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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

THE
SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION
OF HISTORY
WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES

THE
SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION
OF HISTORY BY
SHAILER MATHEWS, A.M., D.D., LL.D,
PROFESSOR OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND DEAN
OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL
THIRD EDITION

CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1917

COPYRIGHT, IQl6
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
First edition issued in December, 1916
Second edition issued in October, 1917
Third edition issued in January, 1919

THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE
LECTURES
This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual founda
tion in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to
the late William Belden Noble of Washington, D.C.
(Harvard, 1885). The deed of gift provides that the
lectures shall be not less than six in number, that they
shall be delivered annually, and, if convenient, in the
Phillips Brooks House, during the season of Advent.
Each lecturer shall have ample notice of his appoint
ment, and the publication of each course of lectures is
required. The purpose of the Lectureship will be
further seen in the following citation from the deed of
gift by which it was established: —
" The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue the
mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire it was
to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, and the
- life; to make known the meaning of the words of Jesus, ' I am
come that they might have life, and that they might have it
more abundantly.' In accordance with the large interpretation
"" of the Influence of Jesus by the late Phillips Brooks, with whose
> religious teaching he in whose memory the Lectures are estab-
- lished and also the founder of the Lectures were in deep sym
pathy, it is intended that the scope of the Lectures shall be as
wide as the highest interests of humanity. With this end in
view, — the perfection of the spiritual man and the consecration

vi THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES
by the spirit of Jesus of every department of human character,
thought, and activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy,
hterature, art, poetry, the natural sciences, poUtical economy,
sociology, ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as
theology and the more direct interests of the religious life.
Beyond a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus
•defined, no restriction is placed upon the lecturer."

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
These lectures were written in the midst of the uni
versal unrest resulting from a world war. They were
an effort to re-examine the bases of an inherited con
fidence in spiritual values. The six months which have
passed since their publication have seen enormous
changes in social attitudes throughout the world, and
in these changes the conclusions which a survey of
human progress seemed to justify have been corrob
orated. Democracy, which seemed two years since
an adventure not altogether sure of its quest, has been
disclosed as an irrepressible tendency. Russia has
overthrown its Czar, and through the screen of war,
popular rights are seen gaining new recognition in
Prussia and the German Empire, in Hungary and
Austria. Even though it is impossible to estimate ac
curately the results of these movements, and though
the forces of reaction should reassert themselves, it is
now beyond belief that society will ever revert perma
nently to conditions as they were before 1914. No
more striking or heartening event ever occurred than

Vlii PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
the ranging of democracies and truly representative
governments against autocracy. Hideous as is the
war, it has released forces that will ultimately " make
the world safe for democracy."
These months have brought new searching of heart
to men and women, who, devoted to the ideals of jus
tice, love, and peace, have yet been forced to approve
war for the self-defence of democracy. But we have
learned to estimate moral values as something concrete
rather than abstract, as affairs of life and progress
rather than as words and theoretical ideals. We have
learned anew the futility of mistaking what we believe
ought to be for what really is. We have dared face
supreme sacrifice as not too high a price for the preser
vation of such measure of spiritual freedom individuals
and society have attained. Religious faith has seen its
goal and its basis more distinctly.
Had these lectures been written during these months
of more intimate participation in the struggle which
suggested them, some paragraphs, particularly in the
last lecture, might have been differently ordered, but
the faith, which the study of human progress in the
large has strengthened, would have been even more
assured. The call to the championship of a victorious

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION IX
world-view would have been even more imperative.
Whatever sacrifice awaits us, we can with revived con
fidence await the outcome of that spiritual process
which justifies men of courage and loyalty in expecting
a nobler social order and a more complete embodiment
of the ideals of the Christian religion.
War is a survival we shall yet outgrow. Devotion
to ideals and institutions we protect by war will find
fuller and more moral expression in the giving of larger
social justice.

CONTENTS

LECTURE I
PAGE
The Limits within which the Spiritual Inter
pretation of History is Possible 3
The two possible interpretations of history. I. Two negli
gible interpretations. 1. History as a mere aggregation
of events. *. History as the product of supernatural
forces. II. Interpretations that minimize spiritual ele
ments in history. 1. The geographic. 2. The economic.
III. Fundamental criticism of the economic interpretation
of history. IV. Facts which the economic interpretation of
history minimizes: personality, great men, ideals in social
customs, racial pride and jealousy, uneconomic passions,
aspirations in art and literature, moral and religious
ideals, the independence of conscious motives. V. The
limits of a spiritual interpretation of history set by a real
world.
LECTURE II
Spiritual Tendencies in History as a Whole 35
History as social evolution involves tendencies as well as
events. I. The tendency of history as a whole seen by a
comparison of modern with primitive civilizations. Earliest
achievements of mankind. Primitive man. The superi
ority of men to animals due to personality. II. Ten
dencies in special epochs, r. Greek history; religion,
social life, the Greek soul. 2. Early Christianity. Not

xn CONTENTS
due to mere eclecticism or economic class struggles. The
messianic hope. Christianity in the Roman Empire. 3.
The Protestant Reformation. Economic aspects of its
origin. Genuine spiritual forces within. HT. Recent
recognition of spiritual forces in historical epochs. Con
sumption vs. production.

LECTURE III
The Substitution of Moral for Physical
Control 67
Outline of further argument. I. The reliance upon force
as a point of departure. The Reign of Terror an indica
tion of its futility. H. The general tendency of history in
this regard. Customs tend to replace force. III. Con
science as determined by fear of divine force. Ancient
codes. The evolution of the Day of Judgment: in the
Egyptian religion; in the Babylonian religion. IV. The
transition from reliance upon force to moral control seen in
the development of religion. Not denied even by per
secution. The Christian conception of a God of love.
Social ideals as reflected in the development of religion.
V. The same transition in the field of law. Force as basis
of early law. Roman law. English law. The influence of
religion. The change in international attitudes. VI. The
present outlook.
LECTURE TV

The Growing Recognition of the Worth of the
Individual
The question of freedom one of fact. I. The relation of
great men to history. Luther and the Reformers. Other
great persons in history, n. The growing personal worth
of the individual seen in: 1. The passing of slavery. 2. The

109

CONTENTS xni
new position of women. 3. The rights of children. 4. The
new care of the aged. 5. The care of the unfit. III.
The subordination of the economic to the personal values
of the individual. ±. The case of war. 2. The case of
slaves. 3. New recognition of personal worth in the indus
trial world. The class struggle.

LECTURE V
The Transformation of Rights into Justice 143
The meaning of "rights" and "justice.'' I. The classes
of rights. 1. The right of property. 2. The rights of
women; children; parents; classes. H. The development
of rights into justice as illustrated by the history of
England. Magna Charta. The rights of Englishmen pass
into the rights of men. The religious origin of the Bills of
Rights. The struggle to get rights. The influence of the
philosophy of Bentham. III. The development of duties
from the recognition of other people's rights. Rights in a
democracy. Personal basis of rights. IV. Democ
racy rather than imperialism makes toward the giving of
full justice to individuals. 1 . The new social interest in ex
tension of rights. 2. The replacement of rights by justice
in the case of women. Woman in the ancient world; in
the Middle Ages; in the eighteenth century; in today's
life. 3. The new sense of justice in the industrial world.
The labor conflict. The new attitude of corporations. 4.
Justice in the new penology. V. Permanent social welfare
comes more certainly from giving justice than from the
fight for rights. The Fourth of August, 1789. The self-
effacement of the Shogun. The relations of Great Britain
and the United States.

XIV CONTENTS
LECTURE VI
The Spiritual Opportunity in a Period of
Reconstruction 188
Summary of the argument. I. God in history. Hege-
lianism and the philosophy of Lotze. II. The call for ideal
ism. Faith in spiritual forces. III. Loyalty to spiritual
values particularly needed in: i. Democracy in which
economic elements tend to be over-emphasized. 2. The
urging the fundamental principles taught by Jesus. IV.
The opportunity for emphasizing spiritual forces in history
are especially seen in three fields: i. Intellectual life. 2.
Social reconstruction. 3. Foreign missions. V. The call
of the present day to men of spiritual ambitions.
Index 221

THE
SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION
OF HISTORY

LECTURE I
THE LIMITS WITHIN WHICH THE SPIRITUAL
INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY IS POSSIBLE
History is more than the record of history. It is a
phase of the universal process in which we live and
of which we are: the continuous stream of human life
flowing from times far more ancient than can be
known from any written records. It is not composed of
" natural men " with social compacts in their ghostly
arms stalking from generalization to generalization,
but of very real persons who loved and traded and
fought. For this reason it is desirable that the inter
preter of history should have helped, though only in
some small but real way, to make it. Only thus can
one thoroughly gain insight into the working of group
consciousness. But if such participation in affairs is
impossible the historian should continually remind
himself that history does not wait upon philosophy.
The interpreter of history faces not hypotheses but a
never-ending attempt of human beings at the adven
ture of living.
But what is the adventure of life ? Men have busied
themselves with this question since first they began to
reflect. On the one side hfe seems atomistic, a mass of

