BURKE AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION
“Everybody knows,” Burke writes of the members of the French National
Assembly, “that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which
of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all
resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their
manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all
the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the
debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his
life he is their canon of _Polycletus_; he is their standard figure of
perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to
Frenchmen, the founderies of Paris are now running for statues, with
the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches.”
I have presented Rousseau in his essential influence as the extremist
and foe of compromise. In contrast to Rousseau, Burke is usually and
rightly supposed to embody the spirit of moderation. Many of his
utterances on the French Revolution, however (the passage I have just
quoted may serve as a sample), are scarcely suggestive of moderation,
and towards the end he becomes positively violent. There is at least
this much to be said in justification of Burke, that in his writings
on the Revolution, he is for the most part debating first principles,
and when it comes to first principles, the issue raised is not one
of moderation, but of truth or error. Burke was no mere partisan of
the _status quo_. He was not opposed on principle to revolutions. He
is perhaps open to the charge of pushing too far his admiration for
the Revolution of 1688. His attitude towards the American Revolution
was consistently one of compromise and in many respects of sympathy.
He did not stand in any undue awe of those in authority. No one could
on occasion call them to a stricter accounting or show himself a more
disinterested champion of the victims of unjust power. He recognized
specifically the abuses of the Old Régime in France, and was ready
to admit the application to these abuses of fairly drastic remedies.
If he refused, therefore, to compromise with the French Revolution,
the reason is to be sought less in the field of politics than in
that of general philosophy, and even of religion. He saw that the
Revolution did not, like other revolutions, seek to redress certain
specific grievances, but had universal pretensions. France was to
become the “Christ of nations” and conduct a crusade for the political
regeneration of mankind. This particular mixture of the things of God
and the things of Cæsar seemed to him psychologically unsound, and in
any case subversive of the existing social order of Europe. The new
revolutionary evangel was the final outcome of the speculations that
had been going on for generations about a state of nature, natural
rights, the social contract, and abstract and unlimited sovereignty.
Burke is the chief opponent of this tendency towards what one may term
metaphysical politics, especially as embodied in the doctrine of the
rights of man. “They are so taken up with the rights of man,” he says
of the members of this school, “that they have totally forgotten his
nature.” Under cover of getting rid of prejudice they would strip man
of all the habits and concrete relationships and network of historical
circumstance in which he is actually implicated and finally leave
him shivering “in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical
abstraction.” They leave no limit to logic save despotism. In his
attack on the enemies of prejudice, by which was meant practically
everything that is traditional and prescriptive, Burke has perhaps
neglected unduly certain minor though still important distinctions,
especially the distinction between those who were for getting rid of
prejudice in the name of reason, and those who, like Rousseau, were
for getting rid of it in the name of feeling. The rationalists and
the Rousseauists were actually ready to guillotine one another in the
Revolution, an opposition prefigured in the feud between Rousseau and
various “philosophers,” notably Voltaire. Rousseau was as ready as
Burke, though on different grounds, as I shall try to show presently,
to protest against the “solid darkness of this enlightened age.”
By the dismissal as mere prejudice of the traditional forms that are in
no small measure the funded experience of any particular community, the
State loses its historical continuity, its permanent self, as it were,
that unites its present with its past and future. By an unprincipled
facility in changing the State such as is encouraged by Rousseau’s
impressionistic notion of the general will, the generations of men can
no more link with one another than the flies of a summer. They are
disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality. In point of
fact, any political philosophy, whether that of Hobbes or of Rousseau,
which starts from the supposition that men are naturally isolated
units, and achieve society only as the result of an artifice, is in its
essence violently individualistic. For this atomistic, mechanical view
of the State, Burke is usually supposed to have substituted an organic,
historical conception. Much of his actual influence, in Germany[34]
and elsewhere, has certainly been along these lines. Yet this is far
from being the whole truth about Burke. A one-sided devotion to the
organic, historical conception is itself an outcome of the naturalistic
movement. It may lead to fatalistic acquiescence in traditional forms,
and discourage, not merely abstract rationalism, but a reasonable
adjustment of these forms to shifting circumstance. It relates itself
very readily to that side of the romantic movement that exalts the
unconscious at the expense of moral choice and conscious deliberation.
