Ideography

“ The democratic ideas, in a new form and fitted to existing circumstances, began to burn again in the poetry, the philosophy, the religion, the social and political realms of England. Deep-seated, wide-spreading emotion, accompanied by serious thinking, stirred the country and the towns, even the universities; and the deaf opposition of the baser conservative elements in society only deepened the excitement. ”

“ Could I wish humanity different Could I wish the people made of wood and stone, or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
There is danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more advanced than the intellectual, and moral qualities which alone can secure the success of a revolt. These intellectual and moral qualities—the skill to organize, the wisdom to control large undertakings, are not natural gifts but the results of experience. They are evolutionary products. ”

“ My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of evolution. Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a snake sloughing off its outworn skin. I was part of that process. Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and demanded [246] something else. I wondered that morning whether after all there weren't more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a whole life of preaching and moralizing. ”

“ And, in fact, it has happened, and it happens, that some men, and especially professional scientists, lay or clerical, have found, and find, the means of intellectual livelihood in the closed circle of the reflex and secondary products of civilization, and that they have been able and are able consequently to submit all the rest to the subjective view which they have elaborated under these conditions; that is, the origin and explanation of all the ideologies. Our doctrine has definitely outgrown the visual angle of ideology. ”

“ Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day,—orthodoxy, skepticism, missions, popular education, temperance, anti-masonry, anti-slavery; see how each of these abstractions has embodied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community ”

“ It is the people who, in the long run, without theories, by their spontaneous creations, modify, reform, absorb the policy projects and philosophical doctrines, and who, incessantly creating a new reality, incessantly change the basis of politics and philosophy. ”

“ Whatever goes by the different names of the revolutionary, the radical, the democratic, the liberal, the free-thinking, the sceptical, or the negative and critical school or party in religion, politics, or philosophy, all passes with him under the designation of metaphysical, and whatever he has to say about it forms part of his description of the metaphysical school of social science. ”

“ Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Everyone of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly anyone of us has the idea of the State, as a working power. ”

“ Nay, this Kingdom begins to be seen not only in religious ecstasy, in moral vision, but in the light of common sense, and the human understanding. Social science begins to verify the prophecy of poetry. ”

“ Mill. "There are the historical Radicals, who demand popular institutions as the inheritance of Englishmen, transmitted to us from the Saxons or the barons of Runnymede. There are the metaphysical Radicals, who hold the principles of democracy, not as means to good government, but as corollaries from some unreal abstraction,—from 'natural liberty' or 'natural rights.' There are the radicals of occasion and circumstance, who are radicals because they disapprove the measures of the government for the time being. ”

“ Men were raised tame, and what tamed them was an ideology—a unified, coherent body of ideas—which related the knowledge of the world to the sphere of morals, which was applied by the intellectually dominant classes as a means of control, and which secured for the controlling classes hegemony over all groups in society. ”

“ The book, with its deep reading of human nature, its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side. ”

“ One must understand the sense of events, one must tear off the masquerade clothing, one must wash off the paint and judge not by words, but by deeds, not by intentions, but by results. One must understand the objective meaning of the revolution. ”

“ This accounts for the whole humane movement of modern times toward democracy, toward the breaking of caste and the leveling of class divisions, toward emancipations and enfranchisements, toward equity in institutions and laws, toward common education and toward public and private charities of every kind.
It is not the fact, however, that every man acquires entirely for himself these larger and more intelligent perceptions, which broaden and clarify his notions of right. ”

“ If our difference of opinion is so inclusive that we can agree on nothing political, our differences have gone from mere opinion into the depths of ideology. Here the institutional framework is affected. ”

“ The more rigid the social order, the more stubborn its resistance to change. By the same token, more fluid societies lend themselves more readily to changes in practice and in theory.
It is not possible to discuss ideology without some reference to the closely related problems of means and ends. ”

“ Every political party based upon real principles (rather than upon a desire for spoils) , is organized as the result of the radiation of those principles held in the self-reliant hearts of a few men. Every school of thought, in philosophy, theology, medicine, law, ethics, or political economy, is based upon the radiation of ideas from self-reliant men. ”

“ Supposing that philosophers can find exquisite reasons for considering the institutions and requirements which have resulted from all this self-seeking and violence to be contributory to the common good of those who have to submit to them, is it not trifling to speak of them as founded on or representing a conception of this good, when no such conception has influenced those who established, maintain, or submit to them? ”

“ When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. ”