4 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
happenings; on the other it is exigent, a daily struggle
for food and clothes and the other things for which the
Gentiles seek. Is this, then, all that hfe means — a
mechanistic tropism, a struggle to fill hungry stomachs
with food, protect cold bodies with clothes and houses,
extract passing pleasures from the senses ? Or has hfe
something more: a unity emerging amidst opposing
diversities; a becoming rather than a mere being; a
movement towards personal values; a world order to
be constructed from within as well as from without; a
freedom from the world of physical and chemical
forces; a kingdom of ends as well as of causes; a world
of reason rather than a world of sense; a community of
creative love which frees humanity from the limitation
of natural egoism; a development away from ani
malism toward Godlikeness ?
Which of these antitheses — the materialistic and
the spiritual — best describes lif e's adventure ? Or,
if both are to be accepted, which describes most
effectively life's general tendency ?
Professor Eucken1 has voluminously given his
answer to this challenge, but more in the way of a
prophet of philosophical romanticism than in that of
the historian.
1 It is not always easy to discover definitions in the work of
Eucken, but as satisfactory a statement of the problem of spiritual
life as he has furnished I am inclined to think is given in Life's Basis
and Life's Ideal, pp. 1 10-134. See also King, The Seeming Unreality
of the Spiritual Life, pt. 1, especially pp. 3-12.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 5
I set before me no such high task as that of the phil
osopher. I wish rather to put to actual history this
question as to human hfe viewed in the large: Has it
within itself spiritual forces that result in a spiritual
tendency ? The question, I am sure, we shall all
regard as vital and imperative. For not only have our
social ideals and hopes of late been strained by war,
but there has arisen an attitude of hesitation and
incipient despair on the part of many earnest souls.
To many a lover of his kind human life seems a miser
able mistake, and idealism only an effort to make the
best of a bad business. Who of us has not experienced
something of this Weltschmerz ?
If, however, history discloses a general tendency
towards spiritual rather than the materialistic ends,
we shall have found a basis for something more uplif t-
ing than devotion to fellow-victims of a sad and sad
dening world-order; for a renewed allegiance to our
threatened idealism and a revived confidence in the
might of right. ReUgious faith — the quintessence of
spiritual life — will have found standing ground amid
the interrogations with which it now struggles.
In the present lecture I plan to consider certain
views which more or less explicitly belittle or deny
spiritual forces in history, and then I shall endeavor
to show that after they have been given full weight
they overlook or underestimate data for which a
spiritual interpretation is demanded as a working

6 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
hypothesis. In later lectures I shall attempt to show
that a study not only of these data but of the historical
process itself discovers a tendency which compels the
recognition of spiritual forces, if not a Spirit, in social
development. Thus history, while not reading us
" lessons," will furnish an outlook, if not some measure
of direction and cheer for men and women who wish
their lives to count seriously.

Before considering other views, however, I wish
briefly to treat of two interpretations of history which
do not help us in our attempt to understand social
change; the one because it is too neglectful of historical
process, and the other because it is too neglectful of
objective historical facts.
i. In despair of finding any sort of unity in the
stream of hfe, historians have sometimes insisted that
all we need is facts. " What I want," Dickens makes
Mr. Gradgrind protest in 1854 when Cobden and Bright
were doing their best to introduce the human element
into economic legislation, " what I want is Facts.
Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts
alone are wanted in hfe. Plant nothing else and root
out everything else. You can only form the minds of
reasoning animals upon Facts. Nothing else will ever
be of any service to them." And the historians of the
middle of the nineteenth century (and some who have

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 7
lived since) certainly sought to produce these facts.
Neglectful of social processes, their volumes are veri
table dust-storms of facts. Admirable masters of
records study the French Revolution as if it were as
barren of pedigree as Melchizedek — a mass of geo
graphical, biographical, and political facts. Yet the
French Revolution, as Thomas Jefferson 1 and not a
few actual participants in the movement, including
Robespierre,2 believed, was a social and political recon
struction accomplished before what is popularly
regarded as the French Revolution began. Such
discrepant views of an outstanding epoch show that
historical interpretation is not gained by a simple
massing of detached facts. These are, of course, indis
pensable to the historian, but they must be seen to
gain meaning from their genetic relationship as tension
points in a social process. One might as well describe
a journey by sending home a collection of illustrated
postal cards as to describe history as an aggregation of
events. Society like the individual is what it is
becoming. 2. Another interpretation of history, quite the
opposite to that of " facts alone " is the theological.
1 Works, ii, 257 sq., 469. See also Hazen, American Opinion of the
French Revolution, pp. 30-34.
2 On September 29, 1791, Robespierre in an address said " The
Revolution is finished." Archives Parlementaires, xxxi, 620. Rabaut
St. fitienne published his panegyric on the work of the Revolution in
1792.

8 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Its representatives see little in history except provi
dential and often miraculous guidance by God. By
most pre-scientific thinkers, the deity is believed to
have had an active interest in the affairs of some
section of humanity. As a member of a tribe or of a
clan he provided victories for his people up to the
limit of his ability. If he was persistently defeated,
he was liable to be rejected by a disappointed con
stituency who preferred a god who not only advocated
but exemplified a higher degree of military prepared
ness. The Old Testament, for instance, has preserved
interesting accounts of the victory of Jehovah over
other gods, like Dagon, even though his own sacramenta
had been captured by those who worshipped these other
gods.1 History for the Hebrew prophet and psalmist
was a record of the deeds of Jehovah. He had brought
his people up out of Egypt, He had guided their fathers
through the wilderness, He had led in the conquest of
Canaan, He had interfered with the sun and moon in
order to let Joshua more thoroughly complete a vic
tory. In the future, they believed, He would continue
to guide their national destinies, giving advice through
his prophets as to alliances with Egypt or Assyria, and
raising up Cyrus as the rod of his international wrath.
The same idea of divine interposition and direction
through miracles is to be seen in every religion with
which I am acquainted. The Romans repeatedly were
1 r Sam. 4:1-7:2.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 9
saved by miraculous appearances as at Lake Regillus;
the fate of Troy was set by the Olympians; the Greeks
were protected from the Persians by Athena; Gregory
of Tours in his amazing book on the affairs of France,
finds divine interposition so common as almost to
destroy its miraculous character. In other words,
these pre-scientific minds held that history was under
the control of some deity who did not hesitate to inter
fere with its ordinary course by way of some miracle.1
This is the earhest interpretation of history at our
disposal. That it contains an element of truth every
religious heart affirms; but it is not akin to scientific
thought, and indeed does not pretend to be scientific.
A more philosophical view of the divine control of
human affairs appears in Augustine's treatise on the
City of God. The opening passages in which Augus
tine states the occasion of the treatise make the
ancient world live again vividly. It was written to
disprove the charge that the sack of Rome by Alaric
was due to the conversion of the Roman people from
their pagan gods to Christianity. Augustine sees in
the universe two kingdoms: the world, or the kingdom
of Satan, and the kingdom of God. Although the
latter of these two kingdoms is only partially present,
that of Satan is in full operation. The kingdom of
God, however, although it gloriously exists, is yet in
1 Nor need these minds be in the distant past. Recall the angels of
Mons, and the explanations given the catastrophe of San Francisco.

io SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
heaven, but it has had the Hebrew people and the
Christian Church as its outposts in the midst of the
world. The antagonisms and adjustments of these two
kingdoms constitute history, and are traced from the
revolt of the angels through the Creation and biblical
history to Augustine's own day. The time approached,
Augustine bravely hoped, when the kingdom of God
would emerge victorious and the kingdom of Satan
with all its agencies, governors and members would be
cast into the fire of Hell, there to burn forever. Pend
ing this glorious triumph God had revealed himself
partially to the Hebrews and completely in Jesus and
the Church, his body.
History was thus to Augustine a transcendental
drama, and the sufferings of the present moment were
not to be compared to the glory which was to come.
Indeed the power of the new kingdom of God was
already manifest because during his sack of Rome
Alaric had preserved those who had taken asylum in
the Christian temples.1
This interpretation of history with its silence as to
economic and other forces makes no appeal to our
modern thought, but it is at least a consistent and
honorable attempt to give coherency to the course of
events that was to bring so tragic results to the
1 Characteristic passages are City of Cod, bk. i, chs. 1-3, p. 34; bk.
xi (in which the origin of the two cities or kingdoms is shown to have
been among the angels), bk. xv, especially pp. 1, 2, 4; bk. xviii, xix,
especially pp. 7-17.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE n
ill-starred Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth
centuries. Augustine's follower Orosius was not content to
leave his master's thought in the field of religious
hope. He saw God already punishing his enemies.
With the encouragement of Augustine he compiled a
voluminous treatise, Seven Books of History against the
Heathen. In his preface he gives the point of view set
before him by Augustine. " Thou hast commanded
that I should gather from history and annals whatever
mighty ills and miseries and terrors there have been
from wars and pestilence, from famine, earthquake
and floods, from volcanic eruptions, from lightning and
from hail, and from monstrous crimes in the past cen
turies." Orosius' volumes do credit to his purpose.
His record of the miseries and crimes of the Baby
lonian, Macedonian, African and Roman Empires
makes even the modern daily paper tame. These
miseries he thought should be commemorated " in
order that with the security of God's ineffable judg
ments laid partly open, those stupid murmurers at our
Christian time should understand that one God
ordained the fortunes of Babylon in the beginning and
at the end those of Rome, that through his clemency
we live, although wretchedly because of our intem
perance." His interpretation makes history a con
tinuous miracle in that God has so ordered events that
suffering follows the neglect of service to himself.