Once obscure this capacity in the individual, which alone raises him
above phenomenal nature, and it will not be easy in the long run to
preserve his autonomy; he will tend, as so often in German theory, to
lose his independent will and become a mere organ of the all-powerful
State. Though Taine, again, often professes to speak as a disciple of
Burke in his attacks on the French Revolution, it is not easy to see a
true follower in a philosopher who proclaimed that “vice and virtue are
products like sugar and vitriol.”
The truth is that Burke is in no sense a collectivist, and still less,
if possible, a determinist. If he had been either, he would not
have attained to that profound perception of true liberty in which
he surpasses perhaps any other political thinker, ancient or modern.
For one who believes in personal liberty in Burke’s sense, the final
emphasis is necessarily not on the State but on the individual. His
individualism, however, is not, like that of Rousseau, naturalistic,
but humanistic and religious. Only, in getting the standards by which
the individual may hope to surpass his ordinary self, and achieve
humanism or religion, he would have him lean heavily on prescription.
Burke is anti-individualistic in that he would not set the individual
to trading on his own private stock of wit. He would have him respect
the general sense, the accumulated experience of the past that
has become embodied in the habits and usages that the superficial
rationalist would dismiss as prejudice. If the individual condemns
the general sense, and trusts unduly his private self, he will have
no model; and a man’s first need is to look up to a sound model and
imitate it. He may thus become exemplary in his turn. The principle
of homage and service to what is above one has its culmination and
final justification in fealty to God, the true sovereign and supreme
exemplar. Burke’s conception of the State may be described as a free
and flexible adaptation of genuinely Platonic and Christian elements.
“We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the
basis of civil society, and the source of all good and all comfort.”
“God willed the State.” (Thus to conceive the highest in terms of will
is Christian.) “He willed its connection with the source and original
archetype of all perfection.” (The language is here Platonic.)
Not merely religion but the actual church establishment is held by
Englishmen to be essential to their State, as being indeed the very
foundation of their constitution.
“Society is indeed a contract,” though the basis of the contract is
not mere utility. The State is not to be regarded as a partnership
agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee. It is not, as a contemporary
pacifist has maintained, the “pooled self-esteem” of the community, but
rather its permanent ethical self. It is, therefore, a partnership in
all science and art and in every virtue and perfection. “As the ends of
such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes
a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those
who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Though Burke thus uses the language of contract, it is plain that he
moves in a different world from all those, including Locke, for whom
the idea of contract meant that man has certain rights as a free gift
of nature and anterior to the performance of his duties. Talk to the
child, says Rousseau, of something that will interest him--talk to him
of his rights, and not of his duties.[35] To assert, as Burke does in
the main, that one has only concrete historical rights, acquired as the
result of the fulfilment of definite obligations, is evidently remote
from Rousseau’s assertion that a man enjoys certain abstract rights
simply because he has taken the trouble to be born. The difference
here is not merely between Burke and Rousseau, but also between Burke
and Locke. The final superficiality of Locke is that he granted man
abstract natural rights anterior to his duties, and then hoped that it
would be possible to apply this doctrine moderately. But it has been
justly said that doctrines of this kind are most effective in their
extreme logical form because it is in this form that they capture the
imagination. Now if the out-and-out radical is often highly imaginative
in the fashion that I have attributed to Rousseau, the Whigs and the
liberals who follow the Whig tradition are rather open to the suspicion
of being deficient on the side of imagination. One cannot help feeling,
for instance, that if Macaulay had been more imaginative, he would have
shown less humanitarian complacency in his essay on Bacon. Disraeli
again is said to have looked with disdain on J. S. Mill because of his
failure to perceive the rôle of the imagination in human affairs, a
lack that can scarcely be charged against Disraeli himself, whatever
one may think of the quality of his imagination.
Now Burke is the exceptional Whig, in that he is not only splendidly
imaginative, but admits the supreme rôle of the imagination rather
more explicitly than is common among either Christians or Platonists
with whom I have associated him. He saw how much of the wisdom of life
consists in an imaginative assumption of the experience of the past in
such fashion as to bring it to bear as a living force upon the present.
