Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/658

 644 THE AMERICAN JOURI^AL OF SOCIOLOGY

labors on Homer. Here is, of course, a case of the subjective or biased standpoint. With some classical scholars it has been as impossible to pass an impartial judgment upon the classics as it would be for a very pious Moslem to criticize the Koran. I need not develop this proposition as a general one. In respect to Homer the most startling illustration is that afforded by one who was, in some respects, a very great man — the English states- man, Gladstone. A classical scholar of renown once remarked to me that it would, in many respects, have been better for Homeric scholarship if Gladstone had never written. The ab- surdities into which his undiscriminating love of the Greeks and of Homer, combined with his stiff Christian orthodoxy, were able to lead this man, were scarcely exceeded by those better- known ineptitudes of his, which were impaled and labeled for the world by Huxley. But other classical authorities, while under no such thoroughgoing prepossession, have been led to oppose Hom- eric interpretations which ran counter to an ideal that lay in their own minds, and which was rooted in the i)erhaps involuntary de- termination to view the loved past with the eyes of the present, and to make its mores fit our own. They have said that such and such a distasteful interpretation "need not" be accepted, when the only visible grounds for non-acceptation lay in the humor of the reader, that is, depended upon whether a pre-conceived ideal of Homer was thereby to be injured or not. From such a pre- disposed viewpoint it is of course next to impossible to admit such evidence as that of survivals — evidence as to an antecedent stage of lower culture or savagery — which at bottom means that it is impossible not to deny that society is an evolutionary product. In fact, there must exist, for one in such a state of mind, a strong tendency forthwith to adopt a picturesque interpretation, if there is one ; and of old the human imagination has been able to invest with roseate hue whatever it chose thus to exalt. It is this tend- ency which helped to produce the welter of nonsense about the Morgenroth and other tenuous abstractions generally associated with the name of Max Muller. It is the presence of this sort of prepossession, combined with what sometimes amounts to a studied indifference to the results of anthropological investiga-