Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/356

342 cussion of the nature of human conduct and the elements of human well-being. As an example of such a discussion we might take the controversy that has raged from the beginning among moralists as to whether the end is happiness or perfection. But this definition would not be sufficient to distinguish "abstract" from any other kind of ethics. For all ethics is abstract in this sense. It is a system of thoughts and judgments and all thoughts are abstract in the sense that they are "of" or "about" an object; they are not the object itself.

But if we look closer we shall see that there is an intelligible sense in which we may speak of an ethics which is abstract and contrast it with an ethics which is not. For while ethics has to do with thoughts or ideas, and all ideas are abstract, yet there are abstractions within abstractions. Among ideas of an object we must recognize a distinction between the idea which is abstract in the sense that it is one-sided and partial and the idea which, by holding together different sides or aspects of the thing, aims at becoming concrete as the object itself is concrete. In the sense first mentioned, thoughts or ideas are by their nature abstract. It is no reproach to them that they are so. In the latter sense of the term abstract, it is a radical defect of our thoughts to remain abstract when they might be concrete.

If now with this distinction in mind we ask who is it who thinks abstractly? we are apt to get an answer that throws a curious light on the antithesis with which we started, between the abstract thinker and the practical man. For we are apt to find that the so-called practical and matter-of-fact people, instead of being those who have the firmest hold upon the concrete in the sense above defined, are just the people who are most likely to become the victims of abstractions. People, on the other hand, who are sometimes thought of as idealists and dreamers may be just the people who are most likely to be free of them.

This, at any rate, was the conclusion at which the philosopher Hegel arrived when in a well-known pamphlet he addressed himself to this question. "Who " he asked, "thinks abstractly ? " And he answers "Not the man of culture, far less the philoso-