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 33** THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of imagination ; it cramped the emotions ; it misinterpreted the social impulses ; it deprived religion of all wonder ; it neglected the ebullient side of human nature. But its cardinal sin was failure to furnish a good cohesive principle for society. Its cement would not hold, and the moral bankruptcy of its method became apparent. Romanticism, revivalism, sentimentalism, idealism, and the new Stoicism fell upon it and overwhelmed it with jeer and contumely. Thus the world's second ray of sun- light was withdrawn, and the fly ing mists were permitted to make our century a century of half-lights.

The method of enlightenment has distinct correlations. An age that deems man, at bottom, a reasonable creature, thinks much of education as a cure for human depravity. Times of great educational enthusiasm are, therefore, times of faith and enlightenment, and vice versa. The magnificent educational zeal of the nineteenth century was inspired by the theories of the eighteenth.

The subversion of tradition, custom, and precept and the attempt to manage > men by enlightenment, hurries society toward consciousness of itself. For with the endeavor to awaken a sense of responsibility by dwelling on the consequences of conduct to others, or to the institutions of society, there grows up a popular theory of social relations which is preliminary to the " good citizen " that democracy presupposes. Thus the group becomes aware of the relations and processes on which its life depends, and utilitarianism proves to be the forerunner of social science.

The prudential method flourishes in periods of religious breakdown, when it is no longer heresy to confess that the right- ness or wrongness of an act depends upon the character of its censequences. It prospers in a scientific age when physiology, psychology, and sociology bring to light unexpected sanctions for old rules of conduct. It thrives in an industrial epoch when the discipline of regular work has developed in the common man that habit of self-control and reflection, without which enlight- enment would be of no effect. It grows apace in democratic