointed out (p.
226), a will to act and not a will to refrain from acting. One
may therefore raise the question whether it can be counted on
to quell effectually the expansive “lusts” of the natural man

1 See his Hume, ch. x (end).

5 Schiller wrote satirically of the categorical imperative from this
point of view in his poem Die Philosophen (v. 35 ff.). Elsewhere (Werke,
Goedeke Ed., x, p. 101) he opposes to what seems to him the “ Draco¬
nian” severity of the Kantian reason, the point of view of the ‘‘beauti¬
ful soul.” Kant himself tended at the outset to base ethics on feeling.
About 1770, however, he repudiated Shaftesbury and his followers on
the ground that they were guilty of Epicureanism.
3 Jacobi has this aspect of the categorical imperative in mind when
he exclaims: “Yes, I am that atheist and godless man who will lie as
dying Desdemona lied; will lie and deceive as Pylades did when he
feigned to be Orestes, will murder as Timoleon did, etc.”
326 APPENDIX
— for example, the lust of domination. As an expression of
cosmic reason, the categorical imperative reminds one of the
reason-will of the Stoics. The reason, however, that the Stoic
took as his guiding principle (to rjytfjLovLKov) was conceived as
one with reality; whereas the conclusions of the “Critique of
Pure Reason,” so far as the relation between reason and reality
is concerned, are largely sceptical. Kant therefore asks us to
make certain important affirmations, not as necessarily true in
themselves, but as postulates of the practical reason. He thus
prepares the way for the Philosophie des Als Ob of Yaihinger.
According to Vaihinger, you do not will a thing because it is
true; you merely act as if it were true on the ground that it is a
“useful fiction.” 1 The “ As-if ” philosophy, again, is akin to the
point of view of the pragmatist. The pragmatist does not con¬
ceive of truth as something that already exists: he makes his
truth as he goes along, in other words he takes that to be true
which seems useful or agreeable to his ordinary self. He thus
tends to eliminate both the high impersonal standard and the
ethical will that, with reference to this standard, opposes
bounds to the expansive desires.
Though the philosophy of Kant supplies the freedom and
the synthetic element that were absent from a philosophy like
that of Hume, it supplies them in an abstract and rationalistic
way. It does not satisfy the craving for immediacy. Those
who felt this craving sought to gratify it by basing ethics on
the emotions. Kant’s “ Critique of Practical Reason” suggests
that the ultimate reality, the “thing-in-itself,” is very closely
related to will. Schopenhauer actually pushes on to the identi¬
fication of reality and will. Only the will that he sets up is very
different from the categorical imperative.2 It is a cosmic will
1 Cf. p. 225. See also Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 370 n.f where
I touch on the philosophy of Vaihinger in its relation to the problem
of the imagination.
* For Schopenhauer’s attack on the categorical imperative see the
first nine sections of his Grundlage der moral. The reconciliation of
liberty with necessity that Huxley ridicules seems to Schopenhauer,
however, to be, along with his “transcendental aesthetics,” Kant’*
most distinguished achievement.
 APPENDIX 327

conceived as a will to live and at the same time as the source of

evil Schopenhauer does not oppose to this cosmic nisus a
higher will that may control it and even renounce it; if he had
he might have achieved a true dualism. Instead he affirms
expressly that the will, as he understands it, should include
only that which is common to man and beast.1 He hopes to
get the equivalent of a true dualism by a recourse to the benev¬
olent theory of ethics, especially, as we have seen (p. 73), to
Rousseau’s doctrine of natural pity. At the same time Scho¬
penhauer inclines on occasion to see in actual nature not pity
but ruthless struggle, thus anticipating Darwin. Nietzsche
follows Schopenhauer in according the primacy to will but
denies natural pity and affirms that the will that is funda¬
mental in man is the will to power. He is thus related, on the
one hand, to Hobbes and the Machiavellians, and, on the other
to the evolutionists. '
One should note that those who gratify their thirst for im¬
mediacy by basing ethics on instinct or impulse, whether they
conceive of the resulting “will” as a will to brotherhood or a
will to power, agree in denying that the element of inhibition
is primary or vital; they dismiss everything that interferes
with the free expansion of “will” as artificial or conventional.
Moreover, the attempt to recover the unity and spontaneity of
instinct usually involves another dualism — that between a
man’s “heart” (in the sense of his impulsive and emotional
self) and his “head” (in the sense of his analytical intellect)
which destroys unity and leads him to see things, as Words¬
worth phrases it, “in disconnection dead and spiritless.”
The difficulties in the way of maintaining the benevolent
theory of ethics have increased in direct measure as the nature
“red in tooth and claw” of the evolutionist has been substi¬
tuted for the idyllic nature of Rousseau. These difficulties may

