nlJt 
 
 MARLES FERfiUJ 
 
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 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THK 
 
 University of California. 
 
 oiK'r OF 
 
 Rec."U^e.eW U'<^. 
 
 ^Accession 91211 Cl(us ^^A^rv 
 
 ZI^HJX2 
 
 366 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 "A Great Book of a Great Epoch" 
 
 EDWIN MABKHAM says : ''It has style, insight, high seri- 
 ousness, spiritual passion. It is a great book of a great epochs 
 
 JULIAN HA WTHORNE says : ''He is a voice speaking unfa- 
 miliar things, with good emphasis and discretion.'''' 
 
 CHARLES H. PARKHUBST, D.D., says: "An interesting, 
 stimulating, startling, and, all in all, wonderful book.'''' 
 
 THE RELIGION 
 OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 A Memorandum of Modern Principles 
 
 Rev. Philip Moxom, D.D.: " It is great in that it clearly 
 belongs, as do few books in a century, to the prophetic literature 
 of the world." 
 
 Geoi'ge Hodges, D.D., Dean Episcopal Theol. School, Cam- 
 bridge, Mass. : "It differs from the current sociology as Carlyle's 
 French Revolution differs from the history of the schools. . . . 
 The reader never fails to be stimulated and strengthened." 
 
 Ella Wheeler "WUcox: "It is a clarion call to a higher civili- 
 zation." 
 
 Boston Transcript: "Probes as deep as Carlyle, and smitcfl 
 with the strength of Rnskin. . . ." 
 
 The Sun, Baltimore: "There is strength in this book— the 
 strength of a crusader who strikes boldly and goes straight to 
 the point." 
 
 T. T. Hunger, D.D.: "A brilliant, searching book, that 
 reminds one of ' Sartor Resartus.' " 
 
 12mo, Cloth. Price, $1.00. Post-paid 
 
 FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Pub'rs 
 
 30 Lafayette Place, New York 
 
THE 
 
 AFFIRMATIVE 
 
 INTELLECT 
 
 An Account of the Origin and 
 Mission of the American Spirit 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES FERGUSON 
 
 Author of *'The Religion of Democracy' 
 
 FUNK & WAGNAI,!^ COMPANY 
 
 NKW YORK AND I.ONDON 
 1901 
 
^_. 
 
 hj/ 
 
 ^3f% COPTWOHT, 19OI, BY 
 
 CHARIvES FERGUSON 
 
 Registered at Stationer's Hall, London, England 
 
 [Printed in the United States of America] 
 
 Published September, 1901 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAOK 
 
 Preface 5 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 The Secret of Evolutionary Progress . . 15 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Superstition of Arbitrary I^aw ... 30 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Two Opposite Sanctions of Social Order 42 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The Revolutionary Church-idea .... 61 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Positive Organization of Society . . 79 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 The Axioms of the Affirmative Intelledl . 113 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Working-out of the World Problem . 150 
 
 8 
 
 91211 
 
Digitized by the Internet Arciiive 
 
 in 2007 witii funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 littp://www.archive.org/details/affirmativeintelOOfergrich 
 
The shout of the battle dies away. We 
 are tired of the heroism of crowds. One 
 crowd is no better than another crowd, 
 and never was better. The only avail- 
 ing viSlories are those that 07ie man 
 wins against the mob. 
 Every man^s body is environed with a 
 sacred precin5l; and every fine, free life 
 is a challenge to all the world. To be 
 a friend to another is to defy him. And 
 it is death to surrender to a friend — 
 fataler than to any enemy. 
 The greatest man is the Man that is 
 nearest — and farthest away. My arm. 
 is around His neck, yet I have never 
 touched Him, and dare not. He has 
 broken bread with me familiarly, and I 
 have been filled with awe, as if I had 
 seen God, 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The real battles of history — those that have 
 issues — are those waged between the men of 
 affirmative and creative intellect on one side and 
 the men of negative and passive intellecft on 
 the other. The creative intelledl is that which""" 
 is dominated by the ideal — never for a moment 
 abandoning the heart's desire and the inner law 
 of humanity. The passive intellecft is that which 
 is cowed by the appearance of things and pros- 
 trated to an external law. On both sides there 
 are those called a priorists and those called a 
 posteriorists — on both sides men of letters, men 
 of science, and men of affairs. 
 
 On the side of the creative intelledl there are"^ 
 craftsmen, and there are men who spend their I 
 lives over microscopes and in laboratories, side | 
 by side with the makers of statues and sermons. I 
 And on the side of the negative intelledl may be '^ 
 found theologians who postpone to a book the I 
 7 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 authority of their own souls, listed in common 
 cause with biologists who would govern society 
 by the motions of badleria, and statesmen who 
 would buy an archipelago and slay a nation for 
 the sake of the sancflities of property law. 
 
 The "original sin" of the world is, as we 
 have been told, the rejedlion of the human ideal 
 and the going in search of a non-human law of 
 good and evil. The world's redemption is in the 
 Man who is utterly true to his humanity — in 
 whom it is discovered that in the depths of a man 
 are real freedom and creative power. So it may 
 be said of the poet, the artist, the man of science 
 — any one who lives and works in the strength 
 of the creative mind — he is begotten, not made; 
 he is not of the substance of the creation, but of 
 the Creator. 
 
 The history of the world is a struggle — on the 
 whole a successful struggle — of the creative intel- 
 ledl against the terror and the discouragement of 
 the external law. It is the progressive endeavor 
 of the human spirit to make itself at home in the 
 universe, and to fashion the stubborn things of 
 Nature according to the uses of the soul. 
 8 
 
Introduction 
 
 The central drama of history is Christianity, 
 which is in its broadest aspedl simply the attempt 
 to supersede the old world social order, governed 
 by an external authority and the prepossessions 
 of the passive intellect, by a new world-order 
 governed by an internal authority — the faith of 
 the affirmative spirit. 
 
 The meaning and use of the historic Church is 
 that it has served as a mighty causeway between 
 the old order and the new — between theocracy 
 and democracy. It belongs to both the old and 
 the new. For a thousand years it gestated the 
 soul of the West in the womb of the East. The 
 very nature of the Church, in its medieval 
 constitution, was contradidlion; it could not 
 otherwise have done its work. Every dog^a of 
 the Church was a proclamation of liberty framed 
 in the language of slaves. Every sacrament was 
 a pledge of equality, making its difficult appeal 
 in the acceptable symbols of privilege and caste. 
 
 The inner logic of the Church's great system 
 of administration was not the permanent separa- 
 tion of the sacred from the secular, but the win- 
 ning of a new polarity of social organization. 
 9 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 The social ideal of the modem world was bom 
 out of the bosom of the Church. Americanism 
 is the evolutionary produdt of historic Catholi- 
 cism; for the quintessence of the old Catholicism 
 was simply the attempt to estabHsh a great 
 social order, not by external authority and the 
 compromise of interests, as in the * ' kingdoms of 
 the world, ' ' but through the purification and the 
 concurrence of wills. 
 
 In the last analysis there are but these two 
 possible forms of social order — there are these 
 two opposite and contradicflory conceptions of 
 the sandlion of social law. The sanc5lion, the 
 force of the law, is either outside of mankind or 
 it is within. Either it is in the nature-of- things 
 and the arbitrary will of God, or else it is the 
 wiU of the people — the heart's desire of humanity. 
 
 The idea that the will of the people could be 
 the source of social law was born into the world 
 with great travail. It was for ages difficult, even 
 impossible, to conceive such an idea. The wills 
 of the people seemed so shallow and weak, or else 
 so irrational and contradictory. But Christianity 
 is the discovery of the infinite depth of the human 
 10 
 
Introduction 
 
 will. And so for nearly two thousand years it 
 has been possible to imagine that a multitude of 
 men — the controlling element of a population — 
 might be brought to desire and to will with steady 
 insistence things that are beautiful and j ust . The 
 Church of the Middle Ages stood as a provisional 
 plan of such a social system. In the midst of a 
 world-order based upon an opposite principle — 
 the principle of the external law — the Church 
 wrought into concrete forms and the solid struc- 
 ture of institutions the democratic ideal. It was 
 a marvelous achievement — this magnificent rough- 
 sketching of a new world in the oppugnant 
 materials of the old. 
 
 In the sixteenth century the idea of the social 
 law as proceeding from the sanified and consen- 
 taneous wills of the people was fairly born into 
 the secular world. The Church had poured its 
 vital store into the lap of the nations. It had 
 breathed out its very soul of liberty in the breath 
 of the modern spirit. And for four hundred 
 years democracy has wrestled for the spiritual 
 order — for the sovereignty of the human ideal — 
 in the open arena of the secular world. The 
 11 
 
aA/ 
 
 The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 issue has commonly found a statement in terms 
 of politics and the forms of government, but that 
 is superficial. The issue reaches to the intimacies 
 of life; it is revolutionary in the spheres of morals, 
 law, art, science, and economics. 
 
 Despite the political forms of democracy, more 
 or less espoused by every nation in Europe, the 
 trembling scale has nowhere in the world fairly 
 turned against the old regime save in one country 
 — the United States of America. In England 
 the scale balances in an unstable equilibrium, 
 but with a marked tendency toward readlion 
 and a return to the past. In every other country 
 of Europe the social center of gravity still rests 
 unmistakably in the old order. 
 
 Everywhere a state-supported Church stands 
 as the symbol of the unbroken sway of dogma — 
 the preponderance of the passive intellec5l, the 
 rule of a non-human and external law. America 
 stands alone for the Church-supported state — a 
 faith-supported commonwealth. We have openly 
 discredited here every semblance of external 
 authority, and have removed all the symbols of 
 dogma from the forum of our common life. 
 12 
 
Introduction 
 
 If there be only a God of Sinai and no God of 
 the Soul of Man, certainly we are in a way to 
 find it out with cost — for we have rested the 
 stupendous weight of a vast social system upon 
 the possibility that a controlling majority, or 
 minority, here will wish for what is fine and will 
 a law that is fair. 
 
 The law of America is not static, but vital. It 
 rests upon no tradition, no code, no perfedled 
 system; it undertakes to win and dominate the 
 world by the sheer kinetic reasonableness of the 
 creative intelledl. 
 
 America — standing alone among the nations in 
 the morning of the last cycle of two millenniums — 
 girds herself to the fulfilling of the ancient faith. 
 
 18 
 
The Affirmative Intelled: 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE SECRET OF EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS 
 
 I. Considering our modern faith in the unity 
 of the world, it would seem reasonable to suppose 
 that the secret of the success of nations is closely 
 related to that of the success of individuals, and, 
 in turn, it would seem that the answer to the 
 question, What is the greatness of great men ? 
 should contain the answer to a certain other ques- 
 tion which has staggered all the biologists up to 
 this time — the question, namely, of the motive 
 force of progress in organic evolution, What is it 
 that makes life go forward ? 
 
 The evolutionary experts have, to speak gen- 
 erally, established nothing but the broad proposi- 
 tion that all kinds of life, from the lowest to the 
 highest, are somehow related by heredity. It is 
 satisf adlorily shown that altho man may not have 
 sprung from the monkey, yet the two have, 
 15 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 somewhere in the beginnings of life, a common 
 ancestry. 
 
 At this jun<5lure the scientists have abandoned 
 us to our relations, without giving us any sug- 
 gestions for proving our own prestige. They 
 have discovered no principle of progress — no 
 justification of the claim for an upward and for- 
 ward tendency in evolution. For all that they 
 have shown us to the contrary, we are bound to 
 conceive of life as flowing in an accidental, inde- 
 terminate way, or swirling in meaningless cycles. 
 We ask. How can the stream rise higher than its 
 source ? how can the less produce the greater ? 
 And there is no answer. The men of science 
 have completely failed to show how it is that life 
 can mount and meliorate. They have found out 
 nothing of the energy and spring, the push and 
 go of evolution. 
 
 Darwin's natural-seledlion theory is now greatly 
 discredited by the experts, and as an explana- 
 tion of progress it was inadequate at best. I^a- 
 marck came near making a good guess, but his 
 followers have broken up into rival camps and 
 have not brought his suggestion to any effedlual 
 16 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 issue. There have been a good many other 
 speculators, but scarcely two of them have 
 agreed. 
 
 All that the evolutionists have told us, there- 
 fore, about the life-process is very interesting, 
 but it is not yet important. It does not teach us 
 anything about the way of success, and it pro- 
 poses no escape from the fearful round of human 
 failure — we can not use it for the solution of the 
 prac5lical problems of human life. 
 
 II. There is an honored Socratic maxim that 
 man himself is the measure of all things, and an 
 Aristotelian one that the real nature of a growing 
 thing is to be discovered only in its matured 
 charac5ler. 
 
 Following these intimations, let us, in a tenta- 
 tive way, set down the formula of a scientific 
 method which may afford us a key to the secret 
 of the motive force of evolution, and to a good 
 many other mysteries that remain to be explained. 
 Find the deepest thing in the most representative 
 person and you will have found the deepest thing 
 in the protozoort,. 
 
 17 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 It is time to give up trying to probe the nature 
 
 of a man by looking hard at an amceba. I^et us 
 
 reverse the scientific process, and attempt rather 
 
 to explain the lowest reaches of life by studying 
 
 the inmost and simplest principle of humanity. 
 
 For, try as he might, no man ever did succeed 
 
 \J in divesting himself of his own soul, no one ever 
 
 i did or can escape from the human point of view 
 
 \ or regard things from the thing-standpoint. Our 
 
 science has in this regard suffered a delusion. 
 
 III. Now the principle of success in represent- 
 ative persons is, we may venture to affirm, a 
 certain elemental faith or world-gripping self- 
 persistence. The most superb and human man 
 is the one that likes and roots himself in the 
 widest range of real things. To feel solidly at 
 home in the world of death, labor, and accidents, 
 to find one's self in the whole constitution of it, 
 to have the widest and deepest interests without 
 capitulation or the sacrifice of one's one nature — 
 that is to be representatively, redoubtably human. 
 
 All life — so far as we know or can know — 
 exists in and through a very real and insistent 
 18 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 relation to its environment. And to say that 
 this relation is the sine qua no7i of life is to say 
 what is true, but it misses the principal point ; 
 that point is that the internal law of the organ- 
 ism must dominate the law of the environment. 
 Certainly the living thing must keep up a cordial 
 correspondence with the world around it, but the 
 critical question remains, the question of Ufe or 
 death — to wit : Shall the organism assimilate the 
 world to itself, or shall it assimilate itself to the 
 world? In the one case there is growth and 
 strength, in the other decline and dissolution. 
 
 What appears thus to be true in the lower 
 regions of life we can feel and know to be true 
 in the region of humanity. A man gains morally 
 as he gains physically by assimilating the elements 
 of the external world in the way of his own con- 
 stitution. He must not, on pain of mental dis- 
 tradlion and moral decay, vacate his own ideal or 
 give up his own desire. His health and sanity 
 depend upon his wrestling confidently with the 
 world for the things that he really cares about. 
 
 Absolute excellence for a man would be the 
 facing of the innumerable diflScult choices of life 
 19 
 
A A 
 
 The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 — its contradidlions, restraints, defeats — without 
 once lapsing into self-pity or self-praise, and with- 
 out once meditating a sacrifice of his human nature 
 or questioning the validity and legitimacy of the 
 elemental passion of his heart. It is an approxi- 
 mation to this excellence that characfterizes the 
 first-rate men of history and the heroes of scrip- 
 ture and romance. Absolute excellence is inex- 
 tinguishable faith, and relative excellence is the 
 maintaining of the widest and deepest possible 
 relationships to the world with the fewest and 
 least considerable capitulations. 
 
 Now the point here is that this quintessential 
 faith — this confident embrace of the external 
 world — is the principle of advance and success in 
 all life from the mollusk to the son of man ; and 
 that, with due abatement of the intension of 
 words, it is true to say that organisms of the 
 very lowest order survive and prevail according 
 to their self -loyalty and venturesomeness of faith. 
 They make effedlual connedlion with their envi- 
 ronment when they have some degree of self- 
 persistence in spite of difficulty — some pluck and 
 potency of will, some inner energy of faith to 
 30 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 subdue the nature of the external world to that 
 of their own lives. 
 
 Progress is in the spontaneous adventure of 
 the living thing to assimilate to its own nature 
 new and unprecedented circumstances — to find 
 itself and make itself at home in a wider world. 
 The spring is not in the will of an arbitrary and 
 transcendent Providence, not in the force 
 cumstances, and not in fixed laws and resident 
 forces. It is a principle of self-origination. It 
 operates with an energy derived firom a sphere 
 superior to that of natural sequence and mechani- 
 cal causation. It is creative rather than crea- 
 turely, and even in its lowest expressions it may 
 be regarded as the embryonic representative of 
 the free and creative spirit of man. 
 
 So it becomes possible to say of all life in its 
 progressive and vidlorious aspects that it is begot- 
 ten, not made — that it is of the substance of the 
 Creator rather than of the creation. 
 
 To be sure, nobody knows, or can know by 
 
 black-board demonstration, that the foregoing is 
 
 the final truth of the matter ; but it affords an 
 
 hypothesis that has the advantage of explain- 
 
 31 
 
 -sidenF | j/v 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ing the facfts. And we must come to understand 
 that valid science is not so much charadlerized by 
 the conclusiveness of its proofs as by the pradlica- 
 bility of its assumptions. 
 
 IV. We are told that all organisms are related 
 by heredity; and what is heredity? What is it 
 but the night-side of life — the negative of which 
 life itself is the affirmative ? It is the principle 
 in biology that corresponds to the mechanical 
 principle of inertia. Its essence is that it does 
 nothing, works no changes. It is a fact, but it 
 is not a force. 
 
 On the other hand, change is the very defini- 
 tion of life. The distinguishing note of an 
 organism as marked off from the inorganic world 
 is that it has in its own body a law of perpetual 
 change. Heredity is the name given to the 
 limited and temporary persistence of the things 
 that life achieves. But life itself has always had 
 a career outside of and beyond its past achieve- 
 ments. Over the realm of nature there has 
 always brooded a realm of creative causes ; and 
 it is in the creative realm, and not in the realm 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 that is natural and created, that the progressive 
 career of evolution is running its course. E very- 
 living thing has some sort of access to an ever- 
 present store of original powers. 
 
 There is in a sapling tree a latency of enter- 
 prise, and real incalculable history in the wheel- 
 ing wing of a hawk. 
 
 The chance of making a^ark Jn_tlie_.world — | 
 for~a~Bat or a bee — depends not upon his circum- 
 stances or any decree of destiny, but upon his 
 trust in the inner and upper powers — his draft 
 upon the infinite. 
 
 Of course no bat and no bee ever did make 
 much of a mark in the world. The pathos of 
 the living universe is its inexhaustible stupidity 
 and cowardice. 
 
 The constant tendency of all living things has 
 been to settle back upon the precedents, and to 
 rely upon a failing heredity and a mere habit or 
 reflex adlion. The bathos and degeneration of 
 life, its bestial ugliness, its physical goiters and 
 contortions, are due to its faithless denial of its 
 own desire — its low subserviency to circum- 
 stance. 
 
 28 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 V. The central interest of the world-process 
 is the economy of this spontaneity of life, and the 
 quickening and deepening of it into the serenity 
 and gaiety of heart of high-spirited men. In the 
 beginning the force of circumstances is nearly 
 everything, and the spontaneity of life is nothing 
 or next to nothing. But when the consummation 
 is reached in a free and enterprising humanity 
 the conditions are reversed — life becomes nearly 
 everything, and circumstances nothing or next to 
 nothing. Evolution is revolutionary. It moves 
 forward by coups de main and conquest. It is 
 the progressive supersession of the rule of seem- 
 ingly fixed and static laws by the rule of an 
 incalculable freedom. Mechanical force — the 
 tyranny of the irrational elements of~hatUfe — 
 gives way to vital force, the energy of creative 
 life. In the lower reaches of the process, as 
 compared with the higher, heredity is relatively 
 strong. It is likely enough that characfteristics 
 acquired in the lifetime of the individual are, in 
 the lower orders, transmitted by heredity, but in 
 higher life this seems generally not to be the 
 case. Heredity is seen to be a failing thing, and 
 24 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 the privileges that depend upon it are, with the 
 advancement of the world, ever shorter and 
 shorter lived. The competencies that avail in 
 the highest circles can not in any considerable 
 measure be passed on from generation to genera- 
 tion, but must be won out of the infinite by each 
 individual for himself. In all that is great and 
 prevailing an organism is born not of the flesh. 
 
 VI. The teleology of the life-process — its 
 general aim and purport — is thus apparent 
 enough. One can not contemplate the march of 
 life from its status of creaturehood almost utterly 
 subjedl to the law of its environment, to the 
 status of free creatorship, pressing upon the 
 breast of nature the image of a supra-natural 
 ideal — without feeling that he is witnessing the 
 unfoldment of a spiritual drama. 
 
 It is as if the desire of God had been from the 
 beginning that he might escape from his abso- 
 luteness. He has been resolute to limit and share 
 his liberty. It would seem that he has cared 
 above everything that he should not be all in all, 
 but that life might come into the world that 
 25 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 should look him tmshrinkingly in the face and 
 demand of him all that is reasonable and good. 
 
 It is unthinkable that God should create a free 
 soul ; the soul must be begotten and bom ; it can 
 not be made. Neither can freedom be given as a 
 gratuity — it can not exist in virtue of any charter 
 or franchise. And the liberty of a reasonable 
 man must be as deep as the liberty of God — a 
 kind of participation in the creative responsibil- 
 ity — or else it is a fantastical illusion. "' 
 
 iDoubtless God could have gotten himself a 
 man in a moment of time and with little trouble 
 if it had been merely a matter of executing his 
 own laws and diredling his own forces. 
 
 It took time and trouble — immeasurable eons 
 of time and trouble — because he had to wait for 
 the little living thing to move of its own motion 
 to the exploitation of the universe. And he 
 had to suffer meanwhile all the caricatures and 
 contradidlions of life that come of the wayward- 
 ness and fatuity of the stumbling, groping, in- 
 choate will. The difficulty of God in bringing a 
 man to birth has been the stubborn, primordial 
 inertia of all living things — a kind of sag and 
 26 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 gravitation back to mere mechanism, passivity, 
 and poor creaturehood, a besotment of toryism 
 and orthodoxy that reaches to the very grubs — 
 always infidel at heart, and refusing to risk their 
 lives in the current of the passing day. 
 
 One must not venture, then, to say that God 
 has ever quenched the heart's desire, the quick- 
 ening will, of any living thing. On the contrary, 
 it would seem that he has nursed and fanned 
 that little flame with stupendous patience for a 
 billion years, as if it were his inmost wish that 
 life should want something of him and make 
 importunate demands. 
 
 So the legitimate lord of the world is the 
 Heart's Desire of Humanity. The world is not 
 to be governed by rapt consideration of what 
 the soul ought to want, but by buoyant and ven- 
 turesome struggle for the things that it really 
 does want in the red heart and center of it. 
 
 VII. The novum organum here proposed — to 
 wit, the scientific method which undertakes to 
 find in the nature of man its hypotheses for the 
 interpretation of the nature of the non-human 
 
 27 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 world — is, after all, very old. The simple truth 
 is that in the last accounting no other method is 
 possible. 
 
 It is found upon examination of history that 
 scientific theories of the universe are invariably 
 corresponsive with prevailing ethical theories of 
 the nature of man. The mind can never escape 
 from its own shadow — and light — but, spite of 
 all premeditation, it always has written and 
 ddtibtless always will write the theories of science 
 in the charadlers of conscience. There must be 
 virile ethics before there can be sound physics. 
 Our biologists have cut the heart out of organ- 
 isms, and treated life as if it Were dough, because 
 they are still under the spell of the soul-contem- 
 ning theological habit. They owe their fespedlful 
 acknowledgments to the clergy. If they were not 
 so firmly persuaded that the right moral rule of 
 human life is to be found in an external law, 
 they would not have gone to their biological 
 investigations with so stubbornly fixed a prepos 
 
 i session that the rule and explanation of all life 
 
 J ...... 
 
 is to be looked, for in its environment. A mental 
 habit does not necessarily change with a change 
 
The Secret of Progress 
 
 of opinions. The fathers worship an infallible 
 book, and the children the invincible nature-of- 
 things ; but it is all one and the same. Both 
 refuse to see that life itself is original and an 
 authority. 
 
