Towards a New Social Order - Introduction
Introduction
- Reason projects the democratic Trinity of Godheads: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
- But Reason cannot sufficiently establish them or sustain them. One by one, these Godheads tend to be discarded as noxious democratic chimeras.
- What is the solution?
The Train of Reason
Democracy -- Socialism -- Anarchism
Liberty -- Equality -- Fraternity
“If we may judge from the modern movement, the progress of the reason as a social renovator and creator, if not interrupted in its course, would be destined to pass through three successive stages which are the very logic of its growth, the first individualistic and increasingly democratic with liberty for its principle, the second socialistic, in the end perhaps a governmental communism with equality and the State for its principle, the third -- if that ever gets beyond the stage of theory -- anarchistic in the higher sense of that much abused word, either a loose voluntary co-operation or a free communalism with brotherhood or comradeship and not government for its principle. It is in the transition to its third and consummating stage, if or whenever that comes, that the power and sufficiency of the reason will be tested...”
The Right Terminus of Reason
All find in the spiritual truth their standing ground of mutual recognition and reconciliation.
“The spiritual is the one truth of which all others are the veiled aspects, the brilliant disguises or the dark disfigur-ements and in which they can find their own right form and true relation to each other. This is a work the reason cannot do. The business of the reason is intermediate: it is to observe and understand this life by the intelligence and discover for it the direction in which it is going and the laws of its self-development on the way. In order that it may do its office, it is obliged to adopt temporarily fixed viewpoints none of which is more than partially true and to create systems none of which can really stand as the final expression of the integral truth of things. The integral truth of things is truth not of the reason but of the spirit.”