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In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of over-simplification is apt to persist. But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actual trend of political forces? In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later influence the moral judgments of the working politician.
American political writers, for instance, of the traditional intellectualist type are sometimes faced with the fact that the delegates to national party conventions, when they select candidates and adopt programmes for Presidential elections, are not in a condition in which they are likely to examine the logical validity of their own mental processes.
If there be any higher sort of reality the 'absolute, for example that sort, by the confession of those who believe in it, is still less amenable to ordinary logic; it transcends logic and is therefore still less rational in the intellectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence.
You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their own works!
Religions and the many interpretations of Christianity have been good or bad, according as they ministered to character. So strong was this ethical trait in Kant that it dwarfed all else. He was not himself a man of great breadth or richness of feeling. He was not a man of imagination. His religion was austere, not to say arid. Hegel was before all things an intellectualist.
None of these features does intellectualist logic deign to recognize. For if truth is absolute and not relative, it is all or nothing. Yet no actual thinking has such transcendent aims. It is content with selections relative to a concrete situation.
This pragmatist talk about truths in the plural, about their utility and satisfactoriness, about the success with which they 'work, etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse lame second-rate makeshift article of truth. Such truths are not real truth. Such tests are merely subjective.
Even Tchaikowsky, who was a good deal of an intellectualist himself, and dubbed "perfect," in a characteristically servile letter, every one of the thirty practice fugues that Rimsky composed in the course of a single month, complained that the latter "worshiped technique" and that his work was "Full of contrapuntal tricks and all the signs of a sterile pedantry."
Intellectualist political thinkers often assume, not only that political action is necessarily the result of inferences as to means and ends, but that all inferences are of the same 'rational' type.
In making up the balance for or against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit side of the account. The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic possibility.
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