 Modern scientific theory is morally patholog- 
 ical ; it is low-spirited. It breathes the atmosphere 
 of the failure and discouragement of the French 
 Revolution. It could not possibly have grown 
 up within the tonic range of Goethe and Diderot, 
 or within sound of the song of Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and Shelley. 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THK SUPERSTITION OF ARBITRARY I,AW 
 
 I. If one would go to the root of the law of 
 the social constitution, one must examine the 
 idea of natural law; for human society has never 
 defied jthe natural universe, but, on the contrary, 
 has always shaped its ordinances in conformity 
 with what it has supposed to be the fadl of 
 nature. Nature has ever been big and over- 
 whelming, and the social state has from the 
 beginning lain little in the hollow of her hand. 
 
 II. Over against Nature stands the Man, and 
 deep in his heart is the passion for liberty. For the 
 passion for liberty is only another name for life 
 itself. lyiberty is a word of much sophistication, 
 but it means, when it means anything, oppor- 
 tunity to live one's own life in one's own way. 
 
 Now, as intelligence brightens into intelledl it 
 would seem that a moment arrives when con- 
 
Arbitrary Law 
 
 sciousness separates itself from the mere engross- 
 ment of passing experience, and refledlion be- 
 comes possible. The man looks before and after, 
 considers his disappointment of yesterday, his 
 fear of to-morrow. He thinks, and the thought 
 rises in his heart : * ' This nature-of-things which 
 is so overwhelming in power, is it not also over- 
 bearing in disposition? Can I trust it farther 
 and continue on my way, or would it not be safer 
 to postpone my living for a while and sit down 
 here to study out the law?" 
 
 The temptation is to cut the intellecfl loose 
 from the heart of life and to live without risks. 
 The man longs for a sure rule, an unquestionable 
 definition of good and evil. 
 
 And so, in fine, he rejedts what is interesting 
 for what is authoritative. He sets out to follow 
 after the things that he does not care for and to 
 discover a truth that is more true than life itself. 
 And after many ages and across world-tyrannies 
 and the convulsions of nations he returns with a 
 harvest of pedantries and prurient lusts. 
 
 The original sin of the world is not contempt 
 for arbitrary laws, but respe(5l for them. It is 
 31 
 
 k 
 
 4^ 
 
«WAfl 
 
 
 The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 the refusal to believe that nature is plastic to the 
 ideal. It is the abje<5l worship of the laws of 
 creation, and the subjedlion of the creative soul 
 to the authority of Things. 
 
 The process of spiritual redemption is a tonic- 
 ing of the will with faith until it shall dare 
 believe in its own desire, and be reasstured of the 
 authenticity of the ideal. The soul is taught to 
 turn away from the bullying idols, to reject the 
 evident gods that order us around, and to serve 
 only the unseen God who backs us up. 
 
 This is not disdain of Nature, but the opposite 
 of that. It is the embrace of Nature — man- 
 fashion — ^with an imperious tenderness that falls 
 in love with all her ways, but will not suffer her 
 to didlate. 
 
 III. Since the beginning the human mind has 
 labored under the delusion that there exists, deep- 
 3 bedded in the nature of things, a reverend and 
 ^ f'K I authoritative law that stands in its own right and 
 ' ' without any relation to human nature. It has 
 been supposed that this law is the absolute, capi- 
 tal truth; that it is capable of being elicited in 
 
Arbitrary Law 
 
 one way or another — by gratuitous deliverances 
 from Sinai, by vigils and prayers, by the diligent 
 exercise of microscopes and specflroscopes; and 
 that, once got, it can be done up in solid and im- 
 perishable propositions with which to rule the 
 world — in chastened and martyred disregard of 
 what a man cares for. 
 
 It seems that this is the chief of superstitions — 
 the great apostacy. It is the reje(5lion of that 
 principle of faith, that confident embrace of 
 Nature, which is the elan and impetus of whole 
 sane life. The soul is split in two, a schism cuts 
 across it, and it is ready for corruption. 
 
 In the first instance men are drawn to attempt 
 this schism in the endeavor to escape from the 
 mere assaults of Nature; but in the social order 
 security from Nature gets itself refined into the 
 forms of privilege. For social privilege has its 
 origin in the discrediting of the human spirit and 
 the setting up of an arbitrary and external law. 
 
 This is the great temptation of the stronger 
 men of a society. For if they can but bring 
 themselves to contemn the sane indicative passion 
 of their own hearts, they can get all the crowd to 
 
 Wi 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 do the same ; and after that they can discover 
 and define the righteous law in the terms that 
 suit themselves. 
 
 Of course it is not ordinarily a matter of craft 
 or imposture ; insincerity could never convince 
 the crowd for long. It is that immedicable sin 
 of Pharisaism which, from a sincere faithlessness 
 of heart, has always despised this naive soul of 
 the people and rebuked the blasphemy of the Son 
 of Man. 
 
 IV. In its normal exercise intelledt is as insep- 
 arable from the elemental passion of life as the 
 light from the heat of a flame. The disinterested 
 pursuit of truth is at best an unconscious affedta- 
 tion, the blindness of the pharisee. A man can 
 not go in knowledge further than the reach of 
 his real interest and concern. And it is not pos- 
 sible to discover in nature any such thing as a 
 non-human law — a law unrelated to human feel- 
 ing. If such a thing existed we could not truly 
 discover it, but could only caricature it into some 
 kind of forced congruity with our soul-and-sense- 
 penetrated human knowledge. This would be 
 34 
 
Arbitrary Law 
 
 discouraging if human life in its nature went less 
 deep than the roots of chemistry and physics. 
 But if life is as real as things, the impossibility 
 of escaping from the human point of view is 
 cheerful enough, and does not preclude the prac- 
 tical certainties of science. 
 
 The serene and confident intellecft ranging 
 with unterrified eyes the vast realms of the uni- 
 verse, sees in it all simply the expansion of a 
 congenial and familiar dwelling-place. For eons 
 life has succeeded in making itself at home here 
 in a narrow way; why now should it wince at 
 wider horizons? Standing up before the uni- 
 verse, the living man sees in it just a great sane 
 living body — corresponsive throughout with his 
 own body — the microcosm exacflly balancing the 
 cosmos. 
 
 The inmost nature of Nature is seen to be 
 human nature. And the knowledge of it — 
 natural science — is like knowing a man — a 
 genial, resistant, cosmic- tempered man. 
 
 It is possible to know a great many things 
 about a man without being acquainted with him, 
 and it is possible to be a very patient investigator 
 85 
 
 |!A 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 of Nature without acquiring any considerable 
 amount of science. Science may make gains 
 through patient investigations, but primarily it 
 is not itself an investigation but an intimacy and 
 a correlation. Sheer blank staring at things is 
 not conducive to science. One can not make an 
 inch of progress without assumptions — working 
 hypotheses; and the hypotheses will not work 
 unless they are true. So you can learn nothing 
 about Nature unless you know her through and 
 through already — just as you can not understand 
 a word that a man says in the sense in which he 
 says it, unless you know the heart of him before 
 he begins to speak. 
 
 The man that you love and trust you feel to 
 be of inexhaustible resource and full of surprises. 
 You can not tell for a certainty what he will do; 
 you can only be sure that he will not put you to 
 moral or intelle<5tual confusion, that his adlions 
 will be reasonable and humane. So Nature is 
 unfathomable, surprising, indefinable. Its circle 
 can not be squared. Its fluent life can not be 
 caught into the forms of an abstract logic or com- 
 pa<5ted into inerrant propositions. 
 86 
 
Arbitrary Law 
 
 The so-called laws of Nature are discovered to 
 be not constitutional but only by-laws, relatively 
 and provisionally applicable — good for frying 
 fish and running railroad trains only so long as 
 they are interpreted by cunning craftsmen with 
 a measure of human genius for the equitable 
 corredlion of the abstradl law. 
 
 Pure science — science for its own sake — is not 
 science at all. Nature mocks and eludes the 
 passive intellecfl — the eunuchry of the mind. 
 She aches to be compassed by a man — to be 
 challenged from a lover's heart demanding 
 answers that are intelligible to a man's soul — 
 reasons that are human reasons. 
 
 V. An intelle(5l without a will is cut at the 
 roots and can never flower into science. For the 
 intelledt grows out of the will, and in its sanity 
 and strength is constantly nourished by desire. 
 The intelle(5t is born in the wrestle with the 
 elements of nature for the things that seem good 
 to have. The inmost web and texture of it 
 is will and choice — the setting of things in their 
 relative places with reference to the appetency 
 87 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 of life. The first flicker of intelledl is to be dis- 
 covered in the earliest worm of the dust that 
 was shocked out of oblivion by the external 
 necessities of a divided way and roused to a 
 choosing. 
 
 To be the primary worm and to be appealed to 
 by the close feel of a forage that is good, and by 
 the smell or sound or sight of one that is better 
 but harder to crawl to, and then to make the 
 great refusal, forsaking the line of least resistance 
 and risking the way of the laborious ideal — that 
 is to be the first of scientists and the founder of 
 civilization. It is the beginning of the intelledl. 
 Ever since that first adventure of faith, the grow- 
 ing power of the intelledl has been a waxing 
 energy of choosing — a clarifying of desire. 
 
 It deepens and strengthens by dint of choices 
 that are costly and ever costlier, and it flames up 
 into its most vivid consciousness when the will 
 goes forth in contempt of all the senses to seize 
 upon the things that are eternal — ^but always its 
 life and vigor is desire. 
 
 The exfoliation and fulfilment of one's own 
 nature through the confident embrace of the 
 
Arbitrary Law 
 
 world-nature and the wrestle with its elements 
 to get the things one cares for — that is the only 
 sound method of science. '«^*-««--~-«««-«««^- 
 
 VI. Modern science — in its sane moods — pro- 
 ceeds upon an immense assumption of faith — to 
 wit, that Nature is unitary, that it is one vast, 
 whole and organic body, that it is humanly 
 reasonable clear through and viable to intelledl. 
 This assumption is made in the face of the uni- 
 versal experience of the diversity and multi- 
 fariousness of nature — the infinite variability of 
 phenomena. It is a surpassing ac5l of faith. 
 
 And the fruitfulness of modern science, its 
 pradlical availability for the uses of civilization, 
 is accurately proportionate to its humanism — its 
 adherence to the human point of view and free- 
 dom from abstraction. 
 
 It accomplishes most in the regions where it 
 is least dogmatic. Its Synthetic Philosophy is a 
 monument of futility, but its management of the 
 confessed mystery of lightning is the poem of 
 the age. 
 
 VII. It is, then, the revelation of the Modern 
 
 39 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 Spirit that truth for a man is to be had, not in 
 the form of abstradl propositions, but only in 
 experience. The absolute is discovered to be not 
 in any stated law or formula, but in the living, 
 protean soul — so that men, if they would keep 
 the garden and get justice done upon the earth, 
 must break the hypnotic spell of abstradl prin- 
 ciples and live out riskily into the changeful 
 world. The Will must bridle and bestride the 
 Intellect if it would ride to its heart's desire. 
 
 This subjecflion of the will to the intelledl is 
 the psychology of the modern spirit and the clue 
 to what is charadleristic in modern history. It 
 marks the transition of the consciousness of man- 
 kind from the status of a creature living by an 
 external law, and wistfully longing for knowledge 
 as to what kind of a being it ought to be, to the 
 status of a creatorship that is law-making and 
 self-governing. 
 
 The soul sets out to impose itself upon the 
 universe with confidence that, in spite of appear- 
 ances, it is possible to do so; that the constitution 
 of the universe is not alien to the soul; and that 
 the natural laws exist not to intimidate the spirit 
 40 
 
Arbitrary Law 
 
 of a man but only to harden the bones and stiffen 
 the thews of his liberty. 
 
 The intellect ceases to be the master of the 
 will and becomes its servant. The world aban- 
 dons the attempt to think out a way to right liv- ' {7 
 ing, and determines to live and learn. 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TWO OPPOSITE SANCTIONS OF SOCIAI. ORDER 
 
 I. According to the depth of a man's sanity is 
 the strength of his passion for order. A sane 
 man is one that spends his working days in put- 
 ting things in order and his holidays in rejoicing 
 that it is possible to do so; while utter misery 
 and madness is simply the persuasion that the 
 world is hopelessly out of joint, and that the 
 grounds of the soul have shifted into chaos. In- 
 sanity and folly are descriptions of a defedlive 
 sense of order or a feeble passion for it. 
 
 We rejoice in relations and proportions, or else 
 we do not rejoice at all; and the difference 
 between a reasonable person and a fool is little 
 else than that the former generally puts the first 
 thing first, while a fool puts the second or third 
 there. So civilization is the expression in man- 
 ners and institutions of the passion for order. It 
 is the fulfilment of the intellect, the delight in 
 law. 
 
 42 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 Civilization is not an exadl science; it is a 
 miracle of fine art. And as fine art is the put- 
 ting into materials of more than mere materials 
 can possibly contain, so the work of civilization 
 is to accomplish the marvel of expressing the in- 
 finite spirit of liberty in the definite forms of law. 
 
 II. The foundations of the social law go down 
 to unfathomable depths. The infinite element is 
 due to the fadl that a man's natural strength and 
 wisdom are disproportionate to his interest in the 
 world. There is a large overplus of interest that, 
 in the nature of things, can not get itself ade- 
 quately expressed in terms of law, but must 
 always press in upon the law, shaping its ordi- 
 nances in tentative conformity to an insatiable 
 ideal. 
 
 This element of infinity might conceivably be 
 eliminated from the social constitution by rem- 
 edying in either of two ways the disproportion 
 between mortal strength and human interest. 
 
 The constitution could be reduced to measur- 
 able proportions, and its foundations, from the 
 bottom up, would stand in plain sight, if, on the 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 one hand, the people could be endued with prac- 
 tical omniscience and physical immortality, or if, 
 on the other, they could be brought to take a 
 sufl&ciently weak and shallow interest in real life. 
 
 The former method of effedling an equation 
 does not lie, it appears, within the scope of our 
 possibilities. But the latter method has, in the 
 history of the world, been tried again and again, 
 and always with considerable success. The 
 secret of success in tyranny is the shallowing of 
 the people's interest in this real world, either by 
 diverting their hopes to another or by dulling 
 their sensibilities and depressing their self- 
 respedl. And the society which is most tyran- 
 nical, and so most superstitious and sordid, is 
 the very one in which the social strudlure is most 
 measurable and definite, most amenable to the 
 methods of what goes by the name of pure in- 
 duc5live science. 
 
 In the Chinese Empire an effort has been made 
 on a grand scale and through a disciplinary regi- 
 men of ages to eliminate the infinite from history 
 by squaring the soul to a mathematical definition 
 of prudence and propriety. And China still 
 U 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 offers the choicest extant laboratory for our 
 savants of the newly invented science of soci- 
 ology. But they must be quick with their 
 statistical machines, for there are signs that 
 that Infinite which for so long has beat to wind- 
 ward in the offing, biding its time, is now about 
 to enter full-sail into Chinese history. 
 
 III. Now the infinite and incalculable element 
 underlying the social constitution is the subje<5l- 
 matter of religion. Religion is, in its nature, 
 a taking account of the infinite with reference 
 to its resources for furthering or thwarting the 
 heart's desire. It is the inevitable attempt of the 
 human spirit to form a working estimate of the 
 characfler of that all-encompassing Unknown 
 Quantity in life which is always dealing with us 
 and disposing of our affairs, whether we will or 
 not. Religion begins at the point where the 
 things that men really care about outgo their 
 mortal reach and understanding. It is therefore 
 universal, so far as human ideals are universal. 
 Society, of whatever sort, presupposes ideal 
 interests, and therefore presupposes religion — 
 45 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 presupposes in the people an interested estimate 
 of the characfler and disposition of the Unknown 
 Quantity. And society can not have a unitary 
 and coherent constitution — ^must be merely in- 
 choate and nebulous, or else dissolving and 
 anarchic — unless a controlling element of the 
 people rest in a practically concurrent estimate 
 of the Unknown. The existence of a social state 
 requires not merely religiousness but a definite 
 religion. 
 
 There may, indeed, be many different cults, a 
 variety of forms of worship; that is not a material 
 matter ; and there may be many theologies — 
 philosophies wrought in the cold, dispassionate 
 realm of the abstradl intelledl, creeds written in 
 the mere memory and custom of men, and passed 
 down along the dwindling lines of tradition — 
 these things are of slight and measurable import- 
 ance. 
 
 But the religion of the people, the a(5lual and 
 interested estimate of the charac5ler of that incal- 
 culable Soul and Body of the Universe in which 
 our little fabric of social order is embosomed as a 
 ship in the sea — this religion is the force and 
 46 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 sinew of civil law; and when it suffers definitive 
 schism, social order becomes an impossibility. 
 
 IV. There is a sense in which it is true to say- 
 that society always has been and always must 
 be ruled by force. For human life is an embodi- 
 ment of ideal things in material forms, the effec- 
 tuation of ideas in the dynamics of nature. And 
 the most humane and millennial society can not be 
 conceived of as expressing its ideals in abstrac- 
 tion from economic needs, or maintaining its 
 organization otherwise than through the control 
 of natural forces. 
 
 In another and more important sense, however, 
 society never has been, and never can be, ruled 
 by force, since, as has been pointed out, the social 
 constitution is always grounded upon religion. 
 A mob, a horde, there may be, living from 
 day to day by the sheer rule of the strongest. 
 But the idea of social law can not arise until a 
 controlling element of the people are convinced 
 of a common religion — agreed upon a common 
 way of access to that overmastering Energy of 
 the Universe upon which society must continu- 
 47 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ally draw for the enforcement of its law. The 
 savage warriors of a primeval commonwealth may 
 raise their most muscular bully upon his shield 
 and proclaim him king, but he rules not by force 
 of his muscles — any two or three of his liegemen 
 might meet him and undo him — but as the fit 
 representative of those transcendent brutalities of 
 nature which are the objedl of the common wor- 
 ship at a certain stage of human development. 
 
 Now, in a third and final sense, a sense most 
 significant of all — and this is the particular point 
 of this chapter — the truth is that society passes 
 in the long course of history from the rule of 
 natural forces to the rule of the human ideal. 
 
 V. In the earlier stages of its career society is 
 governed by economic and defensive necessity; 
 in the latter stages, through a process which is 
 both evolutionary and revolutionary, it accom- 
 plishes its enfranchisement in such a heartening 
 of the people as enables them to compass the 
 natural laws and convert them to ideal and human 
 uses. 
 
 The soul of tyranny is not the egotism and 
 48 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 oppression of the ruling class. That is only an 
 incident. The life of social injustice is the faith- 
 lessness of the whole people. It is the common 
 thraldom to the conception of a law of necessity, 
 a fatality inherent in the nature of things — 
 which is regarded as stronger than the soul of 
 humanity with all the forces that humanity can 
 possibly bring to bear. 
 
 The apparent arbitrariness of Nature — giving 
 to men and withholding from them health, 
 strength, beauty — is what gives countenance and 
 confidence to the sentiments of hereditary privi- 
 lege and legitimism. It is this seeming arbitra- 
 riness, therefore, that grounds the aristocratic 
 regime. For the principle of aristocracy is the 
 idea of natural or divine eledlion, the idea that 
 some men's lives are worth more and are more 
 deserving than other men's. But this is not a 
 class idea, tho it seems on the surface to inure to 
 the benefit of a class. And the conception that 
 underlies it, the conception of the rightful and 
 inevitable domination of the external law of the 
 universe over the internal law of humanity, a 
 conception which to a great extent still engrosses 
 49 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 the common mind, is not and never was a class 
 feeling. And they can never come at the heart 
 of the social problem who approach it with class 
 prejudice or in the prepossession of special in- 
 terests. 
 
 The ruling classes have from of old ruled 
 because of their representativeness. Social 
 classes provide themselves from time to time 
 with an assortment of class opinions, but deep 
 beneath the surface of opinion the course of so- 
 ciety is direcSled by the genetic ideas of its 
 strongest spirits, and these ideas, preached or 
 unpreached, pass out to the boundaries of the 
 community by an irresistible contagion. 
 C' It would seem that successful governments 
 always have been and always will be admin- 
 istered by minorities. But it is equally apparent 
 that they always have been and always must 
 be supported by majorities. 
 
 The crux of the social problem, the issue 
 between the old regime and the new, is a ques- 
 tion of the religious convidlion of the common 
 human mind as it faces the stupendous mystery 
 of the universe. 
 
 60 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 So long as the people regard the transcendent 
 Force or Spirit of the Cosmos as a power non- 
 human and alien to humanity, so long society, 
 under whatever political form, will continue to 
 support a privileged class, and will continue, in 
 spite of ever}^ protest of social sentiment, to be 
 ruled by a principle of economic and defensive 
 necessity. On the other hand, if the common 
 mind of men can be brought to regard the great 
 Cosmic Power as essentially human, it will be 
 possible to frame and execute a social law that 
 shall consider the liberties of persons above the 
 sanctity of property or the grandeur of the 
 state, and that will give pradlical expression to 
 the human ideal. 
 
 VI. It is the fatalism of the people that gives 
 san(5tion and strength to arbitrary and unequal 
 codes of law. From the beginning the heart of 
 the people has quailed not so much under the 
 lash of the masters of society as beneath the in- 
 cubus of that terrific and unintelligible law, 
 natural or divine, of which the masters seemed 
 to be the favored and authentic adminis- 
 51 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 trators. The paramountcy of status and the 
 rights of property over free contradt and the 
 rights of persons — the thraldom of economic 
 privilege — is a bitter fruit that has grown from 
 that radical infidelity of the heart wherein men 
 have rejedled the fair Bden of their own ideal 
 and cowered in the idolatry of an external rule 
 of good and evil. 
 
 The gravamen of privilege is not inequality of 
 material possessions. The longing for an equal- 
 ity of goods is the platitude of mechanical minds 
 or the Utopian dream of envy. The mastery of 
 materials and the appropriation of the good of 
 things is the prerogative of an intense and afflu- 
 ent life. And the statutes can never run for long 
 against wisdom and capacity, tho indeed it is to 
 be noted that wealth does not consist in the 
 owning of things, but in the appreciation of 
 them. 
 
 The gist of the social crime of privilege is the 
 legal emphasizing of personal inequality, the in- 
 stitutionalizing of the fatalistic dodlrine of nat- 
 ural or divine eledlion. The abolition of privilege 
 means, therefore, not the equalizing of fortunes, 
 52 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 but the reconceiving of the whole fabric of the 
 law in a new spirit, so that, whereas in the past 
 its chief emphasis has been laid upon the safe- 
 guarding of exceptional deserts, it shall hence- 
 forth concern itself solely with the guaranteeing 
 of a common liberty, the giving to every man the 
 utmost chance. 
 
 VII. The real interest of democracy, in its 
 negation of the principle of deserts, is to exalt and 
 emancipate the human spirit. 
 
 It is as much concerned for those that have 
 been regarded as the most deserving as for those 
 that have been supposed to be the least so. Its 
 program runs in the interest of the upper as well 
 as the lower classes. For the operation of the 
 principle of deserts degrades all alike in the sub- 
 jedlion of the human spirit to an arbitrary and 
 unhuman law. It assumes to measure men by 
 a mete-yard of things and circumstances, and to 
 pay the soul in preferments. Its constant appeal 
 is to the footman's standard; it overwhelms the 
 will with clothes and furniture. 
 
 The beauty, the art of the old regime is pam- 
 53 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 pered and lie<5lic, a feeble and ineflfedlual protest 
 against the besetting fatalism of society. For 
 beneath the gilt and purple of the old order is the 
 heart of the mob, the adulation of brute forces, 
 and the terror of irrational necessity. 
 
 VIII. Social law is at last simply the obje(5lifi- 
 cation of the average intelledl. 
 
 The xUtellecft is often conceived of, in the fancy 
 of psychologists, as a colorless medium, the pure 
 white light in which a man stands face to face 
 with the universe. But there is no such thing as 
 an acromatic intelledl. The essense of intelledl 
 is the principle of order, and the intelledl must be 
 penetrated through and through either by the 
 order of the interior life of the man or else by 
 that of the external universe. 
 
 All human ac5livity may be summed up as con- 
 sisting in the attempt to bring the external order 
 of the universe to a harmony with the interior 
 order of a man's life — his sincere conception of 
 what is desirable. The gist of all thinking and 
 working is the endeavor to ease the strain of the 
 disparity between the desire of the heart and 
 54 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 the fadls of the world. And since in all sound 
 thinking and working both terms of the contra- 
 didlion are to be accepted as indisputably real, it 
 follows that the contradidlion can be resolved only 
 by a kind of subjedlion of one of the terms to the 
 other. 
 
 From this point of view the description of the 
 old, undemocratic regime is that therein the pre- 
 vaiUng tendency is to ease the strain of the con- 
 tradidlion by discrediting the human will, and 
 subjedling the internal order to the external, 
 while in democratic society the opposite is the 
 case. 
 
