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 necessary 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 elsewhere, 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 predominantly naturalistic, or humanistic, or religious; and it will also be found that political forms tend to vary accordingly.

If, for example, a people is deeply religious, a government 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 hierarchy that traditional religion had established, first of all in the family and then in the State, was gradually undermined by individualistic and equalitarian tendencies. The yielding of religious control to an anarchical naturalism 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 mediæval 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 cathedral 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 excommunication, 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 that of these same men to their unions. Still, if one compare 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 individualistic 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 implies 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 Emperor, the head of the temporal order, to God’s vicar upon earth, the Pope. Others maintained that the Emperor derived his sanction, not through the Pope, but immediately from on high. This latter form of the theocratic conception is best set forth, perhaps, in Dante’s “De Monarchia.” Dante desires coöperation and ultimate 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 Cæsar, showed themselves in so far true Christians. We need to remember, however, how much in the Christian tradition itself goes back ultimately, not to Judæa, 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 mediæval 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 mediæval view of life rests on a belief in a supernatural revelation. 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 outlook 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 attitude, inclined to repudiate Aristotle as the chief source of the scholastic logomachy. Bacon, for example, practically never gets behind the scholastic Aristotle to the real Aristotle.

Plato, then, differs from the mediæval thinkers in dealing critically with the political problem in the “Republic” and elsewhere. He arrives, however, at a conception that is on the whole theocratic; so that if one looks, not to the method, but to the conclusions, one is forced to agree in part with those who assert that the Middle Ages already begin in Plato. Add the all-important distinction between the things of God and the things of Cæsar and the class of Guardians in the “Republic” would work out into something very similar to a monastic 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 Plato’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 history 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 disagree 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 enlightened 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 enlightened 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 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 religious than India. India has always been the home of religion, good, bad, or indifferent; and so one is not surprised 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 perhaps been even more successful, and that down to our own day, than the Church of mediæval 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 interesting 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 critical view of life; secondly, because he displayed this positive and critical spirit in the field of religion. His kingdom, like that of Jesus, and unlike that of Plato, is not of this world. He does not seek, like the Plato of the “Republic,” 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 religious 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 movement 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 political 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 movement. The nearest approach to it, perhaps, is the doctrine of the middle path that Buddha proclaimed in the religious life itself. It is difficult to imagine a more complete contrast in this respect than that between India and China, which in its central tradition, of which Confucius is the chief exponent, has always been humanistic. The bathing ghats at Benares suggest something almost as remote from ordinary Chinese psychology as from our own. Confucius is less concerned with the other world 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 Confucian tradition of the Far East has much in common with the Aristotelian tradition of the Occident. In one important respect, however, Confucius recalls not Aristotle, 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 humble 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 experience of his race that had accumulated through long centuries and found living embodiment in these sages should be conveyed to the present and the future; in his own words, he was not a creator but a transmitter. A man who looks up to the great traditional models and imitates 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 necessary 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.

In dealing with the political problem, Confucius is inevitably led to brush aside, as of slight account, everything except the question of leadership. “The virtue of the leader,” he says, “is like unto wind; that of the people like unto grass. For it is the nature of grass to bend when the wind blows upon it.”⁠[6] Now the true leader is the man of character, and the ultimate root of character is humility. This Confucian conception has such a central 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. Confucius himself had a deep and genuine perception of what is specifically human in man which he defines as a principle 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 associated 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 information, 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 imaginative, such as is found in Greek humanism at its best. We are also likely to feel something more modern and, therefore, more congenial to us in the highly untraditional and individualistic Buddha. Still Confucius, though traditional, is not dogmatic; he is not even systematic. 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 consistently 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 regarded only in a very qualified sense as the descendants of the Greeks of the age of Pericles: whereas the descendants 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 Confucian tradition.

I have been considering thus far, in both East and West, various religious and humanistic views of life, whether on a traditional or a positive and critical basis, and the corresponding types of political thinking. It remains to consider the naturalistic view of life and its 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 otherworldliness 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 spontaneous impulses to the law of measure that one finds in Confucianists and Aristotelians. The rise of the individualistic and critical spirit and the resulting break with the mediæval and theocratic ideal, from the Renaissance 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 destroy the religious unity of mediæval Europe, one needs to turn to Machiavelli. He will probably remain the best type in either East or West of the unflinching political naturalist. To understand Machiavelli, one needs to study him in his relation to traditional religion. Christianity, 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 conclusions regarding the secular order and its political problems that are, if possible, more Machiavellian than those of Machiavelli himself. One seems to have no alternative except to get rid of ethics in getting rid of theology. Moreover, the Church, as an actual institution, had such a monopoly of the higher life of man that to seek, like Machiavelli, to give the State a basis independent of the Church was to run the risk of giving it a basis independent of morality. Furthermore, Machiavelli was, within certain limits, an extraordinarily shrewd observer. His views reflect the failure of Christianity to control men’s actual deeds, either in his own time or in the mediæval 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 preservation.”⁠[7] 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 Machiavellian. There is, for example, a strong Machiavellian element in this sense in Thucydides.