12 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
The same theological interpretation appears in
practically all historical works written by churchmen
of the Middle Ages. By the time of the Reformation,
history has become as polemic as a sermon upon the
book of Revelation. Cardinal Baronius has no lan
guage sufficiently strong and explicit to set forth his
interpretation of history as a triumph of righteous
Catholics over evil Protestants, while the Protestants
were ready to show that God's judgments were already
operating in the misfortunes of Catholic states.
This brief treatment must suffice for these two
interesting rivals in the field of historical interpreta
tions. Let us now face more fundamental issues.1
II
i. At the extreme remove from the theological
interpretation of history is the mechanistic or more
specifically the geographic. Where Augustine could
see the operation of God or devil, Ratzel2 and Semple3
would find the operations of mountain ranges and
plains, rivers and seas, tillable soil and desert. Iso-
1 For a good summary of various philosophies of history including
that of Augustine, see Flint, Philosophy of History; Barth, Die Phil
osophic der Geschichte als Sociologie, i; summary in Small, General
Sociology, ch. 4.
2 History of Mankind; Anthropogeography.
3 Influences of Geographic Environment. See Thomas, Source Book
of Social Origins, pp. 134-139 (1909) for bibliography. A thorough
going treatment of the older sort will be found in Mougeolle, Le
proUeme de I'histoire.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 13
lated habitats like those of Egypt encouraged the birth
and precocious growth of civilization. The need of
intercourse by land and sea made Venice and Greece,
England and New England. Lombroso x holds that
revolutions generally occur on limestone formations;
Von Treitschke, in loyalty to the Germany he apotheo
sized, taught that the lack of artistic and poetical
development which he thought he discovered among
the Swiss, is due to the fact that they live among over
powering mountains, while low mountains and hill
countries like those of his own land produce poets and
artists. Mason says that " hawks taught men to fish,
spiders and caterpillars to spin, the hornet to make
paper and the cray-fish to work in clay." And so
generally; if it were not for the Dardanelles, the
Baltic Sea, and Kattegat, Russia would not be so
interested in Balkan pohtics; and if it had not been
for the rich unappropriated lands of Africa, Germany
would have been less eager for a place in the sun.
Prophets and poets come from mountains; art from
river banks and monotheism from the desert.
Of course we must recognize that this reliance upon
geographical influences to explain the course of history
is often supplemented by reference to other forces,
including the spiritual.2 But the actual impression
1 La Crime politique et les Revolutions. For other statements see
Semple, op. cit., ch. 1.
8 A sane and popular treatment is illustrated in Brigham, Geo
graphic Influences in American History.

14 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
given by this emphasis is not friendly to discourse
upon the hfe of the spirit. When Miss Semple says
that the early pioneers moved westward because they
did not wish to hear their neighbor's dog bark, we
recognize a pleasantry rather than a scientific prin
ciple; when Marx assures us that " in changing the
modes of production, mankind changes all its social
relations, the hand mill creates a society with the
feudal lord, a steam mill a society with the industrial
capitalist," we remember Engels' bill of exceptions,
and the third volume of Das Kapital. But when Grant
Allen1 says that " the differences between one nation
and another ultimately depend . . . simply and
solely upon physical circumstances to which they are
exposed," and that Greek culture " was absolutely
and unreservedly the product of the geographical
Hellas acting upon the given factor of the undifferen
tiated Aryan brain," we recognize propaganda and
refuse to be placated even by the concession of the
undifferentiated Aryan brain. From such a point of
view history becomes an enlargement of Masefield's
interpretation of the individual :
" What am I, Life ? A thing of watery salt
Held in cohesion of unresting cells
Which work they know not why, which never halt;
Myself unwitting where their, Master dwells.
I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin
1 Gentleman's Magazine, 1878, quoted in James, Will to Believe,
P- 237.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 15
A world which uses me as I use them.
Nor do I know which end or which begin,
Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.
" So, like a marvel in a marvel set,
I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave
Or the great sun comes north; this myriad eye
Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why." 1
The progress of history is thus described by Pro
fessor Mason.2
In this partnership between man and the earth the progress
of culture has been from naturalism to artifidalism; from exploi
tation to cultivation and domestication; from mere muscular
power to more subtle physical force of man, of beast, of water, of
air, of fire, of electricity; from tools to machinery; from simp
lest imitative processes to highly complex' processes, involving
many materials and motive powers and inventions; from short
journeys to long journeys; from mere barter to world-embracing
commerce; from monotonous and monorganic food and clothing,
shelter and furniture, mental and social appliances, to forms as
complex and varied as the imagination can conceive. And
when the supply gives out, it is not the earth that fails, but it is
the comprehension and the skill of men.
It cannot escape attention that even in this type of
interpretation of history man is introduced as a factor
coordinate with nature. But the thorough-going
geographer is only incidentally concerned with man.
History is a vast tropism. Nature is working changes
1 Atlantic Monthly, January, 1916.
s American Anthropologist, vii, 158.

16 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
in a humanity that apparently has little more initiative
than the flower that turns to the sun.1 It was natural,
therefore, that for a time men should think that this
subservience of history to the physical universe might
enable us to formulate laws which should be twins with
the laws of energy. Buckle, Ratzel, not to mention
Comte, Spencer, Allen, and Draper, undertook to
develop these laws. They are often careful to mention
the human element, but because of their emphasis
their influence was to depersonalize history. Yet
although their thought seems remote from a complete
interpretation of the process the causes of which they
seek, there is no reason to deny the actual facts they
propose. They fail to satisfy our search for some inter
pretation that gives more weight to the human element,
more insight into effects as well as origins, more
appreciation of the genetic character of history as a
whole, but they have led us to recognize the influence
of nature. Hereafter history will be seen to walk on
the earth, breathe the air and expand or climinish with
the process of the sun.
2. Popular as is the geographical interpretation of
history among the representatives of physical science,
the economic interpretation is more in evidence among
historians, and above all among the sociologists. If
1 To realize the strength of this conviction see Loeb, The Mechanis
tic Interpretation of Life; Snyder, The World Machine; Haeckel, The
Riddle of the Universe.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 17
geography has slain its hundreds of idealists, economics
has slain its thousands. No field of investigation is
now being worked more vigorously or with greater
assurance than that of economic forces. The key to
history is asserted to be man's economic production
and consequent antagonisms. Naturally such a view
rests to no smaU degree upon a geographical view of
history. The explanation of social institutions and
morality is to be found in the fact that nature appar
ently is more willing to provide inhabitants than
inhabitable areas, hungry mouths than food, and cold
and heat than fuel and shade. Relative economic
scarcity is therefore the incentive to progress and in
the effort to solve the problems which arise from such
scarcity history is said to emerge.1 :
The intermediary between the limitations of nature
and the development of human civilization is declared
to be social antagonism. The disproportion between
human wants and the means of satisfying them results
in an attempt to subdue and to establish with nature a
harmony which did not at first exist. Out of this lack
of harmony between man and nature emerges, how
ever, disharmony between man and man. By this
principle of antagonism not only is property explained,
but the conflict between the individual and the group,
out from which morality emerges, as well as the conflict
between classes in society from which comes the state.
1 See, for instance, Carver, Essays in Social Justice, ch. 2.

1 8 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
This economic or materialistic view of history may
be summarized in Engels' statement: x " that view of
the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause
and the great moving power of all important historic
events in the economic development of society, in the
changes in the modes of production and exchange, in
the consequent division of society into classes against
one another."
This economic view of history is largely the contri
bution of Karl Marx.2 True, just how thorough-going
materialistic is the philosophy of Marx is of late a mat-
terof dispute. Engels, writing in 1890, says, "Marx and
I are partly responsible for the fact that the younger
men have sometimes laid more stress on the economic
fact than was necessary. In meeting the attacks of our
opponents, it was necessary for us to emphasize the
dominant principle denied by them, and we did not
always have the time, place or opportunity to let the
other facts which were concerned in the mutual action
and reaction get their deserts." Furthermore, a
1 Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, p. xix. For this and other
quotations from Marx and Engels, see Skelton, Socialism: A Critical
Analysis, pp. 98-100.
2 Marx first proposed this view in his Critique of Political Economy,
but it appears throughout his writings. A brief summary of his posi
tion in history will be found in Le Rossignol, Orthodox Socialism, ch. 7;
Skelton, Socialism; A Critical Analysis, pp. 95-114. Morgan, Ancient
Society, independently advanced (1877) the view that " the great
epochs of human progress have been identified more or less directly
with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence."