 IX. The unblurred consciousness of the reality 
 of this fundamental contradi(5lion of life is the 
 indispensable condition of social stir and progress. 
 Without it society lapses into stagnation. It is 
 better, more conducive to the ultimate triumph 
 of the principle of democracy, that the prophets 
 of the people should despise human nature and 
 the ideal order that it contains, than that they 
 should deny the reality of the contradicflion or 
 hold out hopes of resolving it without a struggle. 
 55 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 It is more democratic, more bracing to the self- 
 respedt of the people, that they should strive to 
 pluck their own hearts out and fling them upon 
 the altars of Moloch than that they should swoon 
 away into a denial either of the reality of nature 
 or of their own sincere desire. The popular 
 dodlrine called Christian Science undoubtedly has 
 at the heart of it an old and familiar truth, but 
 its affedled disregard of the material world is one 
 of the morbid signs of the times. It is the fitful 
 recoil of a sick society from an opposite infatua- 
 tion — that obsesssion of machinery which for a 
 century has overwhelmed the will and enfeebled 
 the feeling of personal existence. But social 
 decadence follows upon every kind of denial of 
 the reality of the historic struggle. The excesses 
 of spiritualism are, in their pra(5lical effedls, 
 scarcely to be distinguished from those of mate- 
 rialism, since both alike fail to bring the affirm- 
 ative ideal to bear upon the adlual conditions of 
 life. The controversies between the pure spirit- 
 ualists and the pure materialists — the profession- 
 ally religious and the professionally irreligious, 
 the blind partisans of the soul and those of the 
 56 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 stomach — are sham battles. They have no con- 
 siderable consequences, no real issues, because 
 both parties are convinced at heart of the unreality 
 of the task of life and the futility of human 
 endeavor. Both alike dishearten faith and evis- 
 cerate its meaning — for the greatness of that 
 word is in its suggestions of resistance and 
 antagonism, its implication of the need of patience 
 and labor. 
 
 The real battles of history are those that are 
 fought between the aristocrats and the democrats 
 — between those that try to give every man his 
 deserts in due reward or punishment, and those 
 that strive to give every man the utmost chance. 
 For these are battles in which both parties realize 
 that life is a stridl and perilous trial- time, and 
 that it is worth while to try — the one endeavor- 
 ing to bring human nature into subjec$lion to 
 the nature of things; the other striving with equal 
 resolution to subjedl the nature of things to the 
 human ideal. 
 
 X. The persuasion of the superior authority 
 of the external law is the explanation of the 
 57 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 dominance in undemocratic society of the abstradl 
 thinker over the worker. If the law that ought 
 to prevail in society is conceived of as residing 
 outside of humanity, it is inevitable that society 
 should be ruled by those that gain a reputation 
 as philosophers and seers. But if the legitimate 
 authority is thought of as residing in humanity 
 itself, then the commanding social stations must 
 be given to such as show a pradlical efficiency in 
 the subjedlion of natm-e — those that succeed best 
 in making men at home in the world. 
 
 This is the idea that lies buried under a wilder- 
 ness of cant in the praise and patronage of 
 workingmen and the talk of the dignity of labor. 
 Certainly there is no dignity, only indignity and 
 shame, in relucSlant and necessitous toil; but 
 throughout the world to-day there is a dawning 
 perception that the effedlive worker, in whatever 
 way, is the true and modern idealist, the legit- 
 imate lord of life. 
 
 XI. To put the proposition of this chapter in 
 final form : Social order presupposes the prac5lical 
 agreement of a controlling element of the people. 
 68 
 
Sanctions of Social Order 
 
 This agreement can be eflfedled in either of two 
 ways. 
 
 On the one hand, it is possible to get men to 
 think alike, to defer to the same things, to hold 
 pra(5lically identical opinions as to what is oblig- 
 atory and inevitable. That is one way of estab- 
 lishing a social order; it is the old, undemocratic 
 way. 
 
 On the other hand, it is possible to get men to 
 want congruous things, possible to bring them to 
 a concurrence of desire. It is possible to so 
 deepen and integrate, to so sanify and purify the 
 wills of a controlling element of the people that 
 they shall delight in and heartily maintain a 
 common order. This is the modern and demo- 
 cratic way. 
 
 It is a question, in fine, between getting peo- 
 ple to fear similar things and getting them to 
 have congruous desires — a question between con- 
 formity in opinions and consentaneousness of 
 wills. 
 
 The faith of democracy is the belief that the 
 deepest thing in the individual man is, after all, 
 his humanity; that the wills of men are not, at 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 bottom, irreconcilable; that, on the contrary, the 
 things that men want most and care most for are 
 those that are most human and freest from the 
 taint of privilege. 
 
 60 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE RKVOI.UTIONARY CHURCH-IDKA 
 
 I. Christianity is a vast enterprise for super- 
 seding the old world-order based upon a concur- 
 rence of opinion as to what must be, whether we 
 will or not, by a new world-order based upon a 
 working agreement of sane and reasonable wills 
 in the pursuit of what is desirable. The historic 
 church is nothing other than this modern world- 
 order in its imperfe(5t development, or in its 
 failure and distradlion through disloyalty to its 
 own ideal. 
 
 II. The root of all religions is the passion for 
 liberty. They spring out of the crossed and 
 thwarted will, and express the desire of the heart 
 for a satisfadlion that seems to be denied by 
 nature and the real world. Religion is a protest 
 against the apparently anti-human elements of 
 the world, a defiance of the seemingly unfeeling 
 
 61 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 forces of Nature; it stands for liberty against 
 the external law. Its witness is, immemorially 
 and always, for the miraculous, because to the 
 end of the world the cause of liberty must be 
 bound up with the belief that necessity and the 
 fixed law are not everything, that there is a 
 chance in the universe for the sheer simple pas- 
 sion of the heart. 
 
 After all the subtleties of the spiritual special- 
 ists and the political philosophers, liberty can 
 mean nothing else to an unsophisticated mind 
 than the chance to do what one really wants to 
 do. This primitive and inextinguishable desire 
 of the heart set over against the antagonisms of 
 rivals and enemies and the seeming fatality of 
 nature, is the thing that religion has always 
 dealt with, attempting to solve somehow the 
 problem of liberty and to thwart or diminish the 
 final vidlory of Fate. 
 
 III. Religion has two cardinal phases: it is 
 theocratic and democratic. The social revolution 
 consists in the conversion of men's minds from 
 theocratic to democratic religion. 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 Religion may be said to be theocratic so long 
 as the accent of its claim for liberty rests merely 
 upon the assertion of the liberty of God. It be- 
 comes democratic when it passes on, as by neces- 
 sary inference it must at length pass on, to the 
 proclamation of the liberty of the people. 
 
 The assertion of the liberty of God implies 
 human liberty, for to lay hold of a god that can 
 do as he pleases is to find at length a way of 
 escape, albeit a fearful way, from the fatalism of 
 the world. 
 
 The theocratic religions are provisional; they 
 find their fulfilment in Christianity, the religion 
 of democracy. Christianity is the religion of revo- 
 lution, but since the revolution that it proposes is 
 of so thoroughgoing a kind that it can not be 
 wrought by any sudden violence, it is necessary 
 that for a long while it shall appear as in process 
 — a new polarity of social organization straining 
 against the old. 
 
 The religion of democracy is thus not unre- 
 lated to the theocratic religions, tho it stands 
 among them wholly unique and presenting the 
 sharpest contrasts. It is related to them as a 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 faith is related to a hope out of which it has 
 grown up, or as a child that is born is related to 
 its embryo; there is a great difference, even a 
 kind of reversal of all vital processes, but there is 
 unbroken continuity. 
 
 In its historic forms Christianity is seen mak- 
 ing its difficult way in the world through con- 
 tinual compromises with those fixed theocratic 
 ideas which from the beginning have held the 
 minds of men, and it is only in its mature and 
 modern development that its original and essential 
 character is fully disclosed. 
 
 The contrast between theocratic and democratic 
 religion may be described in a great variety of 
 ways, but the most radical description is that 
 under the former regime the human will, or what- 
 ever lies deepest in personality, is regarded as 
 creaturely — a made thing, partaking of the nature 
 of Nature; while in democratic religion it is re- 
 garded as creative — a maker of things and par- 
 ticipant in the life of the Creator. 
 
 Accordingly, theocratic rehgion looks upon the 
 heart's desire of an ordinary man as naturally 
 unauthentic and dependent for any degree of 
 64 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 quasi-authentication upon the arbitrary will of 
 God, while democratic religion declares that the 
 heart's desire, however corrupted by lack of faith, 
 is in its primitive character as deep and authentic 
 as the heart of God himself. 
 
 It follows that in theocratic religions the pas- 
 sion of the heart — which never can die or really 
 deny itself, whatever men may agree to say or 
 think about it — seeks its satisfacflion through 
 some kind of compromise with the will of God. 
 Thus the salient charadleristic of all theocratic 
 religions is the principle of sacrifice, the essence 
 of which is the getting a part of what one cares 
 for on condition of giving up the rest, or the get- 
 ting of one's heart's desire in the future on con- 
 dition that it be given up now. This way of 
 looking at things is charaderistic of all the ancient 
 religions. It infec5ls historical Christianity just 
 as everything else that belongs to the old regime 
 infec^ls Christianity, but it has no relation to 
 Christianity except that of stubborn opposition. 
 
 Christianity comes into the world disclaiming 
 all compromise, and denying all need of sacrifice 
 save the sacrifice of God in suffering so faithless a 
 65 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 world. It cuts with the sword of Faith the 
 Gordian knot of the old-world social problem — 
 declaring that the problem is insoluble to the 
 abstract intellec5t, but that to the Spirit of Adven- 
 ture there is no final antagonism between the 
 external law of nature and the inmost heart's 
 desire. It declares that a man with patience may 
 make himself entirely at home in the universe; 
 that it is arterial all through to the circulation of 
 red, human blood, and that the social law is just 
 what the will of a catholic humanity, working 
 through the long redemptive travail of civiliza- 
 tion, may choose to make it. 
 
 IV. The promise of this great change in the 
 social order was a corollary of the proclamation 
 that a man had been born who was of the same 
 stuff as God — a proclamation that was accom- 
 panied by the assurance that any and all other 
 men might, if they would, share the life of this 
 man — even to the partaking of his flesh and blood. 
 
 It was by this road that the modern idea of 
 liberty came into the world, the idea of liberty not 
 as the privilege or accomplishment of superior 
 66 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 persons, but as the right of every man in virtue 
 of his mere humanity. For the assertion of the 
 utter reality of liberty, its independence of all 
 conventionality and circumstance, is in fa(5t the 
 same thing as to say that the spirit of man is 
 begotten, not made; that it stands in the last 
 accounting, not in the status of the creature but 
 in that of the creator. This is the pivotal point 
 of history. If a man is at last just a creature of 
 God, the quintessence of dust, he must to the end 
 be ruled — as all mechanisms, even the most exqui- 
 site, are ruled — by an external law. And in that 
 case the sovereignty of government, based on the 
 foundations of economic and defensive necessity 
 or of an extra-rational duty or destiny, is inex- 
 pugnably established. On the other hand, if it 
 be true that a man lives in this world, or by any 
 purification of his soul may live, as kin of God, 
 then for a certainty the sovereignty is to be 
 established, even through ages of vicissitude and 
 failure, not in brute force or necessity but in 
 the free association of the people. 
 
 V. The Church undertakes to coordinate and 
 67 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 catholicize the wills of the people for the pradlical 
 governance of the world. It would reduce the 
 economic and police forces to a relation of organic 
 subordination to the human ideal, and would 
 abolish the infidel empire of a non-human Must 
 or Ought. 
 
 The historic church-idea is at bottom simply 
 the basing of civilization upon faith in the eternal 
 nature of man and the reaHzation of the equality 
 of persons. It is the attempt to establish a 
 universal social order in the spirit of democ- 
 racy. The history of the Church is the story 
 of the genesis and evolution of the American 
 ideal. 
 
 In its original conception, the Catholic Church 
 stands*over against the old Roman empire in the 
 same sense of contrast and contradidlion that the 
 American ideal presents to the recrudescent 
 empires of to-day. The inner logic of primitive 
 Catholicism was the universal demonstration of 
 the sovereignty of the people and the subordina- 
 tion of secular governments to the service of 
 human liberty. But the inner logic of a principle 
 is of course very far from being identical with the 
 68 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 shapes that it takes on when it enters into history, 
 and attempts to get itself expressed in the alien 
 and oppugnant elements of the world. 
 
 VI. The church-idea has suffered three prin- 
 ciple perversions which may be named ecclesi- 
 asticism, sacramentalism, and dogmatism. These 
 perversions are simply the diverse aspecfls of the 
 Church's betrayal of its own revolutionary cause 
 under the stress of the old-world order. They 
 are the various ways iu which the principle of the 
 sovereignty of the people has been compromised 
 under the pressure of the opposite principle — three 
 ways of taking the heart out of democracy, 
 through an implied denial of the legitimacy of 
 the common desire. What is called orthodox 
 Christianity to this day for the most part works 
 and speaks under one or other or all of these per- 
 versions. So that the Christ of conventional 
 Christianity is not yet clearly disclosed as the 
 vindicator of the principle of democratic society, 
 but is seen rather as if unrelated to the Modern 
 Spirit and scarcely human at all, the hierophant 
 of a huge supernal corporation, the dispenser of 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 spiritual privileges or the author of a more exqui- 
 site Mosaism. 
 
 The word ecclesiasticism represents the idea 
 that sacred interests are to be separated from such 
 as are secular; that the Church has an existence 
 and a mission apart from secular society. In its 
 out- working ecclesiasticism becomes the negation 
 of civil liberty since it denies the real and spiritual 
 significance of secular history, reducing it to a 
 meaningless mechanical process. 
 
 Sacramentalism, with the ideas of spiritual dis- 
 cipline that go with it, stands for the conception 
 that good persons are to be separated from the 
 bad — the old world-idea of privilege and deserts. 
 In its outworking it becomes the negation of 
 the democratic principle of equality. Its subtle 
 logic justifies the sovereignty of government — 
 regarding civil magistrates as rewarders and 
 punishers, the arbiters of right and wrong. It 
 undermines the fundamental democratic idea 
 that government, however multifarious its 
 offices, is, after all, simply a perpetual civil 
 warfare against violence and privilege, a war- 
 fare in which every individual that wields the 
 70 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 sword of civil law takes a personal and indefeas- 
 ible responsibility. 
 
 Dogmatism stands for the rule of the abstract 
 or passive intelledl — the authority of the intelledl 
 over the will. It undertakes to establish social 
 order on a propositional basis, institutionalizing 
 the distinction between true and false proposi- 
 tions. Before the Renaissance and Reformation 
 it was possible for the principle of dogmatism, with 
 its firm leverage in ecclesiasticism, to guarantee a 
 consistent social order, in the spirit of the old 
 regime; but in later times it is this same dogma- 
 tism that has prevented the possibility of a coher- 
 ent social order, committing the world to the 
 endless confusions of sedl and party. The 
 modern hope of a working social agreement 
 depends solely upon the clarifying of men's wills 
 to the attainment of a mutual reasonableness and 
 a common and fraternal desire. 
 
 VII. Over against the sovereignty of state 
 stands the church-idea in world-historic antith- 
 esis. The most important fact in the history 
 of the last two thousand years is the dual polar- 
 71 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ity of social organization in Christian countries, 
 the phenomenon commonly described as the 
 separation of the Church from the State. Always 
 and everywhere throughout Christendom the 
 Church has in some sense fixed its standard out- 
 side the political system, and with more or less of 
 confidence has held that system under suspicion 
 and corredlion. This separation has been most 
 distindl among the peoples with whom the mod- 
 em and democratic spirit has been most influen- 
 tial, and has tended toward effacement among 
 the peoples that have been relatively unaffedled 
 by that spirit. Accordingly, the separation of 
 the Church from the State is more pronounced in 
 America than anywhere else, and of all nominally 
 Christian countries, is most slight and theoretical 
 in Russia. 
 
 The phenomenon in question is peculiar to 
 Christianity. Among non- Christian peoples the 
 cause of religion has always been identified with 
 that of the existing political order, and the relig- 
 ious oflSces have been regarded as fundlions of 
 the state. 
 
 It is to be noted, however, that the separation 
 78 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 of spiritual offices from secular offices, the dis- 
 tindlion in charadler between the priest and the 
 soldier, has always been most clearly maintained 
 under the old theocratic regime. The principle 
 of the separation of Church and State is not 
 therefore to be confounded with that of the 
 separation of sacred and secular interests. Its 
 real purport is the very opposite of that. The 
 Church is separated from the State under the 
 claim that the old world distin(5lion is fallacious, 
 and that the spiritual . interests of humanity are 
 the real interests and have a right to dominate the 
 whole range of secular life. The Church breaks 
 from the patronage of the State and plants its 
 standard of democracy outside the sphere of theo- 
 cratic politics — determined to make a New World 
 on eternal and spiritual principles, and to heal the 
 old schism between sacredness and secularity. 
 
 VIII. From the beginning of the era the spirit- 
 ual genius of Christianity has discerned the 
 necessity — for the regeneration of the nations — 
 of establishing in every land a new and demo- 
 cratic center of social organization. 
 73 
 
The Ajffirmative Intellect 
 
 The principle of this establishment is obscured 
 by the confusions and cross-currents of history, 
 and nowhere does it find its ideal and perfedl 
 illustration. Nevertheless, the principle is per- 
 fedtly clear. At one pole of the social life 
 stands the sovereign government, the center of 
 a dominating social theocracy; at the other stands 
 the institutional organization of Christianity, the 
 heart of inchoate democracy. As the government 
 is not the state but only the center of the state — 
 since the state-idea comprehends the whole social 
 system in its minutest ramifications and takes in 
 all the people, including the knaves and traitors 
 — so, on the other hand, the institutional organ- 
 ization of Christianity is not the Church; for the 
 church-idea takes in the whole social system too, 
 and includes all the people, even the scribes and 
 Pharisees. 
 
 The social center of gravity, the center of pre- 
 vailing influence, in sovereign states falls within 
 the government, and generally coincides with the 
 personality of the chief executive. The power of 
 the Church is forever drawing against the old 
 order; its aim is, through the operation of vital 
 74 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 and interior social forces, gradually to absorb and 
 efface the principle of state sovereignty, shifting 
 the social center of gravity to the reasonable 
 heart of the people and superseding the masters 
 of armies by the masters of creative forces. 
 
 IX. The church-idea is the germinal principle 
 of this era, the key to modern history, and the 
 spring of the evolution of democratic society. 
 But in its intellec5lual definition it is itself an evo- 
 lutionary produdl, a conception which could not 
 possibly have been put into words two thousand 
 years ago — or two hundred. 
 
 Ideas produce events, but events readl upon 
 ideas, shaping them to new conceptions forever 
 more elemental, more simple. The church-idea 
 has no abstradl validity; it grows up through 
 events, and it is rooted in an event — to wit, the 
 life of Jesus. 
 
 The historic Christ is a sublime and representa- 
 tive personality around whose timeless and incom- 
 parable name are gathering through the ages the 
 powers and graces of a rejuvenescent humanity. 
 His convincingness is not in the tales of prodigy 
 75 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 that the wide-eyed child- world has woven in his 
 story, but in his invincible reasonableness and 
 his immense success. He is the Master of history, 
 entrenched and bulwarked in events — the world's 
 great banker and promoter, the capitalizer of the 
 people's credit. 
 
 His uniqueness is not arbitrary but historical. 
 It does not rest in the inscrutable decree of 
 providence, but in the logical unfoldment of the 
 drama of the ages. His faithfulness to the human 
 ideal precipitated the long-prepared crisis of the 
 world, and committed the nations to that all-com- 
 prehending revolution which is shifting the center 
 of gravity of universal society from the temporal 
 to the eternal. 
 
 The idea of a Christ exists in the very nature 
 of thought. The world of men passes through 
 ages of experience from slavery to liberty, from 
 its creaturely to its creative charadler. The 
 Christ-idea is the ever-growing and brightening 
 conception of the kind of man that a free and 
 creative man would be. This was prophecy first, 
 then history. 
 
 As the world turned upon its moral axis from 
 76 
 
The Revolutionary Church-idea 
 
 the old to the new regime it was inevitable that 
 some signal personality should stand as the pivotal 
 man. It was also inevitable that the name of 
 that man should get itself indissolubly associated 
 with the Christ-idea, and that his name should 
 become the symbol of the new age and the hope 
 of a universal humanity. 
 
 The man in whose name the principle of the 
 sovereignty of the internal law has been won, is 
 sure to be the first citizen of the planet as long as 
 it shall hold its course. For this principle is the 
 spring of all moral principles, the most intimate 
 pulse of life. There is an intrinsic scale and 
 hierarchy of principles, and since, in the ways of 
 human nature, it is certain that every principle 
 as it is disclosed and vindicated must get itself 
 personified in a particular man, it comes to pass 
 that the personal life that disclosed the most 
 commanding principle of all has won an unpar- 
 alleled fame and love. 
 
 But this is the surface view of the subjedl. 
 
 Ideas are only the shadows of life; and it is no 
 
 satisfactory account of the life of Jesus or of any 
 
 other world-moving man to say that he stands as 
 
 77 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 the discoverer and exponent of a great idea. The 
 more substantial fadl is that he throws all men 
 into new relations to each other. Kvery event 
 has infinite consequences; the central event of 
 history has an all-correlating significance. 
 
 Thus, all individual lives of all times are by 
 the event of the life of Jesus dislocated from their 
 mere natural relationships and thrown into new 
 and spiritual relations. The old solidarities of 
 heredity and caste are broken up and the magnetic 
 pole of a world-wide unanimity is unchangably 
 established. 
 
 It is in the personality of the historic Christ 
 that the democratic revolution fixes its leverage 
 against the sovereignty of state and th^ rule of 
 economic necessity. This is iho. point d'appui of 
 the church-idea, which could not in a million 
 years have won any considerable credit as an 
 abstradt theory of philosophers. 
 
 98 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE POSITIVE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 
 
 I. The historic church-idea as it rises and 
 clears to its definition in the new age must as of 
 old have organized expression. For the organi- 
 zation is of the essence of the idea. Democracy 
 without a democratic, catholic Church is an ab- 
 stracftion of political philosophy and never can 
 be realized on the plane of history. The sover- 
 eignty of the people without a concrete represen- 
 tation of its principle is as barren and impractical 
 a thing as a sovereign state without a sovereign 
 government. Political democracy, long cherished 
 as an ideal, but hitherto disappointed of its hope 
 and snared in the futile, changing modes of state 
 sovereignty, must now at length in its extreme 
 perplexity — if it would escape despair — obtain for 
 its ideal a definite embodiment. 
 79 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 It is an indispensable condition of democracy 
 that there should be a distindl organization of 
 society apart from the sphere of politics. For 
 society can never wield the forces of government 
 to the ends of equality until it shall establish a 
 standing-ground whereon to realize its existence 
 and unity outside the governmental machine. 
 The people, a commanding element of the popula- 
 tion, must escape from the transcendental and 
 theocratic conception of government, and must 
 come to hold it with a firm grip as a thing con- 
 ventional and provisional, before they can use it 
 with masterful responsibility in subservience to 
 the human ideal. So long as the government is 
 looked upon as a providence and the arbiter of 
 right and wrong, it will be the keeper of the 
 people's conscience and the center of social 
 organization. The military and police power, 
 standing as a kind of sublimation of the elemental 
 forces of Nature, will be the objedl of the com- 
 mon devotion, and in the secret corners of their 
 souls the people will do homage to the brute- 
 gods. The principle of miHtarism and plutocracy 
 does not turn upon the question of a large army 
 80 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 or a small one, or upon the ups and downs of 
 trusts. It is a mental attitude, the reverence for 
 irrational forces, in denial of the ideal. And 
 whatever the braver spirits may do, the mass of 
 men will continue to worship the irrational forces 
 until such time as the forces of reasonableness 
 shall succeed in humbling the brutalities of 
 society with the specftacle of a serene and con- 
 fident order that does not derive its title from 
 fear of hunger or force of arms. 
 
 II. A genuine democratic society is one that 
 does not rest upon the patriotic principle or the 
 law-abiding habit, but upon the existence of a 
 controlling element of the people that may be 
 depended upon not to play the mob. It is not a 
 question of majorities. A comparatively small 
 minority standing together will suffice for every 
 emergency, since with a people that live in the 
 open air of the real world sanity is a contagion. 
 Nor is it a question of producing a multitude of 
 infallible persons who have perfedlly subdued the 
 mob-spirit that lurks at the bottom of every 
 man's soul. A solid and dependable nucleus of 
 81 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 reasonableness may be maintained in a commu- 
 nity in which every single member is, from time 
 to time, a fanatic or a fool. 
 