The conclusions to which Machiavelli was led by his special type of realism are familiar. The rules of ordinary morality may hold in the relations between man and man, but have only a secondary place in the relations between state and state; what prevails in these latter 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 fox.⁠[8] 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 incarnation of his own conception in Cæsar 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 actions 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 government.”⁠[9] One should mark especially the meaning that Machiavelli attaches to the word virtue. He begins an account of the mediæval 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 heavenly commonwealth or City of God. This divided allegiance 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 religious, 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 embodies, 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 thoroughgoing realists. The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation. Without asserting that there is no such thing as reason of state and that public and private morality should coincide precisely at all points, nevertheless, one may affirm that it is chimerical to set up a dual code in the Machiavellian sense, to suppose that men can, as a rule, be ruthless in the service of country and at the same time upright 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 property 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 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 significant line of development runs rather through England. Hobbes is possibly even more lacking in ethical perception, even more naturalistic in his conception of human nature, than Machiavelli himself. Strip man of the conventions that have been imposed upon him from without, says Hobbes, and what one discovers as his essence is “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”⁠[10] Hobbes reflects, to some extent, in his philosophy the cynicism and disillusion that had been engendered in many by the civil convulsions of seventeenth-century England. If one is to retain 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 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 geometrical 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 English 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 assumptions 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 assumptions the conception of absolute and unlimited sovereignty. When anything absolute is set up, we may 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 mediæval 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 mediæval sovereign, whether Pope or Emperor, if not responsible to the people, is responsible to God, who is, finally, the only absolute and unlimited ruler. Furthermore, 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 Machiavelli, not only unmediæval 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, in opposition to a state of society where men escape from their isolation on the basis of a convention or contract. 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 naturally. 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 Cæsar, 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 conceptions 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 (bellum 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 unlimited sovereignty to the State. Men also tend to be equal in the natural state, since the physically weak may, 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 complex. 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 incorporated in Roman law. The underlying driving power behind the “return to nature” from the Renaissance 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 Christian and mediæval dualism was due even less perhaps to scientific discovery, and to the type of progress that resulted, 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 traditionalists. In the political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the naturalistic and Stoical elements are combined in almost every conceivable proportion with elements that derive from the traditional supernaturalism. A mixture of this kind is especially evident in the “De Jure belli et pacis” (1625) of Grotius, the father of international law. The great nationalities, that were arising with the breakdown of mediæval theocracy, were plainly in a state of nature as regards one another, so that it was even more important to determine, 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 Aristotle that man is a political animal, and that it is, therefore, natural for him to live in society, one needs in either case to define with some care the principle of cohesion 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 association of this rule of reason with nature, is, strictly speaking, not Christian, but Stoical. It is as natural for a man to serve other men, says Marcus Aurelius in his exposition of Stoical “reason,” as it is for the eye to see. This doctrine of service, which the Stoic deems at once rational and natural, does not involve the inner life in the Christian sense. The final appeal is to something outside the individual—namely, to what Cicero, a main source of Stoical influence upon the modern world, calls the “common utility” (utilitas communis). The community 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 doctrine 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 promote the common good; thus to serve the community, says Cumberland, combining the new utilitarian conception 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 religious 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 the egoistic naturalists of the type of Machiavelli and Hobbes, who have maintained that the most fundamental impulse in man is the push for power. The rise of emotional ethics may be studied, especially in the England 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 nature on either theological or naturalistic grounds were still numerous and aggressive. The divergent views concerning the goodness or badness of human nature were combined in almost every conceivable proportion in different 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 Rochefoucauld 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 making increasingly possible the satisfaction of these desires. It was gradually developing a vast machinery designed 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 “reason” can control the selfish passions, he refutes. The assertion of Shaftesbury that there inheres in the natural man a “moral sense” or will to serve, that can prevail 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:

Mandeville concludes:

In Shaftesbury and Mandeville, we see clearly revealed, for perhaps the first time, the opposition between 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 Mandeville’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 himself 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 instinctive affection of man for his own species, Shaftesbury 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.⁠[11] The moral æstheticism that is beginning to appear in 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.⁠[12] As a matter 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 unrelated 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 remember 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 itself 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 Rousseau 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 sciences 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 recognition 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 rationalistic 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 territorial nationalities governed in their relations to one another by international law. As conceived by Grotius, international law rests largely upon naturalistic foundations. The publication of his work was followed in a few years by recognition of the new Europe in the Peace of 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 naturalistic views are blended in almost every possible proportion. For example, Protestants, especially the Calvinists, 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 sovereignty, with its theocratic implications, in the spiritual order.