1 Neue Paralipomena. FouillSe seems to have missed the point

seriously when he affirms {Descartes, p. 198) that in giving the pri¬
macy to will Schopenhauer continues Descartes. So far as Descartes’s
emphasis on the divine will is genuine, it is a survival of Christian
328 APPENDIX
be illustrated from Huxley’s attempt to deal with the problem
of the will. In his “Evolution and Ethics” (Romanes Lecture,
1893) he develops the thesis that civilization and the cosmic
process are sharply at variance with one another. A man
should therefore in the interests of society seek to rise superior
to this process. The lecture ends with an eloquent exhortation
to effort and struggle along these anti-cosmic lines. At the
same time Huxley denies that man has a will that transcends
the cosmic process and moves in an opposite direction from it.
He adopts unreservedly the determinism of Hume.1 He pro¬
claims that “man, physical, intellectual and moral, is as much
a part of nature, as purely a part of the cosmic process as the
humblest weed.” 2 In that case, if one is to avoid the Nietz-
schean conclusion, it would seem necessary to affirm like Rous¬
seau and the sentimentalists some principle of benevolence in
Nature herself. On the contrary, Huxley declares in the most
uncompromising fashion that Nature is ruthless.3 When one
confronts with one another passages of the kind I have been
citing it is hard to avoid the conclusion reached by Mr. P.
E. More4 that Huxley is in his main trend a naturalistic
sophist.
Recent philosophers like Bergson and James and Croce
cannot be said to differ essentially in their dealings with the
will from the older partisans of a subrational unity and spon¬
taneity as a mode of escape from mechanism. Bergson exalts a
type of “intuition” that involves a more or less complete
turning away from the analytical intellect on the ground that
it leads to the setting up of a “block universe”; at the same
time he eliminates the will to refrain (frein vital) in favor of
elan vital. He differs however from many of his romantic for¬
bears, as I have already remarked (p. 17), by associating 6lan
vital not with a will to brotherhood but with a will to power.
Signor Piccoli points out that Croce’s view of the will has
much in common with that of Bergson.6 Croce is not, how-
1 See Hume, ch. x. 2 Works (Eversley Ed., ix, p. 11).
• Works (Appleton Ed., ix, p. 200).
4 Shelburne Essays, vm, p. 193 ff. 4 Benedetto Croce, p. 198.
 APPENDIX 329
ever, so frankly imperialistic. James, again, though he felt
himself in intimate accord with the ideas of Bergson, is nearer
to the older romantic psychology. Consider, for example, his
essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Men are
not most human, it would seem, in their moments of strenuous
effort with reference to a human law that they possess in com¬
mon; on the contrary, they are most themselves in the reveries
of their idle and irresponsible moments:1 they should at least
try to enter sympathetically into one another’s romantic
dreams. In general the difficulty of discovering any basis for a
genuine ethical communion among men becomes acute if one
seeks, like James and Bergson, to prove freedom and spon¬
taneity by the “gushing forth” of novelty in the cosmic proc¬
ess.2 It is hard to see how men can come together in their
differences. Moreover, Nature herself may be active in pro¬
ducing the vital variations that the intellect can neither fore¬
see nor formulate, but the man in whom the “creative” evolu¬
tion is taking place is not active; from a truly human point of
view, he remains both passive and purposeless. In the popular
summing up of this whole philosophical trend, he does not
know where he is going but merely that he is on the way. He
may be sure in any case that, as a result of his failure to put
forth a specifically human quality of will, he is not on the way
to peace or brotherhood.
I have already said something about two contemporary
doctrines, psycho-analysis and behaviorism, that, at least as
popularly interpreted, tend to break down the principle of con¬
trol in human nature, and to that extent to disintegrate civili¬
zation. It may be well to add a word about behaviorism. Man
is an animal among other animals, and in so far is subject to
laboratory methods. When, however, one attempts to base a
1 “The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, be¬
cause they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of
magically irresponsible spell.” The point of view is related to that of
Schiller when he says (Werke, Goedeke Ed., x, p. 327): “Der Mensch
ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt.”
2 For attempts of James to prove free will in this way see A Plura¬
listic Universe, p. 391 n.; also Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 145.
330 APPENDIX
complete explanation of conduct on such methods,1 when, on
the pretext that one must be “objective,” one refuses to dis¬
criminate qualitatively between the behavior of a man and
that of a frog, the result is naturalism gone mad. The be-
haviorist is not only pushing the mechanistic view of life to a
point where he denies certain “immediate data of conscious¬
ness” but, in his eagerness to reduce everything to stimuli and
physical reactions, he is in a fair way to eliminate conscious¬
ness itself. If, as Dr. Johnson says, all experience bears witness
to the freedom of the will, one must conclude that the extreme
behaviorist is turning his back on something that is highly
experimental in favor of a theory.
In general, this very inadequate review of theories of the will
held by the professional philosophers seems to confirm the
wider survey I have attempted in the body of this volume. If
the older treatment of the will led to a theological nightmare,
the more recent treatment has only too often resulted in a
metaphysical bewilderment. There has been a failure, on the
whole, to assert in a positive and critical form certain truths of
the inner life that were compromised by the interminable
wranglings of the religious sects about God’s will and its mode
of operation.
1 For an attempt of this kind see J. B. Watson: Psychology from the
Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919). For a discussion of the whole
tendency see Mary W. Calkins: The Truly Psychological Behaviorism
(Psychological Review, vol. 28, p. 1-18).
 APPENDIX B

ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY

By their distrust of absolutism combined with their respect

for standards and the discipline in the State that only stand¬
ards can give, our liberals of the unionist type are, as I have
remarked (p. 246), close to the English political tradition of
which the best exponent is Burke. Much of the Englishman’s
concern for personal liberty, it has been maintained, is merely
an aspect of his humorousness (in the older sense of the word),
of his dislike of conformity and regimentation; and so is in a
way a denial of standards. But this is not the whole truth.
English statesmen at their best have attained to some con¬
ception of the liberty that is at the heart of genuine Chris¬
tianity and have been more successful than the statesmen of
any other country in making this conception politically ef¬
fective.
The lover of personal liberty is inclined to esteem it a fortu¬
nate circumstance that the common law never gave way in
England, as it did in various European countries, to Roman
law. I am not competent to discuss so vast a subject as the
influence of Roman law on the mediaeval and modern world,
nor does my present subject require it. It is enough for my
purpose to point out that the conception of liberty found in
Roman law, even at its best, is very inferior to the Christian
conception; it reflects unduly Stoic rationalism and, like all
Greek and Roman political philosophy, is ready to sacrifice in
a quite unwarranted measure the individual to the State. At
its worst Roman law does not deserve to be called Roman at
all but Byzantine. One should note the origin assigned in
Roman law to the idea of plenitudo potestatis or unlimited
sovereignty, an idea that can be shown to have had a con¬
siderable influence on the absolutists of the late mediaeval and
332 APPENDIX
early modern period. By the lex regia, we read in the “Di¬
gest,” 1 the Roman people made over its unbounded power to
the emperor. The reasons for this renunciation are worth
pondering. At the instigation of its demagogues, the Roman
people had refused to limit itself and had at the same time
tended towards the type of equality that is won at the expense
of quality and the due subordination to standards that quality
always requires. So far as our modern democracies are pursu¬
ing a merely quantitative equality, their fate would seem to be
foreshadowed by this Roman development. The moment
comes, sooner or later, when the concentration of power in the
hands of one man is felt as a relief from the irresponsible
tyranny of the mob. This is at all events the process by which
a radical democracy passes over normally into what I have
termed a decadent imperialism.
The genuinely mediaeval conception of sovereignty is very
different from the conception I have been associating with the
lex regia and Roman law. For the Christian, sovereignty does
not derive from the people as in Roman law but from God, who
is conceived primarily not as reason but as will. The whole
tendency of the doctrine of grace is to make this will seem
absolute and irresponsible, a sort of supernatural bon plaisir.
I have already said something about the historical justification
of the doctrine of grace; one may maintain without exaggera¬
tion that it saved Western civilization. By historical justi¬
fication I do not mean that the doctrine is to be regarded as a
“useful fiction”; the saving element in it is its truth — its em¬
phasis on the higher will. At the same time I have hinted at
the difficulties that the doctrine offers to the individualist.
The acceptance of the maxim that man is the measure of all
things — and all individualists must accept the maxim in
some form 2 — is fatal to every absolute whether of will or

1 Book i, 4.1; see also Institutes, Book i, 2.6. So far as it refers to one
specific transaction, the lex regia is of course a juristic fiction. The
concentration of power in the hands of the emperor was more gradual.
21 have discussed the various meanings that this maxim may have
in the last chapter of The Masters of Modem French Criticism.
 APPENDIX 333

reason. Absolute and unlimited will in the religious sense has

often run over into a will to power, even when the rulers who
asserted it have professed to do so only as the humble recipi¬
ents of the grace of a divine sovereign. The tendency of a be¬
lief in the arbitrary sovereignty of God to result imperialisti-
cally may be illustrated not only from the history of royalty by
divine right but also from that of the papacy.
In my first chapter I attempted to trace the transition
through an intermediary period of rationalism from the me¬
diaeval belief in absolute will to another form of the same be¬
lief, — the transition, in short, from the sovereignty of God to
the sovereignty of the people. The superiority of the person
who conceives of the political problem in terms of will in any
sense of the word is that he is taking his stand for something
vital and primary, something compared with which reason will
finally prove to be only secondary and instrumental. It is
interesting to consider from this point of view the rationalistic
absolute of Hegel. According to Hegel the Idea, after various
incomplete historical manifestations, finally found its perfect
incarnation in the Prussian State. The absolute reason that is
supposed to animate this State has shown itself in practice,
most persons would agree, the servant of the will to power.
The rival claims of reason and will may also be studied in¬
terestingly in connection with international law. This whole
subject is now under the suspicion of being chimerical. If this
suspicion should prove to be justified, the explanation is either
that international law has given a primacy to reason that does
not belong to it or else has been unduly superficial in its treat¬
ment of will. The representatives of the so-called positive
school of international law have tended to confine themselves
to recording the unfolding wills of various sovereign states in
their relations with one another. If this record is to deserve
the name of law at all, it should surely be distinguishable from
mere force, from the will to power of some state or league of
states at any particular international crisis. At this point one
perceives that the fortunes of international law are closely
bound up with the new doctrine of will that has tended to take
334 APPENDIX
the place of the mediseval dependence on the divine will as well
as of the later reign of rationalism. The question as to the
quality of will that the sovereign people is likely to display is
subordinate to the question as to the truth or falsity of Rous¬
seau’s underlying dogma of natural goodness. The tendency of
this dogma is to discredit both inner and outer control. With
the disappearance of control, popular will becomes only an¬
other name for popular impulse. I have already concluded
that what manifests itself in a people that has reached this
stage of naturalistic expansion is not a will to brotherhood but
a will to power. One must admit the imperialistic elements
that insinuated themselves into the humanistic and religious
traditions of the Occident, especially in connection with the¬
ories of absolute and unlimited sovereignty. Yet these tradi¬
tions were after all in some measure genuine and so did some¬
thing to set bounds to the libido dominandi. For at the heart
of genuine religion is c, will to peace and at the heart of genuine
humanism is a will to justice; whereas, if my analysis be cor¬
rect, radical democracy and imperialism are in their essence
identical.
I have already said something about the other side of the
modern movement in its relation to theories of sovereignty
(p 296 f.).1 The utilitarian is tending to conceive of the State
in a more and more absolute fashion. He feels that its
power should suffer no restriction when it is seeking to
promote what is socially useful, the greatest good of the
greatest number. The underlying fallacy of the utilitarian, I
have said, is that he conceives of the “greatest good” and
of happiness in general in terms of pleasure or else in terms
of a merely outer working. Society is bound to protect
itself against the unrestraint of the individual, but if it is not
to push this necessary assertion of its authority to an oppress¬
ive extreme, it needs to take cognizance not only of outer
1 Perhaps the best known attempt to base a theory of sovereignty
on utility and social expediency is that of John Austin in his Province
of Jurisprudence Determined (1832; 2nd ed., 1861). See especially
ch. vi.
 APPENDIX 335