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 19
socialist like Walling 1 would prefer to think of Marx
as a pragmatist rather than as a materialist, but the
philosophy of history as expounded in much socialistic
hterature certainly makes the economic factor practi
cally supreme.2 The struggle for the economic surplus
and its appropriation by a portion of society rather
than by the entire group of working men, its alleged
originators, lies at the basis of capital and the long
succession of struggles between class and mass. The
great movements of history according to this view
have been shaped by machinery, and the real epochs
of history center around the invention of gunpowder,
the printing press and the means of transportation.
The necessities of production account for the various
forms of society and institutions which humanity has
evolved.3 But of late the neo-socialist has reversed the argu
ment by saying that aU this is precisely what has not
happened. Sociahsm is rather a prophecy of what
1 Larger Aspects of Socialism, especially ch. 5. I am indebted to
this volume for several quotations from Marx and Engels.
2 See, for example, Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialistic Concep
tion of History; Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; Loria,
Economic Foundations of Society; Spargo, Socialism (although Spargo
is not thoroughly Marxian or deterministic).
3 Seligman,, The Economic Interpretation of History, ch. 6, gives a
brief summary of various applications of the theory. See also Robin
son, " War and Economics in History and Theory," a brief article in
Political Science Quarterly, xv (1900), 581, and Rogers, The Economic
Interpretation of History,

20 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
will happen when history is perfected, and equitable
and effective processes of production shall have been
established throughout civilization.1
How far this reliance upon economic forces for the
explanation of social evolution may go among those
who are not sociahsts is to be seen in works of those
writers who like Beard hold that the movement for
constitutional government in the United States was
" originated and carried through principally by
four groups of personalty interests which had been
adversely affected under the Articles of Confederation:
money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and
shipping." 2
Such a view of history seems to me partial and
indifferent to the full mass of the actual facts of
human Hfe; often as thoroughly a priori and dogmatic
in its treatment of actual human phenomena as that of
the theologians. Economic self-interest and capitalis
tic manipulation of social forces are certainly not to be
overlooked, but when an historian appeals to them to
furnish an " ultimate " interpretation of human
achievement and finds in them the general tendency
of history, he becomes a sort of scholastic Glendower,
1 So Walling, op. cit., ch. 5, especially p. 106.
2 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,
p. 324. This view as to history is also to be seen in the works of Pro
fessor Patten, especially his Theory of Social Forces and The Social
Basis of Religion; although some of his statements of fact in the latter
book need to be verified.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 21
boasting that he can summon causes from the vasty
deep. It is with no lack of admiration for the solid
accomphshments of the representatives of this view of
life that we renew the challenge: " But, cousin, will
they come ? " III
Professor Seligman l recognizes five classes of criti
cisms of the economic theory of history: first, that it is
fatalistic; second, that it rests on a questionable
assumption of historical laws; third, that it is social
istic; fourth, that it neglects the ethical and spiritual
forces in history; and fifth, that it leads to absurd
exaggerations. Such criticisms are obviously of
unequal importance and to my mind do not strike the
fundamental question which must be applied to theory
in whatever field it may emerge. This fundamental
issue is one of method rather than of conclusion and is
this: Does the theory grow out of a study of the entire
range of facts, or is it brought to facts ? In particular,
Can the economic interpretation of history as actually
employed be said to recognize fairly all the elements
which go to determine and create the processes in
human life ?
To the five criticisms recognized by Professor Selig
man, I venture to add a sixth: as apphed to history,
the economic interpretation is too simple.
1 In his interesting volume, The Economic Interpretation of History,
pp. 89, 90.

22 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Such a criticism does not apply merely to the eco
nomic interpretation of history. Every monistic inter
pretation of human hfe is too simple. It gets its
intelhgibility by some neglect of fact. A historian
with a single explanation of human life is apt to be a
sort of academic Procrustes proudly showing his fel
lows how facts are all of the same length because they
fit into his theory, but not very eager to have them
notice the pile of disjecta membra at the foot and head
of the theoretical bed which he has made his standard
of measurement. The first step in any historical
method is the recognition of history as a genetic pro
cess, not a collection of static facts.1 The gathering of
facts comes next and not till that is fairly complete,
interpretation. Interpretation depends upon the dis
covery of genetic relationships, both prior and sub
sequent to any event or epoch under investigation.
These relationships must be as far as possible positive
and not theoretical, much less a matter of epigrams.
That there is now a tendency toward a less sweeping
statement of the economic interpretation of history
will be shown in a subsequent lecture, but modifica
tions which have been made in it have been largely
in the way of concession. It may be expressed cau
tiously as by Professor Sehgman,2 "Economic inter-
1 See Bury, Darwin and Modern Science, pp. 531-539; Robinson,
The New History, chs. 1-3.
2 The Economic Interpretation of History, p. 157.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 23
pretation of history means, not that the economic
relations assert an exclusive influence, but that they
assert a preponderant influence in shaping the progress
of society." Yet when even Professor Sehgman
undertakes to apply his economic interpretation, we
find such unqualified statements as this, " It is no
longer open to doubt that the democracy of the nine
teenth century is largely the result of the industrial
revolution; that the entire history of the United
States to the Civil War was at the bottom a struggle
between two economic principles; that the Cuban
insurrection against Spain, and thus indirectly the
Spanish-American War was the outcome of the sugar
situation; or, finally, that the condition of inter
national politics at present is dominated by economic
considerations." 1
Now any real interpretation is a description of actual
process revealed in relations between facts rather than
a formulated principle, and while, as in the case of the
geographic readings of history this economic interpre
tation may be cautiously framed, the impression given
by champions of the theory — and impressions are in
effect interpretations — is that economic forces are
the really significant features in history. History thus
exhibits a materialistic determinism. I know that
many economic historians would protest against such
a characterization of their views and I welcome their
1 The Economic Interpretation of History, p. 86.

24 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
protestations of behef in spiritual values. But I
simply refer objectors to the hterature which has been
produced by those holding the economic point of view.
In fact, some of these pubhcations especially those of
certain socialist writers, seem to be less histories than
propagandist documents, glorifying such matters as
soil, climate, continental peculiarities, crops, produc
tion, machines, railroads, and water transportation.
He would be a bhnd observer who did not recognize the
share physical nature has had in human hfe; and to in
sist that physical forces are to be neglected in the inter
est of emphasizing spiritual forces would certainly be
unscientific. The real issue is one of facts. It is always
dangerous for a historian to be a philosopher, but it is a
thousand times more dangerous for him to be obsessed
by a theory. To such a person the record of human
hfe is liable to become a metaphysics masquerading
in references to original sources.
He who would really understand history must go
straight to history. He must first of all look at
matters in the actual process and as far as possible
realize that to understand history we must ask more
questions than those as to origin. Efficient causes
give no final formula for the student of humanity.
Events, persons, institutions, social attitudes, and
civilizations compose a cycle of change in which they
are causes as truly as they are effects.1 The inter-
1 See Small, General Sociology, pt. 5, 7.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 25
prefer of history must recognize the total range of
facts and processes even though it be at the expense
of simplicity and at the end produce no convenient
phrase which undergraduates can easily remember as
the key to the process of the ages.
IV
If, forgetting all theories and for the moment all
attempts at interpretation, we look impartially upon
the complex current of human hfe of which we are
momentarily a part, we shall see on the one side that
humanity walks upon the earth and is conditioned by
physical and chemical forces. Man is an animal sub
ject to what we caU animal life; he is placed in a world
that does not satisfy aU his wants except in response to
toil and even then with such limitations as to make his
relations with his fellows one of struggle. But we shall
see something else in history: that man has always
felt himself to be something more than a peripatetic
chemical laboratory driven by the sex instinct; that
social history is the sum of innumerable adventures
into strange regions into which star dust and #-rays
never entered and of which even the most genially
disposed animal never dreamed. In brief, to such an
observer it will appear that the facts which the best
intending economic interpreter of history overlooks or
underestimates are quite as important as the facts
neglected by historians who dwell among Ideals and

26 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
World Spirits. If to the latter human history is an
Hegelian Weltgeist culminating in Germanistic Kultur;
to the former it is a Caliban who has discovered that
his mother's god Setebos is only a personification of
the economic customs of her primitive ancestors.
I propose to mention a few of these facts which in
the interest of brevity I wiU roughly classify without
any severe attempt at scholastic precision.
(i) There is human personahty itself. One does
not need to be a believer in absolute freedom, a denier
of the dependence of humanity upon the universe
from which it has emerged, to realize that there is
something creative in the human self. Whatever may
be our vocabulary with which we express our convic
tion, a human being never goes into a material situa
tion without impregnating it with some plus element
which was not in the situation itseh. Marx himself
recognizes this in his critique of political economy:
" We must," he says, " always distinguish between the
material transformation in the economic conditions of
production of which natural science teaches us, and the
legal, political, aesthetic or philosophical, in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of
this conflict and fight it out." This plus element is the
glory of humanity, and it is no accident that men who
over-emphasize geography and economics so often
speak as if human activities were hke those of physics,
deal with statistics impersonahy, and love to describe

