Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/47

Rh kind, find their friends on our side, or nowhere; for the other side will have none of them.

That democracy implies a doctrine of love cannot be demonstrated by any formal process of logic. Democracy is not a system but a ferment. The militant state, on the contrary, is a system, and herein lies both its weakness and its strength. It appeals to the head, but it leaves the heart cold. It embodies law; but it fails alike to embrace morality and to enshrine religion. The militant state is static, democracy is dynamic. The one stands until it breaks, the other is a growing thing which suffers death only to live again more abundantly. And the seed of democracy is social sympathy. Viewed externally, the democratic spirit might seem to be but a spirit of revolt. Viewed from within, it is perceived to be a spirit of toleration such as enables outworn conventions to be constantly renewed without rupture of the social tie. Hence democracy is hateful to a certain type of philosopher. It smacks of the infinite, that bugbear of the tidy-minded. It cannot be reduced to an idea; its content is a discontent, which is divine only for those who seek God in the indefinable. This school of thought, indeed, would likewise regard a philosophy of love as something of a misnomer. Love implies hope, which is the despair of knowledge; it implies faith, which is heresy for the dogmatic. Then let us say, in deference to the prejudices of those who view the world through the spectacles of formal logic, that the humanism with which the cause of democracy is bound up is not so much a philosophy as a religion. It involves a more spiritual interpretation of the destiny of man than does the complacent conceptualism of the militant state, which is through and through mechanical in its determination of human functions.

And yet it is the upholders of the militant state who appeal to nature and the primitive—as if the voice of nature and the wild bore unmistakable witness to the truth of