working but also of the inner working that is the final source
of a sound individualism. To do so is not to become abstract
but on the contrary to turn from sociological theorizing to
positive psychological observation.
This brief survey of theories of absolute sovereignty would
seem to confirm the passage of John Adams that serves as one
of the epigraphs of this volume. From the lex regia to the
utilitarian-sentimental movement these theories have been as¬
sociated with a series of theological and metaphysical conceits
that have, in their ultimate implications, been subversive of
personal liberty.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
I have included in this bibliography the more important
works mentioned in the body of this volume; also a few others
that, for one reason or another, seem especially relevant to the
topics I have discussed.

Acton, Lord:
Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. 1904.
The History of Freedom and Other Essays. 1907.
Althusius, J.:
Politica meihodice digesta. 1603.
Aristotle:
Nicomachean Ethics. Tr. by D. P. Chase. 1847. (Reprint
in Everyman’s Library.)
Politics. Tr. by B. Jowett. 1905.
Arnim, H. von:
Die politischen Theorien des Altertums. 1910.
Atger, F.:
Essai sur Vhistoire des doctrines du contrat social. 1906.
Augustine, Saint:
De Civitate Dei. Ed. E. Hoffman. 2 vols. 1898. Tr. by
M. Dods. 1897.
Barker, E.:
Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the
Present Day. 1915.
Greek Political Theory. 1918.
Beveridge, A. J.:
The Life of John Marshall. 4 vols. 1916.
Mr. Beveridge brings out interestingly the irrecon¬
cilable opposition between Marshall and Jefferson.
He should, however, at some point in his work have
338 BIBLIOGRAPHY
discriminated sharply between the unionist and the
nationalist of imperialistic leanings. Marshall is very
far from being a precursor of Roosevelt.
Bossuet, J. B.:
Politique tiree de Vicriture sainte. 1709.
Bourgeois, E.:
Manuel historique de politique etrangere. 3 vols. 4e 6d.
1909.
Burke, E.:
Works. 8 vols. (Bohn Library.) 1854-61.
Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. 1791.
Bury, J. B.:
The Idea of Progress. 1921.
Carlyle, R. W., and A. J.:
A History of Mediaeval Political Theory. 4 vols. 1903-22.
Chateaubriand, F. R. de:
Essai historique, politique et moral sur les Revolutions. 1797.
Memoires d’Outre-Tombe (1848). Ed. E. BirA 6 vols.
1898-1901.
Confucius:
The Sayings of Confucius (Analects). Tr. by L. Giles.
1907.
The Conduct of Life. Tr. by Ku Hung Ming. 1906.
This is the Confucian treatise usually entitled The
Doctrine of the Mean. A still more literal rendering of
the two Chinese words that make up the title, if we
accept Mr. Ku Hung Ming’s explanation of them,
would be the “universal norm” or “centre.”
Cumberland, R.:
De Legibus naturae. 1672.
Dante Alighieri:
De Monarchia. About 1310. Ed. Moore. 1904. Tr. by
P. H. Wicksteed in Temple Classics.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 339
Dedieu, J.:
Montesquieu et la tradition ‘politique anglaise en France.
1909.
Diels, H.:
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 2 vols. (in 3). 2d ed.
1906-10.
Dunning, W. A.:
A History of Political Theories. 3 vols. 1902-20.
Ferguson, W. F.:
Greek Imperialism. 1913.
Fester, R.:
Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie. 1890.
Figgis, J. N.:
Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius. 1907.
2d ed. 1916.
An excellent treatment of the all-important period of
transition from a theocratic Europe to a Europe of
great territorial nationalities.
The Divine Right of Kings. 1914.
Filmer, R.:
Patriarcha; or The Natural Power of Kings. 1680. (Re¬
printed together with Locke’s Treatises of Government
in Morley’s Universal Library.)
Frank, T.:
Roman Imperialism. 1914.
Fustel de Coulanges, N. D.:
La CitS antique. 1864. 16th ed. 1898. Tr. by W. Small.
1874.
It is difficult to exhibit the relation between ethos
and political forms without seeming, and perhaps with¬
out being, too systematic. La Cite antique has been
criticized severely from this point of view. C. B6mont,
however, goes too far when he asserts (article on Fustel
in the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica) that it
340 BIBLIOGRAPHY
“has been largely superseded”; on the contrary, it is,
in certain important respects, a work of almost defini¬
tive excellence.

