Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/246

 230 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

nothing so adequate as the question-mark. Stars, crosses, tri- angles, circles, would stand for something, but the question- mark would tell most; nay, it seems as if the question-mark would tell all. Since life began, life has had its fundamental questions. Moreover, these questions, the typically philosophical questions What is the world? What am I? What is God? or, How do I have knowledge ? What ought I to do ? and, What may I hope for? these questions, in spite of occasional varia- tions in form, have been, on the whole, as constant as they have been perennial; they have, indeed, been so constant, and have so truly been perennial, in their nature that some men, through losing sight of what the question really is, have even denied that philosophy has ever had or ever could have a real history. Still, on such a view the question-mark could hardly be a suitable symbol of life; and as for the nature of the question itself, instead of being a mere collocation of words followed by a little curve, snakelike in appearance and peculiarly depressing to the dot below called a period, it is a real, living experience, in which all the interests and relations of the inquirer or inquirers are moving with power. A grammatical form is always dead; it is only a mummy, revived in imagination for dramatic or rhetori- cal purposes; and, in view of this fact, men should not let it or its constant form determine their ideas of history. Who sees only the formal questions or the equally formal answers that have been deposited through the centuries by the course of events, should hardly expect to find a real history of philosophy in general, or of any of its special branches.

Of the question in general still more needs to be said before we can turn to the ethical question, which is, of course, our special interest. Thus, it seems worth remarking though there will be little difference of opinion in the matter that life's questions, like life's experiences at large, are not strictly departmental, are not independent of each other. To ask any one of them is to involve all the others; and, equally, to an- swer any one is to involve answers to all the others. This is, of course, a familiar fact of positive history, not to say also of general personal experience; but perhaps it has not always been