Excerpt from The Next Step in Democracy Large movements bearing on many aspects of life are hard to define. There are at least two reasons for this. In the first place, they imply a criticism of the old standards of justice and the good and therefore cannot be defined by means of them. In the second place, they consist in large measure of tendencies which are only partly conscious of their end and which are impressive because of the prophecy they contain rather than for what they explicitly champion. So long as a definition is thought of as an expression of definite relations between fixed and essentially changeless terms, no significant definition can be given of a new movement. The true definition is a product of a slow and creative growth; it is the expression in conceptual elements of an intuition which is made possible only by the final settling down of social forces into something approaching an equilibrium. The intellectual formulation comes after the relative maturity of a social movement rather than before. At certain periods everyone feels that something new is abroad. There is no longer that quiet satisfaction with the customary methods of doing things that characterizes the epoch of accepted order. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.