Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/564

538 the man who has read and understood Kant's Critique and Goethe's Faust, will know how to discriminate between a needless popular rising and an indispensable revolution.

Moreover, our judgment of the revolution will vary according to our estimate of the significance of state organisation, of government, and of dynasties. One who does not regard the state as the most important and most valuable element of social organisation, will hardly regard a political revolution as a revelation from on high.

An insight into the nature of social harmony leads us to insist that the revolutionary, if he claims the right to be judge over others in life-and-death matters, must himself before all things think, feel, and live progressively and democratically. Democracy has its duties as well as its rights. Democracy is no mere political system of universal suffrage, but a new philosophy and a new conduct of life. It is essential that democrats should educate and train men for democracy. For the time being, the schools are in the hands of state and church, and an essential point to-day in the political struggle is therefore to liberate the school from the theocracy; political culture and education must for the nonce be secured outside the school, and in opposition to the official ideals of education. The supreme difficulty lies in the vicious circle, that the children are educated by the fathers, the young by the old, democrats by aristocrats. Hence the revolution is an uprising of the children against the fathers.

N support of their opinion that revolution is justifiable, progressively minded and democratic jurists appeal to the so-called natural right which was formulated in the sense of the humanitarian ideal. Substantially, by natural right is meant that ethical rules are to be embodied in legislation, and numerous attempts have been made towards the formulation of this idea. According to Hume and Kant, however, no precise epistemological foundation has hitherto been provided for natural right.

A primary democratic claim is the right of individual initiative, and this applies in especial to revolution. The justification for a revolution is not furnished by the participation of the masses, but depends upon the motives of those