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 27
human society in terms of the " pack." Human his
tory would indeed be very simple if it were not for
human folks. It is always easier to deal with " natural
men," " economic men," and " primitive men " than
it is with actual people; yet history is made by individ
uals like ourselves possessing likes and dislikes, wills
and character, rather than by these highly specialized
persons who, like Eve, have been taken by their aca
demic creators from real persons by the process of
abstraction. (2) In this same connection it can be said that the
economic interpretation of history tends to minimize
the significance of great men in history. Instead of
being partly creators, they are made whoUy creatures.
The conditions under which they hved begat them,
social situations to which they ministered bore them,
but the history which came from their ministration to
their age and to their social environment is apparently
in no need of them. The chief point of interest is how
they came into existence, not what they did after they
existed. And yet, as I shall undertake to show later,
history has reahy been to no small degree shaped by
the individual experiences of men, and great move
ments have grouped themselves around great per
sonalities. They cannot be ignored if history is to be
treated inductively.
(3) There are the ideals to be seen in social customs.
These customs, of course, have economic aspects even

28 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
though they be such homely matters as trade in fish
for Fridays and turkeys for Thanksgiving and ever
greens for Christmas; but the faith to which these
economic processes minister has shaped the spirit of
nations. The memory of the dead Jesus is not born of
fish; the goodfellowship of Thanksgiving is not identi
cal with turkey; the annual devotion of the world to
generosity and faith in good- will is no kin of forestry.
(4) So, too, racial pride and jealousy are not exclu
sively economic and geographical, even in origin. The
white races have enslaved the black races and con
trolled the brown and yellow races. Obviously eco
nomic motives as weU as geographic conditions are to
be seen in the accumulation of international loot which
makes so large a part of the white man's burden. But
the pride of the conqueror, the fear of the slave are
human elements in a world situation not to be ignored.
So, too, many a nationality figures in history today
because of a pride in its language. An exclusively
economic study of the Balkan situation, for example,
will fail to account for the national passion of the
Bohemian, the Serb, the Croatian, the Bulgarian, the
Roumanian, and the Greek, because it overlooks the
pride of language.1
(5) Uneconomic passions hke those of parental love,
adventure, honor, play, and glory, and that extraor-
1 See Buck, " Language and the Sentiment of Nationality," Am.
Pol. Set. Review, x (19 16), pp. 44-69.

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 29
dinary social force of loyalty to one's leaders and
nation ah laugh at economic laws if only they once
find general self-expression. Here too belongs the
principle of imitation which operates so mightily in
the construction of social groups.
(6) Aspiration as embodied in art and hterature
may be conditioned by geographical and economic
situations, but it is something more. If human history
were merely a matter of wars and rumors of wars,
kings and merchants, there would have been no artists
and scholars, philosophers or scientists. The modern
world would know nothing of music, nothing of pure
science, and poets would have given immortality to
warriors but never have thought of skylarks, Greek
urns or some lost Paradise. To omit from history these
strivings after that which is true and beautiful and
good is forgetfulness; to reduce them to mere aspects
of the economic struggle is brutality.
(7) History abounds with ideals and behefs which
are both moral and religious. It of course is true that
morals and religion are social attitudes to no small de
gree shaped under economic situations, but after they
are shaped they operate as independent forces which are
not to be neglectediby the historian. The Crusades can
never be explained by exclusive reference to economic
renascence, nor can the wars of religion be debited only
to economic readjustments. As Bryce 1 says, " it is
1 Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind, p. 22.

SO SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
religion which has created that apparently insoluble
problem which we call ' the Eastern Question '."
(8) And finally, any materialistic interpretation of
history overlooks the fact that conscious motives, no
matter what their ultimate origin, come to function in
ways quite independent of such origin. That is an
empirical fact which forestalls any reply that these
data I have mentioned may be traced whoUy to eco
nomic origins. Even if such a statement were true —
and I heartily deny its truth — to attempt to measure
vital forces in terms of their origin is to overlook growth
in the interest of simple formula; to depersonalize
history in the interests of theory. The study of history
does more than run humanity to earth. However
much social evolution may be due to geographic in
fluences and economic tension, fuUy developed motives
and values are as truly data for the historian as
alluvial soil or economic scarcity.
Here, then, because of those personal human ele
ments in history which other interpretations, while
recognizing, tend to undervalue or disregard, we see
the need of a recognition of spiritual forces. Only let
us define our field. It is no ail-inclusive monistic
interpretation that we venture. We only insist that a
process must be treated as " a going concern "; that
the discovery of origins is only a partial interpretation.
The interpretation of history is as comphcated as his
tory itself. There is no single explanation of multiple

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 3 1
forces. It would be as much a mistake to interpret his
tory in terms of spiritual forces alone as to reduce it to
any other single formula. Nor should an over-zealous
champion of some interpretation seek to cover his
tracks by saying that his interpretation, be it economic
or spiritual, is only the " more predominant." The
only true interpretation of history is an inductive
description of actual movements and tendencies within
history. The historian must hold himself as impar
tially to the task of observation as any man of science.
If he is to have any working hypothesis it should be a
multiple hypothesis,1 for it may very well be that he
will discover that human history is carried along by a
variety of forces which are capable of no synthesis this
side of metaphysics — and when a historian enters
into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from
whose bourne he will never return a historian.

Within the limits set by such observation, the ques
tion as to whether there is room for spiritual interpre
tation of history is a question of fact. One can ask at
the same time whether and how far the economic,
geographical, biographical, biological, philosophical,
theological, pragmatic, Hegehan, or any other theory
of interpretation of history is warranted. If facts
1 See Chamberlin, " The Method of the Multiple Working Hy
pothesis," Journal of Geology, November, 1897.

32 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
permit, they might all hve together happily because
each is a description of some movement, fact or situa
tion inexphcable by the others. To answer our ques
tion, therefore, as to whether a spiritual interpretation
of history is possible, we have simply to ask what
impression is made by the process of change through
which human life not only has passed in the long course
of time during which it has been on the earth, but is
passing in the present as well. And the answer will
not be made by a study of isolated, static facts, or of
their origin alone, but by the evidence that what we
call history is a genetic, socio-psychological process.
Astronomy is no more a study of movement and
change than is history a study of a process in which
situations are not to be analyzed but seen as dynamic,
synthetic units.
But the question of movement inevitably leads to
the deeper question of direction and tendency. Not
that the historian should assume such a tendency;
much less that he should seek to forecast its precise
goal. Here is indeed a danger. At the door of every
one who believes in the presence of spiritual forces in
human hfe there always crouches the temptation to see
a destination, and estimate the progress of human hfe
by sighting across it to this destination. But who of
us is wise enough to know the destination of history ?
We may not with the pessimism which finds such
beautiful expression in Wilham Vaughn Moody's

LIMITS WITHIN WHICH POSSIBLE 33
Gloucester Moors, deny a port beyond the mists of the
present, but when a historian dogmatizes as to the
precise location and organization of a Utopia, he is
experimenting as a prophet, and must stand examina
tion as to the source of his inspiration. What we can
do and what, in view of the facts already mentioned,
we must do is far simpler; namely, patiently watch the
forces and the general tendency in history. Therein
hes, if not the interpretation, an interpretation of his
tory. We can understand events only by placing them
in the perspective of their origin and their effects. The
perspective of process is the outstanding reahty of
history. In its hght we can prophesy at least the
general direction of the future.
Thus we can define the limits within which the
recognition of spiritual forces in human hfe will be
legitimate: first, after due recognition of physical
environments, the tendency of history and of epochs
in the large; and second, those changes and tendencies
in more restricted fields which are due to forces which
are not traceable directly to any economic or imper
sonal causes. If we analyze this statement, we shall
see that it is both negative and positive. Negatively,
any spiritual interpretation must arise from the dis
covery of a tendency in the complicated operation of
social evolution to carry men away from dependence
on impersonal causes, away from the state of society
which they once shared with the animals; and posi-

34 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
tively, there must appear tendencies in history which,
within the limits set by physical and economic forces,
and in accordance with the general direction away
from what is mechanistic, economic, and animal set
toward that which is personal and ethical. If these
tendencies be found, to speak of an economic interpre
tation of history as " ultimate " is out of the question,
although economic situations must be recognized as
furnishing origins, motives and occasions of human
action. For such tendencies wfll compel the conclusion
that within limits set by the real world within which
men hve, personal forces operate, and that whatever
explanation may be found for individual events, the
general process of social evolution is directed from
within by spiritual forces toward that which is ever
more personal.
The spiritual interpretation of history, accordingly,
must be found in the discovery of spiritual forces
cooperating with geographic and economic to produce
a general tendency toward conditions which are truly
personal. And these conditions wih not be found in
generalizations concerning metaphysical entities such
as the older psychologists assumed, but in the activi
ties of worthful individuals finding self-expression in
social relations for the ever more complete subjection
of physical nature to human welfare.