 The church-idea is the establishing of the mag 
 netic pole of an eternal Humanity as a rallying- 
 point for the general reasonableness. And 
 democracy depends not upon the perfedlion of 
 any individual or class, but upon the unshakable 
 fixity of that pole — just as theocratic societ}^ de- 
 pends upon the unimpeachableness of the title of 
 the president or king. 
 
 The realization of a genuine democratic society 
 has waited upon the ability of the people to 
 understand the church-idea in its simplicity, 
 stripped of the disguises that it has been obliged 
 to take on in order to make its way through the 
 contradictions of the old regime. 
 
 These disguises, generalized under the names 
 ecclesiasticism, sacramentalism, and dogmatism, 
 have been penetrated by the light of the modern 
 spirit one after another in the order named, and 
 have been greatly discredited — if not altogether 
 cast off. So it is at least with the peoples that 
 have accepted the Reformation. 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 III. The principle of ecclesiasticism as a prac- 
 tical working-force in secular history may be said 
 to have come to its end in the sixteenth century. 
 Up to that time it had been of immense but, on 
 the whole, of steadily dwindling importance. 
 
 The Church of the first three centuries exhibits 
 Christianity swathed in its most ecclesiastical, 
 sacramental, and dogmatic disguises. For eccle- 
 siasticism is in principle the dissociation of the 
 sacred order of society from the secular, and it 
 is only incidentally concerned with prelacy or 
 the rule of priests. It was at its maximum 
 strength in the early Church — so strong that the 
 spiritual order was thought of as barely touching 
 the earth with the hem of its robe of ascension. 
 Sacramentalism then wrought a clear breach be- 
 tween the saved and the lost, and dogmatism con- 
 ceived of salvation as depending upon the accepta- 
 tion of a few bald propositions containing the 
 minimum of ethical rationality. From the begin- 
 ning of history the Church has grown more and 
 more secular. Thus it has grown more and 
 more Christian, notwithstanding the scandals of 
 the papacy and the corruptions of the cloisters. 
 83 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 For the decay of the things that pass away is 
 the means of their passing. 
 
 It is to be noted that the putting away of 
 ecclesiasticism is, in a large general way, histor- 
 ically and logically corresponsive with the estab- 
 lishment of the principle of constitutionalism. 
 For constitutionalism signalizes the breach be- 
 tween the Church and the State. It is the appeal 
 from the authority of the sovereign to the com- 
 mon sense of the people, an appeal which, in 
 human nature, could never have been taken if 
 the barons and the burghers, in the prosecution 
 of their ordinary business as citizens of a com- 
 monwealth, had not felt themselves invested with 
 spiritual powers in some sense superior to those 
 of the sovereignty. 
 
 Now, constitutionalism is not democracy; it is 
 the joining of issue with the old order in the 
 serious struggle for democracy. Considered as 
 a social condition it is illogical and transitional. 
 It calls in question the sovereignty of the prince 
 or president, but it affords no solid footing for 
 the sovereignty of the people. Civil society can 
 not rest permanently upon a series of legal propo- 
 84 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 sitions any more than the narrower domestic 
 society, the family, can do so. In the family there 
 must be the patria potestas — the unquestionable 
 authority of the head of the house — or else free, 
 unpledged personalities, agreeing in what is reason- 
 able. There is no permanently tenable middle 
 ground. And so, in civil society there can be no 
 harmonious and self -consistent social life so long as 
 the case stands undecided between the sovereign- 
 ty of the state and the sovereignty of the people. 
 
 IV. In the United States to-day the people are 
 bewildered with the long controversy. They 
 have been shamed by the taunt that their govern- 
 ment is a debilitated and crippled thing, lacking 
 the powers that belong to the sovereignties of the 
 Old World; and there is danger that they will 
 give up the fight and restore to the state the 
 panoply of sovereignty which has been stripped 
 ofE in six centuries of constitutional struggle, 
 unless there shall soon be shown a way that plain 
 men can see, for the achievement of a command- 
 ing and unitary social order on the basis of the 
 sovereignty of the people. 
 85 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 With the stripping off of ecclesiasticism, the 
 old regime revenged itself by swathing the 
 church-idea in new and thicker veils of sacra- 
 mentalism and dogmatism. 
 
 The medieval Church had never known a 
 spiritual discipline so sharp and decisive between 
 man and man, or a thraldom to abstradl proposi- 
 tions so absolute as that which marked the earlier 
 course of Protestantism. And similarly, it is to 
 be observed, that when, after centuries of warfare 
 with words and blows, the sacramental-idea — the 
 idea that religion exists to separate the faithful 
 from the heretic — was generally discredited, then 
 the forces of all the wrong-headedness in this 
 world, which theretofore had made their election 
 of two or three kinds of perversity, gathered 
 themselves together with undiminished devotion 
 in the redoubtable fortress of pure dogmatism. 
 
 For after all the definitions and distincflions, 
 this word dogmatism will ser^^e tolerably well as 
 the roll-call of all the great delusions of the 
 world, for it sums up the particulars of that rule 
 of the passive intelledl over the will, which is the 
 original and universal sin. 
 86 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 V. The nineteenth century was the age of 
 sudden discoveries and of vast and unpremeditated 
 expansions of the circle of commerce. Thus the 
 spirit of dogmatism was turned most efifecflively 
 against itself in the violence of the collision 
 between opposite schools, policies, sedls, and 
 parties. 
 
 Never before had dogmatism been so rife; never 
 hafpure intelledl lorded it more insolently over 
 the will; never had men denied more vehemently 
 the authority of the soul, or sought more confi- 
 dently for an arbitrary and non-human law that 
 should settle all things, social and scientific. But 
 the ages-old, unbroken spell of the passive in- 
 telleifl has been in these latter years subjec5led to 
 a stupendous reduSlio ad absurdum. This Hydra- 
 headed Unholy Ghost of dogmatism has been 
 heard babbling its infallible oracles in a thousand 
 jangling voices, and so at last has suffered the 
 advertisement of its shame. The abstradl intelledl 
 has discredited itself in the gloating excesses of 
 its triumph. And in very despair of finding any- 
 where on earth, in school or cabinet, in sedl or 
 party, a credible external authority, men are 
 87 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 being driven — with whatsoever of reludlance — to 
 believe in their own souls. It is a pity that we 
 could not have come to the enfranchisement of 
 Christianity on more honorable terms, but it is 
 enough to have found the way on any terms. 
 
 VI. The gradual deepening and simplifying 
 of the church-idea is the grand spiritual motive 
 of the drama of the Middle Ages. The Church 
 bred at her own breast the children of the Reform- 
 ation and of modern democracy. The men of 
 the modern spirit, the creators of what is modern 
 in modern society, are the true champions of the 
 Church, the continuators of the apostolic tra- 
 dition. 
 
 The Reformation was not a revolt against the 
 church-idea; it was a revolt against those impedi- 
 mental elements of the medieval Church that 
 hindered the success and progress of that idea. 
 In the Reformation the great stream of historic 
 Christianity, long confined within narrow, ecclesi- 
 astical limits, debouched upon the broad surfaces 
 of secularity . Civil society itself became the suc- 
 cessor of the medieval Church. The Protestant 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 se<5ls, so far as they stood apart from the struggle 
 for social liberty, and were conceived of as having 
 bounds less broad than those of civil society, were 
 but signs of the persistence of the ecclesiastical 
 tendency. They stood, and still stand, as the 
 evidence of an imperfedl apprehension of the 
 historic church-idea and an imperfedl under- 
 standing of the charadler of modern society. 
 
 The medieval Church at its worst was morally 
 commanding. It always played its part in the 
 real and passionate world-struggle, because it 
 always claimed a tentorial jurisdi(5lion and 
 would not admit that any class of the people 
 could stand outside its pale. It was always, in 
 some effecflual sense, representative of the social- 
 revolutionary principles of Christianity. On the 
 other hand, it is the suflScient condemnation of 
 the modem sedls, in spite of their special virtues, 
 that they have no vital interest in these principles. 
 Unless, therefore, we are to suppose that the 
 middle stream of modern tendency has been lost 
 in the sand, we are bound to conceive of the 
 great idea of the Christian era as seeking, in the 
 midst of all the seething cross-currents of post- 
 89 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 Reformation history, a finer and truer embodi- 
 ment than the Roman and Protestant secSls can 
 possibly afford. 
 
 The Reformation was the announcement of 
 the fadl that the great issue between the sov- 
 ereignty of the state and sovereignty of the 
 people could no longer find expression in the 
 rivalries of popes and emperors. The issue passed 
 to a new and more intimate phase, as the moral 
 consciousness of the world reached nearer to a 
 mastery of the moral definitions that were 
 involved. Thenceforth the passion of the struggle 
 lay between the institutions of the old regime, 
 bulwarked in authority and privilege, and the 
 upspringing life of the new nations. Here and 
 there in diverse lands the democratic spirit found 
 a tentative expression in the forms of national 
 churches. But the principle is in its very nature 
 cosmopolitan, and the national churches have 
 proved inadequate, exhibiting a constant tenden- 
 cy to capitulate to kings. Thus the cause of the 
 sovereignty of the people has been adjourned from 
 time to time. And it has been left to the twen- 
 tieth century to undertake the task of giving 
 90 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 definite expression to the post-Reformation con- 
 ception of the church-idea. 
 
 Back of the constitutions of modern states there 
 stands a world-wide humanity challenging the 
 arbitrary sovereignties of government, and breath- 
 ing a spirit of indomitable and expanding liberty 
 into the lifeless letter of constitutional law. 
 
 How to give prevailing embodiment to that 
 aspiration of the people — this is the grand problem 
 of the new age. 
 
 VII. Americanism is not a local principle; it is 
 a universal principle. The historic charadleristic 
 of the American spirit is its supra-nationalism, 
 its universality. Its mission is to show that 
 the grounds of national prosperity are in the 
 eternal unity of things, so that the way of national 
 self-realization breaches all the walls of protedlion 
 and exclusion, and commits the national destinies 
 to the free-flowing currents of the world. The 
 uniqueness of this land is that it is the cross- 
 roads where all ways meet. 
 
 Along these embracing shores and into these 
 vast open valleys the daring spirits of the earth 
 91 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 have passed as into a land prepared from the 
 beginning to be the synthesis of times and peoples. 
 Asia and Europe were, in the creation, broken 
 up and partitioned by large inland seas and 
 impassable mountain walls, for the breeding of 
 peculiar tribes and the differencing of racial 
 experience; but America was planned as the place 
 of the All, and its hospitable plains were spread 
 between the two free viable oceans that the peoples 
 might come from the corners of Nature to the dis- 
 covery of the Wholeness of the World. 
 
 America has no special or provincial interests; 
 its mission is to advance a catholic and all-con- 
 taining law, to abolish the caste of climates, and 
 make all mankind participant in the wealth of 
 universal history. Its genius is immeasurably 
 expansive, and if our democracy now halts and 
 staggers at the rim of the continent and looks 
 bewildered across the seas, it is because it is not 
 yet wakened to its own genius. The urgence of 
 events is pressing us to a choice between apostasy 
 from our own ideal and the taking up of an apos- 
 tolate of world-wide emancipation. We shall not 
 fail . This is the birth-hour of a new Catholicism — 
 92 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 the epochal moment when the Holy Spirit of the 
 ancient Church descends from the high altars to 
 proclaim in the market-places a fraternal world- 
 polity and the real communion of a commerce of 
 boundless reciprocity. 
 
 VIII. The new religious forms must grow up 
 somehow out of the old political forms. It 
 appears that we have been brought to such a pass 
 in the history of this country that we can hope 
 for no solution of our domestic political problem 
 unless we take into consideration the whole 
 world. Henceforth we are compelled, even in 
 our provincial and parochial interests, to deal 
 with universal principles. But universal prin- 
 ciples are not political principles at all in the old 
 sense of politics. They are religious principles. 
 Thus politics is driven into the realms of religion 
 and in turn religion becomes a world-polity. 
 
 In the Middle Ages the church-idea had, 
 provisionally, a splendid embodiment, because it 
 escaped from the jealousy of classes and stood 
 aloof from the stress of economics. So it bided 
 its time. By the sixteenth century the idea 
 98 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 had grown strong enough to descend to closer 
 quarters with the tough world. It wrought it- 
 self into the forms of national churches and be- 
 came the power of the people in the long struggle 
 for constitutionalism and the republics. But 
 now in the beginning of the last cycle of two 
 millenniums we see that the idea has grown 
 stronger still — strong enough to venture upon a 
 descent into the very dust and passion of the 
 world, and to seek its embodiment in the forms 
 of a political party. This is quite in the way of 
 the genius of the incarnation. Up from the rank 
 soil of politics come the germinant forms of demo- 
 cratic Catholicism, but down from the great 
 historic heights of Christianity comes the spirit 
 that is to inform and use them. 
 
 IX. The political party in America, regarded 
 as a social phenomenon, is, in its external aspec5l 
 and general conception, a suggestive embodiment 
 of the church-idea. What has been lacking is, 
 that its party-spirit should be translated into a 
 spirit of humanity and universality. In all 
 English-speaking countries there has been a con- 
 94 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 stant tendency to divide the political body into 
 two great parties. This is a tendency diredlly 
 related to the prevalence of the democratic ideal 
 and consequently less manifest, or not manifest 
 at all in countries that have been relatively 
 unaffedled by that ideal. 
 
 The two parties represent the democratic ideal 
 in two opposite and mutually destrucflive exagger- 
 ations. And in the attritions and collisions of a 
 deepening social experience it seems to be the des- 
 tiny of these two contending spirits to discredit 
 each other and to give rise to a non-partisan spirit, 
 or spirit of humanity, which shall be the soul of 
 a synthetic and universal party. In the United 
 States this process seems now to be on the eve 
 of its consummation. The two great organiza- 
 tions have ceased to represent the rival faiths of 
 men, since they no longer have in them any con- 
 siderable faith at all. Their vitality has been 
 lost in a gradual hardening process until they 
 have become mere mechanisms — huge Franken- 
 stein monsters that have passed beyond the con- 
 trol of their creators. Their power is still 
 enormous, but it is unvital. It is derived from 
 95 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 the moral passivity of the people. The party 
 organizations are strong in the degree that the 
 people are lacking in the convicftion of ideals and 
 possessed with the sentiment of the fatalism of 
 the world. The politicians rely solely upon the 
 economic forces and the fear of disaster. 
 
 The arrival of the two great political corpora- 
 tions at this juncture is the signal for the rise of 
 a social organization of unexampled character. 
 It is evident that the old corporations can not be 
 redeemed to humanity, and it has been shown by 
 a multitude of experiments that the people will 
 not respond to the half-faiths of the fathers 
 clothed in whatever allurements of new-party 
 programs. 
 r"^ The people are sick of the party-spirit and 
 I weary of fadlional servitude; they are longing 
 I for the spirit of liberty, and the loyalties of a 
 I wider humanism. 
 
 ^The philosophy of the original moral constitu- 
 tion of the two decadent parties may be variously 
 expounded, but in no way can the distindlion be- 
 tween the spirit of the two systems be more 
 simply indicated than by pointing out that it cor- 
 96 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 responds in a general way to the historic differ- 
 ence between Catholicism and Protestantism. 
 Both are true, and both, because of their partial- 
 ism, are false. And as the old Catholicism and 
 the old Protestantism are both destined to pass 
 away in the synthesis of a democratic Catholi- 
 cism, so the principles of the old political fa(5lions 
 are to be fused in the same synthesis. 
 
 In the constitutional history of the United 
 States the two great parties, considered together, 
 have served in a dual and imperfedl way, to effedl 
 that free association of the people, which is the 
 si7ie qua non of democratic society, as a guarantee 
 against the tendency to absolutism which is in- 
 herent in all governments. Without the great 
 parties the general government must inevitably 
 have stood as the center of social organization 
 with consequences fatal to the American ideal. 
 It is the rivalry and alternation of great and 
 equal fa<5lions that has kept us from that old- 
 world idolatry of government which is the nega- 
 tion of the moral principle of constitutionalism. 
 It seems that a century or more of the recrimina- 
 tion of rival partisan administrations was neces- 
 87 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 sary in order that the American people might 
 fully escape from the shadow of the old theocra- 
 cies and come to understand that a government 
 is of human responsibility and not a gift of God. 
 Thus the principle of party organization has 
 stood in evident opposition to the old-world prin- 
 ciple of the sovereignty of the state, and has in- 
 dicated, in how^ever tentative and vacillating a 
 way, the lineaments of that democratic Catholi- 
 cism in which the people are to realize their ex- 
 istence and social unity outside the machinery 
 of state. 
 
 The party organization, notwithstanding the 
 poverty and partialism of its spirit, has exhib- 
 ited all the formal charadleristics of a true em- 
 bodiment of the church-idea. If it were not for 
 our prolonged experience of the reality of such 
 an organization, it would be hard to prove the 
 possibility of it. For the reality is so vital and 
 fluent that it eludes the conceptions of pragmati- 
 cal and unimaginative minds. The party organi- 
 zation in its normal and popular type, before it 
 has degenerated into a mechanism, illustrates the 
 historic church-idea in the essential particulars 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 that have been indicated. While being in itself 
 no negation but a living and potent thing stand- 
 ing for an ideal, it may, by an accommodation of 
 words, be described as non-ecclesiastical, non- 
 sacramental, and non-dogmatic. This accom- 
 modation of words is not too violent, for the psy- 
 chology of church and party is the same. 
 
 To begin with, then, the political party in its 
 youth and strength does not conceive of its own 
 organic interests as separate from the interests of 
 the whole commonwealth, but attempts, through 
 the attra(5liveness of its ideal, to establish in the 
 midst of the commonwealth a polarity of free 
 social organization that shall be inclusive of all 
 public interests and magnetic to the ends of the 
 land. The party is on the decline when it begins 
 to be more concerned for its organization than for 
 its mission. 
 
 In the second place the normal political party 
 does not try to separate the good from the bad, 
 the wise from the foolish, but invites all the 
 people to come in their sins. When the tests of 
 partisan orthodoxy begin to be applied and those 
 that lack a lineage are discriminated against, the 
 99 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 party is passing into its mechanical stage. The 
 appeal to class interests is the sign of dis- 
 solution. 
 
 Finally, the party organization, in its original 
 type, rests confidently upon the unformulated 
 reality of its general ideal. It makes and abro- 
 gates platforms and programs according to the 
 exigencies of times, but refuses to be ruled by 
 precedent and definition. It is not dogmatic. It 
 is only in the moribund phase of its existence 
 that the councils of a great political party are 
 ruled by scribes and pedants that ring the changes 
 upon the formularies of the past. 
 
 Of course, no political party was ever for a 
 moment free from the human qualities that the 
 words ecclesiasticism, sacrament alism, and dog- 
 matism stand for. The point is that these quali- 
 ties are not the strength of the party but its 
 weakness. The study of the history of the polit- 
 ical parties therefore settles the question as to the 
 possibility of establishing a wide social organiza- 
 tion, a democratic Catholicism, on a basis alto- 
 gether different from that on which the existing 
 se<5larian churches stand. 
 100 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 It proves that an effec5live and continuous organ- 
 ization can be maintained on sheer ideal grounds 
 without reliance upon successions, sacraments, 
 or dogmas. 
 
 X. The political party has only faintly fore- 
 shadowed the organization of catholic democracy. 
 And the faintness of the type has been due not 
 only to the fadt that it has been partisan, but also 
 to the fac5l that it has been distincftively political. 
 The genius of democratic society can not breathe 
 its full breath in an atmosphere pervaded by 
 politics, for the subordination of the forces of 
 politics to the uses of a free and creative humanity 
 is of the essense of democracy. 
 
 In the old order of the world the cultivation 
 of the humanities depends upon the political 
 organization, but in the new order the political 
 organization depends upon the cultivation of the 
 humanities. The old regime begins with law 
 and order, and strives for liberty; the new begins 
 with liberty, and strives for law and order. 
 
 The great men of letters of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury announced the discovery that fine art has 
 101 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 its roots in morality and law. They did much to 
 close the gap between the humanities and the 
 common life. But the true account of the matter 
 seems to be that morality and law have their 
 roots in fine art. The Church of the twentieth 
 century, therefore, will better the instrucflion of 
 the wise men of the nineteenth, and will make the 
 firee, creative life of the people, the life of fine 
 art, the sole basis and reliance of civil law. The 
 political parties have lost their vitalities and have 
 become machines because they have permitted 
 their interest to be absorbed in a machine, the 
 machine of government. The solution of the 
 political problem, which is simply the problem of 
 vitalizing and humanizing the governmental 
 machine, is seen to lie in a social-political organi- 
 zation which has time for politics every day, but 
 lays the accent of its interest upon the dignity 
 and grace of ordinary living. 
 
 PoHtics will continue to be a game of politicians 
 so long as the people attend to it only once in a 
 while. There is need of a political primary 
 that shall be always in session, and there is need 
 of a fertile, flowering soil of humanity that shall 
 108 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 send a steady stream of vital sap up into tlie 
 gnarled and withering limbs of law. 
 
 XI. It is to be supposed that the externals of 
 religion are about to undergo a great change. 
 The symbols of a half-theocratic Christianity can 
 not be taken as sufficiently expressive of the 
 religion of democracy. The old church archi- 
 te(5lures must give place to types that are indig- 
 enous to the soil of liberty — types more magnifi- 
 cent than those of the Middle Ages, since the 
 resources of modern art and commerce are more. 
 And the prisoned artists must break out of the 
 mills to forge the world into human shape and 
 make the cities fit for souls. The sovereignty of 
 the people is only plain speech for the kingship 
 of the Son of Man. The old world-church dedi- 
 cated its architedlural glories to this idea and the 
 new world-church is likely to do the same. The 
 time may be near at hand when the church in a 
 country-town will be as grand as the court-house 
 or the jail. 
 
 Democratic religion will produce new types, 
 but the old will not be despised. Its principle of 
 103 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 universality relates not only to space but to time. 
 The Church which stands for the humanity of all 
 lands will stand also for the humanity of all the 
 centuries. The people will always respedt the 
 plebiscite of the ages. But great uniformities are 
 cheap. It is easy and always has been easy to 
 get men to go in crowds to worship at the shrine 
 of a beauty which they do not see, and can not, 
 because they go in crowds. We must commit 
 ourselves frankly to our great enterprise ; we 
 are bound to break up the good customs that 
 are corrupting the world and give the sweet 
 spirits of the Hours a chance to flourish in the 
 sunlight. 
 
 XII. The Church is destined to pour its life 
 into the university. The university, as it exists 
 in the United States, is a nondescript thing, mort- 
 gaged to the past and reaching aimlessly toward 
 the future. It is partly a monastic survival, 
 partly a subsidized supporter of social privilege, 
 partly a trades-school, partly a proprietary insti- 
 tution for the propagation of private opinions, and 
 partly a hopeful prophecy of what is to come. 
 104 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 Now the university, in its original and final 
 definition, is the stronghold of the affirmative 
 and creative intelledl. The university-idea is the 
 bringing of the whole of knowledge pundlually 
 to bear upon this present place and moment. 
 But knowledge has no wholeness to the merely 
 passive mind — is only a colledlion of irrelevant 
 details, a medley of useless curiosities. It acquires 
 a wholeness and the university-idea becomes 
 realizable only when the intelledl is penetrated 
 with faith and acfluated by the passion of the 
 human ideal. 
 
 The university was born out of the body of 
 the church and suckled at her breast. In its 
 youth it rose up and destroyed ecclesiasticism. 
 Its work for the future is to continue the life of 
 its mother. These institutions of dubious learn- 
 ing that we have, smooth proteges of million- 
 aires and half-starved step-children of the state, 
 are doubtless something, and may be given a 
 name, but they are not universities. The spirit 
 of the university can not grow otherwise than 
 out in the open air in daily venture of its life. 
 
 The segregation of thinking men was a medi- 
 105 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 eval and monastic idea. It suited the genius 
 of ecclesiasticism. For the times that are com- 
 ing, it is well enough that the technical school 
 should lodge its expensive apparatus in some safe 
 and accessible spot, but the university must go 
 with the Church to the people. The talk of 
 academic liberties is vain. Where and when was 
 thinking and speaking ever free to those that 
 rested in vested rights, or unfree to those that 
 would pay the price ? And in all reason how can 
 the world be expedled to assure an income to 
 those that break its idols? The people should 
 write on the pediments of the churches for the 
 admonition of their teachers: We are foolish 
 children and may stone you, but we implore you 
 to speak the truth. 
 