Gierke, O.:
Political Theories of the Middle Age. Tr. and ed. by F. W.
Maitland. 1900.
Johannes Althusius. 1880. 3d ed. 1913.
A valuable repertory of information on such topics as
natural rights and the social contract. Gierke probably
exaggerates, however, the influence of Althusius on
Rousseau who mentions him only once (end of 6e
Lettre ecrite de la Montagne).
Gomperz, T.:
Griechische Denker. 2d ed. 3 vols. 1903-09. Tr. by L.
Magnus and G. G. Berry. 1901-12.

Gooch, G. P.:
Germany and the French Revolution. 1920.
Grotius, H.:
De Jure belli et pads. 1625. Tr. by Whewell. 3 vols. 1853.
Hearnshaw, F. J. C. (editor):
The Social and Political Ideas of some Great Mediaeval
Thinkers. 1923.
In one of the articles of this volume Eileen Power
points out that Pierre Du Bois, a lawyer in the service
of Philippe le Bel, formulated a plan of European peace
that anticipated in some respects the Grand Dessein of
Sully. This plan, like that of Sully, would have re¬
sulted practically in the French domination of Europe.

Hobbes, T.:
Leviathan. 1651. Ed. W. G. Pogson Smith. 1909.
Hooker, R.:
Ecclesiastical Polity. 1592. (Reprint in Everyman's
Library.)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 341
Hume, D.:
A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739-40. (Reprint in
Everyman’s Library.)
Janet, P.:
Histoire de la science 'politique. 2 vols. 1858. 4th ed. 1913.
Jefferson, T.:
Works. 10 vols. Ed. P. L. Ford. 1892-99.
Laski, H. J.:
Political Thought from Locke to Bentham. 1920.
Lecky, W. E. H.:
Democracy and Liberty. 2 vols. 1896.
Locke, J.:
Two Treatises of Government. 1690. (Reprint in Morley’s
Universal Library.)
Louter, J. de:
Le Droit international positif. 1920.
MacDonald, J. R.:
The Socialist Movement. 1911.
Machiavelli, N.:
Del modo tenuto dal duca Valentino nelV ammazzare
ViteUozzo Vitelli, etc. 1502.
II Principe. 1513.
Vita di Castruccio Castricani. 1520.
Translations of all three pieces appear in the same
volume of Everyman’s Library.
Maine, Sir H. J. S.:
Ancient Law. 1861. (Reprint in Everyman’s Library.)
See especially ch. iv, “ The Modern History of the Law
of Nature.”
Maistre, J. de:
Du Pape. 1819.
Soiries de Saint-Petersbourg. 1821.
The “Premier entretien” contains the celebrated
“Portrait du bourreau.”
342 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mant>eville, B.:
The Fable of the Bees. 1714. (The Grumbling Hive, the
verses that form the nucleus of this volume, appeared
originally in 1705). 5th ed., 2 vols. 1728-29.
Marsilius of Padua:
Defensor Pacis. 1324. Text in Goldast, Monarchia S.
Imperii Romani.
Merriam, C. E.:
American Political Theories. 1903. New ed. 1920.
Michel, H.:
L’Id£e de V&tat. 1896.
Mill, J. S.:
On Liberty. 1859. (Reprinted together with the essays on
Utilitarianism and Representative Government in Every¬
man’s Library.)
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat de la Br^de,
Baron de:
De VEsprit des Lois. 1748.
Oliver, F. S.:
Alexander Hamilton; an Essay on American Union. 1907.
Pascal, B.:
Pensees et opuscules. Ed. L. Brunschvicg. 1917.
Plato:
Works. Tr. by B. Jowett. 5 vols. 3d ed. 1892.
Pound, R.:
The Spirit of the Common Law. 1921.
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law. 1922.
Powers, H. H.:
America among the Nations. 1917.
Renan, E.:
La Reforme intellectuelle et morale. 1871.
Ritchie, D. G.:
Natural Rights. 1894. 3d ed. 1916.
The notion of natural rights is, according to Ritchie,
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 343
chimerical and leads to an unsound individualism.
What he opposes to this unsoundness is not a sound
individualism but social expediency, which is itself, in
virtue of the doctrine of evolution, constantly changing.
A useful feature of this book is the appendix which
contains the more important eighteenth-century dec¬
larations of rights in France and America.
Rousseau, J. J.:
(Euvres completes. 13 vols. (Hachette.)
There is no good complete edition.
The Political Writings. 2 vols. Ed. C, E. Vaughan. 1915.
