Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/265

 ETHICS AND ITS HISTORY 249

precision, for example, which belong peculiarly to professional science, are interesting as showing how a lawful, responsible nature has been made, so to speak, to observe and measure her- self ; and in personal life the experimental nature of habit, or the one habit of treating all other habits as experiments, also invites attention. But I can speak now only of the social institution. The institution is not infrequently described as crystallized experience, and certainly in social evolution it takes form during a period of intellectual fermentation. The rise of the Roman state or of the Roman church will occur to many as an illustration, for Rome shows the treasures or attainments of the previous civilizations become utilities. Rome, the Roman law, and the Roman institutions generally took form out of the intellectual activities that had accompanied the decline and the leveling con- flicts of the earlier civilizations in Greece and in the east and the south; and if that intellectual activity was an effort on man's part to determine what his life really was, and what its proper ideals were, it is to be added at once that the great professionally ethical systems of Stoicism, which represented the standpoint of rigorism, and Epicureanism, representing the standpoint of hedonism, served together as a solvent for the entrance of Rome, concrete something that she was, into the life of the Mediterranean peoples. Also the skepticism of the time, which of course was not foreign to the spirit of the ethical teachings, although professionally it found independent formulation, is seriously misunderstood if taken to mean that men relinquished absolutely the fruits of their past. They relinquished only their personal and racial conceits; the fruits of the past remained, but as impersonal or non-human products, and so as quite avail- able resources; and the skepticism served only to bring those available resources into positive use. Free use is always of material things, not of personal, national, or racial treasures; and the skepticism made things of all that the past had to give ; it made the things which Rome used whether for her law or for her games. Moreover, no sooner was Rome well established than her conflict with Christianity set in; a conflict in which she took a losing part; and her final conversion to Christianity