Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/365

 ABSTRA CT AND PR A CTICAL ETHICS 3 5 1

reason forms and institutions that have hitherto rested on instinct or interest. This, it will be admitted, is a hard enough task under any circumstances. But the difficulty is greatly increased under the circumstances of pressing practical need, in which, as we have seen, it has to be attempted.

It is precisely here that the above-mentioned danger comes in. The danger is lest in our haste to formulate the new ethical creeds and the new programmes of political reform we overlook fundamental elements in human nature and ignore organic needs. Expressed in the terms this paper has tried to make familiar, it is lest, overborne by the clamor of those who "know in part and prophesy in part," we betray the trust we have received from the time in which we live, and resign the call " to see life steadily and see it whole."

That this danger is not an imaginary one is seen in the con- flict of opinion that exists among would-be leaders on many of the most fundamental questions of social life. Many of these illustrate what we mean by an abstraction in the field of politics, and may be taken as typical of the leading forms of abstract ideas in general.

First we have those who may be said to be abstract thinkers because they see the whole without seeing the parts. An impor- tant species under this class are the people who see the end without seeing the means. As a rule they are people who have a high ideal of what human life may be, but they are apt to have little or no idea 'of how their ideal is to be realized. The better type of anarchist is an extreme instance here. The anar- chist is a man who looks forward to a time when the law of life shall be the law of liberty, when the cumbrous apparatus of law, with its class bias, its blunders, and its incitements to crime, will no longer exist, when no man shall say, " Know the Lord," for all shall know him, and when force and compulsion shall be things of the past. He is an extreme type, but to the same brotherhood belong all those who, confining themselves to less sudden and sweeping changes, set down all our troubles, moral and social, to some single economic abomination or group of