ABSTRACT
The above analysis applies to the life of spirit, when spirit ignores its station in the material world. This word “spirit” will occur at various crucial points in this book, because politics is a moral subject and it is the earthly fortunes of spirit that, at bottom, are its theme; but the word has many meanings and I had better explain at once in what sense I use it. By “spirit” I do not understand any separate power, soul, person, or deity persisting through time with an individual character, like a dramatic personage. I understand by “spirit” only the awakened inner attention that suffuses all actual feelings and thoughts, no matter how scattered they may be and how momentary, whether existing in an ephemeral insect or in the eternal omniscience of God. Spirit so conceived is not an individual but a category: it is life in so far as it reaches pure actuality in feeling or in thought. All imaginable ideas fall within the sphere of possible spirit, and are open to it by right of its intellectual essence; yet in fact, in you or me, poor spirit may be helplessly humming some old tune, or stupidly watching leaf after leaf fall from the autumn trees. Spirit is the witness, involuntary and unprepared, of everything real or imaginary, good or evil that is ever experienced.
