□ □
□ □ □
□? □
The demands made by the masses were characteristically bourgeois , and purely democratic and republican in their nature ; even the economic reforms were compatible with the interests of capitalism - - as , for instance , the eight hour day , the confiscation of land , and others . For all these and other reasons , there is hung in the air , in the fantastic imagination of many , the picture of an ultra-perfect Christianity , which shall be different , or is absolutely different , from the one which vulgar history knows and depicts , a Christianity that stoned Stephen , that instituted the Holy Inquisition , which dispatched so many multitudes of infidels to the other world ; from the barefooted fisherman Peter , who played the part of a Sancho Panza by his cowardly denials , to Pope Pius , who consoled himself for the loss of his temporal power by assuming infallibility ; from the spontaneous agape of the poor visited by the comforter to the Jesuits who arm squadrons and contract commercial loans , like daring harbingers of the colonial policy of the bourgeois world ; from the Rabbi of Nazareth , who says that his kingdom is not of this world , to the bishops and other prelates who occupy in his name from one fifth to one third of the land , according to various countries , and who rule as its sovereigns and proprietors , enjoying even the jus primae noctus . But if it is so easy to reduce historical materialism to powder , if class-struggles as a dynamic of history are but an erroneous generalization of ill-understood facts , if the expectations of facts , if the expectations of Communism are practically utopian , if the theories of Capital are so obviously false , and if all the fundaments of Marxism have now been destroyed , why does Masaryk take the pains to write another two hundred pages on rights , ethics , religion , and so forth , that is , on the systems which are called ideological ? Hence his conception amounts to an absolute negation of individualism . Or you pick out from them what suits you , and cut your arguments to fit your choice , and in that case you burden yourselves with useless labor , because the history of thought is so constituted that nothing is lost of the things which were in the past the conditions and preparations for our present conceptions .