Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/147

 INFLUENCE OF THE FORM OF SOCIAL CHANGE 133

tions and thus altering that national type of excellence which is the expression of national institutions and circumstances."

Stoicism and Epicureanism may be regarded as typical expressions of the remnants of older sentiment in the midst of just such periods of decay before the later reconstruction has had time to be effected. These philosophies were efforts to get an orientation in the midst of disintegrating primitive morals. In the emotional turmoil that accompanied the loss of old beliefs, the Stoic endeavored to turn in on himself and there find the moral stability that was lacking in the external world. The Epicurean tried to ignore the wants implied in these primitive religious forms, seeking happiness in what came to hand, worry- ing not over ultimate values. In short, we have in these two philosophies two characteristic points of view for a period of disintegrating morals. They did not attempt to reconstruct, but to state the kind of comfort the wise man might get out of what was left. The barren casuistry that they fostered was the nat- ural expression of an age that had lost its old standards and had not as yet worked out new ones.

Whether or not we regard Christianity as simply another expression of this period of disintegration in a further stage of its development, we must at any rate admit that its tremendous progress was due to the state of mind of the people among whom it was propagated. It was essentially a reconstructing force, while the philosophies of the time. were merely statements of the way the individual could, in the midst of the present ruin, retain his sense of moral values or dispense with them. The Christianity of that time did not seek simply to retain in the individual the sense of values lost to the community as a whole. It attempted rather a statement of the best elements of the old worships on a new basis. It offered the charm of sympathetic worship, the joyous fellowship of the primitive religions, adding to it the subjective evaluations that had in the earlier period been held of only minor importance.

In no wise is the changed temper of the people more clearly to be seen than in the growth of the subjective as over against the objective emotions. Benevolence and sympathy were set