“ Certainly in the civilizations with which we are most familiar, political and economic forces, the principles of necessity and availability have led to the formulation of an ideology that would justify and promote the interests of the social group which was controlling and directing the community or communities in which the civilization was maturing. ”

“ After two years' reflection, experience, intercourse, reading of the graduated writings and information, you will necessarily have formed the idea that the final aim of our Society is nothing less than to win power and riches, to undermine secular or religious government, and to obtain the mastery of the world, and so on. ”

“ All alike, by a dogged persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also, and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals, taste, society, and literature. ”

“ Whatever may now dwell within him,—or, more strictly speaking, whatever he might have acquired in the course of his progressive culture,—he is unable to explain clearly either to himself or others, or to make it the deliberate rule of his actions and thus realize it in the world. He wants the two necessary elements of the true life of the Idea,—clearness and freedom. ”

“ Without having subjected the work to critical scrutiny, we are much impressed by the evidence it shows of extensive and conscientious labor, the freshness and interest of its chief subject-matter, the untrammeled treatment of the subject, and the vigor of the portrayal of that long and agonizing conflict with bigotry and intolerance, religious and political, public and private, which is the price of our modern liberty of thinking. ”

“ In order to discover this, it is necessary to consider whether these movements, although apparently divergent in their ultimate purpose, have nevertheless any ideas or any aims in common. One fundamental point of similarity will certainly be found between them. All desire to dominate the world and to direct it along lines and according to rules of their own devising; more than this, each desires to direct it solely for the benefit of one class of people--social, intellectual, or national as the case may be--to the entire exclusion of every human being outside that class. ”

“ I have shown in another work how institutions, arts, and languages are modified in passing from one people to another, and how the laws of these transformations differ from the truth as stated in books. I allude to this matter now merely to show why, in examining the subject of democratic ideas, we occupy ourselves so little with the text of doctrines, and seek only for the psychological elements of which they constitute the vestment, and the reactions which they provoke in the various categories of men who have accepted them. ”

“ Our most important opinions—those, for example, having to do with traditional, religious, and moral convictions, property rights, patriotism, national honor, the state, and indeed all the assumed foundations of society—are, as I have already suggested, rarely the result of reasoned consideration, but of unthinking absorption from the social environment in which we live. Consequently, they have about them a quality of "elemental certitude", and we especially resent doubt or criticism cast upon them. ”

“ In the free action of individual thought and expression grew eccentricities of belief and of practice, and a crop of so-called "isms," more or less temporary, unprofitable, and pernicious. Public opinion attained an astonishing degree of freedom,—I never heard of any community that was altogether free of its tyranny. At least extraordinary latitude was permitted in the development of extreme ideas, new, fantastic, radical, or conservative. ”

“ Having created an ideally perfect state, the philosopher proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce revolutions, of the moral effects of various forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the deductive method and to proceed from a priori psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the apparent chaos of political life. ”

“ Why then should we wish that the rising generation, who are to frame and control public opinion, after we have passed from being, should be on this question of vital importance taught doctrines which are in direct conflict with what we now believe? ”

“ Besides the organized institutions—visible as tools of industry or politics, or invisible in literature, science, settled and admitted principles of private morality or of public law,—which represent the history and achievements of mankind, they brought also ideas not organized in either form of institution, and sentiments not then translated into conscious thought. ”

“ But we can ask all men—artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists—to be citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. ”

“ What is stimulating those few, who are worth talking about and who still remain within the religious pale, is either the intellectual exercise of the new critical and historical methods, or else the democratic and socialistic aspects of the Founder's early teaching, both of them brought into being by modern and secular movements from without. Culture and Socialism are transmuting everything, but, for Heaven's sake, let us have them at first hand. ”

“ So far as experience has shown, they are certain to be, in a socialistic or communistic state; and the battle for toleration of opinion, for the liberty of the individual personality to expand along its own unique lines, for the chance of any further development in the possibilities for the advancement of the race, may have to be fought out again upon a grander scale than any the world has yet seen. ”

“ The assertion, then, that an idea of social good is represented by, or realised in, the formation of states, is not to be met by pointing to the selfishness and bad passions of men who have been instrumental in forming them, if there is reason to think that the influences, under the direction of which these passions became thus instrumental, are due to the action of such an idea. ”

“ With so much the more of reason, then, may we regard it as a sign of the times, and one, too, full of good promise and of bright and cheerful hope, if this long and cruelly-oppressed people seems suddenly to be aroused again or awakened from its degradation, and in manifold ways evincing an intellectual, moral, and social activity, begins to partake of a more liberal development and culture. ”