Even the church is most
active in social service, and philosophy is accounted most
original when it accounts for behavior. Theology has become a
stagnant science, and, to prove the rule by contraries, the main
problem of man's spiritual relation to the universe, his end in
living, and the secret of real happiness is left to a sentimental
idealism in which reason, as the Greeks knew it, has less and less
place, and primitive instinct, as the anthropologists define it,
and the Freudian psychologists explain it, is given more and more
control.
The flat truth is that, as a civilization, we are less sure of
where we are going, where we want to go, how and for what we wish
to live, than at any intelligent period of which we have full
record. This is not pessimism. It is merely a fact, which is
dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy,
machinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working dogmas by
scientific discovery, have presented to us. All these things are
more likely to be good than bad, all bear promise for the future,
but all tend to confuse contemporary men. New power over nature
has been given them and they are engaged in seizing it.
Pages:
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164