Vaughan has done good work on the text. In his in¬
troductory material, on the other hand, he develops
ideas — for example, the idea that Rousseau is politi¬
cally a true Platonist — which will not bear serious
scrutiny.
Saint-Pierre, Abb£ de:
Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en Europe. 1712-17.
Schopenhauer, A.:
Grundlage der Moral. 1840. Tr. by A. B. Bullock. 2d ed.
1915.
Seilli^re, E.:
L}Imperialisms democratique. 1907.
Le Mai romantique. 1908.
Introduction d la philosophic de Vimperialisme. 1911.
Le Peril mystique dans Vinspiration des democraties
modernes. 1918.
Balzac et la morale romantique. 1922.
Vers le sodalisme rationnel. 1923.
M. Seilli&re intends this last volume as a summary
of his whole point of view. Among the expositions of
his philosophy that have been published by others the
best is that by R. Gillouin: Une nouvelle philosophic de
Vhistoire modernc (1921). See also La Penste d’Ernest
SeiUibre,twelve studies by contemporary French writers.
344 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1923 (Bibliography at the end). M. Seilli&re has been
criticized for giving an undue extension to the term
imperialism. A more legitimate objection is that to
his use of the word “mysticism.” On this latter point
see Henri Bremond: Histoire litt&raire du sentiment
religieux en France, vol. rv (1920), p. 566 n.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of:
Charaderisticks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times.
1711. 2d ed. 1714. Ed. J. M. Robertson. 1900.
The Life, unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen.
Ed. B. Rand. 1900.
Smith, A.:
The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1761. 6th ed. with criti¬
cal and biographical memoir by Dugald Stewart, 1790.
(Reprint in Bohn’s Library.)
The Wealth of Nations. 1776. (Reprint in Everyman’s
Library.)
Spengler, O.:
Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 2 vols. 1919-22.
Stephen, Fitzjames:
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 2d ed. 1874.
Tagore, Rabindranath:
Nationalism. 1917.
Troltsch, E.:
Augustin, die christliche Antike und die Mitielalter. 1915.
VlALLATE, A.:
U Imperialisme economique et les relations Internationales
pendant le dernier demi-si&cle (1870-1920). 1923.
Whitman, W.:
Leaves of Grass. 1855.
Democratic Vistas. 1871.
Zanta, L.:
La Renaissance du stoicisme au XVIe Si&cle. 1914.
 INDEX OF NAMES
Acton, Lord, 2, 94, 127, 178, 184, Bordes, 74 n.
298 n. Borgia, Caesar, 39.
Adams, Henry, 231 n., 252 n. Bossuet, 21, 55, 56, 57, 68, 60, 67J
Adams, Herbert B., 305 n. 187, 219, 260, 276, 277, 301.
Adams, John, 306, 335. Bourgeois, E., 130 n.
Adams, John Quincy, 248. Boutroux, E., 131.
Addison, 13. Brownell, W. C., 167 n.
Alexander, 139. Bryan, W. J., 240, 282, 285.
Anselm, Saint, 118 n. Bryce, Lord, 241.
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 2, 30, Buddha, 32, 33, 36, 67 n., 158,
164, 320. 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 169,
Aristophanes, 148, 149. 170, 173, 184, 194, 195, 199,
Aristotle, 2, 27, 30, 31, 32, 35 n., 202, 209, 214, 222, 273, 275.
44, 46, 54, 61, 64, 70, 78, 83, 92, Burke, 22, 69, 96, 97-116, 126,
117, 149, 150, 152 n., 163, 164, 128, 141, 157, 166, 178, 199,
165, 192, 199, 204, 205, 209, 202, 207, 221 n., 246, 251, 258,
213, 214, 258, 273, 276, 299, 262, 272, 293, 331.
301, 302, 308, 309, 320. Byron, Lord, 244.
Arnold, Matthew, 160, 243, 281.
Asoka, 159, 160. Caesar, 29, 31, 44, 54, 92, 98, 196,
Asquith, 289. 270, 284, 285, 286, 288.
Asquith, Mrs., 203. Calhoun, J., 247.
Attila, 158. Caligula, 141.
Augustine, Saint, 2, 21, 30, 31, Calkins, Mary W., 330 n.
176, 319. Calvin, 54, 74, 188, 189, 190 n.,
Austin, John, 334 n. 253.
Carlyle, 7, 131, 137, 138, 140, 209,
Bacon, Francis, 30, 94, 103, 113, 211.
143, 159, 190, 192, 197, 259, Castricani, Castruccio, 39.
314, 321. Chaplin, Charlie, 240.
Bacon, Roger, 113. Chateaubriand, 126 n., 128, 140,
Bagehot, W., 106. 217, 220.
