the suppression of the anti-social.[1] Accordingly the freeing of reason from the clogs of bigotry makes its appearance as a struggle between the leaders of illumination and the slothful masses. To the latter the great underlying machinery of institutional life is too familiar and comfortable to permit ready venture into the realm of novelty and unrest. Upon the former the task of the courageous pioneer is laid; they must break with the past through their vision of the future and seek to create freer play by easing the bonds in the slow reconstruction of the basic substructure. In the last analysis, the contest concerns the welfare of the social order; whatever change may be effected, the security of this order must be preserved. This limitation is therefore inevitable so long as society endures. Indeed, as one reads his history from this viewpoint he inclines more and more to regard humanity as that particular organism whose affective and volitional life has flowed at a tide just strong enough to enable the happy adjustment of progress,—a loosening of the screws precisely consonant with an advance slackened enough to prevent impairment of the machinery.[2]
To put the matter compactly in another form. Man is a social creature held within the bonds of a corporate life. Now the rules for the conduct of such a life are summed up in morality, which is accordingly a brief way of reciting the conditions necessary for the existence of man as a social creature. But if morality is a symbol of these conditions, then nothing which man does or thinks may be allowed seriously to threaten morality.
- ↑ See J. Guiraud: Questions d'histoire et d'archéologie chrétienne, Paris, 1906, pp. 3-46 ("La repression de L'hérésie au moyen âge"). Cf. also Leslie Stephen, op. cit., vol. I, ch. 1.
- ↑ It is only maintained that individual initiative operates necessarily under the dead weight of the institutional mass,—and not that the latter is the sole factor operative. Obviously the former enables the latter, which is after all the crystallization of great ideas. But the leaders are gifted so far beyond the mass of mankind—not alone in insight but in vital force as well that radically sweeping change is impossible. It is perhaps needless to add that the more enlightened the social order is the less onerous will be the pull of the massive substructure. Hence all pleas for freedom of thought and of speech have been accompanied by concern for maximal enlightenment of the social order. Nor does this mean merely that education is desirable in itself. More properly it registers the instinctive consciousness that only so can society meet the strain of accelerated progress.
