Is it desperate? That is not the question to be asked. But
rather, What must I do to give full force to the teaching and spread
of ideas that can awaken men's confidence?
Any effective spread of these ideas will find its first obstacle in the
habits of thought of the present age, which will quarrel with them on
two grounds:--Either it will be objected in some form or another, that
any dismemberment in the unity of the social life is inconceivable,
that its three supposed branches cannot be torn apart, seeing that
in actual practice they are everywhere intertwined. Or else people
will opine, that it is quite possible under the onefold state to
give each of the three branches its necessary independent character;
that all these ideas are mere cobweb-spinning, with nothing in them,
and quite apart from all reality. The first objection comes from
thinking unreally, from presupposing that unity of life is only
possible in a community of human beings, when the unity is introduced
by ordinance. What life in reality requires is, however just the
reverse. Unity must be the result, the final outcome of all the
streams of activity flowing together from various directions. This
idea is the one in accordance with life; but it had the evolution of
the latter age against it; and so the tide of life in men bore down
against the artificial "order" in its path,--and landed in the present
social conditions. The second preconception arises from inability to
distinguish the radical difference in the working of the three systems
of social life. People do not see, that man stands in a separate and
peculiar relation to each of the three; that, for the full development
of its special quality, each of these three relations requires a ground
to itself in actual life, where it can evolve its own form apart from
the other two, in order that all three may combine in their working.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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