 XIII. Out of the struggling soul of Chris- 
 tianity have come the three cardinal institutions 
 of the existing social order: The political party, 
 the se<5larian church, and the organization of 
 learning summed up in the university. These 
 three things in their rise, their growth and their 
 predestined decay and supersession, may be best 
 106 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 understood if regarded as the partial and exag- 
 gerated forms of the protest of the democratic 
 spirit against the old regime. 
 
 These institutions can give real and permanent 
 effedl to their several protests, and realize their 
 own ideals by dying and pouring their life into 
 the profound and simple synthesis of a demo- 
 cratic Catholicism — the positive organization of 
 society. 
 
 The political party protests against ecclesias- 
 ticism. In its ideal it is the assertion of the all- 
 importance of the real and present world of living 
 men. It affirms the moral dignity of material 
 civilization as involving all the spiritual issues. 
 It turns its face resolutely away from the world 
 of ghosts and metaphysical abstradlions, holding 
 nothing sacred that is not secular, and declaring 
 that the free and ideal life is to be lived here and 
 now. But it fails to apprehend the spiritual prin- 
 ciple of liberty. It is shallow, and its shallowness 
 means onesidedness and futility in the struggle 
 for civil liberty. It becomes sacramental and 
 dogmatic — the instrument of privilege and the 
 slave of formularies. It ends by the negation of 
 107 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 its own original principle in a thirst for an un- 
 economical — a transcendental — glory . 
 
 The sectarian church, as idealized in the 
 minds of the people, stands to-day as the protest 
 of the modem spirit against sacramentalism and 
 as the assertion of the primacy of the principle of 
 charity or fraternity. It will not any longer 
 separate the deserving from the undeserving. It 
 declares that brotherly love will solve all prob- 
 lems. But the virile heart is not in it. Its 
 Christ has only a soul of soft sentiments and 
 pity. It does* not believe in liberty or the crea- 
 tive spirit of man. Its fraternity is superficial 
 and unconvincing. And in its conscious weak- 
 ness it has recourse to a recrudescent ecclesiasti- 
 cism and dogmatism which is less convincing 
 still. Its extremity is the denial of its own 
 specialty; and the crowds gather in the streets 
 to accuse the churches of partialism and caste, 
 and to pass resolutions that their charity is a 
 sham. 
 
 Finally, the university stands as a protest 
 against dogmatism, the last of the triple Fates. 
 It maintains, as its point of honor, the freedom 
 108 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 of the intelle<5l. But the university also is with- 
 out that faith which is the life and breath of the 
 modern spirit. It does not yet understand that 
 science is impossible to the passive intellecfl; its 
 soul is still thralled in the superstition of arbi- 
 trary law. 
 
 In its eagerness to escape from the foul spirit 
 of dogmatism, it flies for refuge to an ideal world 
 and to the strongholds of privilege. And in the 
 end it falls into the arms of its aversion — it 
 becomes the mouthpiece of tradition and preju- 
 dice, and announces fixed opinions with the 
 fearful unanimity of caste. 
 
 XIV. In a true and searching psychology the 
 great trinity of errors is reducible to a unity — to 
 wit, the original sin of dogmatism — the rejedlion 
 of the creative authority of life itself in the pre- 
 possession of arbitrary and irrational law. When 
 the rejedlion is complete, and the superstition 
 unlighted by a single gleam of faith, there is no 
 room for any other error, and the world lies 
 prostrate with an utter passivity of intelledl in 
 the thralldom of an unmitigated despotism. But 
 109 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 in the gloaming light of half- faiths the mind re- 
 ac5ls against this abjedl servitude, and ventures to 
 search for a law which, while not related to 
 the heart of man, or answering his sincere de- 
 sire, may yet serve to break the force of an en- 
 tirely irrational tyranny. It is thus that the 
 other two cardinal phases of falsehood come into 
 play. These are two, not one, because a man 
 with a half-faith is two men. He is drawn hither 
 and thither by the seesaw of the ineradicable 
 passion of his heart and the unescapable f ac5l of 
 the external world. He is by turns an a priorist 
 and an a posteriorist. He is torn between the 
 rival fanaticisms of spiritualism and materialism. 
 In his endeavor to escape from despotism he 
 seeks a saving law, now in his pale etiolated con- 
 science and now in the hard, mechanical order of 
 the material world. The former tendency pro- 
 duces the ultra-spiritualism of religion, the latter 
 the ultra-materialism of politics. 
 
 But the splitting process does not stop with a 
 single fission; for the morbid dualism of the 
 heart-contemning intelle(5l is a force that is con- 
 stantly operative. As soon as it has wrought 
 110 
 
Positive Organization of Society 
 
 one schism, cleaving the whole of life into two 
 parts, it sets to work on each of the parts to make 
 two more — and so on. Religion becomes on the 
 one hand ecclesiastical, interested in the construc- 
 tion of a purely spiritual state, and on the other 
 hand sacramental; for sacramentalism is merely 
 materialism stated in ecclesiastical language. 
 Kcclesiasticism in its turn becomes, on the one 
 hand, an a priori Protestantism, and, on the 
 other, an a posteriori Romanism. Then Prot- 
 estantism bifurcates into the abstra<5l logic of 
 Calvin and the literalism and traditionalism 
 of lyUther — and so forth, to the end of the long 
 catalog of religious se<5ls. 
 
 Starting with the other term of the original 
 schism, we might trace in the history of politics 
 the same process. However, there is a constant 
 tendency, more or less strong, according to the 
 common sense of the people, to clear up the com- 
 plication and reduce the difficulty to its original 
 terms. And there is a natural congeniality of 
 extremes — the rule of sentimentality being the 
 rule of the stomach. In this way things get 
 simplified. 
 
 Ill 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 But the aim here is to point out that all the 
 perplexities and contradic5lions of the social order 
 have their spring in the principle of dogmatism. 
 It follows that the particular social institution 
 that is conceived of as specially antagonistic to 
 this principle must afford a strategic point from 
 which to attack the general confusion. 
 I The university, therefore, holds the key of the 
 I situation. To carry out the university-idea in the 
 I forms of politics and in the spirit — the faith — of 
 historic Christianity — that is in general terms the 
 solution of the problem of the positive organiza- 
 tion of society. 
 
 112 
 
The Axioms 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THS AXIOMS OP THB AFFIRMATIVE INTELLKCT 
 
 I. The reje(5lion of dogmas does not mean the 
 denial of creeds. A generation of men can not 
 go forth to the remaking of the world without 
 great definitions, exadl and rigorous principles. 
 Not by faith alone, or by any power or passion 
 of the soul, can the world be put in order. For 
 order is a principle of the intelle(5l; and it is the 
 intellecft, renewed and empowered by the confident 
 will, that must plan the strudlure of the world- 
 cities. 
 
 The old creeds are nothing to us so far as they 
 rest upon authorities, but they are passwords to 
 the future if they answer the heart's desire. 
 
 II. Now Christianity is not a peculiar creed 
 resting upon authority; it is the historical devel- 
 opment of the aflSrmative intellec?^. All the great 
 do(5lrines of the Church are implicit in the fadt 
 of faith itself. 
 
 118 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 I rl 
 
 L 
 
 Qiven a thinking man face to face with death, 
 disease, and the cruelties and contradidlions of 
 the world, and if he does not succumb to the 
 stress and strain and become half-hearted, but 
 adheres with faithfulness to the law of his own 
 life, then the great dodlrines of the catholic 
 creeds will be discovered to lie bedded in the very 
 Structure of his mind, tho he may never have 
 heard of Jesus or" considered the theories of the 
 theologians; The simple truth is that the cath- 
 olic faith is the very breath of human desireli^lffie'' 
 life of life itself. 
 
 Now faith is cheap to children, to people 
 that do not think, and to prosperous people of 
 small sympathy. It is none the less genuine in 
 such persons, but faith of such a degree is not 
 construdlcve because it is not intelledtual. It 
 contains no answer to the problems of the defeated 
 or to the disquietudes of those that think and 
 feel in wide horizons. 
 
 From the beginning the social strudlures have 
 
 been built by men of comparative strength of 
 
 mind who, because they were men of intelledl, 
 
 could not believe in life as children and the 
 
 114 
 
The Axioms 
 
 unseeing do. Thus the social structures have 
 been built in unfaith. The whole scheme of 
 social law from immemorial times has been 
 warped to the conceptions of a passive and faith- 
 less intellec5l. 
 
 Into such a world-order comes Christianity, with 
 its proclamation of the principles of faith — the 
 chief and summary things that a man wants to 
 believe and is bound to believe if he would main- 
 tain the sincerity of tfie'^'universe, tlfei*i:*eaiity of 
 his personal existence, and the pracSicaBiIity of 
 his own ideal. They are not propositions to 
 think about or talk about, to argue to or argue 
 from. As propositions addressed to the' ni^fe 
 refledliveness of men, it matters not at all whether 
 they be rejecfted or accepted. They are not the 
 flower or fruit of intelledl, but the root and sap ; 
 not forms of right thinking, but the formal 
 vindication of the right to think. 
 
 The emancipation of the intelledl for the work 
 of building a social order on the plan of the 
 human ideal became a possibility and an expec- 
 tation when first a man grounded his conscious- 
 ness in the Eternal, and gained strength of heart 
 115 
 
 H 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 to say that the laws were for men — not men for 
 them. This was to demand a reversal of all the 
 social currents ; it put the will above the under- 
 standing, and located the seat of authority within 
 the soul. Of course, the flood swept over this 
 man, but it could not submerge him — for the 
 heart of the world was secretly with him. 
 
 III. The historic mission of Christianity has 
 been the establishment and assurance of the 
 affirmative intelledl. The assumption that men 
 can be saved by the acceptance of right forms of 
 thinking is precisely the fundamental assumption 
 of that ancient order into which Christianity 
 came as an alien and opposite thing. The history 
 of the pre-Reformation Church is, on the whole, 
 the story of a magnificent struggle for intel- 
 ledtual liberty against the superstitions of barba- 
 rians and the dogmatisms of Judea, Greece, and 
 Rome. 
 
 There is not a single dogma of the Church that 
 
 does not contain the antidote to its dogmatism — 
 
 an implication of the subordination of dogmas to 
 
 the principle of faith. The dogmas of the Church 
 
 116 
 
The Axioms 
 
 are all do<5lrines of liberty clothed in such terms 
 as to render them not utterly repugnant and in- 
 credible to a world thralled in the prepossessions 
 of fatalism, skepticism, and social slavery. And 
 there is not a single great primary institution of 
 the Church — as baptism, the holy communion, 
 the episcopate — that does not in its original con- 
 ception and practise contain an implied denial of 
 the old-world idea that society depends iipon 
 established institutions. In the minds of its 
 clearer spirits the Church was never an institu- 
 tion : it was the maker and unmaker of insti- 
 tutions. 
 
 The formulation of Church dodlrines and the 
 setting up of the Church's institutions was always 
 a pressingly pra(5lical matter as to how best to 
 commend to a servile and insensate world the 
 spiritual principle of self-government and the 
 authority of the internal law. 
 
 The radical thing in Christianity is the con- 
 substantiality of a man with God. This was 
 dramatized and pressed upon the credit of men 
 in the sublime formularies of Nicene theol- 
 ogy. The doc5lrine of the Trinity is the imper- 
 il? 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ishable charter of human liberty. It is the very 
 arrogance and insolence of faith, the taunt of the 
 confident will flinging its defiance to formal logic 
 in the proclamation that God shall be true to 
 Himself and Man shall be true to himself, and 
 yet the Spirit of Order shall prevail and the 
 Holy City shall be built! 
 
 The inner logic and inevitable social conse- 
 quence of unitarianism, or pure monotheism, is 
 despotism. The human spirit must set its stake 
 in the eternal if it would win the world to civil 
 liberty. So long as everything can be settled by 
 a cry of '' God wills it," or ''Great is Allah," 
 there is no chance for democracy. It is neces- 
 sary to demonstrate the Ktemity of the Human — 
 the absolute Authority of the Soul. 
 
 The Greeks achieved a shallow and conven- 
 tional kind of liberty by filling their Olympus 
 with divinities that were frivolous — and so could 
 be laughed down. The Jews accomplished the 
 same thing — cleared a little space for the sin- 
 cerely human — ^by making a contradl with Jeho- 
 vah and holding him stridlly to it. But a real 
 and universal social liberty was not so much as 
 118 
 
The Axioms 
 
 conceivable until the name of the Son of Man 
 was shrined in an equal and ineffable greatness 
 with the name of God, and not until the rela- 
 tion between the two was conceived of as no 
 captious rivalry or hard bargain but a profound 
 and spiritual kinship which gave a man the 
 charter of eternity in following out to the last 
 definition the prompting of his own humanity. 
 
 Indissolubly associated in ancient theology with 
 the dodlrine of the Trinity is the doc5trine of the 
 duality of nature and singleness of personality in 
 the Son of Man. This, too, is implied in the very 
 principle of faith. For faith is faith only when 
 it faces a contradidlion and a difficulty; and 
 the doctrine in question is a frank avowal that the 
 divine image has feet of clay. It is a manly recog- 
 nition of the fadl that, in a certain broad aspedl 
 of his existence upon the earth, a man is creaturely 
 — a vi<5lim and subjedl of circumstances. It affirms 
 that life is a real struggle of the creative spirit 
 against the fatality of the world — for the realiza- 
 tion of integral personality. 
 
 Finally the great dodlrine of the Reformation — 
 that of justification by faith only — is simply a 
 119 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 somewhat scholastic announcement of the broad 
 principle in hand — to wit, that all the great and 
 saving dodlrines of Christianity are implied in 
 the very fadt of faith itself. 
 
 IV. The history of the post- Reformation era is 
 the history of the gradual translation of the 
 transcendent creed of earlier Christianity into 
 more ethical and pradlical terms. 
 
 The dodlrines of the Church become the funda- 
 mentals of secular society — Christianity merges 
 into democracy. The creed of democracy, like 
 its original, is merely an exfoliation of the prin- 
 ciple of faith. It may be conveniently summa- 
 rized in the historic formula — I^iberty, Equality, 
 Fraternity. 
 
 lyiberty, in the definite democratic-revolution- 
 ary sense of the word, means that common human 
 life has an original and creative character and is 
 the source of all moral authority. It negatives 
 the distindlion between sacred and secular 
 interests, and denies the theocratic authority of 
 the Church and the sovereignty of the State. It 
 is the modern and democratic unfoldment of the 
 120 
 
The Axioms 
 
 Christian do(5lrine of the consanguinity of a man 
 with God. It has no affinity with the ancient 
 Greek idea of conventional and acquired liberty, 
 and it was grossly misconceived by Rousseau and 
 the French Revolutionists in their theory of the 
 absolutism of majorities. 
 
 V. The dodlrine of equality is the sequence of 
 the dodlrine of liberty, since, however greatly men 
 may differ in their creaturely endowments, the 
 creativeness which is attributed to all men is a 
 thing in its nature miraculous and infinite, 
 baffling all standards of comparison. As a work- 
 ing hypothesis equality means that however low a 
 man may fall in the scale of success he never 
 forfeits his rights to an equal consideration with 
 the highest in the scale. It means that in a 
 democracy the law must utterly refuse to con- 
 sider the question of the relative deserts of men. 
 It has no competency to bestow titles of nobility 
 or pass bills of attainder; it can utter no word of 
 praise or blame. The penal code exists not to 
 punish those that are adjudged to be bad, but 
 simply to defeat those that seem to threaten the 
 121 
 
 y 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 common life. The whole system of government 
 and law is conceived of as a perpetual crusade in 
 the interest of liberty — a crusade in which there 
 is no blind obedience to a mystic authority, but 
 every citizen bears the sword of law as a personal 
 responsibility. 
 
 Equality as a principle of jurisprudence works 
 a revolutionary change in the spirit of laws, and 
 gradually readjusts the forms and ordinances of 
 the old static codes to a new and dynamic con- 
 ception of human rights. The old codes were 
 conceived and wrought out in the prepossession 
 that man is himself a creature and commodity of 
 God, a mere thing — albeit the highest. Accord- 
 ingly they approach every juristic question from 
 the standpoint of things — they are riveted to the 
 proprietary point of view. 
 
 The cry of the oppressed and disinherited for 
 an equality of possessions is the echo of the 
 sordidness and stupidity of the ancient masters 
 of the law. The question of the equality or 
 inequality of goods is an impertinence — it has 
 nothing to do with the real issue. And the code 
 of a democratic equality will refuse to be a divider 
 123 
 
The Axioms 
 
 until the real and important question has been 
 answered — namely, this: Does the proposed meas- 
 ure make for the creative life of the lowest man 
 concerned? If it does, then no title or vested 
 interest, tho it were very clear and long, should 
 stand for a moment in the way. If a statute 
 degrades anybody it is ipso fa5lo void. The 
 docftrines of liberty and equality issue from a 
 perception that there is a life in men that is 
 incommensurable with commodities, so that no 
 proprietary title can be good in law that does not 
 make for life. 
 
 Democratic law is not a dedudlion from the 
 principles of nature — it knows nothing of the 
 * ' Natural Rights of Man " ; it is a work of fine 
 art, and its concern is with the spiritual and 
 creative rights of men. It holds that wealth — 
 material welfare — consists only in a very limited 
 and secondary way, in the owning of things — 
 that it consists principally in the power to vitalize 
 things with the forces of ideas. The absorbing 
 interest of democratic political economy is the 
 releasing of the ideal forces to their maximum 
 efficiency. The matter of ownership, however 
 123 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 important, is distindlively subordinate, and, from 
 a democratic point of view, presents no grave 
 perplexities, but tends to settle itself on the 
 general principle that the tools belong to the man 
 that can use them. 
 
 VI. Turning now to the final term of the 
 democratic formula, the principle of fraternity is 
 by no means to be taken as a mere sentiment of 
 sociability. I^ike the principle of equality, it is 
 a profound and spiritual corollary of the primary 
 postulate of liberty. It is born of the cool sanity 
 of faith, and no ardor of good-fellowship can 
 possibly attain to it. It faces the problem of the 
 collision of wills. Men strive for conflic5ling 
 objedls — how then can social order be established ? 
 The old regime solved the problem by denying 
 the validity of all private and personal wills; in 
 the theory of the sovereign state the wills of 
 rulers and ruled alike are subjec5led to an external 
 and transcendent authority. Christianity, democ- 
 racy, looks for a solution in the opposite diredtion. 
 It declares that the collision of wills, the pursuit 
 of conflidling purposes, is born of the faith- 
 124 
 
The Axioms 
 
 lessness and shallowness of our living; that in 
 the bottom of men's hearts there is a congruity 
 of desires, a harmony of all individual interests. 
 This is the doc5lrine of fraternity. lyike all the 
 articles of the Christian and democratic faith, 
 it is incapable of expression in terms of the 
 passive intellecfl. It is an axiom, but it is an 
 axiom of faith. It is the ground of our con- 
 fidence that, in the passing away of the old social 
 order and the discrediting of the authorities upon 
 which that order has depended for social peace, 
 we are not committing the world to anarchy and 
 the mere lawless and malignant strife of rival 
 egotisms. It is the reasonable basis of our ex- 
 pedlation that an efficient government and a law 
 of world-wide prevalence can be established on 
 the basis of free and uncapitulating wills — the 
 consent of the people. 
 
 The perf ec5t triumph of democracy is to get the 
 knaves to consent to the jail and rejoice in it. 
 Meanwhile the sincere and unsentimental colli- 
 sions of wills is the purifying travail of the world. 
 And Evil is anything that breaks the spirit of a 
 man and makes him cringe to another. 
 125 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 VII. As the spiritual principle of democracy 
 will not permit the subjec5lion of one man's will 
 to another's, neither will it allow the subjedlion 
 of the individual will to the sum total of other 
 wills. Democratic fraternity is not the confusion 
 of all private and personal interests in a huge 
 and overwhelming public interest ; that is the 
 fraternity of the old social order which is passing 
 away — it is the fraternity of clans and races, the 
 fraternity whose bond is hereditary and of the flesh. 
 The social solidarities whose cohesive force is the 
 instin(5l of heredity, a kinship of blood, are 
 mutually repulsive in proportion to the energy 
 of their interior cohesion — they can not there- 
 fore produce a world-order. The irrational lust 
 of heredity, the agglutinousness of races, is of 
 the essence of the world-problem, and it contains 
 in itself no hope of solution. One must leave 
 father and brother if one would enter into the 
 fraternity of the modern spirit. Democracy lifts 
 its standard against all the old solidarities, and 
 proclaims a kinship that is not of flesh. The 
 consanquinity of democracy is not carnal but 
 spiritual. It is a transfusion of the blood of 
 126 
 
The Axioms 
 
 God, a communion in the Eternal Human. The 
 old solidarity must be dissolved in order that the 
 opposite principle, the principle of unanimity, 
 may be established. 
 
 VIII. Democracy stakes everything on the 
 individual, because the individual is the uni- 
 versal. The faith of democratic fraternity is that 
 if one go deep enough into any man's heart one 
 will find that the passion of his life issues out 
 of the Eternal Reasonableness and Justice ; and 
 the travail of history and experience is to bring 
 men to unity and to universal humanity by bring- 
 ing them to themselves. From the beginning of 
 civilization the world has been governed by the 
 mass-man, the mob. The principle of individ- 
 uality, though it has been the power of all liter- 
 ature and art, and the charm of all chivalry and 
 song, has hitherto played no considerable part in 
 the affairs of state. Theocracy can produce only 
 crowds and classes ; the dominance of an external 
 law can never produce individuals. Mass-man and 
 class-man are interchangeable terms, and individ- 
 uality and universality are interchangeable terms. 
 127 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 In the constitution of human nature, it is impos- 
 sible to accomplish the individualization of the 
 soul without universalizing it. A man can not 
 possibly have a clear, unitary, and persistent will 
 of his own until he has given himself unreservedly 
 to a design that is creative in the service of 
 humanity. As one grows in consistency and 
 persistence of desire, one grows in sanity and 
 usefulness. The laws of the material universe 
 are all drawn in favor of the sane and integral 
 will of the individual — the eternal passion of the 
 heart. And they are framed for the confusion of 
 all prurience and lust. The patience and per- 
 sistence of Satan is a Miltonian myth. It would 
 seem that the true and typical Prince of Sin 
 should be a soul with a shattered and divided 
 will, not half for good and half for evil, but 
 half for his crowd and half for himself — thus 
 working the damnation of his crowd and of 
 himself. 
 
 No man can abolish his heart's desire, tho he 
 
 may indeed be persuaded to the attempt by much 
 
 preaching of social sacrifice and by the lures of 
 
 glory. The truth about the mass-man as evinced 
 
 128 
 
The Axioms 
 
 by his patriotism and class-feeling, his sedlarian- 
 ism and party -spirit, is that he is balked of his 
 individuality by his half-hearted altruism. He 
 can not achieve an intelligent will or a sober 
 judgment because his mind is divided between 
 the law of his clan and that of his own soul. 
 His loyalty becomes a sentimentality or a fanati- 
 cism, and his desire, a preposterous lust of gain 
 or glory. So the social system of the mass- 
 man is ruled by fine theories — and sheer hunger. 
 Then when the cry of the fainting and crushed 
 goes up, the preachers go through the land plead- 
 ing with the people to give their wills into the 
 keeping of new sec5ls and parties — which serves 
 only to increase the confusion and bewilderment, 
 refining the fine sentiments and strengthening 
 the secret lusts. 
 
 IX . Democratic philosophy squarely j oins issue 
 with the current conception of the organic char- 
 adter of political society. The organic idea is 
 the fetish of the age, the modem form of the 
 ancient superstition of nature-worship. The 
 inevitable logic of the conception is the efface- 
 129 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ment of the individual, the subjec$lion of the part 
 to the whole. And the conception requires for 
 its completion the idea of a huge social Oversoul 
 or corporate personality, an idea that is utterly 
 mystical and unreal when applied to a local and 
 particular commonwealth. It creates a world of 
 warring gods, and commits the people to the 
 dominance of mere physiological law and the 
 economic forces. For how can a feature or a 
 finger resist the whole bulk of a body? And 
 how can one who is only a member of an organ- 
 ism do anything interesting until he has got 
 every rib and tissue to agree to it ? Moral enter- 
 prise becomes a problem for specialists, and agi- 
 tation a disease. Nobody can do anything until 
 everybody is ready to do it. A society that con- 
 tinues to lie under the spell of this superstition 
 is devoted to death — or a reign of reviving devil- 
 try. For society is not an organism; it is an 
 organization. 
 