LECTURE II
SPIRITUAL TENDENCIES IN HISTORY AS A
WHOLE
If we are to study history from the point of view of
genetic process rather than from that of events or even
origins, we must bear in mind that tendencies and
directions are to be seen only when consideration is
given to long periods of time. The study of events
detached from the entire sweep of their relations may
give very mistaken explanations. Therein the study
of human hfe differs radically from the study of physi
cal or even biological laws. Heat is produced today
as in the dimmest past, and hght is what it always has
been. In chemistry the actual operations of elements
do not need to be traced through the past to see the
meaning of an experiment. The combination in cer
tain proportions of an acid and a base always has and
always wih give a salt. If we had an infinite number
of such combinations there could no tendency or pro
cess be discovered. But it is otherwise with hfe. His
tory is not of necessity indifferent to the individual
experiments of some single hfe; it may even undertake
to explain how this event rather than another came
into existence, but history as history is process as truly

36 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
as a mass of events and must be so studied. We are
interested not only in points of arrival and departure,
but also in the passage from one point to the other. It
is quite impossible for us to judge what may be called
tendencies and directions in history except by the
examination of long periods.
A second characteristic of history is that it is social.
We shah later have something to say about the relation
of the individual to the course of human events, but
history is distinct from biography in that the unit with
which the student is engaged is not the individual, but
some group, large or small.
The social character of history seems ah but self-
evident to us, and yet it is among more recently ac
quired points of view. There have been times when
history was regarded as httle more than the deeds of
great characters like Themistocles and Juhus Caesar.
There have been other times in which historians have
had to deal with generals and armies. We have come
now, however, to see that the history of a nation or
people is not only complicated in that it is the never-
static combination of many forces, but that it con
stitutes some sort of social unity and cannot be fully
understood by simply studying individuals even
though they may be heroes worthy of Carlyle. A
monistic interpretation of history is impossible because
social movements are not reducible to a single force.
This fact it is which at present is causing the attention

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 37
of scholars to center upon social movements. So far
indeed has this gone that there has arisen a sort of
modern docetism like that of Drews 1 according to
which a Christian movement created Jesus rather than
was founded by Jesus.
When we come to combine these two elements of
history in the one concept of social progress, the need
of extensive rather than intensive observation is
apparent. True, such observation runs the perilous
risk of rhetorical generalization. The extent of history
it covers prevents the minute portrayal of special facts
and brief periods. But wide induction of outstanding
facts need not of necessity be superficial. At ah events
he who would reahy interpret history rather than pro
duce monographs on the details of history must con
sent to run the risk of being regarded as a sort of
cross-section of errant omniscience. And he can plead
as his apologia that history hke an ocean hner needs
space if its direction and its rate of progress are to be
appreciated. I
Having thus, I trust, at least partially forestalled the
criticism of those who apparently think that history-
writing is the production of an infinite number of
doctors' theses united by a card catalog, let us consider
what may seem to be a wilfuhy insulting insistence
that before the progress of history is interpreted in
1 The Christ Myth.

38 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
detail it must be judged as a whole. My excuse for
such historical naivete is the danger of not seeing
history because of historical investigations. Just as
children studying maps more readily see the names of
towns than of continents do we easily see events but
fail to see history in its perspective. Yet it is through,
perspective that history is to be interpreted.
i. Even if one does not regard history as the collec
tion and description of static events, in which processes
culminate and cease, and looks at events as tension
points in a continuous stream of changing human
experience, it is by no means unlikely that such a
student wih take too short a view of the processes he
observes. Bishop Usher, as we ah know, figured out
that creation was completed on a Friday afternoon in
4004 B.C. But if we are reahy to understand history,
we must go back not 4004 years, but scores of
thousands of years before Christ. Just how far, in
fact, the historian does not know and must needs
inquire of the geologist, and to the geologist a thou
sand years are as a day. Yet if we make proper allow
ance for geological prodigahty in its gift of a prehistoric
past, there is no denying that long before humanity
produced records, human hfe was creating history.
Nor were these prehistoric people by any means so
unimportant as the absence of record might indicate.
Just when and where the first reasoning man emerged
from the melee of animal evolution we do not know,

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 39
nor is it of importance that we should know. To the
scientist, of course, the descent of man is a matter of
vital interest, and we may very well mingle gratitude
with discrimination as we hsten to the attempts to
reconstruct history for which there is ah but no evi
dence. For the historian, however, the significance of
these early men and women is not to be found in dis
cussing how they are connected with the preceding
animal life, but how they are connected with the sub
sequent human hfe. To him the ascent of man is of
more importance than the descent of man. The beasts
of the forest started on a geographic and economic level
with man. Why has the history of these fehow deni
zens of social chaos been so different ? The beast is as
he was — historyless. Man has made a growing
civilization. The measure of this difference is the
measure of non-economic, personal forces. Even pre
historic man began to progress.1 He it was who
bequeathed us the fundamental things of our civiliza
tion. His real significance lay not in what originated
him, but in what he originated. Mankind was what it
was becoming. It is sobering to compare even our most
amazing inventions with those elemental discoveries
upon which our hfe depends, but of whose originator
we have no record. What early Edison discovered
that fire would ward off cold ? What Mary Lyon
discovered that children could be taught ? What
1 Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age.

40 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
primitive Madame Curie discovered that heat made
raw flesh more digestible and that yeast would make
a mixture of pounded grains and water more pala
table ? What man — or woman — first of ah hving
beings on the earth sought to get personal help from
that outer world upon which hfe was seen dependent,
and thus gave the world rehgion ? Certainly it is too
heavy a draft upon our imagination to think that
human beings were taught the various elements of
civilization by animals, even though the animals did
and still do some things not unlike habits built into our
social evolution. Yet the foxes still have holes and the
birds of the air their nests, but the sons of men have
built themselves cities.
When one proceeds to compare the modern world
with that of his ancient ancestors who hovered along
the edge of the great ice cap, leaving no trace of them
selves except an occasional chipped rock or a bone or
two, the differences are startling. In their day as in
ours, the frost, rain, snow, and the hail mellowed the
soil; the humble earth-worm built up the tillable
lands; birds scattered the seeds of plants; animals
gorged and slept and gorged again.
In a word, physical nature as a whole was essentially
the same then as now. But who can picture the
brutahty, the nakedness, the savagery of these early
humans ? Yet the vast distance which separates
humanity of our day from these prehistoric times is a

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 41
denial that history is ultimately determined by physi
cal forces alone. If mankind had possessed no spiritual
energy, we should still be following the ways of Ab the
Caveman. But the caveman refused to remain the
caveman and became " primitive."
If, as must be confessed, what has just been said is
based more upon conjecture than upon positive data,
our conclusions are more defensible as we pass into the
stage of human experience revealed in recent studies
of primitive customs. Anthropological investigations
enable us to estimate more certainly the difference
between our modern civilization and that of existing
primitive peoples. These peoples as they now exist
are, as Thomas says, cases of arrested social develop
ment. No one knows how many centuries or mihenia
may he back even of the civilization of the Black
Fellow of Austraha. Barring superficial differences,
humanity remains physically about the same the
world over. The widespread study of these primitive
people makes it appear that human progress tends to
become standardized. In the same conditions, differ
ent races arrive at much the same state of mind
relative to totems, the dead, magic, women, and the
physical mysteries of birth and puberty. Most of the
resulting customs have been furnished by speculation
with economic or geographic ancestry, but even if we
were to grant that ah of the hypothetical origins were
exactly as some anthropologist might state — and his

42 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
fellow-anthropologists be pretty apt to question — we
should still face the epochal fact that some of these
primitive folk did not stay primitive. Within the
period of traceable human history upon the earth —
say the few thousand years that have elapsed since the
days of the lake dweller in Switzerland — human
nature has accomphshed what it has accomphshed and
is ever more rapidly accomplishing. Evidently primi
tive man must have been something more than a mere
machine responding to physical forces and conditions.
Nature and animals are today essentially as ten
thousand years ago. Man has changed.
If one asks how this plus element in humanity came
to bring about such results, the answer is to be found
not in academic speculation, but in the actual study of
the process itseh, as it has developed in physical con
ditions. We find, first of all, that humanity has always
been social but that the geographic element has had a
distinct influence upon the shaping up of social cus
toms. Contrast, for example, the hfe of the Eskimo
and the Hottentot. This geographical environment
has worked in human nature through its effects upon
the food supply, water, forage, climate and other
physical conditions which made the economic hfe of
one sort more successful than another.
Out from these physical conditions emerged eco
nomic tension, — but only with men. Primitive man
and woman soon became superior to the animals with

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 43
whom their ancestors apparently started on equal
geographic terms. And for this reason: the economic
tensions resulting from the scarcity set by physical
nature were neither merely economic nor geographic,
but personal as well. Animals have only analogies to
true economic problems. Group antagonisms made
men more reflective and purposeful. Out from the
midst of the resulting primitive societies emerged
groups possessed of pecuhar intellectual ability to use
nature as in tilling the soil or to get the better of other
people through the barter. Thus there developed still
other groups of interests, centering about the control
of the agents of economic production. When this
stage was reached humanity began its more recent
history. The processes of production and consump
tion became more comphcated. Tribal wars remade
the original groups. The enemy who was captured
was no longer killed, but put to work. Groups inter
married. Women were respected as those who assured
the tribe new members and furnished it vegetables as
the men furnished it meat. Civilization was at hand.
It wih be granted, I think, that in this rapid sketch
of the inception of our modern world I have given
weight to economic and geographic conditions. I do
not see how any man who cahs himself an economic or
materiahstic interpreter of history could fairly find
fault with this recognition of anthropological and
economic facts. And yet these formulas leave obscure

