ABSTRACT
the state has suffered, even in the sphere of theory, the extremes of love and hatred, of eulogy and vilification. Even its ideal nature has been diversely interpreted and treated as a manifestation now of good, now of evil, the highest good or the greatest evil. It has been loved and worshipped by the ‘statolatrists’ who under various names and disguises have figured in the history of ideas and of political alignments. It has been hated and reviled by anarchists, who likewise have their various disguises and names. Various, in fact, are the motives leading to either attitude, some noble and some mean. The ‘anarchists’ have sometimes been moved by a thirst for the freer development of human powers or even by a vision of the purest and most abstract moral ideal, or, like the anchorites, by the horror of social brutalities; but sometimes by a morbid intolerance of duty and discipline. The ‘statolatrists’ at some times have been moved by an austere reverence for the moral law and at others have truckled to the powers that be or tried to propitiate them and use them for their own purposes. But whatever the psychological motives discernible in each case according to the historical situation and the temperaments and characters of individuals, they all lead to the same error, in which men are led astray by false imaginations of good and evil. The theoretical formula for this kind of error is ‘the fallacious denial or misinterpretation of some necessary stage or element in life and reality’