 It is indeed possible to say, by a figure of 
 
 speech, that mankind becomes an organism as it 
 
 comes to its humanity and realizes its relationship 
 
 to God. This simile came from the Man of 
 
 180 
 
The Axioms 
 
 Nazareth, and it has played a great part in the 
 history of the Church. It serves to emphasize 
 the intimacy of human relationships in the realm 
 of the ideal. But it is only a figure of speech, 
 and like many another figure of the same im- 
 mortal speech it has been wrested to false mean- 
 ings. It has been woven into the superstition of 
 transubstantiation. And there is no fitter char- 
 a(5lerization of this modern theory of social or- 
 ganism than to say that, in its psychology, it is 
 a newer version of high-church sacramentalism. 
 It hushes all questionings with its * ' Hoc est 
 corpus,'^ It overawes the individual with the 
 mystery of majorities — it is the elevation of the 
 Host — the adoration of the Mass. 
 
 X. In contrast with the dodlrine of social 
 organism, democracy sets up its axiom of frater- 
 nity — a fraternity which is not a matter of hered- 
 ity, contiguity, or material interest, but depends 
 for its bond upon the communion of men in rea- 
 sonableness. 
 
 It is in the depths of personality that democ- 
 racy discovers its social principle — its principle of 
 131 
 
 "^ ^ OF T4 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 universality. True it is, that so long as democ- 
 racy is conceived of as a matter of the wider 
 extension of the balloting practise, it contains no 
 necessary implication of universalism and no 
 negation of the sovereignty of separate and 
 mutually exclusive states. For, as has been 
 pointed out, the strength of the old world-gov- 
 ernments — even the most despotic — has been in 
 the support given by majorities. They all have 
 made their appeal to the mass-man. But in spite 
 of ' the shallowness of political philosophy and 
 the general inarticulateness of mankind, democ- 
 racy has always meant in the common sense of 
 the people infinitely more than this. 
 
 It means, and has always meant at bottom, 
 not that majorities shall have their unquestioned 
 way, but rather the opposite — to wit, that the 
 individual has a right that no masses of men 
 shall be permitted to override. The quintes- 
 sence of democracy is the legitimizing of the 
 will of the weakest man and the championing of 
 his claim against the fanaticism of masses and 
 the arrogance of an external and arbitrary law. 
 It conceives of the wills of the multitude as all 
 182 
 
The Axioms 
 
 alike growing out of the will of God, and as 
 deepening back through the discipline of life and 
 the attritions of human commerce to their root 
 in the Eternal Desire. It announces the equality 
 of persons, not as a proposition in mathematics 
 but as a disclaimer of the human possibility of 
 fixing the gradation of deserts. 
 
 The democratic principle does not require that 
 men should eat and sleep together or wear each 
 others' clothes. Its catholic charity proceeds 
 from that which is discovered to be the source of 
 all law and dignity upon the earth — the immeas- 
 urable souls of ordinary men. 
 
 It is this democratic conception of the final 
 authenticity of the individual desire that is under- 
 mining the old systems of traditional law, dis- 
 integrating the solidarity of the great political 
 aggregates, and discrediting the sovereignty of 
 states. And this is the conception that gives to 
 democracy its charadter of universality. 
 
 The vigor of democratic polity is in democratic 
 
 religion. So long as the American people would 
 
 make their citizenship a privilege as against the 
 
 rest of the world, they will be ridden over rough- 
 
 133 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 shod by domestic monopolies. For American 
 citizenship is not a privilege; it is a propagandum. 
 The great psychological discovery of Chris- 
 tianity is that, back of every private and ego- 
 tistical will, there is in every man a deeper and 
 more indigenous will that is public and catholic. 
 The claim of Christianity — and so of democracy — 
 is that the individual will is not a bad thing 
 capable of being made good, but a good thing 
 capable of being made bad. In its bold declara- 
 tion of the legitimacy of the heart's desire it 
 makes a venturesome appeal from that in human 
 nature which is accidental and acquired to that 
 which is deepest and most essential. '^ '^*^««5^i*« 
 I Now it is the ancient conception of the badness 
 lof the natural will that bases and sanations every 
 Ischeme of class-privilege and national exclusive- 
 Iness. Given the conception that the will is 
 essentially illegitimate — that it is endowed with a 
 merely potential goodness — and it becomes inevi- 
 table that the relative value of the souls of men 
 will be judged by a standard external to them- 
 selves. The demonstration of power will be 
 regarded as a proof of right, economic success 
 184 
 
The Axioms 
 
 will bestow a moral prestige upon the successful, 
 and the winning of a crown will cure defedl of 
 title. The social law throughout its whole extent 
 will be warped to a conformity with this primary 
 prepossession, and in spite of the formal equity 
 of the law it will be found pracflically impossible 
 to construe it otherwise than in the special interest 
 of the prevailing nations and classes. 
 
 It is a total misconception of the nature of class 
 and national privilege to suppose that it can 
 rest and enjoy its spoils on a basis of sheer frank 
 aggression or good luck. The aggression would 
 be repressed as criminal and the luck would 
 be canceled by law if the people did not — in a 
 more or less conscious way — attribute to the 
 successful a superior moral desert. And in spite 
 of the promptings of self-interest, the defeated 
 can not, at the bottom of their fearful hearts, do 
 otherwise than attribute to the successful a 
 superior moral desert so long as they worship a 
 non-human god, and think of the will as legitimized 
 only through conformity with an external rule of 
 good and evil. 
 
 Hence no people can break the reign of fatality 
 135 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 or by any means escape from the yoke of military 
 and economic despotism so long as they deny the 
 legitimacy of the will of the brownest or blackest 
 man on the other side of the world. They may 
 impose terms, but they are bound to deal with 
 him as an equal person; the demand for his 
 unconditional surrender is a moral absurdity. 
 
 Under the sway of state sovereignty it is 
 possible for a people to claim and successfully 
 maintain their various class privileges and con- 
 ventional deserts under the sovereign law, with- 
 out claiming equal rights for an alien and 
 subjugated people. The subjugated race then 
 becomes simply a part of the lowest and most 
 unprivileged class in a social order that is pen- 
 etrated through and through with the spirit of 
 monopoly. But it is not possible for a nation to 
 maintain the principle of the sovereignty of the 
 people, the principle of the unconventional 
 authority of the soul, without maintaining the 
 legal equality of all souls. 
 
 It is morally impossible for a man to believe in 
 the legitimacy of his will, as a thing existing in 
 its own original right, apart from the accidents of 
 186 
 
The Axioms 
 
 his social and material condition, without con- 
 ceding a like legitimacy to the wills of all other 
 men of whatever condition. The principle of 
 individuality is thus the exa(5l equivalent of the 
 principle of universality. If you are protestant 
 enough you will be a catholic, and to be a 
 thorough-going American is to be a citizen of the 
 world. 
 
 XI. We have found that the essentials of the 
 historic creed of Christianity are all implicit in 
 the mind of any man that has determined to make 
 the adventure of faith, determined to risk the 
 reasonableness of the cosmic world, the sincerity 
 of God, and the pradlicability of the ideal. We 
 have found also that the great historic creed of 
 democracy — summed up in the formula: L<iberty, 
 Equality and Fraternity — is simply a more ethical 
 and pracflical unfoldment of historical Christian- 
 ity, and that, like its original, it is contained in 
 the very fa(5l of faith. 
 
 The axioms of these creeds are neither math- 
 ematical nor what is called scientific. They can 
 not be justified to the criticism of moral cowardice. 
 137 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 There is no way of proving their truth to the 
 mere critical intelligence. They are true only in 
 case the primary assumptions of brave living are 
 true. They are contingent axioms — contingent 
 upon the presumption that life is worth while. 
 But they are axioms — invincible and necessary 
 propositions — in the sense that there is no escape 
 from them. You are bound to reckon with them. 
 You must risk their being true or else give up the 
 affirmation of your own soul and die a deserter. 
 These are the terms upon which life upon the 
 earth must be lived. It seems that God has con- 
 cealed himself from the searchings of the unven- 
 turesome intelledl. The cunningest dete(5lives, 
 ranging the earth for ten thousand years, have 
 not been able to find an indubitable footprint of 
 him. Nature is beautiful? Yes, to the brave 
 and free ; not otherwise beautiful. Kvery external 
 fadl is double-faced — you may construe it in the 
 way of love or terror. 
 
 Thus through the long sifting and simplifying 
 
 processes of history and experience we have 
 
 reduced religion to its simplest terms — have 
 
 found out the quintessence of religion, the 
 
 138 
 
The Axioms 
 
 religion absolute. It is summed up in a magna- 
 nimity of the soul toward God — a quick 
 response to the divine compliment that has put 
 the world in our keeping. God has withdrawn 
 himself to give us room. The end of the long 
 world-process is seen to be not the assimilation 
 of all lives to an archetypal life, but the infinite 
 differentiation of life in the unity of God. We 
 will not huddle any more, but we strike hands 
 with free and indomitable spirits of all times and 
 countries. 
 
 There come drifting in upon us the most con- 
 vincing reassurances. The earth becomes plastic 
 to the ideal. The languages fuse into a volapuk 
 of faith. All the historic struggles are seen to 
 have a common issue. There is nothing any- 
 where that moves and sings, that is not a part of 
 the great epic of the soul. 
 
 The religion of democracy is not new or newly 
 discovered. It is the master-motive of the whole 
 historic drama. The vidloriousness of the free 
 and fluent spirit over the hard elements of the 
 world is the theme of all enduring literature and 
 the energy of all creative art. It is also the 
 139 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 esoteric ideal of the social force and fashion, 
 the beau mo7tde of all ages and of all lands ; for 
 the beau mojide has always affedled at least to 
 measure men by their courage and to care little 
 for clothes and furniture. It never would be 
 ruled by etiquette. It makes fashions, but passes 
 on and does not follow them; expects every man 
 to answer for his love with his life, and would 
 impoverish the soil and the seas for the sake of 
 human reverence and hospitality. Democracy 
 comes out of Nazareth, but it does not learn its 
 lessons from the stupid. It is the lyric song of 
 ancient chivalry, deepened and exalted to a 
 world-symphony. It is the ideal of the old nobil- 
 ities, sobered by science and the economic fadls. 
 It is the romance of the ages, with the senti- 
 mentality cleaned out. For the soul of chivalry, 
 nobility and romance is the contempt of laws 
 and of all earthly things, except as they make 
 for the freedom and dignity of persons. 
 
 In a word, there is nothing in this world that is 
 
 great or half -great that has not been the produc5l 
 
 of the affirmative intelledl. All the lines of great 
 
 tradition converge in the heart of democracy. 
 
 140 
 
The Axioms 
 
 Out of the close courts and cloisters, the libraries 
 and galleries of the old regime, democracy in 
 perennial youth comes into the open air to take 
 up the burden of the world. The old faiths die 
 and faith is bom — a faith now at length grown 
 self-conscious and aware of its world-revolution- 
 ary implications. 
 
 XII. The university has also a creed, and as 
 the creed of religion and politics issues out of the 
 simplest affirmation of faith, so it is with the 
 creed of the university. The modern university 
 is not a school of dialec5lics and speculative phi- 
 losophy; it is related only by contrast to the 
 Academies and Museums of antiquity. The 
 history of learning shows a clear breach be- 
 tween the ancient and the modem world. The 
 ancient school exhausted the possibilities of the 
 passive and reflec5live intelledl, and after the 
 intervention of the long, silent ages of early Chris- 
 tianity, the university grew up, in the nurture 
 of the Church, with an ideal in its heart that is 
 the antithesis of the ancient scholastic ideal. It 
 is true that the medieval university used the 
 141 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 books of tlie ancient world, and mimicked the 
 methods of the rhetoricians and sophists of 
 Greece, but the world's intelledlual ideal had 
 turned the crisis of a revolutionary change. 
 Henceforth the currents of human thinking were 
 set in a new diredlion. Anselm's ** I believe — in 
 order that I may understand ! ' ' was a word that 
 could have been spoken only by a man of the 
 modern spirit. It marks the turning of the tide. 
 
 To the ancient man thinking was an exercise 
 that had no necessary relation to the fadls of the 
 universe. It was a variety of mathematics, the 
 algebra of ideas. To the man of the modem 
 spirit thinking is a wrestle with things ; it is the 
 tense struggle of the soul to get its bread and 
 wine out of this stubborn, tempting, denying, 
 and inviting wilderness of nature. In the ancient 
 man's thinking there was no need of moral 
 adventure — one had but to lie still and look up 
 at the ceiling ; but the thinking that is charac- 
 teristically modern begins and constantly con- 
 tinues in the buoyant, risky assumption, which 
 never can be fully verified until the day of judg- 
 ment, that it is possible to find the complete, 
 
 -" ' 142 
 
The Axioms 
 
 resplendent aura of the ideal in the very dust of 
 the obdurate earth. 
 
 In the old world thinking was respedled for its 
 leisure, but in the modern world for its labor. 
 Thinking becomes the divine travail of the soul. 
 We are led to surmise that God made the world 
 resistant, and laid his fond anathema upon the 
 soil, in order that in the real and passionate 
 struggle for the things that taste sweet to the 
 soul, a man might be raised from creaturehood 
 and become a man. The old world has be- 
 queathed to us heads bereft of hands, and hands 
 bereft of heads ; and the bitterness of death lurks 
 equally in both bereavements. The old world 
 has thus posed a problem which, in the way of 
 its statement, has no possible solution. There 
 can be no communion except that of compassion 
 and patronage between creative men that think 
 and human creatures, if such there can be, that 
 just hew and moil. It is a mad dream that hands 
 can dicflate terms to heads, and the maddest 
 dream of all that hands can dispense with heads 
 and run the world without them.' jThe only 
 effedlive and wage-earning labor in the world is 
 143 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 spiritual — the toil of the feeling, knowing, 
 creative spirit. j The movement of muscles may 
 be as painful as the contortions of fever and as 
 useful as the trade- winds ; but it is not human 
 labor unless it is ac5luated by free human hearts 
 and heads. The real and economic values of the 
 coarsest and simplest work are in the ideal forces 
 that go into it. And if there be anywhere a dead 
 soul whose body has been riveted to a machine, 
 his grievance is, not that he gets less pay than 
 he deserves, but that he is excluded from human 
 company and deprived of the chance to be 
 humanly useful. 
 
 When a man is reduced to the state of a thing, 
 an analysis will show that he makes no contribu- 
 tion whatever to the civilizing wealth of the 
 world. His very person becomes merely an em- 
 bodiment of the blind forces of nature. He 
 ceases to be a social producer and becomes a 
 social problem. 
 
 The old regime despised the brain-worker, the 
 concrete thinker, and gave its honors to glory- 
 seekers — the soldiers and the priests. The rise 
 of the third estate to the rule of the modern 
 144 
 
The Axioms 
 
 world was inevitable in the nature of things, 
 since those that deal with realities are stronger 
 than those that live in dreams. But that third 
 estate — the merchants, manufadturers, civil- 
 izers — have in turn submitted their minds to the 
 domination of the lingering political and ecclesi- 
 astical superstitions, and have sought to recon- 
 stitute the old order of aristocracy and social 
 abstrac5lion. So far as this is true of them, they 
 have invalidated their title to the inheritance of 
 the earth, and it must pass to stronger and more 
 venturesome spirits. For as the earth can never 
 be gripped by mechanical hands, so also it can 
 never be ruled by self-cultivating people, intent 
 upon the safeguarding of their special interests 
 and the saving of their own souls. 
 
 Both extremities of society are dead at heart, 
 passionless, and destitute of purpose. Both are 
 ruled by an external law — the one by the law of 
 animal necessity, the other by an intricate code 
 of customary pieties, proprieties, and vested 
 rights. The world is not to be saved by mimicry 
 of the rich or by mimicry of the poor. For 
 both riches and poverty are solecisms and im- 
 145 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 pertinences — the death of the heart's desire. 
 The rich and poor alike are to be drawn back 
 by shame and love into living contac5l with the 
 people that feel and know the world as it really is. 
 
 Bffedtive thinking is orderly and consistent 
 feeling. No one has ever thought to any pur- 
 pose with his head alone; the thing must be done 
 with soul and body and the whole passion of 
 life. The talk of head-work and hand-work is 
 the pedantry of drawing-rooms and social-reform 
 seances. The distindlion is not interesting to 
 people absorbed in doing their work. The man 
 that is wrestling his way into the divine soul of 
 things does not care to soil his hands — or care 
 not to. 
 
 We are to be delivered from the infidelity of 
 supposing that the world was made with the 
 ache of toil in it just for the sake of the ache, or 
 as if God were a bungler and must perforce com- 
 mit the world to a daily dead loss and misery. 
 We are bound to believe, if we believe in life at 
 all, that the necessity of working for what we 
 want exists for the quickening and clarifying of 
 consciousness, the deepening of the sense of per- 
 146 
 
The Axioms 
 
 sonal existence, and the strengthening and em- 
 boldening of the will. Nature holds us hard to 
 her breast, in this straining and necessitous em- 
 brace, in order that we may feel the pulse of the 
 blood of God, and come to understand that the 
 Truth is out-of-doors and not in the recesses of 
 the brain. 
 
 The archetypal laborer, then, is the man that 
 thinks and feels the most — the man that can cor- 
 relate, in the synthesis of his sanity and faith, 
 the largest number of concrete and humanly 
 relevant fadls. From this point of view it be- 
 comes apparent that the university-idea is of 
 commanding importance for the solution of the 
 world-problem. For the university — the strong- 
 hold of the affirmative intelledl — is seen to be 
 the source of all human produdlions — the creator 
 of material civilization. 
 
 The university, as it exists, bears to its own 
 intrinsic idea a relation like that which a relig- 
 ious sedl bears to the essential church-idea. 
 The adlual institutions of the university are the 
 detritus which has been borne along in the stream 
 of history from the banks and shoals of the 
 147 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ancient world. So closely have the things 
 which are its opposites been identified with it, 
 that in coming to itself the university must seem 
 to deny itself. To the superficial view it has 
 seemed to stand for a learning that receives 
 everything and affirms nothing — offering only an 
 unbounded opportunity for debate; but its real 
 mission is to demonstrate the futility of all the 
 imaginations and eruditions of mental abstrac- 
 tion, and to go forth to the world to communi- 
 cate to the people the quickening passion of 
 affirmative ideas. The university is to break 
 the immemorial spell of the passive intellecfl and 
 to expose the superstition of arbitrary law. It 
 will declare that there is nothing so certain in the 
 world as life itself and the chance to live it 
 bravely out. 
 
 The ways have been prepared, broad highways 
 of the republic of art and letters leading like 
 Roman roads from the centers of civilization to 
 the ends of the world, for the passage of the 
 university-idea across all the frontiers of 
 politics. 
 
 The university contends for the Humanity of 
 148 
 
The Axioms 
 
 God, the congeniality of the Mind of Nature 
 with the Mind of Man, and the plasticity of all 
 materials to the human ideal. The beginning of 
 its world-conquest waits only upon its discovery 
 of the axioms of its own faith. 
 
 149 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THK WORKING-OUT OF THK WORLD PROBI^KM 
 
 I. When under the old regime the authority 
 of the external law was definite and unquestioned, 
 the organs of that authority and its material 
 forces stood like fac5ts of nature, and it was pos- 
 sible for the stronger spirits to live simple, 
 straightforward lives without mean anxiety or 
 bewilderment. But when the authorities were 
 partially but not wholly discredited — and that is 
 the way the case stands to-day — everything be- 
 came a problem, and even the strongest men 
 lost their sure-footed confidence and that heroic 
 clearness which is the charm of the old chivalry 
 and romance. 
 
 The discrediting of the old authorities did 
 
 nothing of itself to hearten the hearts of men, and 
 
 in the absence of faith in God authorities of some 
 
 kind are necessary. So men have set to work to 
 
 150 
 
The World Problem 
 
 find new authorities in place of the old, and the 
 earth has swarmed with political corporations, 
 se(5ls, parties, and schools of specialists. The 
 large and settled tyranny has given place to a 
 teeming host of petty tyrannies, among which 
 one may, in a measure, make his choice. 
 
 Those that long for the old heroisms and valors 
 and do not understand the spiritual promise of 
 democracy have proposed a retreat to the old 
 regime, and the reac5lionary currents are every- 
 where in evidence. But it is impossible for the 
 world to go back, and the advocates of the old 
 authorities have but increased the general con- 
 fusion. 
 
 There is but one way to retrieve the dignity of 
 mankind and win back the self-respedl of the 
 world, and that is to set our faces steadily for- 
 ward to finish the work that our fathers began. 
 Society will be reintegrated and the old personal 
 faiths will come back a thousand times renewed 
 when we shall have courage to accept without 
 flinching the whole program of the great spiritual 
 revolution. It is too late to bother with dogmas 
 in detail; the time has come to lay the ax at the 
 151 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 root of the tree and destroy the very principle of 
 dogmatism. 
 
 If there is any such thing as the logic of history 
 it is time now to make trial of the sovereignty of 
 the people. As a fine sentiment it has been 
 ineffec5lual; as a prac5lical program it is still the 
 open door of hope. Nobody has a right to expedl 
 that humanity, unfettered and unscared, will ruin 
 the framework of the world. At all events, these 
 mercantile and military corporations and the 
 spawning sec5ls, parties, and schools are a poor 
 substitute for God and lyaw. We have no choice 
 but to go on. 
 
 II. The integration of universal society fol- 
 lows upon the integration of the individual soul. 
 The soul has been shattered into fragments 
 because the will has been discredited by the over- 
 whelming aspecfls of mechanical law. Thus the 
 real desire of the heart has been discouraged, and 
 men have occupied themselves not with the things 
 they would do but the things they suppose they 
 must. 
 
 Since every man is tangent to the universe at 
 152 
 
The World Problem 
 
 just one point, his happiness consists in his doing 
 one thing at a time and doing it exceptionally 
 well. Specialism is the law of creative life when 
 specialism means the grip of the creative spirit 
 of a man — ^laying hold of the world in his own 
 peculiar way. But specialism is the death of 
 art and joy when it is negative and compulsory — 
 the subjugation of the spirit under the yoke of 
 economic necessity. We have had a plague of 
 mechanicalized specialists. Everywhere we see 
 only fractional people — people that can do a 
 trick. The world is tired of carpenters, clergy- 
 men, pedagogists, and all manner of experts and 
 conventioners who see things with the bias of 
 their trade. The earth is barren, and the people 
 starve for the lack of catholic and cosmic-tem- 
 pered men. Society will grow fluent, expressive, 
 spiritual, and the arts will flourish when the 
 dodlors, lawyers, and ditchers are what they are 
 because they choose to be. 
 
 The faith that legitimizes the heart's desire is 
 
 bound to produce a new and more integral kind 
 
 of man, and that fadl is the main reliance of the 
 
 democratic program. Specialism of the mechan- 
 
 153 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ical and regimentated kind is at war with the 
 modern spirit and belongs to the old regime. It 
 tends toward caste and status, and destroys the 
 freedom and vitality of society. When the old 
 regime was in its prime every man's specialism 
 was prescribed by statute law; now it is pre- 
 scribed and enforced by naked, economic law; that 
 is the whole extent of our achievement up to date. 
 
 So long as every man is a partialist and a par- 
 ticularist it is impossible to solve any social 
 problem, because it is impossible to get a social 
 and comprehensive view of any problem. The 
 first requisite of reform is men that choose their 
 own crafts and put the spirit of individuality into 
 them. To break the spell of irrational economics 
 ii the prime need is poets, artists and lovers of ffie 
 world. The organization of a democratic cafiiol- 
 icism waits upon the coming of such men. The 
 preachers, politicians and savants are inefie<5live 
 because they are, or seem to be, for the most part 
 hired men retained m a special interest. 
 
 We shall rediscover the intrinsic versatility of 
 the human spirit. In the great days of medieval 
 art the artists were painters, sculptors, builders, 
 154 
 
The World Problem 
 
 makers of roads, and movers of mountains; so it 
 shall be again — and more so. A master of any 
 trade is master of all. 
 
