THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS 377
ruled by some great power or group of powers, as all the world was once
ruled by Rome, first with the sword and then with the word.
The universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the
empire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and philosophical
worship, is mentioned no more. . . . Those dark ages, from which our
political practice is derived, had a political theory we should do well to
study; for their theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was
in turn the echo of a former age of reason when a few men conscious of
ruling the world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule
it
82
justly.
Perhaps the development of international sports may give some outlet
to the spirit of group rivalry, and serve in some measure as "a moral
equivalent for war"; and perhaps the cross-investments of finance may
overcome the tendency of trade to come to blows for the markets of the
world. Santayana is not so enamored of industry as Spencer was; he
knows its militant as well as its pacific side: and all in all, he feels more
at ease in the atmosphere of an ancient aristocracy than in the hum of
a modern metropolis. We produce too much, and are swamped with the
things we make; "things are in the saddle and ride mankind/' as Emerson
put it. "In r. world composed entirely of philosophers an hour or two
a day of manual labor a very welcome quality would provide for
material wants." England is wiser than the United States; for though she
too is obsessed with the mania for production, she has in at least a portion
of her people realized the value and the arts of leisure. 88
He thinks that such culture as the world has known has always been
the fruit of aristocracies.
Civilization has hitherto consisted in the diffusion and dilution of habits
arising in privileged centres. It has not sprung from the people; it has arisen
in their midst by a variation from them, and it has afterward imposed it-
self on them from above. ... A state composed exclusively of such workers
and peasants as make up the bulk of modern nations would be an
utterly barbarous state. Every liberal tradition would perish in it; and the
rational and historic essence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emo-
tion of it, no doubt, would endure, for it is not generosity that the people
lack. They possess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather,
for in gathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make
up an aristocratic society. 84
He dislikes the ideal of equality, and argues with Plato that the equality
of unequals is inequality. Nevertheless he does not quite sell himself to
aristocracy; he knows that history has tried it and found its virtues very
m
lbid.> p. 8t ; JR, in S.> p. 255, referring, no doubt, to the age of the Antonines,
and implicitly accepting the judgment of Gibbon and Renan that this was the
finest period in the history of government.
**R. in Society* pp. 87, 66, 69. "Ibid., pp. 125, 1*4; R. in Science, p. 855.