Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/15

Rh dogma. Modern men are not merely aware of these contacts with compatriot and alien, official and civilian, wage-earner and wage-payer, capitalist and landlord and tenant, union and non-union laborer, brain-worker and brawn-worker, industrial and criminal, rich and poor seekers of employment and shunners of employment. Men of all ranks and stations think over these contacts, they listen to arguments about them, they acquire opinions, they accept beliefs.

Before the invention of printing an occasional individual reflected upon societary relations in the large. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century social philosophy had broken out of the schools and in one country had enlisted popular strength enough to destroy a decaying dynasty. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, illiterates are become a feeble minority in the chief countries of civilization and the whole population that can read, with many additions from those who cannot, maintain in perpetual session a lyceum of sociology. If a little learning is a dangerous thing, jeopardy from that source is today universal. The millions have fragmentary knowledge of societary relations, and they are trying to transmute that meager knowledge into social doctrine and policy. The peculiar element of danger in the situation was just now suggested. Modern thought assumes that the fixed factors in human conditions are insignificant as compared with the elements that may be determined by agreement. Popular judgment is just now intoxicated with the splendid half truth that society is what men choose to make it. Popular social philosophy in its countless forms is today unanimous in speculation about institutional rearrangement without due estimate of human limitations.

IV. Popular social philosophy has its counterpart today in a social gravitation or “movement” in the line of certain sympathies and assumptions begotten and fostered by reflection on contemporary societary conditions. In this movement some of the ultimate determinants of human destiny are emerging, yet the play of these profound forces is inconstant and erratic because at present they are almost as enigmatical to the men who trust as to