 III. The discovery that Americanism is the 
 quintessence of historical Christianity, that the 
 creed of the Church is one with that of demo- 
 cratic society, is bound to furnish the substance 
 of a world-moving evangel. But it is a gospel 
 that can not be carried around the world by 
 clergymen or politicians. The old shibboleths 
 of professional religion and professional politics 
 can not be translated into a universal irenicon. 
 The very names of religion and politics are names 
 of confusion and discord. It is impossible for pro- 
 fessional religion to sanc5lify politics, and equally 
 impossible for politics to sanify professional relig- 
 ion. The distin<5lion between the two stands as 
 the immemorial monument of the original sin and 
 schism of the mind — its inveterate, barren a 
 priorism and a posteriorism, forever bullying the 
 human heart either with the terror of ghostly 
 abstractions or the bald brutality of unrational- 
 ized fadls. There is no hope of civilization or of 
 155 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 social order, save in the rise and dominance of 
 the affirmative intelle(5l. It is the mission of the 
 university — the Democratic Catholic Church — to 
 meet this emergency of the world. It must pro- 
 vide new catagories of thinking and a new vocab- 
 ulary of revolution. 
 
 The university must stand to represent the 
 sovereignty of the people. It will derive its faith, 
 its world-conquering spirit from the great tradi- 
 tion of the historic Church. But the forms of its 
 expression will be the historical forms of politics. 
 This is no inspiration of prophecy; if it is any- 
 thing it is psychology — the science of the spiri- 
 tual processes of history. No one is qualified to 
 say when or under what stress of moral com- 
 pulsion the reintegration of society will be 
 effected; but it requires no special gift to see that 
 when it does come to pass, the social institution 
 that has sought to represent democracy apart 
 from the concrete fadts and the institution that 
 has sought to achieve the fa(5l without the 
 spirit will be available — the one as the spirit 
 and the other as the form of that other and 
 correlating institution whose genius it is to ex- 
 156 
 
The World Problem 
 
 press the pradlical power of the God-confident 
 intelledl. 
 
 The identification of Ainericanism with quint- 
 essential Christianity is the disclosure of the 
 meaning and mission of America. But that 
 meaning and mission can never be expressed and 
 carried out in a social order until it shall be 
 clearly conceived and uttered in the precipitating 
 words of intelledl. This is the work of the uni- 
 versity. When it shall realize the terms of its 
 own charter and so be capable of uttering effec- 
 tual words it will perceive that its charter is 
 nothing other than the creeds of Christianity and 
 democracy, and it will proceed to the interpreta- 
 tion of that charter for the enfranchisement of 
 the people. 
 
 IV. As the great political parties in the 
 United States have been formed simply by the 
 establishment in every ward of every city of the 
 standard of a definite social ideal — so it must be 
 with the institution of a democratic Catholicism. 
 The demoralization of the old parties furnishes 
 the opportunity. The fac5l that the old parties 
 157 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 have both ceased to represent the old social 
 ideals clears the way for a new social ideal 
 that shall synthesize and transcend the old con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 The decadence of the old parties does not 
 prove the corruption of the American people or 
 their abandonment of ideal aims. It indicates, 
 on the contrary, a general consciousness that the 
 old bottles can not contain the new wine. The 
 people have left the old parties to the politicians 
 because they are becoming aware of the futility 
 of that party-spirit which once engaged their in- 
 terest. Everywhere there is restlessness. It is 
 the rising of a great hope and the gathering of 
 a great determination. The need of the hour is 
 a definite social ideal that is true both to the ex- 
 perience of the past and the hope of the future — 
 an ideal, historic and evolutionary. It must be 
 seen to be no invention of moralists, but the 
 irresistible logic of the history of the world. 
 And it must be thoroughgoing and worth 
 while; the greatest thing will be the most prac- 
 ticable. Such an ideal, definite, morally com- 
 manding and logically inevitable, is the ideal of 
 158 
 
The World Problem 
 
 a catholic democracy to be carried around the 
 world by the university, in the spirit of his- 
 toric Christianity and in the ways of pradlical 
 politics. 
 
 V. The university, as it plants its standard 
 in town-halls and church-buildings, or in barns 
 and wigwams, from ward to ward and from town 
 to town, will not summon the local assemblies to 
 the general renovation of the world; it will not 
 call people away from their real and present in- 
 terests to imaginary interests on the other side of 
 the earth; nor will it seek to make universal the 
 provincialisms of New York, or of I^ondon, or 
 St. Petersburg. Its endeavor will run in the op- 
 posite diredlion. It will bring the universal 
 humanities to a focus in every village of the 
 prairies, producing catholic individualities and 
 cosmopolitan cities even where the people live 
 in sod- houses or adobe huts. 
 
 The university will rally the people to a com- 
 manding creed. It will accomplish a clear and 
 pradlical working organization for the carrying 
 out of that creed in the forms of law and govern- 
 159 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ment. It will stand in every eledloral precindl 
 as a political primary that never adjourns. But 
 its organization, like that of the political parties 
 in their best estates, will be fluent and responsive 
 to the demands of the people. It will not consti- 
 tute an authority apart from the common life — 
 there will be no oaths or shibboleths, no free- 
 masonries or party-loyalties. 
 
 The apostolate of democracy must be made up 
 of world-tempered men who can pass from 
 metropolis to hamlet, and from country to coun- 
 try — at home in all lands — ^stirring the stagnan 
 pools of provincialism and freshening them with 
 the universal air. There can be no clergy-caste ; 
 the Church of democracy must be governed by 
 the laity, and must draw its material support from 
 the free contributions of the people. The time 
 will come when the people will pour into the 
 treasuries of the university what they now 
 give grudgingly to the sedlarian churches, poUt- 
 ical parties, privately supported colleges, and the 
 innumerable futile charities — so that the material 
 establishments of the democratic ideal may exceed 
 the dignity and splendor of medieval Catholicism. 
 160 
 
The World Problem 
 
 But, for a while, doubtless the ministers and 
 builders of the university must like to live hard. 
 As the institution of the new cathoUcism 
 grows to its prevalence and success, it will accom- 
 plish what is true and democratic in the vague 
 hopes of college-settlements and university- 
 exMlM?5^'m5vanehts. It will gfet the better o! 
 the politicians, and will probably take out of their 
 hands the control of the whole system of public 
 education. Its local organization, like that of 
 the political parties, will have definite territorial 
 limits, and will no doubt keep its census of 
 souls, or parish-register, with all of the pains- 
 taking that is pradlised by Tammany Hall, so 
 that every child that is born shall have a social 
 status and a name to be known by. The secret 
 of Tammany is its utter humanism — it keeps 
 close to the concrete. It prevails over the 
 scholars-in-politics and the ecclesiastical crusades, 
 and deserves to prevail, because it has renounced 
 abstra(5lion and adls in the power of the affirma- 
 tive mind. The political organizations of which 
 it is the type can never be weakened by preach- 
 ing or repressed by law. They must be super- 
 161 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 seded by that which alone deserves to supersede 
 them — to wit, a social organization whose human- 
 ism is wider and more affirmative than their own. 
 
 The new Catholicism must seek to make every 
 parish a little world pulsing with the life of the 
 nations and the ages — a comradeship in what is 
 great and fine, and an intimate neighborhood 
 wherein men know and help each other. 
 
 After the religious fanaticisms are a little 
 dulled it may be possible for the people to under- 
 stand and rejoice in those two great rituals which 
 have stood for ages to celebrate the polar prin- 
 ciples of democracy — baptism and the holy 
 communion of the common bread — the symbol 
 of individuality and the symbol of universality. 
 Tho, indeed, we could even do without the 
 symbols, if necessary, after we had got a measure 
 of the substance. 
 
 **^ VI. In a word, the free association of the 
 people, institutionalized in the university, must 
 supersede the sovereignty of the state as the rep- 
 \ resentative of the original and essential vitalities 
 K of society. This can be accomplished only 
 
The World Problem 
 
 through a moral and intelledlual volte face — a 
 social, spiritual experience which is the ethical 
 reality that has been sometimes foreshadowed, 
 but oftener travestied, in sedlarian theories of 
 conversion. It consists in the appreciation of 
 the fadl that the regime of justice and liberty 
 becomes possible only when the social center 
 of gravity falls not in this ac5lual world but in 
 the infinitely resourceful world of the yet-to-be- 
 accomplished ideal, and that it is impossible to 
 break the yoke of the military and economic 
 power until the people understand that society 
 is society before it is a police-force or an indus- 
 trial partnership. The growing appreciation 
 of the subordinate and conventional charadler 
 of all legal and political institutions will make it 
 possible for the university, in its progress around 
 the world, to efface by a gradual but irresistible 
 process the political frontiers. 
 
 The ministry of the university opens a world- 
 regenerating career to those that love the great 
 adventures of the ideal. They will not imagine 
 that things can be accomplished with ease because 
 they are morally inevitable and lie in the broad 
 163 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 track of the logical movement of history. His- 
 tory swirls and sags, but does not move forward 
 without risk and loss. And the men that are to 
 do the things that are to be done must be trial- 
 tempered paladins of faith, broad-shouldered in 
 the soul, and big enough to press hard on the 
 gate for the turning of the hinge of universal 
 history. 
 
 VII. In the light of the new orientation of the 
 mind which this ministry will accomplish the 
 insoluble social problems will grow soluble. The 
 seemingly irreducible contradictions will yield to 
 a process of synthesis. Neither socialism nor inr 
 dividualism will prevail, but both — in a sense 
 different from either. And so of imperialism and 
 anti-imperialism, capitalism and laborism, con- 
 servatism and radicalism, and so on through the 
 catalog of class-controversies. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that the cause of the 
 constant tendency of men to divide into two parties 
 on every social issue is the prevalence of the pas- 
 sive intellect: and the attempt to institutionalize a 
 social rule that shall be superior to all individuals. 
 164 
 
The World Problem 
 
 Now democracy does not deny the existence of 
 a superior authority, social and universal, but it 
 declares that the authority lies in the heart of 
 the Eternal Man, and can not be institution- 
 alized upon the earth. It rests its confidence of 
 the pradlicability of civilization upon the self- 
 realization of men, and their quickening and 
 deepening sense of participation in the Eternal 
 Humanity. But everywhere throughout the 
 world to-day the people are still ashamed of their 
 own souls and dare not strive frankly for the 
 things they care about. It always has been the 
 egotistic interest of the upper classes — the classes 
 that have done the thinking and furnished the 
 moral theories — to perpetuate this state of aifairs. 
 And never, in any considerable numbers at once, 
 have they escaped from the temptation. The 
 denial of the authority of the human ideal has 
 made it possible to clothe with spiritual sandlions 
 that power of the state which has been, and is 
 to-day, the bulwark of all social privilege. And 
 as the authority of the state has always had a 
 dual expression — transcendentalism on the one 
 hand and brute force on the other — so every 
 165 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 social interest has presented two aspedls to the 
 passive and devitalized minds of the people, as 
 it has been looked at from the standpoint of 
 traditional theories, or from that of the present 
 and pressing fadls. This schism is, as has been 
 already pointed out, a psychologic necessity 
 under the regime of the passive intelle(5l. It 
 corresponds to the interminable scholastic con- 
 troversy between a priori and a posteriori logic. 
 Both logical methods are utterly futile and life- 
 destroying, and would be seen to be so if the 
 slaves of the passive intelle6l had not been gener- 
 ally saved to some measure of sanity by their 
 unconscious confusion of logical methods. 
 
 And if party-spirit has not utterly ruined the 
 world it is because the maddest of a priorists and 
 a posteriorists have usually had some flicker of 
 light from that afi&rmative intelledl which is the 
 creative flame in every man, and will not finally 
 allow the array of reasons and the appearances 
 of things utterly to overwhelm the heart's desire. 
 
 The essence of Americanism is the conception 
 that all intelle<5lual and moral authority inheres 
 in the living body of humanity as it faces its 
 166 
 
The World Problem 
 
 daily problem — while the old and undemocratic 
 regime undertakes to set up a moral and intel- 
 le(5lual authority outside of and above the living 
 persons of men. 
 
 The cause of the world's demoralization is the 
 establishment of moral authorities, and the ex- 
 planation of the general weakness of intelledl is 
 to be found in the intellecflual authorities. Try 
 as he may, a man can not altogether escape from 
 his own soul or from its native perceptions of 
 what is good and true; consequently the rever- 
 ence for an external authority is sure to destroy 
 his integrity and commit his life to a double 
 standard. 
 
 Democracy clears the ground by abolishing all 
 authorities, except the authority of God as real- 
 ized in living men. It does not abolish moral 
 and intelledlual forces; on the contrary, it gives 
 them an incalculable reinforcement through the 
 gains of moral and intelledlual integrity. 
 
 A moral authority, as distinguished from a con- 
 vincing moral influence, is simply an intellecflual 
 authority under a more pretentious name. And 
 the gist of all intellecftual authority is the 
 167 
 
The Afifirmative Intellect 
 
 attempt to institutionalize a Truth apart from the 
 experienced fac5ls and forces of the world. Now 
 democracy is the return to the physical and spirit- 
 ual concrete — the real and material fadls and 
 forces. It organizes its material forces to defeat 
 and destroy every obstacle that seems to oppose 
 itself to the common health and sanity. If mis- 
 takes are made and prophets are killed, that is all 
 in the way of the redemption of the world. It is 
 the business of prophets to take risks. But legal 
 hangings, punitive expeditions, and so on, would 
 soon come to an end if the self-righteousness and 
 the meritricious moral indignation were cleaned 
 out of the law. A democratic society will be 
 content with the defeat of its adversaries; it will 
 not care to destroy them. It will know how to 
 forgive. And no democratic man or company of 
 such men could ever consent to take a human 
 life without risking their own. 
 
 VIII. The democratic revolution can never be 
 
 understood by mechanical minds — by those that 
 
 think with their heads only. There is no 
 
 explaining of the program of the new era to those 
 
 168 
 
The World Problem 
 
 that suppose that the world is ordered by theories. 
 It is necessary to understand that society is gov- 
 erned by vital impulses, and that the diredlion of 
 these impulses depends upon the primary faiths 
 of the people. The changes proposed are not 
 reformatory; they are revolutionary. They are 
 not mechanical, but quasi-chemical. They do 
 not consist in the rearrangement of existing 
 materials, but in the creation of new substances. 
 It is not a question of the repeal of this law 
 and the enac5lment of that. The revolution goes 
 to the root of the matter, and reconceives the 
 whole legal system from the ground up. New 
 laws are indeed to be made, and old ones set 
 aside; immense strudlural changes are to take 
 place. But these changes would be entirely 
 ineffedlual, would be canceled or wrested to the 
 interests of privilege, if they were to be accom- 
 plished by mere argument and agitation while 
 the spirit of the law remained unchanged. They 
 are to be made effedlual only by bringing to bear 
 new social forces in a new and aJffirmative faith. 
 
 IX. The new spirit may be pradlically appre- 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 hended by keeping in mind the three following 
 propositions, which have been already suggested 
 in detail, but which must be gathered up and 
 taken together for the sake of the light they 
 shed upon each other. 
 
 'In the first place, then, the old social spirit 
 regards the heart's desire of the individual as 
 essentially bad, however capable of achieving 
 virtue; while the new, on the contrary, regards 
 it as essentially good and legitimate, however 
 capable of corruption. This is the primary 
 principle of democracy. It gives pradlical sense 
 to the assumption that an ordinary man has vital 
 relation to the infinite, and it justifies the rule of 
 the afiirmative intellecfl. Its assertion marks the 
 transition of human consciousness from the status 
 Bof creatureliness to that of creativeness. 
 
 Secondly, the spirit of the old order aims to 
 ive every man his deserts according to the defi- 
 [nitions of an external law, while the aim of 
 democracy is to give every man the utmost 
 chance to live a creative life. The only equality 
 ''Sown to the old order, even in its most liberal 
 and modern aspedls, is an equality ^' under the 
 170 
 
The World Problem 
 
 law. ' ' Its theoretical operation is to give every 
 man an equal chance to become the master of 
 other men: Practically this is impossible, and the 
 principle of "equality under the law" produces 
 and maintains grosser inequalities than those that 
 existed in the more ancient regime of pure status. 
 The new spirit, on the other hand, proclaims an 
 equality that is above the law. It makes the law 
 the instrument of an equality that is more august 
 than the law itself. It affords no countenance to 
 egotistic ambition or to envy, and has no prizes 
 for the exceptionally good and no punishment 
 for the exceptionally bad. The only goodness 
 that it recognizes is creativeness, and that is its 
 own reward in vital strength and competency. 
 And it knows of no bad but consumptiveness, 
 which is its own punishment in loss of life. It 
 has no scale to measure the relative value of 
 services — counts the tunneling of mountains and 
 the cutting of isthmuses fine, but no finer than 
 any other fine deed. It knows nothing of natural 
 or creaturely rights — as the rights to take toll, to 
 live on the labor of others, or to make a nuisance 
 of one's self; it recognizes only spiritual or crea- 
 171 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 tive rights. And these, in all persons under all 
 changing circumstances, are absolutely equal. It 
 is not concerned with abstradl proprietary rights, 
 but gives all its respedl to the concrete personal 
 right to hold and vitalize as many brute things as 
 one can. It has no prejudice against large 
 possessions or small ones, but it protests at sight 
 of a beggar or a magnate — a man that is servile 
 and envious, and a man that lives by the baseness 
 and hunger of other men. 
 
 The third proposition is that, whereas the old 
 regime starts with law and order and strives for 
 liberty, the new begins with liberty and strives 
 for law and order. So long as the agencies of 
 law — executive, legislative, and judicial — consti- 
 tute the nerve-center of national life, and the 
 people have no consciousness of national or social 
 existence outside the machineries of government, 
 no preaching or praying can possibly prevent 
 their settling every social question from the state- 
 supporting standpoint. The party that is most 
 bent on the aggrandizement of government will 
 always seem to be the safest and will always carry 
 the day. There will be little chance of releasing 
 172 
 
The World Problem 
 
 the incalculable, creative energies of liberty, 
 lyiberty, the opportunity to live one's own life 
 according to one's genius, will be regarded, not as 
 the source of law and spring of civilization, but as 
 something that the law allows, within ever narrow- 
 ing limits. It will be a legal franchise, not an 
 inalienable right. On the other hand, when the 
 people shall have established a standing-ground 
 for their national and social life in aloofness 
 from the machinery of government, they will be 
 able to regulate their affairs in the interests of 
 liberty. 
 
 The tyranny of the high-seas would be insup- 
 portable, and anything could be done against the 
 crew and passengers on the plea of safety for 
 the ship, if there were no shore where explana- 
 tions are demanded. Democracy proposes to 
 establish a seaboard and a serene distri(5l court, 
 and to set limits to that raging main of public 
 policy on which the ships of state are forever 
 tossing, with shipmasters calling for more power 
 and more law. But this is the lowest statement 
 of the case. The truth is that the new regime 
 will work a complete revolution in the law from 
 173 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 top to bottom, shifting the point of view from 
 conventional to primordial rights. 
 
 It is not at all a question of the width of the 
 scope of government and law. That is where the 
 controversy between the individualists and the 
 socialists raises a false issue. A democratic 
 society may enacft what are called sumptuary laws 
 and may enter into the minutiae of social life, 
 making the people's clothes and warming their 
 houses, or it may do none of these things. 
 These are secondary matters, and they can not be 
 settled in a democratic sense until they are 
 regarded from the democratic point of view. 
 The question that democracy asks concerning 
 any proposed extension of the sphere of govern- 
 ment and law is this : Will this new exercise of 
 compulsion increase the opportunities of liberty ? 
 
 X. There is no validity in the distindlion be- 
 tween industries that are in their nature public and 
 those that are private. All produ<5tive work is 
 in its nature both public and private — private, as 
 being the expression of the lives of individuals; 
 and public, as being diredled toward the general 
 174 
 
The World Problem 
 
 welfare. For any work that is not dire(5led to- 
 ward the general welfare has no right to any 
 social recognition whatever. Being a nuisance, 
 it deserves simply to be abated. The workable 
 distinction lies between those operations that are 
 of so elementary and necessitous a kind that they 
 can be reduced to routine, like the alimentary 
 and respiratory habits and unconscious reflex 
 acftions of the body, and, on the other hand, the 
 adlivities that are distindlly creative and human. 
 But the coarser, mechanical interests run up into 
 and interpenetrate the finer interests. And the 
 finer interests run down into the coarser inter- 
 ests in such manner that it is impossible to draw 
 a line between the two in any other than an 
 expediential and temporary way. All that can be 
 said is that, as the individual must not be ruled 
 by his stomach on pain of the forfeiture of his 
 humanity, so a society of individuals must, if 
 they would be free and human, insist upon con- 
 trolling the governmental routine from a vantage- 
 ground of the humanities. 
 
 Democracy is the discovery that a human life 
 can not be lived by all of us or any of us so long 
 175 . 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 as we lie passive under the hand of habit and 
 necessity. So long as the alimentary problem is 
 studied from the alimentary point of view it 
 remains insoluble. Democracy therefore sets its 
 feet firmly in the sphere of the creative spirit, 
 determining to die cheerfully rather than give 
 up that ground. Government becomes a tool of 
 the ideal. All laws are to be repealed that have 
 cramped the creative powers of the people. No 
 man can have any real and creative interests 
 against the creative life of humanity. It is for 
 no man's good that he should be allowed to stand 
 in the way of civilization. The rich — so far as 
 they are parasitic — are wronged by their rights. 
 Democracy owes it to their souls to divest their 
 vested interests. All fraternal consideration they 
 shall certainly have. But material compensa- 
 tion? — that is possible only in a very limited 
 sense. Mainly it is absurd and impossible. 
 
 CAll interests are parasitic that involve a cur- 
 tailment of the produdlive powers of the people. 
 Society is a vast cooperative concern. But as 
 it stands with its divine head in the heavens and 
 its feet in the dust and mud, there must needs 
 176 
 
The World Problem 
 
 be two fairly distinct spheres of its cooperation — 
 the sphere of Hberty and love, and that of com- 
 pulsion and law. The regime which is passing 
 away has dominated the former from the standing- 
 ground of the latter; it has subordinated the crea- 
 tive spontaneities of life to the supposed necessi- 
 ties of law. The mission of democracy is to 
 reverse the terms, subje(5ling the law to the uses 
 of liberty. 
 
 XI. It is not enough to say that all the peo- 
 ple have an equal right to the land and to the 
 elements of nature. They have an equal right 
 also to the ideal goods of the race, the herediti- 
 ments of civilization. The assertion of the 
 former right would in this day be of no avail 
 without the assertion of the latter. Time was 
 when the landlord was the ruler of the economic 
 world, but that time is past. That ancient world 
 which the landlord ruled had not conceived the 
 idea of the conquest of nature, while the econom- 
 ics of these times is motived through and 
 through by that idea. Economic produ<5lion was 
 once carried on in intellecflual passivity, but now 
 
 m 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 the affirmative intelledl is beginning to have its 
 day, and industry is becoming a creative art. 
 The world-power has passed from the hands of 
 the landlord; it rests now in the hands of the 
 capitalist. The world will no longer be ruled by 
 sheer natural fadls; henceforth it is to be ruled by 
 ideas. And capitalism is a symbol — albeit, a cor- 
 rupt and degraded symbol — of the ideal forces. 
 Capitalism has appropriated the ideal goods to 
 the uses of the few; the sovereignty of the affirm- 
 ative intelledl has been usurped in the interest of 
 a class. The work of the future is to democratize 
 the ideal powers by deepening the intellec5l of the 
 controlling class to its ground in the common 
 human faith, and by awakening the passive 
 spirits of the people. 
 
 The mere nationalization of the land would, in 
 these days, afford scarcely a temporary respite. 
 If the people were faithless to democracy, if the 
 root of the matter — the liberty, equality, and fra- 
 ternity — were not in them. Capitalism, with its 
 awesome enthronement in the sovereignty of 
 states, could pay all the rent, support all the gov- 
 ernments, supply the masses with schools, libra- 
 178 
 
The World Problem 
 
 ries, museums, circuses, and bread-doles — and 
 utterly ruin the world. 
 
 XII. The normal elements of production are 
 two: nature and the workman — the intellec5l of 
 God implicit in the order of the natural universe 
 and the intelled: of man making himself at home 
 there. The orthodox economists, writing under 
 the spell of the passive intelledl and in a social 
 order thralled in that spell, have made it out that 
 the elements of produdlion are three — to wit, 
 nature, labor, and capital. That is to say, they 
 have split the human element into two parts. 
 As we have seen, this was ever the way with the 
 old regime. Laborism is humanity subjedled to 
 a law of natural necessity; capitalism is the same 
 humanity under a law that is ideal, but no less 
 compulsive and unfree — to wit, a law of mechan- 
 ical necessity. 
 
