Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/456

 442 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the crash of creed. It is a mistake to suppose that our slowly won altruism is bound up with the church, historic Christianity, theism, or any set of propositions that came into being at a stated time and place. On the other hand, it is still more mis- taken to imagine that the goodness we actually see has its roots within the modern man, that it springs from a rapidly improved and socialized human nature instead of from that vast trans- mitted culture in which we are bathed from earliest childhood and by which we are insensibly tinged. The family may dis- pense with religion and rely on pure natural affection, but soci- ety is very far from being able to dispense with a belief-basis for altruism. Dogma after dogma may be surrendered, but not the idealistic anthropology that utters itself at one time in the teach- ings of Jesus, the theology of St. Paul, or the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and at another in the democracy of Rousseau or Mazzini, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, or the poetry of Walt Whitman.

All-human, then, is the ultimate affirmation that is the corner stone of social religion. Not the doctrine about the gods but the doctrine about men is the thing to be conserved. Higher criticism, or comparative mythology, or Darwinism may endan- ger concrete forms of religious belief, but religion has a power to enter new forms. The only persistent foe of religious anthro- pology is the positive or scientific way of regarding men.

The cool observation of science discloses no bonds between men other than those adjustments of feeling due to natural selec- tion and that mutuality of interest arising in the organization of actual society. The likeness of men is to be attributed to a common descent. Whatever unity there is lies behind, not before them. Men are separate monads, and there is no limit to the degree to which the happiness or perfection of one man may surpass that of another. Fellows they are, but only so far as fellowship is felt. Beyond this their paths need not cross. If one takes up the burden of another's destiny, let him look for result in his own feelings, for other fact there is none. And the time comes when all the burden-bearing is as if it had not been.