The Thraldom of Habit.
Democracy, in a new democratic republic, needs a new man, a new Adam. Man is a creature of habit. If we desire a really modern, consistent democracy we must break with our old political habits, and must abjure every form and kind of violence. Above all, we must de-Austrianize ourselves.
A democratic republic is a matter of principle. It does not simply mean replacing a Monarch by a President. Democracy is the political form of modern social organization, of the modern outlook, of the modern man. To proclaim and to practise the equality of all citizens, to recognize that all are free, to uphold inwardly and outwardly the humane principle of fraternity is as much a moral as a political innovation.
As I have shown when writing of Russia men are wont to make their earthly and heavenly gods in their own image. They are anthropomorphist. Politically and religiously they fashion their ideal of the future, in this world and the next, after their own capacities, their own good and bad qualities, their own usages and habits. All of us and all political parties have something of this folly in us for, in the last resort, anthropomorphism is what men are accustomed to think and to do. They find it hard to do anything new; and, at best, they change what is old as little as they can. Most of them are guided, in theory and practice, by analogy—to use the term in its logical and epistemological sense—not by creative understanding. But true philosophy and science demand that men should think, that they should gather wide experience, observing and comparing the present and the past, and verifying their deductions from experience by further experience so that haste may not lead them to fantastic conclusions. In art, as in politics and life, there is a difference between fantastic imaginings and the power of imagination, pure imagination as Goethe called it, for precise imagination is a very necessary means to right and exact thinking. A thinking man, ponderate in action, is he whose power of imagination can take him beyond himself, free him from the circumstances to which custom has bound him—a man who, by feeling and thought, can enter into the lives of other men and other times, immerse himself in the spirit of his race, of Europe, of humanity. Only thus can he create something and become a new man. Even then he will be modest and remember that men are no Titans, let alone gods.
From what I have called “anthropomorphism,” from slavery to habit, politics and parliamentarism suffer in especial degree.
