Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/541

Rh we understand the new religion, and not ecclesiastical religion, not ecclesiastical Christianity.

The relationship of democracy to religion is implicit in the ethical foundation of democracy. Democratic equality is based not on revelation but on ethics; and modern philosophy, which is predominantly ethical, discusses this foundation.

The social and political aspirations of democracy issue from the democratic ethic, for in ultimate analysis the foundation of justice is necessarily ethical. But theocracy bases justice and ethics upon religion.

Democracy proclaims the right of individual initiative, for this is the essence of modern individualism. How extensive is the social and political power attaching to the faculty which each one of us now possesses of publicly criticising persons and things! This power of public criticism having been acquired once for all [written in 1913], aristocracy and its occultism tend increasingly to grow feeble, to decay, and to be replaced. The referendum and the initiative demanded by the democracy already exist in substance, even though they have not yet been formally incorporated into parliamentary institutions.

Democracy consists in the unloosing of every energy, whilst the essence of aristocracy is absolutist restraint.

Democracy perforce desires to create the new; theocratic aristocracy wishes to preserve the old.

Democracy works by scientific method, and its tactics are therefore inductive, realistic, and empirical; theocratic aristocracy is deductive, unrealist, fanciful, and scholastic.

Democracy contrasts with theocratic aristocracy in respect of substance as well as in respect of form. The political and social aspirations of democracy spring from a new conception of the value of human personality. For democracy, too, the supreme moral imperative is love of one's neighbour; the socialists are continually referring to Jesus and to Christianity. It is true that theocracy likewise preached love, but it was and remained aristocratic, for it simultaneously demanded absolute faith, and its conception of love was passivist (in fact, aristocratic). Priests and rulers wished to give their believing and industrious slaves doctrine and daily bread, thereby assuring the continuance of their own dominion.

Democratic love of one's neighbour requires the legal establishment of equality, demands justice; this is the essential