In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.
Form
Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.
We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Man’s shortcomings and sins are all due to substance of the body and not to its form, while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.
Now one of two things is true: Either a republic is a desirable form of government, or else it is not.
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
These wars appear also to have given its death blow to colonialism and to imperialism in its colonial form, under which weaker peoples were treated as possessions to be economically exploited. At least we hope that such colonialism is on the way out.
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.