The very model that one looks up to and imitates is an imaginative
creation. A man’s imagination may realize in his ancestors a standard
of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; so that
he may be enabled to rise with the example to whose imitation he has
aspired. The forms of the past and the persons who administer them
count in Burke’s eyes chiefly as imaginative symbols. In the famous
passage on Marie Antoinette one almost forgets the living and suffering
woman to see in her with Burke a gorgeous symbol of the age of chivalry
yielding to the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.”
There is in this sense truth in the taunt of Tom Paine that Burke
pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. All the decent drapery
of life, Burke complains of the new philosophy, is to be rudely torn
off. “All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a
moral imagination, ... are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and
antiquated fashion.”
The apostles of the rights of man were, according to Burke, undermining
the two principles on which everything that was truly civilized in
the European order had for ages depended: the spirit of religion and
the spirit of a gentleman. The nobility and the clergy, who were the
custodians of these principles and of the symbols that embodied them
and ministered to the moral imagination, had received in turn the
support of the learned. Burke warns the learned that in deserting their
natural protectors for Demos, they run the risk of being “cast into the
mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”
Burke is in short a frank champion of aristocracy. It is here
especially, however, that he applies flexibly his Christian-Platonic,
and humanistic principles. He combines a soundly individualistic
element with his cult of the traditional order. He does not wish any
static hierarchy. He disapproves of any tendency to deal with men in
classes and groups, a tendency that the extreme radical shares with
the extreme reactionary. He would have us estimate men, not by their
hereditary rank, but by their personal achievement. “There is,” he
says, “no qualification for government but virtue or wisdom, actual or
presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, they have in whatever
state, condition, profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to human
place and honor.” He recognizes, to be sure, that it is hard for the
manual worker to acquire such virtue and wisdom for the reason that he
lacks the necessary leisure. The ascent of rare merit from the lower to
the higher levels of society should, however, always be left open, even
though this merit be required to pass through a severe probation.
In the same fashion, Burke would admit innovations in the existing
social order only after a period of severe probation. He is no partisan
of an inert traditionalism. His true leader or natural aristocrat,
as he terms him, has, in his adjustment of the contending claims of
new and old, much of the character of the “trimmer” as Halifax has
described him. “By preserving the method of nature in the conduct of
the State, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we
retain, we are never wholly obsolete.” “The disposition to preserve,
and ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a
statesman.” In such utterances Burke is of course simply giving the
theory of English liberty at its best, a theory almost too familiar for
restatement. In his imaginative grasp of all that is involved in the
task of mediating between the permanent and the fluctuating element in
life, the Platonic art, as one may say, of seeing the One in the Many,
he has had few equals in the field of political thinking.
Burke is, however, in one important respect highly un-Platonic, and
that is in his attitude towards the intellect. His distrust of what we
should call nowadays the intellectual may be variously explained. It
is related in some respects to one side, the weak side, one is bound
to add, of Christianity. “A certain intemperance of intellect,” he
writes, “is the disease of the time, and the source of all its other
diseases.” He saw so clearly the dangers of this abuse that he was
led at times, as the Christian has at times been led, to look with
suspicion on intellect itself. And then he was familiar, as we are
all familiar, with persons who give no reasons at all, or the wrong
reasons, for doing the right thing, and with other persons who give
the most logical and ingenious reasons for doing the wrong thing. The
basis for right conduct is not reasoning but experience, and experience
much wider than that of the individual, the secure possession of which
can result only from the early acquisition of right habits. Then, too,
there is something specifically English in Burke’s disparagement of the
intellect. The Englishman, noting the results of the proneness of a
certain type of Frenchman to reason rigorously from false or incomplete
premises, comes to prefer his own piecemeal good sense and proclivity
for “muddling through.” As Disraeli told a foreign visitor, the country
is governed not by logic but by Parliament. In much the same way
Bagehot in the course of a comparison between the Englishman and the
Frenchman in politics, reaches the semi-humorous conclusion that “in
real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled.”