44 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the one element in these successive situations which
made this progress possible; and that is the emergence
of non-economic interests and non-economic psychical
forces. Human personahty has been not a passive but
an outstandingly creative co-factor in these changes.
So important a fact as this wih bear consideration.
As soon as we begin to trace the actual operations of
human personahty we find that it regarded itseh to a
very considerable extent creative and farthest possible
from passive under the stress of the economic and
geographic elements in some situation. It substituted
final causes for nervous reactions. Survival values
began to control the use of physical environment.
Religion began to shape itself and to cast its own
independent force into social evolution either by way
of initiative or inhibition. Pride of language, of
paternity, group loyalty developed. Humanity began
the conquest of nature and asserted itseh in ways
which no person living in an earher age could have
foreseen. Which of its members could have expected
that within primitive society lay the university, the
poet, and the mass of culture which we take as a matter
of course ? Who could have forecast from the ways of
primitive man that rational planning would replace
custom, that the family would cease to be the eco
nomic social unit and be replaced by the relations of
individuals; that elaborate social organization would
mediate between nature and human needs; that there

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 45
should appear an altruism in which men look upon the
needs of others as well as upon their own, caring for the
unfit as well as the fit; that men should come to see in
social solidarity something more than an opportunity
for economic advantage; that men should come to
believe in a Father Almighty, maker of heaven and
earth ? The painter before his canvas, the musician
drawing harmonies from his instrument, the architect
building his dreams into cathedral and palace, the
philosopher seeking ultimate truth, the saint worship
ping his God, the scientist challenging nature in his
experiments, whatever may have been the occasion
of their devotion, have only to be compared with
the maker of arrowheads, the beater of tom-toms, the
carver of totem poles, the master of initiations, the
guardian of the tribal fire, and the dancing medicine
man, to show clearly that man has developed in the
realm of the spirit. II
The evaluation of history as a whole in such a
sweeping fashion as this which we have adopted, is of
course open to the criticism of being a revel in generali-
tie"s. Yet it may be controlled by applying a similar
method of interpretation to special epochs. The chief
caution to be observed in such procedure is twofold:
" We must not," to use the words of Harnack,1 " let
1 History of Dogma, 1, 33.

46 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the wish to understand history check the effort to
obtain a true knowledge of it "; and we should avoid
selecting epochs where data are few, the process of
development is obscure and interpretation is conse
quently liable to subjective influences. There are,
however, many epochs sufficiently homogeneous and
rapid to be free from such temptations. Let us con
sider the Greek world, the rise of Christianity, and the
Reformation. Each of these periods has of late been
more or less " ultimately " interpreted from the
economic point of view.
i. Greek history lacks political unity. Yet the
Greek cities on the Asia Minor coast, in Greece proper,
and in the Greek colonies present a tolerably uniform
character. One would never mistake a Greek colony
for a Venetian. These traits which tend to appear
thus universally have been and may properly be said
to imply geographic conditions. Few Greeks were
born far distant from the sea, and their rugged land,
beautiful as it is, was never adapted to general agricul
ture, while its location and its numerous harbors
constantly suggested over-sea commerce. Strabo long
ago referred many of the characteristics of his native
country to the effect of geographic isolation and cli
mate, and later studies have served to confirm his
judgment. Had Greece possessed great rivers and
alluvial soil, the history of Greek culture might have
been something very different from that which we

TENDENCLES IN HISTORY 47
possess. If it had had less coast line, it would probably
have developed a greater political unity and a capacity
for foreign conquest through huge military establish
ments which nations of broad river valleys have fre
quently shown. But Greece, while not strictly an
island, had much the experience of island communities.
The fact that it was mountainous made it a group as it
were of geographical compartments within which were
httle independent states which united temporarily for
common defense or as subjects of Macedonia and
Rome, but never for the purpose of developing a
genuine Greek state.
This recognition of geographic forces at work in
Greek L history must be supplemented by a recogni
tion of the economic. Greece developed commercially
and thus accumulated the means on which the arts
could thrive. Situated between the Orient and
Europe with colonies both in the East and the West,
the Greeks found whatever unity they possessed
beyond short-hved hegemonies and leagues in com
merce. Whether or not it be historical scandal, the
money with which Pericles adorned the Acropohs is
said to have been gathered for the purpose of waging a
war against Sparta for the preservation of Athenian
supremacy among the Greek cities and islands. If
this were the case, it is a sort of parable of Greek
1 For more unqualified statement of geographic influence, see the
words of Grant Allen, quoted on p. 14 above.

48 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
history, for the Greeks — the middlemen of the ancient
world — bequeathed to the world no great example of
statecraft, but ideals which, like the Parthenon, give
their civilization its real position in human history.
Another parable, if Gilbert Murray's conjectures be
correct, may be seen in the development of the Greek
religion.1 The three great festivals of Greece, according to this
view, were originally without the presence of the gods
of Olympus and centered around sacred animals, — the
Diasia about the snake, the Thesmophoria the pig and
Anthesteria the buh. In the two latter festivals there
is the suggestion of an economic origin. This is not
altogether a mistaken conjecture if both pig and bull
represented physical forces of reproduction; for the
early Greeks certainly wished harvests and increase in
their herds. But such an interpretation at best is only
partially in accord with facts. Elemental customs
may have made a sacramental feast a means by which
1 See especially Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, The Evolution
of Religion, The Higher Phases of Greek Religion; Murray, The Four
Stages of Greek Religion; Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion, and Themis. In the opinion of some leading students of
Greek religion, the latter three books are too quick to give weight to
the hypotheses of Durkheim as to totemism, and too prone to inter
pret actual Greek literature from this point of view. Professor
Murray's interpretation of Plato is called in question and the accuracy
of bis quotations challenged, while Miss Harrison's views are even
less accepted. A characteristically thorough and scholarly discussion
of the views concerning the pre-literary religion of Greece will be found
in the last edition of E. Meyer's Weltgeschichte, vol. iii.

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 49
the worshipper gained the mana, the vital power of the
animal. Be that as it may, such festivals were
elevated by the introduction of the higher gods and
goddesses of later days. From Homer onward the
advance is to be seen from a rehgion possibly phallic
to one that is less passional, cleaner, warlike in the
heroic sense, looking to inner freedom.
Whether or not this presentation of early Greek
rehgion wih ultimately be adopted by the proper
authorities, the tendencies from Homer onward can
easily be seen by a study of Plato's views as to the
deity, and, in particular, his idealization of Socrates
who had raised Greek rehgious thinking from the
skepticism born of the intehectuahsm of the Sophists.
From Socrates on through Plato and the Stoics there
is a growing tendency to make philosophy into a
rehgion superior to, although not explicitly supplant
ing, the anthropomorphism of Homer. That such a
rehgious mood should have tended in the later im
perial days toward agnosticism on the one hand and
towards Asiatic mysteries and the mysticism of Neo-
Platonism on the other, is not strange. The Greek
spirit had mounted above the control of physical forces
and economic interests.
Similarly when we approach Greek hfe from the
point of view of social hfe in general. With its helots
and slaves the democracy of Greece seems at the best
imperfect. It may have arisen with the development

50 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
of economic classes, but the pride of citizenship which
marked Greeks of the best days was something more
than that of wealth. It was a pride in intellectual
leadership, in supremacy in the arts, in the drama, and
in philosophy. Even when the Greek succumbed to
Roman power he still endeavored to think into the
mysteries of existence, and out from the ruins of the
Greek democracy as from the stump of a fahen tree,
there sprang numerous branches of educational and
idealistic interests.
Whoever studies the course of Greek civilization as
a whole is impressed with the fact that other forces
than economic are to be credited with its achievements.
After one has recognized the influence of geography
and commerce, there still remains the Greek soul.
Men like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides, Pericles and Demosthenes
did as much for Athens as Athens did for them. The
Greek spirit was not passive, shaped by the forces in
which it exerted itself and by which it was stimulated
to self-expression. However evoked, it contributed
itseh to the social evolution. Phflosophy, ethical
ideahsm, political and scientific theory, logic, the
drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture: ah
these the world has come to recognize as the gift of the
Greek spirit. It is predilection for doctrinaire pre
cision which would seek, consciously or with neglected
concessions, to reduce this fruitage of the inner hfe to

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 51
the economic circumstances which made such hfe
possible. In interpreting Greek history, the historian
asks no favor of the economist, but he at least de
mands that ah of the historical factors, personal as
weh as impersonal, shah be recognized in an interpre
tation of the marvellous folk who have given us so
many of the standards of our modern hfe. And
especially does he demand that the tendency of Greek
culture toward the things of the spirit be duly weighed.1
2. It is almost a mark of sophistication nowadays
to find the origin of Christianity either in some form of
mystery rehgion or in the struggle of proletarians for
recognition. With regard to the first of these two
objects of interest, I do not care to speak beyond
expressing my conviction that whatever may have
been the role of Mithra and Isis in the second century,
httle more than highly conventional and unimportant
connection has been shown between these mystery
religions and the origin of Christianity. For the latter
we must look to Judaism and Jesus.2
That Christianity began as a class struggle born of
economic inequalities 3 is, if possible, even more open
1 Eucken in his Problem of Human Life, pt. 1, has traced this
spiritual tendency.
2 See Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions; Case, Evolution
of Early Christianity. More radical views will be found in Reitzenstein,
Poimandres; Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Cumont is more
cautious. Cf. Les religions orientates dans le paganisme romain.
3 See Kautsky, Geschichte des Socialismus in Einzelendarstellungen

