hich he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsisting
would be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, and
inwardly rewarded. For such excellence to grow general mankind must be
notably transformed. If a noble and civilised democracy is to subsist,
the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero.
We see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the same
time how ominous, was Montesquieu's saying that the principle of
democracy is virtue.

CHAPTER VI

FREE SOCIETY

[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit.]

Natural society unites beings in time and space; it fixes affection on
those creatures on which we depend and to which our action must be
adapted. Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, as
more and more things become tributary to our personal being. In marriage
and the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is riveted
on temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural or
corporate. There is then a primacy of nature over spirit in social life;
and this primacy, in a certain sense, endures to the end, since all
spirit must be the spirit of something, and reason could not exist or be
conceived at all unless a material organism, personal or social, lay
beneath to give thought an occasion and a point of view, and to give
preference a direction. Things could not be near or far, worse or
better, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged
somewhere in space and time. Reason is a principle of order appearing in
a subject-matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be an
irrational datum. Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse,
and impulse expresses a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.

At the same time, natural growths may be called achievements only
because, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience.
Nature's works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke;
mechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point of
view of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow grows
impassioned and vehement. Nature's values are imputed to her
retroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logical
and moral primacy of its own. In themselves events are perfectly
mechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor
avoiding what we call failures. And so they would always have