democracy,” they will say, “crushes the very spirit of freedom itself, for its exaggerated individualism erases individuality. It is one endless round of dull repetition, a lethal monotone. Universal exaltation to eternity, in destroying God and his differentiating supremacy, has destroyed the interest of existence, has cast a banal blight upon all originality, and so upon all the verve of life. Restore difference, by subordinating man! — or else confess that in a godless exaltation of freedom you have made freedom the deadliest bondage, the bondage to the tame and the stale.” Nor is it sufficient to reply to this, as no doubt one may, with a tu quoque; for though the old-fashioned subordination to the will of the sovereign God also comes to a monotone of death in life, this does not obviate the charge laid at the door of individualism. It simply shows that, to present appearance, neither view contains a solution of the moral-religious problem, and that our search must be pushed farther.
This possible self-contradiction — I do not say it is real; on the contrary, I hope presently to show it is illusory — is not the only difficulty with our moral idealism. In another aspect, the scheme may be charged with polytheism; or again, on other grounds, with atheism. All the members of this required moral system, men or other spirits as well as the supposed God, are unreservedly self-active;
