If we have told our friends that we do
eighteen holes of golf in 95, we tell them after doing the course in
110, that we are not ourselves to-day. That is to say, we are not
acquainted with the duffer who foozled fifteen strokes.
Most of us would deal with affairs through a rather haphazard and
shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each
generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing,
and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of
Political Economy, the Principles of Politics, and the like. Generally
when we write about culture, tradition, and the group mind, we are
thinking of these systems perfected by men of genius. Now there is no
disputing the necessity of constant study and criticism of these
idealized versions, but the historian of people, the politician, and
the publicity man cannot stop there. For what operates in history is
not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting
imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in
individual minds.
Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital,
but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be
the faithful. From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of
Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of
America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and
the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and
administered, to which you have to go.
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