Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/53

No. 1.] period we must find an answer, not in science, but in the economic, political, and family life.

The changing conditions of business and industry, the shift to urban life, the consequent changes in the family, the demands for new legislation, the controversies over judicial interpretations, the search for more effective dealing with poverty, vice, and crime, last of all the issues of nationalism and internationalism, war and peace,—these and others of like sort have stirred men from easy reflection. Older conceptions of justice have proved inadequate. A new term 'social justice' has been framed to express the consciousness that the present distribution of privileges and goods—in education, in prosperity—is in need of more or less fundamental revision. The great progress in industry and business organization has at once accentuated the power and wealth of the leaders, and increased the class consciousness of the workers. The growth of social interaction and interdependence has at once strengthened the need and possibility of organized control by the state and increased the eagerness of the individual to live his own life. Democracy and socialism have confronted aristocracy and the cult of the superman. Police power has fought a gradually winning battle against private rights. The worth of the universal aspect of man incorporated in the state has been magnified by the rise of national unity and imperial power, and recognized by one philosophical school, only to be challenged as reactionary by the leaders of a democratic liberalism, and recently subjected to still severer scrutiny in view of the war. Social ethics has been faced by new types of individualism. Feminism is suggesting radical changes in codes for women.

These conflicting tides are reflected not so much in the schools as in periodicals, fiction, political platforms, court decisions. No Plato has yet appeared to perform the double task of artistic interpretation and conceptual analysis for our age divided. But it is easy to see that now as in Plato's day the deepest controversies of the time are focused in the conception of justice, while the aspirations or policies or vaguely defined longings find expression also in the watchwords of Liberty, Democracy, Self