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Legislative and Social Centralisation 457to its own. 1 Democracy and Socialism are, as we have alreadysaid, the sign that that self-consciousness is beginning to ripeninto fullness.Legislation may seem at first sight to be something external,simply a form for the administration, not part of the intimategrain of the social life like its economic forms, its religion, itseducation and culture. It so appears because in the past polityof the European nations it has not been like oriental legislationor Shastra all-embracing, but has confined itself until recentlyto politics and constitutional law, the principles and process ofadministration and so much only of social and economic legislationas was barely necessary for the security of property and themaintenance of public order. All this, it might seem, might wellfall within the province of the king and be discharged by himwith as much efficiency as by a democratic government. But it isnot so in reality, as history bears witness; the king is an inefficientlegislator and unmixed aristocracies are not much better. For thelaws and institutions of a society are the framework it builds forits life and its dharma. When it begins to determine these foritself by a self-conscious action of its reason and will withinwhatever limits, it has taken the first step in a movement whichmust inevitably end in an attempt to regulate self-consciously itswhole social and cultural life; it must, as its self-consciousnessincreases, drive towards the endeavour to realise something likethe Utopia of the thinker. For the Utopian thinker is the individualmind forerunning in its turn of thought the trend which thesocial mind must eventually take.But as no individual thinker can determine in thought byhis arbitrary reason the evolution of the rational self-conscioussociety, so no executive individual or succession of executiveindividuals can determine it in fact by his or their arbitrarypower. It is evident that he cannot determine the whole sociallife of the nation, it is much too large for him; no society would1 It does not follow that a true democracy must necessarily come into being at sometime. For man individually or collectively to come to a full self-consciousness is a mostdifficult task. Before a true democracy can be established, the process is likely to beovertaken by a premature socialistic endeavour.