The anti-intellectual side of Burke reminds one at times of the
anti-intellectual side of Rousseau: when, for instance, he speaks
of “the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without
reflection and above it.” The resemblance is, however, only
superficial. The wisdom that Rousseau proclaimed was not _above_
reflection but _below_ it. A distinction of this kind is rather
meaningless unless supported by careful psychological analysis. Perhaps
the first contrast between the superrational and the subrational is
that between awe and wonder.[36] Rousseau is plainly an apostle of
wonder, so much so that he is probably the chief single influence
in the “renascence of wonder” that has resulted from the romantic
movement. The romantic objection to intellect is that by its precise
analysis and tracing of cause and effect, it diminishes wonder. Burke,
on the other hand, is fearful lest an indiscreet intellectual activity
may undermine awe and reverence. “We ought,” he says, “to venerate
where we are unable presently to understand.” As the best means of
securing veneration, Burke leans heavily upon habit, whereas the
romantics, from Rousseau to Walter Pater, are no less clearly hostile
to habit because it seems to lead to a stereotyped world, a world
without vividness and surprise. To lay stress on veneration meant
for Burke, at least in the secular order, to lay stress on rank and
degree; whereas the outstanding trait perhaps of the state of nature
projected by Rousseau’s imagination, in defiance of the actual facts
of primitive life so far as we know them, is that it is equalitarian.
This trait is common to his no-state and his all-state, his anarchistic
and his collectivistic Utopia. The world of the “Social Contract,” no
less than that of the “Second Discourse,” is a world without degree
and subordination; a world in which no one looks up to any one else or
expects any one to look up to him; a world in which no one (and this
seems to Rousseau very desirable) has either to command or to obey.
In his predominant emphasis on equality,[37] Rousseau speaks, to some
extent at least, not merely for himself but for France, especially the
France of the last two centuries. “Liberty,” says Mallet du Pan, “a
thing forever unintelligible to Frenchmen.”[38] Perhaps liberty has
not been intelligible in its true essence to many persons anywhere.
“The love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty,” Burke himself
admits, “is extremely rare.” If the basis of this genuine liberty is,
as Burke affirms, an act of subordination, it is simply incompatible
with Rousseauistic equality.
The act of subordination to any earthly authority is justified only
in case this authority is looking up to something still higher; so
that genuine liberty is rooted in the virtue that also underlies
genuine Christianity. “True humility, the basis of the Christian
system, is the low, but deep and firm foundation of all real virtue.
But this, as very painful in the practice and little imposing in the
appearance,” he goes on to say of the French revolutionists, “they
have totally discarded.” They have preferred to follow Rousseau, the
great “professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity.” Rousseau
himself said that he based his position on the “noblest pride,” and
pride is, even more than vanity, the significant opposite of humility.
I have already spoken of Rousseau’s depreciation of humility in favor
of patriotic pride. The problem of pride versus humility is, of course,
not primarily political at all. It is a problem of the inner life.
Rousseau undermined humility in the individual by substituting the
doctrine of natural goodness for the older doctrine of man’s sinfulness
and fallibility. The forms and traditions, religious and political,
that Burke on the other hand defends, on the ground that they are
not arbitrary but are convenient summings up of a vast body of past
experience, give support to the imagination of the individual; the
imagination, thus drawn back as it were to an ethical centre, supplies
in turn a standard with reference to which the individual may set
bounds to the lawless expansion of his natural self (which includes his
intellect as well as his emotions). From a purely psychological point
of view, Burke’s emphasis on humility and on the imaginative symbols
that he deems necessary to secure it, reduces itself to an emphasis
on what one may term the centripetal element in liberty. Rousseau, at
least the Rousseau that has influenced the world, practically denies
the need of any such centripetal element in liberty, inasmuch as what
will emerge spontaneously on the disappearance of the traditional
controls is an expansive will to brotherhood. If one rejects like Burke
this gospel of “universal benevolence,” it is hard not to conceive
of liberty in Burke’s fashion--namely, as a nice adjustment between
the taking on of inner control and the throwing off of outer control.
