Chapter IV · DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM

In our recent crusade to make the world safe for democracy 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 uncompromising 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 Vogüé, “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 perpetually.”⁠[39] It is interesting to place alongside of this and similar passages which might be multiplied indefinitely, passages⁠[40] 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 establish a first connection between Kultur, which has come to be regarded as in its essence imperialistic, and Rousseauistic democracy. Kultur, when closely scrutinized, breaks up into two main elements—on the one hand, scientific efficiency, and on the other, a nationalistic enthusiasm 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.”⁠[41] Renan might have said with about equal truth that international or cosmopolitan 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 development of the national idea, and that the national idea was also promoted, though on different postulates, by Machiavelli. But with the eighteenth century, nationalism and internationalism take on a more emotional coloring. An underlying influence here is Rousseau’s reinterpretation 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, virtue 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 virtue 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 cosmopolitan. 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.⁠[42] What is Rousseau’s own choice, one may ask, as between an emotional nationalism and an emotional internationalism? 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 intoxication of the citizen; and herein history has certainly confirmed him. The fact that l’ivresse 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.⁠[43] In his schemes for inbreeding 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 Europe, 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 principle 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 likewise 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 another’s women and children en masse. The Papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

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 Christian 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 Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s “Project for Perpetual Peace” (originally published in 1712–17) and wrote his “Judgment” on the “Project” (published in 1782). The Abbé de Saint-Pierre sought to revive the plan for a United States of Europe (le Grand Dessein) that Sully attributes to Henry IV. Rousseau shows much shrewdness 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 survived among its members. He goes on to say, anticipating Heine and following Hobbes, that Rome, having suffered material defeat, sent her dogmas instead of her legions into the provinces. To this spiritual Rome, mediæval and modern Europe has owed what small equivalent it has enjoyed of the Pax romana. The ultimate binding element in the mediæval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the Pope. The latter Middle Ages and the Renaissance saw a weakening of this principle of union and 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 Abbé de Saint-Pierre, perhaps the earliest complete French example of the professional philanthropist, has a still more naïve confidence in reason. He saw well enough, says Rousseau, how his schemes would work if they were once established, but was childish (and herein he resembled other “reformers” 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 governed by their reason, when they are in reality governed by their passions.⁠[44]⁠

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 federative 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 advocates. “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 mediæval 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 preparing a war which was to end war, when his assassination 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 preparations. He leaves us, in short, without any adequate solution of a problem, that of the centrifugal nationality, 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 exercised his main influence on those who began by standing, 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 Revolution, and then, turning away from the more peripheral aspects of the relation between democracy and imperialism, 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 perhaps did the most to promote Rousseauism, and in general the new philanthropy, were the members of the privileged classes themselves. The causes of this strange phenomenon are complex, but have been traced with sufficient accuracy by Taine in his “Ancien Régime.” 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 rationalistic 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’Urfé’s “Astrée” on the Marquise de Rambouillet and her group; and this perhaps made the way easier for another form of pastoralism. “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 melting of all Frenchmen together in a fraternal embrace. Anacharsis Cloots, the “orator of humankind,” had 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 universal fraternity. “Never,” says the Comte de Ségur, “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 Federation 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 attention to avowed disciples of Rousseau like Robespierre. 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 individuals than between whole classes of individuals. The 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 implicit 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 movement 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.⁠[45] It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.

In theory, Robespierre is, like Rousseau, rigidly equalitarian. 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 movement 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 triumph 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 Robespierre 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 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 constrained, 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 quondam 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 repressing popular excesses. From day to day there was taking place the transformation of republicans into imperialists and of the tyranny of all into the despotism of a single man.”⁠[46]⁠

Chateaubriand’s disapproval of Napoleon was ineffective, 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 imperialistic ambition. I have said that the Revolution almost from the start took on the character of a universal crusade. The first principles it assumed made practically all existing governments seem illegitimate. The various peoples were invited to overthrow these governments, 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.⁠[47] This foreign menace moved France to the first great burst of national enthusiasm in the modern sense. The cry of the revolutionary 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.⁠[48] The beginnings 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 levée en masse), go back to this period. The new national enthusiasm supplied France with soldiers so numerous and so spirited that she not only repelled her invaders, but began to invade other countries in turn, theoretically on a mission 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 imperialistic 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.⁠[49] 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).⁠[50]⁠

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 extended 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, contentious, 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 willingness 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 establish a sort of synchronism between the prevalence of pacifistic schemes and the actual outbreak of war. The propaganda of the Abbé 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 pacifist 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 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 explanation 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 humanitarians 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 movement 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 Rousseau, 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 institutions,” says Condorcet, for example, “ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.” 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 Rousseauist set up an ideal of universal brotherhood that led actually 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 nationalities. As a result of the coming together of the various factors I have enumerated, war has become almost inconceivably 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 existing 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—possibly as a result of having learned to read from works like the “Sorrows of Werther.”⁠[51] 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.