Balzac, Honore de, 17 n., 21 n. Chavannes, E., 163 n.
Barabbas, 264. Chesterton, G. K., 125.
Barker, Ernest, 286 n. Christ (Jesus), 33, 34, 98, 130,
Bentham, 224 n., 296 r. 132, 140, 158, 159, 160, 161,
Bergson, Henri, 17, 18, 162, 169, 163, 164, 170, 172, 177, 195,
183 n., 224, 229, 301, 328, 329. 264, 269, 273, 275, 283, 284,
Bernard, Saint, 108 n., 178 n. 289, 291, 298.
Bismarck, 41. Chu Hsi, 164.
Blair, Dr., 85 n. Chuquet, A., 130 n.
Bodley, J. E. C., 287 n. Cicero, 2, 19, 47, 149 n., 268, 270,
Boerhaave, 324 n. 291, 292.
Boileau, 277. Cimon, 148 n.
346 INDEX OF NAMES
Cineas, 271. Ford, Henry, 5, 146, 212, 239,
Cleon, 281. 241, 253, 282.
Cleveland, Grover, 288. Forke, Alfred, 151 n.
Cloots, Anacharsis, 124. Fosdick, Raymond B., 255 n.
Coleridge, 13, 130 n., 221. Fouill£e, A., 327 n.
Comte, Auguste, 258. France, Anatole, 81, 294, 295.
Condorcet, 132. Francia, Dr., 211.
Confucius, 3, 33, 34, 35, 36, 61, Frank, Tenney, 270 n.
154, 158, 163, 164, 165, 184, Franklin, Benjamin, 311.
199, 200, 273, 277 n., 279, 301, Frederick the Great, 41, 131, 211.
310 n. Fustel de Coulanges, 27, 54,253 n.
Cowdray, Lord, 153.
Croce, B., 328. Galileo, 321.
Cromwell, 113. Galley, Mademoiselle, 79.
Cumberland, R., 47, 216. Genghis Khan, 158.
Curzon, Lord, 153. George III, 77.
Gervinus, 135.
Dante, 25, 29, 142, 161, 219. Geulincx, 324 n.
Danton, 126. Gilson, E., 320 n., 321.
Darwin, 164, 327. Gladstone, Mary, 2 n.
Daudet, L6on, 228. Goethe, 130, 138, 145, 211, 241,
Dedieu, J., 63 n. 264.
Descartes, 62, 68, 224, 226, 319 n., Gompers, Samuel, 232, 307.
321, 322, 323, 324, 327 n. Gomperz, 51 n.
Dewey, John, 312, 313. Gooch, G. P., 130 n.
Diderot, 10, 67, 293. Graffenried, Mademoiselle, 79.
Diels, H., 168 n. Grey, Viscount, 289.
Disraeli, 103, 106, 215, 275. Grotius, 45, 52, 71, 122.
Dreiser, Theodore, 254.
Dryden, 141, 265, 266. Halifax, 105.
Duns Scotus, 113, 190, 319, 320, Hamilton, Alexander, 248 n.
321. Hardy, Thomas, 132, 140.
Hawkins, Sir John, 72.
Edison, 241. Hay, John, 249 n.
Edwards, Jonathan, 89, 141, 189, Hazlitt, W., 279.
257, 290 n. Heamshaw, F. J. C., 71 n.
Eldon, Lord, 77. Hearst, Wm. Randolph, 240, 264,
Eliot, Charles W., 290, 303. 281.
Emerson, R. W., 167. Hegel, 333.
Epictetus, 50, 216, 278 n. Heine, H., 121.
Erasmus, 25, 180, 189. Heliogabalus, 271.
Erastus, 53. Henry IV (Holy Roman Em¬
Euripides, 181. peror) , 28.
Henry IV (of France), 121, 122.
Fabricius, 74. Hesiod, 205.
Faguet, E., 64, 108 n., 165. Hildebrand, 178 n.
Fester, Richard, 79 n. Hobbes, 22, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,
Fielding, 72. 47, 48, 59, 72, 74, 87, 90, 94,
Filmer, R., 53, 54, 58. 100, 121, 122, 232, 324, 327.
Flamininus, 270. Hooker, R., 71.
 INDEX OF NAMES 347
Horace, 271. Lycurgus, 74, 89.
Hugo, Victor, 129, 231.
Hume, D., 51, 85, 165 n., 216, Macaulay, 103.
224, 225, 234, 324, 325 n., 326, MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 315.
328. McDougall, Wm., 245.
Hutcheson, F., 48, 51. Machiavelli, 22, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41,
Huxley, 325, 326 n., 328. 43, 44, 46, 48, 63, 70, 94, 119,
134, 135, 137, 314.
Jackson, Andrew, 246. Maistre, Joseph de, 57, 58.
Jacobi, 325 n. Malesherbes, 79 n.
James, Wm., 328, 329. Mallet du Pan, 108.
Jefferson, Thomas, 196, 240, 242, Mandeville, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52,
246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 305. 65 n., 72, 73.
Jhering, 296 n. Manu, 32.
Johnson, Samuel, 72, 206, 228, Marat, 281.
325, 330. Marcus Aurelius, 11, 46, 50, 167,
Joubert, 12, 63, 74, 112, 113, 273, 216.
279 n. Marie Antoinette, 104, 124.
Judas, 190 n. Marshall, John, 248, 250, 251,
Juvenal, 18. 307.
Marsilius of Padua, 58.
Kahl, Wilhelm, 319 n., 321 n. Marvell, 113.
Kant, I., 131, 224, 225, 226, 324, Marx, Karl, 191, 223, 280.
325, 326. Masson, P. M., 95 n.
Krishna, 80. Mei-ti, 151.
Melancthon, 190 n.
La Mettrie, 324 n. Mencius, 151 n., 193.
Lanson, G., 84, 85, 86. Mencken, H. L., 274.
La Rochefoucauld, 41, 48. Mercier, Cardinal, 28.
