IlO Foundations of Democratic Dogma
ity. What a materialistic philosophy of history calls bour-
geois morality—simply the reflection of economic forms of
life—is really merely human morality. What a wholly bio-
logical and naturalistic theory of man speaks of as a moral-
ity of sympathy and weakness is simple human morality. In
any case it is with this simple human morality that democ-
racy, rightly understood, stands or falls. It is built upon the
doctrine of the Everlasting Man, who abides in essence un-
changed through all historical changes. This is the essence
of democratic dogma.
Here, then, we come to the crux of the matter. We speak
of the democratic way of life. But there is no way of life
which does not presuppose some ideology and embody some
fundamental dogma. The basis of all democratic dogma is
the doctrine of the Everlasting Man. This doctrine cannot
be abandoned without stultification of the inmost essence of
democracy. And let us not, in our overweening conceit,
thank God that we are not as other men. For it is precisely
the point of this entire lecture that we ourselves, in our own
way, have had our part in this universal degradation of dem-
ocratic dogma.
VI. DEMOCRATIC DOGMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
AND OF MAN
A
I hope we are beginning to see where all this is inevitably
leading us. The democratic dogma for which men think
they are fighting—although they, alas, often deceive them-
selves—is bound up with certain views of nature and of man.
The idea of man—the Everlasting Man—has been built up
through the long years of our Western Christian culture and
cannot be divorced from it. This idea of man is again
bound up with certain ideas of nature—of the world in
which man lives, of the cosmos of which he is a part—and