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 mechanism of material efficiency, to the building up of which the Occident has for several generations past been devoting 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 traditional controls as a mixture of altruism and high explosives. 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.⁠[52]⁠

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 regarded as the most successful of all the forward-lookers. In the phrase of Gervinus, “he guessed the spirit of modern history.” The last war has been correctly described as a “return of Machiavelli.” But with the progress 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 minutes 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.⁠[53] If there is rightness at the centre, it will no doubt multiply 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, 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 parallel. Superlatives are dangerous things, but one is perhaps 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 relationship. 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 individual. For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

I have already made a distinction of the first importance for the study of the question of war or peace in terms of the individual, and that is the distinction between the traditional Christian conception of liberty, which implies spiritual subordination, and the Rousseauistic 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 portrayed in the very spirit of the “Second Discourse” the paradise that is to result from the abolition of the traditional subordinations and inequalities:

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:

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, infinite 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 universe, they will soon be quarrelling with the owner of the other half. To be sure, as Swift remarks,

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 synonymous 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 according to the natural law he welcomes because it ministers to his power or comfort and in any case piques his wonder and curiosity. Spiritual truth is less welcome because it diminishes his conceit. Truth in this sense, as Goethe says, is less congenial to human nature than error, 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 interest 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 classification 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 appeared in the conquerors and great military adventurers of history. Saint-Evremond has made some penetrating observations on this form of imperialistic psychology 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 imagination 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-Evremond 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 planning 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 human 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 number 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 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 Napoleon 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 expanding freely along the lines of power, and is thus diminished in his conceit of himself. He suffers from repressed 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 description 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:

I have said that to look on the State of Burke with its ethical leadership as merely “pooled self-esteem” is misleading. 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 administered 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 divinities 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 ourselves.” Jonathan Edwards has genuine religious elevation; 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 imperialist. A more unmistakable example is that of certain members of the group of Fundamentalists that has recently 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 Messiah they had hoped for was far nearer to Napoleon than to the Messiah they actually received.

It goes without saying that the imperialistic element 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. Christianity 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 revelation to eternal life, and that of the Emperor to lead them according to the traditions of philosophy to temporal felicity.”⁠[54] 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 mediæval 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 together 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 authority “anterior, exterior, and superior” to the individual. With those who still cling to the principle of outer authority 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 committed 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 measure. The substitution of positive observation for what seemed to a Bacon, for instance, the apriorism and verbal 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 experimentally, that is, according to their own principles, they have, I have tried to show, failed disastrously. The results of the material success and spiritual failure of the modern movement are before us. It is becoming obvious 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 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 breakdown 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 reactionary. 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 civilization, let him be anathema.”

It is, however, possible to admit that some vital element dropped out in the passage from the mediæval 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 matter as is sometimes assumed. I am myself fond of insisting 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 part persons who have been more or less critical according to the natural law, and then have pieced out their incomplete survey of the facts by various rationalistic devices, 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 attempts 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 history.” As a result of the toil of innumerable investigators, 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 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 happenings 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 experience 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 rationalizing 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 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 formulæ, 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 element of illusion. To recognize this element is not to be oneself an illusionist, but on the contrary a keen observer. It is in the rôle 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[55] 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 needful if one is to profit by experience, a task that becomes increasingly difficult according as the experience involved is one’s own experience or that of one’s contemporaries 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 progressiveness, 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 even from his own experience, not to speak of the experience 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 expansion; and this expansion was accompanied, especially at Athens, by an increasing trend towards an equalitarian democracy.⁠[56] Like our own age, it was an age of “intellectuals” who were repudiating the traditional disciplines, largely in virtue of the opposition they had established between nature and convention. If negatively this cult of nature meant revolt against everything prescriptive and established, positively 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 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 political 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 civilization 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.⁠[57] 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 not only with reference to the citizens of other city-states, but with reference to one another. There followed 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.⁠[58] 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 convince himself of the startling relevancy to existing conditions of Aristotle’s “Politics” in particular, especially now that we have begun in this country to slip our constitutional moorings and to drift towards a direct or unlimited democracy. There are passages that are as modern as the morning newspaper, and at least a hundred times more sensible. Rome later ran through a somewhat similar cycle: a constitutional republic resting ultimately on religious control gradually gave way with the weakening of this control to an equalitarian democracy which in turn passed over with the usual incidents of class-war into a decadent imperialism. The imperialistic 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 philosophy of this time, that of Mei-ti,⁠[59] 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 unspeakable, 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.

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, especially in view of the progress that physical science is constantly 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 frequently 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 powerful states of the cultural group I have just defined are not only imperialistic in their attitude towards one another, 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 democratically ruled are very different in this matter from the rest. As early as 1790 Mirabeau warned the French enthusiasts that “free peoples are more eager for war, and democracies more the slaves of their passions than the most absolute autocracies.” This is true in the obvious political sense not only in Europe, but in other parts of the world. Republican France, for example, has been reaching out eagerly for an African and Asiatic empire. But there is a type of imperialistic expansion even more 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 necessary 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 European 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.”⁠[60] 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 England. This issue of oil might even under certain circumstances 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 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 another by the most recent and refined methods of scientific efficiency and at the same time inflict their imperialism and racial swagger on about nine hundred millions of Asiatics; especially as Asiatics have an opportunity of observing the imperialistic rivalries and almost incurable divisions of European powers, not only in Europe, 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 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 impoverishment of its upper classes, the psychic gap between Russia and western Europe is becoming more accentuated. The Bolshevist Revolution, which can be shown to derive 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 speculative 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. 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 Græco-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 relates 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 judgments (Securus judicat orbis terrarum). Now, strictly speaking, this maxim seems less favorable to the Catholic 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 insist, first of all, that the Asiatic experience that led to the rise of Christianity is only part of the total experience 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 communication, 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 inadequate knowledge, but have also frequently worn theological blinders. A more serious form of narrowness to-day is that of the man who judges the total experience of the world, both East and West, from the point of view of a merely mechanical progress. An estimate of this total 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 predicament into which we have been led by our one-sided naturalism. It will aid us to a purely psychological definition of the vital factor that has plainly tended to drop out in the passage from mediæval to modern Europe. It will thus help us to recover and maintain this vital factor not merely in the form of “old prejudices and unreasoned habits”—the attempt to do so is, I said, the weakness of the method of Burke—but in a positive and critical form, a form, in other words, in closer accord with the modern spirit.