Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/41

 who conduct tabloid newspapers make this fact the corner-stone of their metaphysical system. Their ideal piece of news is one in which nothing is left to the imagination that can be wormed through the mails. Their readers want no sublimation and no symbolism.

Love, as Freud explains, has many meanings. It runs from the erotic to the philanthropic. But in all departments and on all planes the inferior man reduces it to terms of his own elemental yearnings. Of all his stupidities there is none more stupid than that which makes it impossible for him to see beyond them, even as an act of the imagination. He simply cannot formulate the concept of a good that is not his own good. The fact explains his immemorial heat against heretics, sacred and secular. His first thought and his last thought, contemplating them, is to stand them up against a wall, and have at them with musketry. Go back into history as far as you please, and you will find no record that he has ever opened his mouth for fairness, for justice, for decency between man and man. Such concepts, like the concepts of honour and of liberty, are eternally beyond him, and belong only to his superiors. The