Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who participate.  And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves.  Let us consider some of the key words of contemporary thought, such as Liberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broad generalisation we have made; and then we shall find it easier to explain our intention in employing as a second technicality the phrase of The Great State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life, which we have already defined.

Sec. 2

The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture, traditional and essentially unchanging.  It has needed no toleration and displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness.  Its beliefs have been on such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs.  The God of its community has been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god.  Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period do we find any human community relaxing from this ancient and more normal state of entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other than its own.  When toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas was manifested in the Old World, it was at some trading centre or political centre; new ideas and new religions came by water along the trade routes.  And such toleration as there was rarely extended to active teaching and propaganda.  Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the last resort at the service of the ancient gods and the ancient morals against the sceptical critic.

But with the steady development of innovating forces in human affairs there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties.  Liberalism—­I do not, of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this profession—­is essentially anti-traditionalism; its tendency is to commit for trial any institution or belief that is brought before it.  It is the accuser and antagonist of all the fixed and ancient values and imperatives and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life.  And growing up in relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the great body of scientific knowledge, which professes at least to be absolutely undogmatic and perpetually on its trial and under assay and re-examination.