Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/363

 ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 349

means among other things that on many subjects that concern the life and destiny of human beings, we no longer stand where we used to. The old maxims and the old authorities that existed to enforce them no longer suffice us. New ideas of individual life are opening up to us, new types of character appeal to us. The center of authority has shifted from the pulpit to the press.

And what is true of individual is still more obviously true of social life. For a century or more we have ceased to see any special sacredness in established forms of government or indeed in any of the fixed forms of social or industrial life. Prescrip- tion is no defence. Every one of them is called upon to submit itself to the test of reason and experience. By its utility it must stand or fall.

The consequence of all this is that people who are in earnest about individual or public duty are beset by perplexities that did not trouble an earlier generation. They have lost faith in the precedents and authorities to which it would have appealed with the result that they are thrown upon their own private judgment in many matters that would have been settled for them in another age. Under these circumstances it need hardly be said that there is danger of mistake where formerly there was none. What precisely the danger is and whence it arises is a more difficult question. The answer will bring us to our point. We shall prepare the way for it if we consider for a moment the nature and origin of the forms we are leaving behind us and the kind of service they performed for our ancestors.

Take first the religious formulae of the ages of faith. With all their crudity these continue to impress us with the rich- ness and many-sidedness of their contents. And this becomes comprehensible when we remember that these forms obtained their hold upon mankind because they represented many streams of thought and aspiration. The theological doctrines we find epitomized in our articles of religion and confessions of faith were the issue of an earnest attempt on the part of their framers to grasp the meaning of life in all its manifold relations. It \\as only natural, accordingly, that so long as they were acquiesced