 The power of capital is that it can bring a 
 thousand men to work a thousand days with a 
 mutual confidence in one another — based upon 
 the power of the police. Most of the wealth 
 of the capitalist is not things, but claims. He 
 
 OF TA 
 
 UNlVEKBiTY 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 is not so much a curator of real and tangible 
 tools as the social representative of a kind of 
 meretricious and artificial credit. If there 
 should come into any community a genuine and 
 authentic capitalizer of the people's credit — a 
 kind of commercial hero and master of materials, 
 who was believed in by the community and 
 justified belief — he could do an unlimited bank- 
 ing business without any capital whatever, and 
 there would be no end of his power as a pro- 
 moter of enterprises. And if some little town 
 on the verge of civilization should be converted 
 to democracy while the world lingered — real- 
 izing the pradlical sense of liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity — it would become a commercial 
 metropolis within a decade without borrowing a 
 dollar from the outside world. 
 
 The talk of the capitalist as a necessary saver 
 and tool-keeper is the tale of the infant-class in 
 economics. It is not, in any important sense, true. 
 Most of the world's capital is renewed every year 
 or two. The simple account of the power of the 
 capitalist is this : a highly complicated material 
 civilization entails a high degree of industrial 
 180 
 
The World Problem 
 
 cooperation; and large cooperations — with their 
 postponed results — require credit. This credit 
 can be secured in either of two ways : the people 
 must believe in each others' strength and sanity, 
 or else they must believe in the power of a common 
 master. There is no middle course. The capi- 
 talist will be the master of our complex modern 
 society — and he is not only inevitable, he is in- 
 dispensable — so long as the people's belief in each 
 other is smaller than the bulk of their material 
 civilization. If the capitalist did not exist it 
 would, as things stand, be necessary to invent him. 
 Cooperation requires credit, and if the available 
 real and human credit is not vigorous enough to 
 compass the magnitude of the enterprises that are 
 proposed, then it is necessary to establish in the 
 hands of some particular person or persons a legal 
 or artificial credit, a huge accumulation of en- 
 forcible claims. The essence of capitalism is the 
 reliance of society upon the police force for the 
 maintenance of that credit, which is the sine qua 
 non of social cooperation. The only possible 
 remedy for the tyranny of capitalism consists in 
 making our humanity match the size of our civili- 
 181 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 zation, either by reducing the complexity of the 
 latter or increasing the energy of the former. 
 
 The socialistic proposition to put the control of 
 industry in the hands of public and political 
 officers contains no promise of substantial melior- 
 ation. For as things actually stand the capital- 
 ists are already public officers — since their power 
 is the power of the police. 
 
 XIII. In the long run trade demands that the 
 buyers and sellers should think and deal in the 
 terms of a common law; consequently there is an 
 irresistible tendency toward the unification of 
 law within the circle of commerce. The only 
 effe<5lual way of perpetuating the distindlness of 
 national codes and the legal solidarity of separate 
 states is to put impassable barriers in the way of 
 commerce. This was once a pradlicable expedient; 
 it is no longer so. For capitalism, having im- 
 poverished the masses in the old centers of com- 
 merce and exhausted their purchasing capacity, 
 is compelled, for the continuance of its own 
 power, to seek foreign markets. And capitalism 
 is the power behind the throne of all the sovereign 
 183 
 
The World Problem 
 
 states, and will insist upon the security of its 
 investments in the newly exploited countries. 
 The program of political expansion is apt to be 
 favored also by the wage-earning classes of the 
 ruling nations, since in general it offers them a 
 temporary respite, shifting the heaviest burdens 
 of economic slavery to a foreign and still more 
 helpless proletariat. The effec5l is to take the 
 lower classes temporarily — but only temporarily 
 — into the capitalistic trust for the exploitation 
 of Asia, Africa, and the islands. 
 
 The collision of interest between the rival 
 capitalisms of different nationalities is a merely 
 transitional fadl. It would come to an end 
 when the unappropriated territories had been 
 exhausted and the various spheres of influence 
 dehmited. After that the interests of capital- 
 ism throughout the world would be absolutely 
 solidaire. It is like the rush for new lands in 
 Oklahoma. Every man's hand was against his 
 neighbor until all the land was appropriated; 
 then the possessing class was a unit for 
 the protection of all titles against the non- 
 possessing. 
 
 188 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 Upon the settlement of the spheres of influence 
 would follow, if capitalism were to have its way, 
 the carrying out of something like The Hague 
 program — the establishment of a supreme inter- 
 national court, or sovereign of sovereignties, 
 backed by irresistible power for the enforcement 
 of its decrees. The court, by the terms of its 
 constitution, would not be called upon to inter- 
 fere in disputes between the several great powers 
 and their dependencies ; the subjugation of the 
 weaker people would go on to its utter conclu- 
 sion. The inauguration of such a world-state 
 would be the complete triumph of capitalism in 
 alliance with the principle of sovereign authority, 
 and would exhibit a full and perf edt antithesis to 
 the ideal world-order of historic Christianity 
 and democracy. It would be the bathos of his- 
 tory and the reestablishment of the theocratic 
 regime. 
 
 The hues of cleavage which now separate 
 nations would be shifted so that they would 
 separate classes by a gulf wider than the seas. 
 There would follow a recrudescence of heredity 
 and caste. An infinite peaceful carnage of the 
 184 
 
The World Problem 
 
 poor and weak would go on in the midst of a per- 
 petual outpouring of charity. The Holy Alliance 
 of governments would in due time set up some 
 kind of a universal ecclesiasticism for the worship 
 of an alien and non-human God. Sacramental- 
 ism, in some new and modern garb, would 
 separate the officially good from the bad by im- 
 passable walls of excommunication — and phar- 
 isaism would be the only virtue. The university 
 would be a function of state, and the only office 
 of intelledl would be to find reasons for the status 
 quo. Dogmatism would prevail with invincible 
 sway, and the press would be the censored ex- 
 ponent of the social code of plutocracy. Art 
 would return to be the sycophant of the rich, and 
 literature would be mere weariness of print. 
 Officialdom and bureaucracy would offer the only 
 career for talent. There would be nowhere 
 between the poles an individual ; the mob would 
 possess the earth and the spirit of the race would 
 be broken. 
 
 XIV. But this is all an imagination. Thus 
 and so it would be if revolutions could go back- 
 185 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 ward; but they can not. It is impossible to 
 reestablish the ancient regime. The perfecfl plan 
 of capitalism and universal state sovereignty is 
 bound to fail. The real issue lies between 
 democracy and chaos. The people en masse can 
 not be got to believe in theocratic religion; there- 
 fore the theocratic social order is out of the 
 question. The people will go on, through the 
 mist and confusion, to believe in the religion of 
 democracy, or else they will believe in nothing at 
 all, and society itself will become impossible. 
 For there is no society without a common faith. 
 Our real and prac5licable choice lies between 
 endless class collisions and insurredlions, accom- 
 plishing only terror and misery, and on the other 
 hand the universal prevalence of a Democratic 
 Catholicism, maintaining a world-wide commerce 
 and a frankly human common law. 
 
 XV. The use of studying international politics 
 is to discover their futility. The international 
 issues are simply a blind to the real issues. The 
 haute politique is a narrow provincialism; the 
 catholic and cosmopolitan issues are local. It 
 186 
 
The World Problem 
 
 makes no considerable difference to anybody, not 
 even to the little knots of capitalists whose bank- 
 accounts are concerned, and certainly not to any- 
 body else, how the territorial lines shall be drawn 
 and the maps colored. 
 
 The real issues upon which the fate of the world 
 is turning are to be encountered in their complete 
 alignment in any county or township. The real 
 question is a social question; and the social 
 question is at bottom simply the choice between 
 theocratic and democratic religion, with the 
 fearful proviso that if the moving spirits eledl 
 theocracy they will be reckoning without the 
 people. The people will not — can not if they 
 would — accept such leading. And such a choice 
 would commit the world to a welter of confusion 
 such as would make the Dark Ages seem radiant 
 with Hght. There is only one avenue of promise, 
 and that lies straight ahead along the great 
 historic highway of evolutionary democracy . We 
 have arrived at a point in the road where the 
 integrity of society can no longer be maintained 
 on theocratic and authoritative principles. Mean- 
 while society has been leavened through and 
 187 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 through with a latent and potential democracy. 
 The transition to the new regime can be accom- 
 plished in peace and order like the mighty 
 mystery and cataclasm of natural birth; but if 
 the process is opposed and prevented there will 
 be an agony of travail. 
 
 XVI. This is not a world of mockery; the 
 impossible is never necessary. Social order has 
 become impossible on the old plan; it must then 
 be possible on the new plan. It must be possible 
 now after these ages of preparation — and here in 
 the country which is most democratic of all — to 
 break the spell of sedl and party, and to accom- 
 plish such an association of the people as shall 
 suffice for the maintenance of a democratic code 
 of law — a law disclaiming all pretence of state 
 sovereignty or transcendent authority, resting 
 frankly upon the general reasonableness of men, 
 and having only such validity as is conferred 
 upon it by private persons at the cheerful risk of 
 their own, not others', lives. The distinguishing 
 mark of such a legal system — a mark which is 
 the seal and substance of our American charter 
 188 
 
The World Problem 
 
 of independence — is that, not the law itself, but 
 the common liberty and equality of the people, is 
 conceived of as the primary social fadl. It is 
 nothing that men of all conditions should be 
 assured that the definitions of the law will be 
 applied without respedl of persons. We have 
 never had that assurance indeed; but if we had 
 it, it would not of itself save us from the most 
 ruthless oppression of the weak. The point is 
 that democratic jurisprudence is utterly careless of 
 all rights except such as avail for the defense of 
 the common right to life and liberty. The 
 equality of the people is, as has been shown, not an 
 equality under the law, but above the law; the law 
 is simply its instrument. Of course, such a prin- 
 ciple as this is foolishness, and a stumbling-block 
 to all sectarians and partisans. It is the hardest 
 saying in all Holy Scripture, but the secret heart 
 of the world is set upon it and the momentum of 
 history is behind it. The last man in the vine- 
 yard is as good as the first. 
 
 Now, the pradlicability of establishing a govern- 
 ment whose sovereignty shall exist simply in the 
 consentaneous wills of the people, depends upon 
 189 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 the cordial rejedlion of the old legal principle of 
 deserts, and the acceptance of the principle of 
 supra-legal equality. If a controlling element 
 of the people in the United States are not ready 
 for this, then we must fail to meet the crisis of 
 the world. The program of democratic Catholi- 
 cism becomes for us impradlicable, and we must 
 die in the ruins of the old regime. 
 
 The history of the world turns upon the ques- 
 tion whether the stronger spirits in the United 
 States — now in the beginning of the twentieth 
 century of the Christian era — will understand 
 and pradlically approve the story of the Prodigal 
 Son, in its assertion of the indefeasible equality 
 of all persons and its negation of the old world- 
 principle of privilege and deserts. 
 
 XVII. As order is the essence of intellect, 
 social order is an intelle<5lual affair. Civilization 
 can not be built on amiable sentiments. The 
 principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity can 
 never adluate a social order until they are appre- 
 hended as axioms of the intelledl. They must 
 be seen to be the more or less conscious assump- 
 190 
 
The World Problem 
 
 tions of all valid intelledlual processes — tlie roots 
 of the common sense of men. The opening of 
 the new era is to be signalized by the bringing 
 to high and deliberate consciousness of those 
 primary intellectual and moral assumptions with- 
 out which the old regime itself would have been 
 unlivable and would have unpeopled the planet. 
 
 The evangel of democracy is the open discovery 
 and announcement that the principles of liberty, 
 equality, and fraternity are the indispensable 
 basis of all valid science and civilizing art — yes, 
 the basis of sanity itself. The gradual rise of 
 the affirmative intelledl, with its assertion of the 
 great historic creeds of Christianity and democ- 
 racy, is the long gray dawn of the world's health. 
 
 The elan of all creative life is the prepossession 
 that there is an Intellec5l back of nature, and that 
 this Intelle(5l is, in its inner law, congruous with 
 the intellec5l of common humanity — is, in a word, 
 itself human. If this prepossession is false, then 
 science and art are both alike impossible. For a 
 man can not know and work in a world that is 
 founded on non-human principles. 
 
 Democracy begins, therefore, with the axiom 
 191 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 of the Incarnation — the dodlrine of the humanity 
 of God. It lays that stone as the comer-stone 
 of the civilization of the world. And it writes 
 on the pediment of its pro-cathedral : I^iberty, 
 Equality, and Fraternity — I^iberty, because it is 
 in the individual and not in any corporate state 
 that the consciousness exists that can understand 
 the consciousness of God; Equality, because priv- 
 ilege is the creature of corporations, and no man 
 standing alone with God can deny the equal 
 humanity of other men; Fraternity, because the 
 consentaneousness of human wills and the 
 issuance therefrom of a congenial and catholic 
 law is the foregone conclusion of common 
 sanity, 
 
 tf-^ XVIII. Democracy submits to majorities, not 
 / because majorities are right, but because it has 
 I faith in the final common sense of men, and 
 I loves beauty and order more than victory or 
 I martyrdom. It hates the fanaticism of little 
 I crowds as much as that of large ones — more, 
 *' indeed; for if the salt of the earth shall lose its 
 savor the world will rot. 
 192 
 
 
The World Problem 
 
 A democratic man fights not for sovereignties 
 and fine sentiments, but only for the concrete 
 things — the human and personal chivalries that 
 a man standing alone might fight for. *«--***1 
 
 The English-speaking race to-day in the Philip- j 
 
 pine Islands and in South Africa is in contact j 
 
 with two weaker races. In the nature of things j 
 
 it is bound to adjust its relations to these people I 
 
 in such a manner as will tend toward the unifi- I 
 
 cation of law. This end could easily have been / 
 attained if the parties concerned had had a work- / 
 ing belief in the principle of the sovereignty of / 
 the people. The one thing that has stood in the / 
 way of a peaceful adjustment of relations has 
 been the common obsession of the sovereignty 
 governments. The conception on every side has 
 been that the law flows down out of some high 
 fountain of authority instead of rising up out of 
 the wills of the people. The question of estab- 
 lishing a common law has therefore been posed 
 in a juristic, abstra<5l, and transcendental way. 
 Men have not dealt with men, but politicians with 
 politicians. The question proposed has not been, 
 How can we best achieve the practical interests 
 193 
 
 tie / 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 of civilization, protect life and property, and 
 release the creative energies of the people ? but, 
 Where shall we set the throne of transcendental 
 authority ? 
 
 The Filipinos and the Boers have fought for 
 two small sovereignties ; we of the northern lands 
 have spent our blood and money for two larger 
 ghosts. But all alike have fought for phantoms 
 and are bound to lose. The rising tide of democ- 
 racy will sweep away all sovereignties of state. 
 
 The democratic spirit has not indeed come yet 
 to its clear utterance, but the day of that pro- 
 nouncement is at hand and events are shaping 
 its words. Democracy comes to itself by con- 
 fronting its contradidlions. The denial of the 
 principles of the world-republic is necessary to 
 their convincing aflSrmation. 
 
 These principles, expressed in the terms of 
 
 politics, are Universal Law and Decentralization. 
 
 i In terms of Christianity they are Catholicism 
 
 i 
 
 and Conscience. 
 ^- The pradlical program of democracy is, on the 
 one hand, submission to the majority in all the 
 dogmas and futile forms of politics, and, on 
 194 
 
 /i 
 
The World Problem 
 
 the other hand, the world-wide association of 
 sensible men in truceless warfare against the 
 money-power and the mob, for real liberty and 
 the solid things of civilization. 
 
 XIX. The mark of the world-movement now 
 in progress is its sublime materialism. It would 
 win heaven by its humility and earth-grip. That 
 is the genius of Christianity and democracy. The 
 awakened intellec5l can not interest itself in 
 purely ethical problems. The preaching of ab- 
 stradl righteousness to a generation that is gird- 
 ing itself with joy for the work of world-making 
 is as idle as the whistling of the wind. 
 
 The philosophy of democracy is the negation 
 of all mere philosophy; its use is to break the 
 ancient spell of mental abstradlion and to deliver 
 the soul to enterprise. The Truth for which the 
 raptured sages have striven — what is it ? It does 
 not exist. The only Truth that the new age 
 knows is pradlicable Fadl. To make the soul at 
 home here is the sum of its philosophy. Its 
 sacrifice is civilization, and it has nothing else 
 to do. 
 
 lOS 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 The final judgment upon the old order that is 
 passing away is that it has not known how to build 
 a city or condudl the commerce of the world. It 
 has been full of futility and words, has talked 
 interminably of rights and duties, and devastated 
 the gardens of the earth. It has dreamed of 
 gorgeous empires and smothered the creative 
 spirit of mankind. The tools of the Titans have 
 been put into its hands, and it has turned the 
 edge of every one of them. Its stupendous 
 machineries have made grist of its own flesh. The 
 ban upon it is incompetency. 
 
 The old regime has scared itself to death with 
 the ghosts of its own imagination. The Nine- 
 teenth Century was frightened out of its faith by 
 the discovery of the size of the cosmos. It 
 made a fetish of capital, and cringed to cor- 
 porations because it was afraid of the elemental 
 fadls. In its hurry to be safe it had no time to 
 be civil, and it forgot the fine arts. It ran 
 to the state for patronage and protec5lion as 
 timid children huddle under their mother's 
 skirt. Its Great Powers fought no battles — 
 except against the weak. They sapped their 
 196 
 
The World Problem 
 
 strength in building armaments as a monument 
 to their fears. 
 
 But now, out of the welter of cowardice and 
 ineptitude, a new day breaks in repentance, to 
 affirm the existence of the soul and the pradli- 
 cability of civilization. The business of these 
 times and the special mission of the American 
 spirit is to set free the creative energies of the 
 people, to girdle the earth with splendid and 
 cosmopolitan cities, and to express, in the eter- 
 nal, fluent forms of art, the infinite romance of 
 humanity. 
 
 XX. Will the University spring up out of the 
 common ground as if it were a new creation, and 
 destitute of a great tradition ? Yes, if necessary. 
 Nothing can prevent its rise — no bHndness or ob- 
 stinacy of those that stand in the way. The 
 stream of history may be driven into subterranean 
 courses, like the great rivers of the arid West, 
 but we are bound to believe that, in spite of all 
 obstrudlions, it will come to the surface again. 
 There can be no hiatus in a stream. 
 
 There is, however, an open and obvious chap- 
 197 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 nel between the old Catholicism of dogma and 
 that democratic Catholicism toward which we are 
 pressing. And, strange as it may seem to those 
 that have not pondered the matter, that channel 
 is the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United 
 States. Here is the line of least resistance be- 
 tween the greatness of the old regime and the 
 greatness of the new. If the current of history 
 shall eventually take some other line — which is 
 quite possible — it will be because the repre- 
 sentatives of the historic church tradition in 
 this country have successfully opposed their 
 provincial conceits to the logic of their moral 
 destiny. 
 
 Anglican churchmanship in America is insig- 
 nificant in numbers, but an umbilical cord is not 
 a thing of bulk. And the proper business of 
 protestant episcopalianism is just to wither and 
 be buried out of sight in giving life and birth to 
 democratic Catholicism — the flesh and blood of 
 the University. The sedl must sow itself as the 
 seed of the Church. 
 
 This protestant episcopalianism — confused, in- 
 articulate, half-conscious as it is — is big with 
 198 
 
The World Problem 
 
 potentialities. It can not be said, perhaps, that 
 it has a great idea, but it is a great idea. It is 
 the only extant thing in Christendom that is ob- 
 viously driving toward Catholicism by the free 
 highway of intelledl. Universality, through in- 
 dividuality ; law and order, through sheer gains 
 of liberty — this is of the very genius of the United 
 States. It is no European importation, but was 
 bom on this soil. 
 
 The signs of this development have not been 
 sufi&ciently noted. They are obvious enough. 
 The unquestioned existence within the Episcopal 
 Church of contradi(5lory schools of speculative 
 thinking, representative of about every possible 
 view of theological things, is a sufficient adver- 
 tisement to the world that this organization can 
 not rest for long on any sort of dogmatic basis. 
 It must, in the near future, either be torn to 
 fragments by the irreconcilable theories of 
 warring facflions, or else must awake to a 
 clear consciousness of its adlual state, and 
 frankly offer the unique spectacle of a thorough- 
 going protesantism — the first church in history 
 to respedl the right of private judgment and 
 199 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 build a social strudlure on a basis of intelledlual 
 liberty. 
 
 That this Church is bound by the very nature 
 of its constitution either to be the Mother of 
 the University or else to die barren is evident 
 from another point of view. It follows from its 
 historical attempt to associate the protestant prin- 
 cipal of private judgment with the catholic prin- 
 ciple of territorial jurisdidlion. This principle of 
 territorial jurisdi(5lion means, if it means any- 
 thing, that not merely the people who agree with 
 each other, but all the people — whether they know 
 it or not, and whether they like it or not — are in 
 some real sense within the pale of the Church. 
 Now, if the Church takes all the people of the 
 community into account, the only way that it 
 can establish an intellectually restridlive dogma 
 is the Roman Catholic way. It must be main- 
 tained that the intelledl is nil so far as the subjedt- 
 matter of the dogma in question is concerned — 
 that the natural mind has no competency for that 
 kind of truth. Then, if one of the Church's 
 teachers changes his mind he can be consistently 
 and logically banned and put down. For to 
 200 
 
The World Problem 
 
 change one's mind about matters that private 
 judgment has no right to deal with is indubi- 
 tably wicked. 
 
 But a church that gives any sort of counte- 
 nance to the protestant principle must, if it would 
 establish a general dogmatic agreement among 
 its members, give up the claim of territorial 
 jurisdi(5lion. It must become simply a company 
 of people that think alike. In that case, if the 
 preacher becomes heterodox it is logical that he 
 should be put out of the society. He can go 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Thus Rome and the run of the protestant se(5ls 
 are involved in no self-contradic5lion in their sev- 
 eral methods of maintaining dogmatic unity. 
 But the case is different with the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church. This Church, in its attempt 
 at dogmatic unity, is involved in a logical 
 absurdity — a prac5lical impossibility. When its 
 authorized teacher changes his mind, this Church 
 cannot say, as the Roman Church does: "You 
 are wicked and an apostate ; be silent, the peo- 
 ple shall stop their ears if you speak!" The 
 Protestant Episcopal Church cannot say this, 
 201 
 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 because it is protestant, and Protestants must 
 change their minds once in a way — it is even 
 their duty. Neither can the Episcopal Church 
 do as the protestant sedls do ; it can not say to 
 its prophet of the strange vision : ' * You have 
 ceased to be one of us ; go outside into the 
 world! " It can not say this because it claims 
 territorial jurisdiction, and refuses to admit the 
 existence of an outside world. Its heretics must 
 I therefore stay within its pale, and that too with- 
 out moral stigma. To sum up the case in a 
 word, this Church, being protestant, cannot put 
 its heretics down ; and, being catholic, it cannot 
 put them out. The situation is certainly fatal to 
 orthodoxy. 
 
 In this extraordinary dilemma, unexampled 
 hitherto in the Christian ages, it is possible for 
 the American Episcopal Church to give up its 
 claim of territorial jurisdi(5lion and confess itself 
 one of the catalog of protestant sedls, or it is 
 possible for it to give up its protestantism and 
 confess itself a scion of Rome ; but it cannot go 
 on for twenty years more along the lines on 
 which it is now moving, without emerging into 
 202 
 
The World Problem 
 
 a new era as the open champion of intelledlual 
 liberty committed to the organization of Amer- 
 ican society on a basis of undogmatic faith. 
 
 The hegemony of the historic Church of our 
 race would then pass from Canterbury and York 
 to New York and San Francisco, The Anglican 
 Church, democratized and extending the organic 
 filaments of an international social order 
 throughout the English-speaking world, would 
 not fail to give expression to the university ideal 
 — effacing the hard lines of race and class, and 
 reducing all political and economic corporations 
 to a utilitarian basis. It would be seen that 
 the cause of intellecSlual liberty is not of mere 
 academic interest, but the burden and passion of 
 Christianity ; that it means the defeat of eco- 
 nomic and political tyranny, and the release of 
 the creative faculties of mankind. 
 
 The Church, in becoming the open champion 
 of intelle<5lual liberty, must pass through a mo- 
 mentous revolution. For so long as the Church 
 puts the lightest fetter upon the intelledl, it is it- 
 self a monopoly and the chief of monopolies — the 
 bulwark of the old regime. But as it passes — 
 203 
 
The Affirmative Intellect 
 
 through the long processes of historic evolution 
 — out into the open air of intellec5lual liberty, the 
 Church becomes the destroyer of monopolies — 
 the Presence and Power of the sovereignty of the 
 people. 
 
 THB BND 
 
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