Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/229

No. 2.] A new positive family ethics must be formed, taking account, not only of the changing economic and social conditions, but of four new values: woman's freedom and development, the child, sex and motherhood, and a sound stock for national life. If the general form of family life is to remain—and it doubtless will remain—it must emphasize its positive values. The needed emphasis varies in the case of the middle and working class family. The former tend to marry too late and to have too few children; for them the social significance of the family for the community should be emphasized. The latter tend to have too many children and to fail to realize domestic, parental responsibility; for them the values of health and opportunity for mothers and children should be emphasized, and the level of intelligence raised. Will the new ethics favor a closer economic unit or a greater economic independence of the woman? Again the answer is not the same for the middle and working classes. For the former no general rules seem necessary, the answer depending on the woman's ability, taste, and the number and age of the children. For the latter, the kind of occupation necessarily pursued would hardly make work without the home desirable. Another question the new family ethics must face is that of public care versus home provision for children. The tendency is now toward public care; but children cannot dispense with parents, nor can parents afford to lose their close association with children. Present evils of family life can in time be abolished. The new family ethics may set as its ideal higher standards of fitness for marriage, of equality, fidelity, and affection in marriage, and of joy in children. It may magnify both the mission of the soul to refine the sense, and that of the sense to refine the soul. For the family will not thrive by denying either mind or body, but only by uniting both.

Animism includes: (1) Hyperphysical Animism—attributing natural occurrences to the action of conscious spirits separable from the body; (2) Psychological Animism—attributing to both animate and inanimate things voluntary, purposive action, and a consciousness like our own inseparable from the body; and (3) Animatism—attributing to inanimate things some vague, partial form of consciousness. Animatism is a primitive, necessary, spontaneous illusion with savages; but Psychological Animism is a specialized temporary attitude or acquired way of imagining or of dealing with things. Conscious agency is attributed to non-human things only when they are injurious, dangerous, noisy, extraordinary, or when they seem to move spontaneously or are connected with totemism, magic or rites. Hyperphysical Animism probably arose from belief in human ghosts, a belief suggested perhaps by shadows, reflections, dreams, and hallucinations, and explaining sleep, fainting, epilepsy, sickness and death. Some savages confuse dreams with their waking experience or regard them as omens of good or revelations of this or another world. The appearance of the dead in dreams gives rise to the belief in their continued existence or immortality. The belief in ghosts is universal among savages and