Laski, Harold J., 223, 224. M6ricourt, Mile. Thferoigne de,
Lear, Edward, 80. 126 n.
Lecky, 115. Michel Angelo, 108 n.
Legge, Dr., 36. Mill, J. S., 103, 111, 201, 286 n.,
Lenin, 266, 312. 324 n.
Leonidas, 108 n. Milnes, Monckton, 231.
Lilly, W. S., 83. Milton, 80.
Lincoln, A., 81, 248, 249, 250, Mirabeau, Marquis de, 86, 152.
251, 280. Mohammed, 161.
Livy, 236, 271. Montaigne, 274 n.
Lloyd George, D., 1. Montesquieu, 18, 63, 64, 65, 66,
Locke, J., 42, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 87, 219.
63, 71, 74, 102, 103, 191, 224 n., More, P. E., 328.
324. Murry, J. Middleton, 135 n.
Louis XIV, 56, 57, 124. Mussolini, 312.
Louis XV, 65.
Louis, Saint, 56. Napoleon, 10, 128, 129, 130, 132,
Louter, J. de, 266 n. 139, 140, 141, 256.
Lowell, James R., 218, 234. Nero, 18, 141, 264.
Lucretius, 217. Newman, Cardinal, 156, 182.
Luther, 25, 53, 188, 189. Nicolay, 249 n.
348 INDEX OF NAMES
Nietzsche, 228, 327. 167, 178, 183, 192, 195, 215;
216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 228,
Occam, William of, 113, 321. 229, 232, 237, 245, 276, 277,
Oliver, F. S., 248 n. 279, 287, 300, 327, 328, 334.
Origen, 319.
Ovid, 172. Sainte-Beuve, 9, 90.
Saint-Evremond, 139, 187.
Page, Walter H., 280. Saint-Just, 126.
Paine, Tom, 104. Saint-Pierre, Abbe de, 67, 121;
Paley, 77. 122, 131.
Palmer, George H., 272 n. Sanson, 126 n.
Papini, 284 n. Savigny, 100 n.
Pascal, 12, 25, 37, 42, 62, 166, 167, Schiller, 81, 325 n., 329 n.
179, 180, 237, 274 n., 301, 322. Schopenhauer, 73, 227, 326, 327.
Pater, Walter, 107. Schwab, 239.
Paul, Saint, 159, 160, 173, 190 n. S6gur, Comte de, 125.
Pericles, 36, 148 n. Seilliere, E., 17 n., 20, 21, 22, 260.
Philo Judaeus, 171. Selden, John, 265.
Piccoli, R., 328. Seneca, 50 n., 71 n.
Pindar, 168. Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 48,
Pius IX, 144. 49, 50, 51, 52, 72, 216, 325 n.
Plato, 11, 12, 30, 31, 32, 33, 51 n., Shakespeare, 137, 147.
87, 92, 149, 150, 168, 169, 171, Shelley, P. B., 76, 77, 136, 137,
172, 173, 176, 177, 202, 231. 220, 222.
Pontius Pilate, 172. Shelley, Mrs., 133.
Pope, A., 48, 58. Sherman, Stuart P., 251, 252.
Pound, Roscoe, 296 n. Shun, 200.
Powers, H. H., 268 n. Smith, Adam, 51, 191, 213.
Proal, L., 77 n. Smith, Vincent A., 160 n.
Proudhon, 108 n. Socrates, 32, 149, 165, 167, 172,
Pyrrhus, 139, 271. 173,179, 264, 278, 283,284,298.
Solomon, 80.
Rambouillet, Marquise de, 124. Sophocles, 147, 295.
Raphael, 191. Speed, 81.
Rehberg, 100 n. Spengler, Oswald, 20, 21.
Renan, E., 118, 130 n., 292. Spinoza, 322, 323, 324.
Repington, Colonel, 203. Stael, Mme. de, 5, 96.
Richelieu, 124, 139. Stephen, Fitzjames, 286 n.
Rickaby, Joseph, 324 n. Stephen, Leslie, 209.
Rivarol, 229. Sully, 121.
Roberts, Lord, 289. Sunday, Rev. William A., 240.
Robespierre, 89, 95, 125, 126, 127, Swift, Jonathan, 137.
217, 266. Synesius, 14.
Rockefeller, J. D., 212.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 249, 269. Tacitus, 232.
Rousseau, 1, 2, 4, 17, 18, 20, 21, Tagore, Rabindranath, 161, 162.
51 n., 52, 58, 59, 69, 70-96, Taine, H., 83, 100, 124, 127.
97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, Tamerlane, 158.
108, 109, 115, 117, 118, 119, Taylor, Jeremy, 137.
121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 132, Tennyson, 81 n., 258.
 INDEX OF NAMES 349
Tertullian, 177 n. Washington, George, 246, 247J
Thompson, D. W., 164 n. 248, 249, 250,251, 263,269, 270.
Thrale, 206. Watson, J. B., 330 n.
Thucydides, 38, 150. Way, A. S., 181 n.
Tiberius, 18, 271. Webster, D., 247.
Ticknor, George, 305 n. Weems, “Parson,” 249 n.
Tyrrell, 141. Whitman, Walt, 4, 219, 228, 249,
260, 267, 268.
d’UrfS, H.f 124. Wicksteed, P. H., 320 n.
Wilson, Woodrow, 196, 268, 280,
Vaihinger, 326. 288.
Vaughan, C. E., 115,119 n., 122 n. Wordsworth, Wm., 227, 327.
Victoria, Queen, 276. Wright, Harold Bell, 240.
Villon, 28. Wulf, M. de, 320 n.
Virgil, 231.
Vogii6, Vicomte M. de, 117. Young, E., 16*
Voltaire, 48, 63, 68, 99, 323.
Ward, Wilfrid, 81 n. Zanta, L., 71 O.