He is always wanting to break through the
abstraction and interrupt the law, in order that he may present to himself
the more familiar image of a divine friend. While the impersonal has too
slender a hold upon the affections to be made the basis of religion, the
conception of a person on the other hand tends to degenerate into a new
kind of idolatry. Neither criticism nor experience allows us to suppose
that there are interferences with the laws of nature; the idea is
inconceivable to us and at variance with facts. The philosopher or
theologian who could realize to mankind that a person is a law, that the
higher rule has no exception, that goodness, like knowledge, is also power,
would breathe a new religious life into the world.
c. Besides the imaginary rule of a philosopher or a God, the actual forms
of government have to be considered. In the infancy of political science,
men naturally ask whether the rule of the many or of the few is to be
preferred. If by 'the few' we mean 'the good' and by 'the many,' 'the
bad,' there can be but one reply: 'The rule of one good man is better than
the rule of all the rest, if they are bad.' For, as Heracleitus says, 'One
is ten thousand if he be the best.' If, however, we mean by the rule of
the few the rule of a class neither better nor worse than other classes,
not devoid of a feeling of right, but guided mostly by a sense of their own
interests, and by the rule of the many the rule of all classes, similarly
under the influence of mixed motives, no one would hesitate to answer--'The
rule of all rather than one, because all classes are more likely to take
care of all than one of another; and the government has greater power and
stability when resting on a wider basis.
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