Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/544

532. Few, in consequence, are the students of human life who in their investigations have held firmly to private interest, and have boldly formulated the conditions of happiness for the individual without regard to social consequences. Thinkers like Rabelais, Machiavelli, Gracian, Bacon, La Rochefoucauld and Schopenhauer have treated the problem of personal life with cynical fearlessness and with more or less fullness.

Most moralists, however, don the cowl the moment they begin a critique and comparison of subjective values. They champion the side of virtue while affecting to advise as to the most prudent ordering of one's life. Though claiming to be experts in values and adepts in the art of getting the most out of life, and all the while professing loyalty to the interests of the individual they undertake to advise, they really hold a brief from society. They are disguised emissaries, unavowed apostles of social order, unaccredited agents of control, bent on gyving the individual rather than on sending him to his goal by the smoothest path. Under color of giving him friendly counsel they betray him into the service of the community. In the cup they mix for him they mingle doubt and scruple and qualm that sickly o'er the ruddy hue of native resolution. Such a moralist, with the one hand stroking the arching back of Self-Will, and trimming its claws with the other, is a most useful, nay, even precious functionary of society. Not small is the service of him who, snaring with the bird-lime of eloquence or the silken net of fallacy that fell ravager the Ego, spares the laborious pit or stockade.

But, if it be true that there is a divergence between the interests of the ordinary individual and the interests of the containing group, we cannot call such a one a scientist. The enthusiastic devotee of Chopin who, during a nocturne, tries to demonstrate to his unmusical fellow listeners that they must be feeling the raptures that thrill his soul, may be an abler propagandist than the lecturer on music. So the eloquent moral teacher, who seeks to convince the commoner order of men about him that the noble emotional experiences so supreme to him have absolute values that can be realized by all types of people,