Some, to be sure, saw the danger of thus making secular 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 advance the people above the king.” A doctrine that was opposed to Jesuitical encroachments of this kind, and played an important rôle in the rise of nationalism, was that of the divine right of kings and of passive obedience. 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 related to that of mediæval 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 by hereditary right over certain limited territories. The theocratic state of Calvin again is related to the mediæval 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 Cæsar, 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 nationalism.

A defence of divine right that should receive attention as an example, though a very imperfect one, of an important type of political thinking, is the work of Filmer 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 apply an adequate psychological analysis to the patriarchal conception and uncover its deep roots in the actual facts of human nature. He is at once too naturalistic 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 tirée 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 boldly; for it is divine and salutary to mankind; but exercise it with humility. It is laid upon you from without. At bottom it leaves you weak, it leaves you mortal, 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 subordination 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 (l’état 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 mediæval 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 nationalism, it seemed by its insistence on the liberties of the French king and clergy (les libertés 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 judgment 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 triumph 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 conception 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 Christian 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 century 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 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 conception finally became, in writers like Locke, the doctrine 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 prerogative, 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 renounces once and for all his liberty or unlimited sovereignty 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.”⁠[13] In fact the law of nature is identical with the will of God⁠[14] (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 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 extreme 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, however, 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. Practically, Locke’s treatise reflects the upshot of the revolution of 1688, the transfer, namely, of the final power of the State from the King to Parliament. The legislative 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 desires.” 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 reference to his own subjects; and being thus unrestrained 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 recognition 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 problem that seems so important to an Aristotle and a Confucius, namely, the problem of leadership. It is characteristic of the English that the radical and equalitarian side of Locke should be slow to develop. The Revolution 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 justification, became manifest in time. This aristocracy virtually 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 representatives who are themselves so imbued with the utilitarian temper encouraged by Locke that they have perhaps ceased to be worthy of respect. If the aristocratic principle continues to give way to the equalitarian denial 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 rationalistic 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 opposition that he thus establishes between reason and prejudice, Locke becomes, along with Descartes, a main influence 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 Voltaire, in the field of political theory, on the other hand, this influence is perhaps best studied in Montesquieu.⁠[15] Like Locke, he stands for parliamentary control 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 legislative, 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 balances 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 possessed in a marked degree something that can scarcely be claimed for Montesquieu—practical sagacity. Compared with the political views of a Machiavelli those of Montesquieu have about them an atmosphere of unreality; 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 Montesquieu. Moreover, our own constitutional statesmen did not for the most part share Montesquieu’s general philosophy. 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 to the sociological point of view, so much so that Montesquieu 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, republican, 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 coincide 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,⁠[16] and within Christianity itself those that are to be Protestant or Catholic.⁠[17] “Good sense” is likewise, it would seem, a matter of climate.⁠[18] This naturalistic relativism implies a revolution in the very basis of ethics. As a matter of fact, 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 submission 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 était un vaisseau tenu par deux ancres dans la tempête—la religion et les mœurs.” With the decay of this traditional ethos, luxury increased and liberty declined.⁠[19]⁠

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, however faithfully it may reflect what aristocracy had actually 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 gentleman (honnête homme) sought to combine with the cult of honor, he discovers little more than a veneer of politeness that dissimulates the scramble of courtiers for the royal favor.

Since laws and governments, according to Montesquieu, 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 religious lines, he may be modified from without not merely by climate but by institutions; and that these institutions 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 prejudice. 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 constitutions.

I have just used the word progressive. As a matter of fact, the idea of progress, which was to give its distinctive note to modern naturalism, was just taking definite shape in the time of Montesquieu. Only the barest beginnings 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 Renaissance. In its early English form, it is associated with the Baconian influence and the founding of the Royal Society (1662), and tends to be practical and empirical. In its early French form, it is associated with the Cartesian influence, and tends to be more abstract and logical. The Baconian and Cartesian currents come together in the eighteenth century, especially in France. The result is an ever-growing confidence in human perfectibility. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre is already a fairly complete specimen of what one may term the professional philanthropist. Diderot and other Encyclopædists 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 Occident—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.⁠[20] But in that case one would 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 formulæ. To be sure, in the deistic movement, an important 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 contrived 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 Renaissance down, had been thus far predominantly rationalistic. 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 Enlightenment, 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 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 anything illustrious.” Rousseau had many precursors, as appears from what I have already said about the English 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.