Functional socialism

102 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

economic, social, spiritual. All these are comprehended in democracy, and only in democracy. It is the ground out of which fructifies the seed of national life. The case against the wage system is that it starves the ground —‘‘lets it run down” to use an agricultural term. If this be so, does it not follow that any economic reformation of society that gives ample scope to the endlessly varied and kaleidoscopic motives, ambitions, and cravings of the mass rather than of the favoured few will best harmonize with motive, enriching that democracy which is the fountain of national life?

This chapter brings me to the end of the theoretical aspect of function. Theoretical, not philosophic. Yet I would like to leave with my readers a truly philosophic concept. Itis Benedetto Croce who has the last word:

Every form of the practical activity, be it as poor and rudimentary as you like (and let as many classes and gradations as you will be formed), presupposes knowledge of some sort. In animals too? will be asked. In animals, too, provided they be, and in so far as they are centres of life, and so of perceptions and of will. This is also true of vegetables and of minerals, always with the above hypothesis. We must banish every form of aristocracy from the Philosophy of the Practical, as we have banished it from the Aesthetic, from Logic, from Historic, esteeming it most harmful to the proper understanding of those activities. The aristocratic illusion is closely allied to that one which makes us believe that we, shut up in the egoism of our empirical individuality, are alone aware of the truth, that we alone feel the beautiful, that we alone know how to love. But reality 1s democratic.