“Society,” he says, “cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will
and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within,
the more there must be without.” This adjustment between inner and
outer control, which concerns primarily the individual, is thus seen
to determine at last the degree to which any community is capable of
political liberty. True statesmanship is in this sense a humanistic
mediation and not an indolent oscillation between extremes. “To make a
government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach
obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It
is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to
form a _free government_--that is, to temper together these opposite
elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much
thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.”
I have already said that Burke is very exceptional in that he is a
splendidly imaginative Whig. As a matter of fact, most of the typical
Whigs and liberals in the Whig tradition, are, like Burke, partisans
of liberty in the sense of personal liberty and of moderation. They do
not, however, give their personal liberty and moderation the same basis
of religion and humanistic control. On the contrary, they incline to
be either rationalists or emotionalists, which means practically that
they found their ethics either on the principle of utility, or else
on the new spirit of sympathy and service, or more commonly on some
compound of these main ingredients of humanitarianism. The liberty of
Burke, I have tried to show, is not only religiously grounded, but
involves in its political application a genuine humanistic mediation.
The Whig compromise, on the other hand, is only too often an attempt to
compromise between views of life, namely, the religious-humanistic and
the utilitarian-sentimental, which are in their essence incompatible.
Thus the liberalism of J. S. Mill is, compared with the liberalism of
Burke, open to the charge of being unimaginative. Furthermore, from
a strictly modern point of view, it is open to the charge of being
insufficiently critical. For the liberty Mill desires is of the kind
that will result only from the traditional spiritual controls, or from
some adequate substitute, and his philosophy, as I shall try to show
more fully later, supplies neither.
Burke can scarcely be charged with the form of superficiality
that consists in an attempt to mediate between incompatible first
principles. One may, however, feel that he failed to recognize the full
extent and gravity of the clash between the new principles and the old;
and one may also find it hard to justify the obscurantist element that
enters into his defence of his own religious and humanistic position.
One might gather from Burke that England was almost entirely made up
of Christian gentlemen ready to rally to the support of the majestic
edifice of traditional civilization, to all the decencies of life
based finally on the moral imagination, whereas the “sophisters,
economists, and calculators” who were destroying this edifice by their
substitution for the moral imagination of an abstract metaphysical
reason were almost entirely French. He does indeed refer to the English
deists, but only to dismiss them as obscure eccentrics. The English
intellectuals and radical thinkers of his own time he waves aside with
the utmost contempt, opposing to them not those who think more keenly,
but those who do not think at all. “Because half a dozen grasshoppers
under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst
thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British
oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who
make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course,
they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the
little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome,
insects of the hour.”
In this passage we have the obscurantist Burke at his weakest. The
truth is that the little, meagre, hopping insects of the hour were
representatives of an international movement of vast scope, a movement
destined finally to prevail over the prejudice and prescription that
Burke was defending. Moreover, this movement was largely, if not indeed
primarily, of English origin. “It is from England,” says Joubert, “that
have issued forth, like fogs, the metaphysical and political ideas
which have darkened everything.” It is hard to trace the main currents
of European life and thought from the Renaissance, especially the
rise of humanitarianism in both its utilitarian and its sentimental
aspects, and not assent in large measure to the assertion of Joubert.
Burke’s conception of man and of the State with its strong tinge
of Platonic realism (in the older sense of the word) and its final
emphasis on humility, or submission to the will of God, has important
points of contact with the mediæval conception. Now, even before
Francis Bacon, men from the British Islands played an important part in
breaking down this realism. Duns Scotus discredited reason in theology
in favor of an arbitrary divine will, and so released reason for use in
the secular order. William of Occam asserted a nominalism that looks
forward to our type of realism, a realism, that is, not of the One but
of the Many, and, therefore, at the opposite pole from the mediæval
variety. Roger Bacon is significant for the future both by his interest
in the physical order and by the experimental temper that he displays
in dealing with this order.
