ABSTRACT
Materialism holds ideas are derived from economic conditions, but Christian and democratic theory has held and must so hold that the autonomy of the spirit is the governing force in history. The structure of a governing class is psychological. The pre-war socialists held that from democracy must come socialism, and from socialism a beneficent international world. Ideology rests upon derivations that have little connection with reality, and which contrast sharply with the application of logico-experimental method. The ideology of Western democratic countries is both a technique and a system of evaluations. The modern defense of democracy and liberalism is a defense of the great intellectual achievements of the past. Religious sanction and the rationalism of revelation have stood for centuries through every culture against the rising and falling of the empirical and materialistic point of view. The idea of evolution assumed a predominant position in intellectual life during the nineteenth century.
