Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/619

 PLACE OF SCIENCE IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 603

The gallantries, the genteel inanities and devout imbecilities of mediaeval high-life would be insufferable even to the meanest and most romantic modern intelligence. So that in a later, less bar- barian age the precarious remnants of folklore that have come down through that vulgar channel half savage and more than half pagan are treasured as containing the largest spiritual gains which the barbarian ages of Europe have to offer.

The sway of barbarian pragmatism has, everywhere in the western world, been relatively brief and relatively light ; the only exceptions would be found in certain parts of the Mediterranean seaboard. But wherever the barbarian culture has been suffi- ciently long-lived and unmitigated to work out a thoroughly selective effect in the human material subjected to it, there the pragmatic animus may be expected to have become supreme and to inhibit all movement in the direction of scientific inquiry and eliminate all effective aptitude for other than worldly wisdom. What the selective consequences of such a protracted regime of pragmatism would be for the temper of the race may be seen in the human flotsam left by the great civilizations of antiquity, such as Egypt, India, and Persia. Science is not at home among these leavings of barbarism. In these instances of its long and unmiti- gated dominion the barbarian culture has selectively worked out a temperamental bias and a scheme of life from which objective, matter-of-fact knowledge is virtually excluded in favor of prag- matism, secular and religious. But for the greater part of the race, at least for the greater part of civilized mankind, the re- gime of the mature barbarian culture has been of relatively short duration, and has had a correspondingly superficial and tran- sient selective effect. It has not had force and time to eliminate certain elements of human nature handed down from an earlier phase of life, which are not in full consonance with the barba- rian animus or with the demands of the pragmatic scheme of thought. The barbarian-pragmatic habit of mind, therefore, is not properly speaking a temperamental trait of the civilized peoples, except possibly within certain class limits (as, e. g., the German nobility). It is rather a tradition, and it does not constitute so tenacious a bias as to make head against the