To come to a later period, the upshot of the civil convulsions of
seventeenth-century England was to diminish imaginative allegiance to
the past. The main achievement of Cromwell himself was, as his admirer
Marvell avowed, to “ruin the great work of Time.” As loyalty to the
great traditions declined, England concentrated on the utilitarian
effort of which Francis Bacon is the prophet, and thus did more
than any other country to prepare and carry through the industrial
revolution, compared with which the French Revolution is only a
melodramatic incident.
If the Christian classical England that Burke took to be truly
representative has survived in a place like Oxford, utilitarian
England has got itself embodied in cities like Birmingham, so that
the opposition between the two Englands, an opposition that is one
of first principles, has come to be written on the very face of the
landscape. The Englishman, however, does not proceed by logical
exclusions, and is capable of maintaining in more or less friendly
juxtaposition things that are ultimately incompatible. Thus a young man
receives a religious-humanistic training at Oxford as a preparation
for helping to administer the British Empire in India, an empire
which is, in its origins, chiefly an outcome of the utilitarian and
commercially expansive England. The kind of leadership that Burke
desired, the leadership of the true gentleman, still plays no small
part in the affairs of England and of the world. The Englishman
whom he conceives to be typical, who “fears God, looks up with awe
to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates,
with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility,” is still
extant, but is considerably less typical. Above all, his psychology
is not that of the great urban masses that owe their existence to the
industrial revolution. What Birmingham stands for has been gaining
steadily on what Oxford stands for, and that even at Oxford itself.
I have said that the only effective conservatism is an imaginative
conservatism. Now it has not only become increasingly difficult to
enter imaginatively into certain traditional symbols, but in general
the imagination has been drawn away more and more from the element of
unity in things to the element of diversity. As a result of the type
of progress that has been proclaimed, everything good has come to be
associated with novelty and change, with the piling up of discovery
on discovery. Life, thus viewed, no longer involves any reverence for
some centre or oneness, but is conceived as an infinite and indefinite
expansion of wonder and curiosity. As a result of all this intoxication
with change, the world is moving, we are asked to believe, towards
some “far-off divine event.” It is at this point that the affinity
appears between the utilitarian or Baconian, and the emotional or
Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement. The far-off divine
event is, no less than Rousseau’s state of nature, a projection of
the idyllic imagination. The felicity of the divine event, like that
of the state of nature, is a felicity that can be shown to involve no
serious moral effort or self-discipline on the part of the individual.
Rousseau himself put his golden age in the past, but nothing is easier
than to be a Rousseauist, and at the same time, like the Baconian, put
one’s golden age in the future. The differences between Baconian and
Rousseauist, and they are numerous, are, compared with this underlying
similarity in the quality of their “vision,” unimportant. I remarked
at the outset that the modern political movement may be regarded in
its most significant aspect as a battle between the spirit of Rousseau
and that of Burke. Whatever the explanation, it is an indubitable fact
that this movement has been away from Burke and towards Rousseau. “The
star of Burke is manifestly fading,” Lecky was able to write a number
of years ago, “and a great part of the teaching of the ‘Contrat Social’
is passing into English politics.” Professor Vaughan, again, the editor
of the recent standard edition of Rousseau’s political writings,
remarked in his introduction, apparently without awakening any special
contradiction or surprise, that in the essentials of political wisdom
Burke is “immeasurably inferior to the man of whom he never speaks but
with scorn and loathing; to the despised theorist, the metaphysical
madman of Geneva.”
Burke will be cherished as long as any one survives in the world
who has a perception of the nature of true liberty. It is evident,
however, that if a true liberalism is to be successfully defended
under present circumstances, it will not be altogether by Burke’s
method. The battle for prejudice and prescription and a “wisdom above
reflection” has already been lost. It is no longer possible to wave
aside the modernists as the mere noisy insects of an hour, or to oppose
to an unsound activity of intellect mere stolidity and imperviousness
to thought--the great cattle chewing their cud in the shadow of the
British oak. But before coming to the question of method, we need to
consider what the triumph of Rousseau has actually meant in the history
of modern Europe, during and since the Great Revolution. A survey of
this kind will be found to involve a consideration of the two chief
political problems of the present time, the problem of democracy and
the problem of imperialism, both in themselves and in their relation to
one another.