52 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
to skepticism. Undoubtedly there are facts in the
Christian movement during the first and second cen
turies which lend the color of probabihty to the theory.
Christianity made a strong appeal to those classes
who had few economic and social rights in the Roman
Empire. Judea was a subject nation, dominated by an
Empire. in which the privileges of capital were well
integrated with political power and this Empire rested
upon the industry of a vast slave population, to whom
the message of a coming kingdom was indeed a gospel.
The various collegia with their esoteric practice of
fraternity by slaves, freedmen, and citizens of all
classes, undoubtedly had distinct influence on the
formation of Christian communities. It is very likely
that some of their customs were embodied in the
practices of the church. But to think of the Christian
movement as a proletarian restlessness in search of
economic equahty and democracy only to be brought
again under the control of a new aristocracy, the
priesthood, is to misrepresent ascertainable facts.1
i, pp. 16-40; Kalthoff, Die Entstehung des Christentums. A popular
but not thoroughly historical presentation of this view is given by
Bouck White, The Carpenter of Nazareth.
1 It is a mistake in view of our present knowledge of Roman Chris
tians to think of the churches as essentially proletarian. Even Paul's
description of the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 1 : 26-28) implies that
others than the poor were among the adherents of the new faith. See
for mteresting details, Orr, Neglected Factors in the Study of the Early
Progress of Christianity. See also Hamack, The Expansion of Chris
tianity.

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 53
To understand the Christian movement one must
see it as related to the stream of Jewish hfe which
shaped a new ethnic epoch in the first quarter of the
second century before Christ. Economic forces as well
as geographic were evidently at work in Hebrew
history, for the location of the country between trad
ing mihtary states on the north and Egypt on the south
as weh as between the sea and the desert inevitably
made it the isthmus, as it were, of near-Eastern his
tory. The Jewish people had been a shuttle-cock
between its mighty neighbors on the north and south
and the economic condition of Jewish hfe had grown
desperate. The spread of Hellenism ahenated the
relatively few persons of property from the farmers
and shepherds who hved on the hills where once their
nation had built its towns and cities. The resulting
struggle between these classes reached its culmination
in the revolt of the Maccabees and the consequent
establishment of a city-state which for a few years
maintained a semblance of national integrity with
Jerusalem as its capital. But Palestine long before
the time of Christ had been incapable of supporting ah
the Jews, and the stress of economic need had scat
tered enormous numbers of Jews throughout the
entire world. On the whole, these Jews of the Disper
sion sympathized with the less privileged classes of
Palestine and constituted a body of men and women
possessed of much the same social mind and enriched

S4 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
with the same national ideals as those of the common
people and the Pharisees in Palestine. The great hope
of divine dehverance which nourished them sprang
from the economic and political situation into which
foreign nations had forced them. The Jew beheved
that economic and political repression were to be
replaced by wealth and world-wide sovereignty.
Jehovah would once more estabhsh his nation in even
more prosperity and power than was known to
Solomon in ah his glory. Such a consummation would
be impossible without miracles and the Jew did not
hesitate to expect miracles. A redeemed nation at
the head of a conquered world, giving laws to those
who had abused them, seeing ah its enemies cast down
into heh while ah its dead fellow-citizens were recalled
from Sheol to enjoy the new epoch — this was the
hope which blazed out in the Apocalypses and Zealot-
ism and upheld the Jews everywhere.1 If this hope
1 On the Jewish messianic hope see Drummond, The Jewish
Messiah; Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the New Testament, pt. i ;
Schweitzer, Das Messianitats- und Leidensgeheimnis; The Quest of the
Historical Jesus, ch. xix; Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evan-
gelien; Baldensperger, Die messianisch-aposkalyptischen Hoffnungen
des Judentums; Charles, Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish and Christian;
Bousset, Anti-Christ. The actual feeling of the non-political mes-
sianists was genuinely social as well as religious. The Book of Enoch
is the most complete presentation of this attitude of mind, but see also
the Apocalypse of Baruch, iv Esdras, and the Psalms of Solomon.
Josephus is also of great value in estimating messianic expectations
among the Jews, although allowance must be made for bis friendliness

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 55
were to pass into the hands of those who, in addition
to being nationally depressed and restrained, belonged
to an economic underclass,1 it might easily lead to
proletarian agitation; but this, so far as we know in
the entire history of the Christian or non- Jewish
Messianic movement which spread through the Jews
out to the Roman Empire never occurred. There is
not an intimation of economic radicalism in the letters
of Paul.2 When the apologists catalog the charges
which were brought against the new rehgion, they
never refer to its being a source of economic disorders,
but on the contrary plead that they are good artisans,
tax-payers, even members of the imperial army.3 It is
toward Roman authority. I have endeavored to sketch the develop
ment of the Jewish state in New Testament times in my History of
New Testament Times in Palestine. The great authority is Schurer,
Geschichte des judischen V dikes in Zeitalter Jesu Christi. Also in Eng
lish translation of earlier edition, The Jewish People in the Times of
Jesus Christ.
1 As seen, for instance, in the Zealot movement with its attack
upon the capitalist and aristocratic classes in Jerusalem in the early
stages of the revolt of a.d. 66. See Josephus, Jewish War, ii, 17: 6, 9;
iv, 5; 3: 6-8; 5: 5; 6:1.
2 The practical problems of social life, such as marriage, civic
duties, employment, customs, were treated by Paul from the point of
view of the approaching return of Jesus and the end of the present
world-order. How far his teachings were from those of a " reformer "
I have endeavored to show in The Messianic Hope in the New Testa
ment, 163-223. See also Kennedy, St. Paul's Conception of the Last
Things; Wemle, Beginnings of Christianity, i, ch. 13.
3 Cf. the apologies of Justin Martyr, Aristides, Melito and the
Letter to Diognetus. Augustine's argument in his City of God repre-

56 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
these elemental facts rather than theories with which
the interpreter of early Christianity must deal. The
early Christians were not concerned with labor reform
or any other sort of reform.1 They beheved the world
was coming to an end and that in the new kingdom
which was to be estabhshed they would sit on thrones
judging angels. Economic and political distress had
long before Christ led the Jews to distrust their own
abilities and to rely whohy upon God, and when the
new faith and hope of the coming deliverance through
Jesus the Messiah, was organized, it was fundamen
tally transcendental. By the time it became one of
the world movements throughout the Roman Empire
it was recognized by its adherents as neither politi
cal nor economic, but that thing which so many
sents a later phase of apologetic but is equally free from any attempt
to defend Christianity from revolutionary economic tendencies.
Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity, ii, chs. 7, 13, 15, treats this
matter at length. See also Glover, The Struggle between Religions in
the Roman Empire. A classical illustration of the Christian attitude
to social life will be found in Clement of Alexandria, Pedagogue.
1 That is, of course, reform in the modern sense of the word. The
early Christian writers, notably Clement of Alexandria and Tertul-
lian, abound in exhortations to individuals to avoid the sinful customs
of pagan society. Ambrose and Chrysostom are the outstanding
exceptions to this non-social attitude. Each of them attempts to
apply Christian principles to economic life. But they represent
Christianity after it had become the religion of the state and had fixed
authoritative limits to doctrinal speculation through dogma. For a
sketch of the ethical attitude of the early church see Hall, The History
of Christian Ethics, chs. 3 and 4.

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 57
" materialist " interpreters of history fail to estimate
justly, a supernatural rehgion. And it was1 as
a rehgion avowedly supernatural that Christianity
moved out into history and wrought its changes.
Here again it is possible to see a spiritual tendency
as a social movement breaks away from the con
ditions which give it rise and becomes on its own
account an independent cause.2
3. The Protestant Reformation is an epoch for
which just now an economic interpretation is being
sought.3 Ever since the Crusades there had been a
rapid development of commerce and manufacture.
This tended to give rise to commercial cities and to
those first accumulations of wealth which he beneath
our modern capitahstic system. Men began to use
money as a commodity and interest was distinguished
from usury. Thus there graduahy developed what
1 Sohm, Outlines of Church History, p. n, states the matter pre
cisely: " To the Christian the Highest was, before all, not of this world,
for his longing was fixed upon a better." See also, his acute estimate
(p. 15) of the motive of the persecution of the Christians as those who
were disloyal in thought rather than in deed.
2 Professor Royce in The Problem of Christianity presents an inter
esting psychological study of Paul, making his faith center about
loyalty to the Beloved Community. The Pauline Epistles seem rather
to make this loyalty bind Paul to a Beloved Lord. The supernatural
rather than social element is basal with him.
* Here socialist writers are, as might be expected, most in evidence.
See Bax, German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages; The Peasants'
War; The Anabaptists; Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the
Time of the Reformation.

58 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
might be called a new but untitled aristocracy with
far more wealth and consequent power than the feudal
aristocracy of the knights. This new commercial
group found itseh opposed to some extent by the
church in its preaching, but even more because of
economic rivalry; for the church was the great capital
ist of, Europe. It was not only possessed of enormous
endowments and landed estates, ah exempted from
ordinary taxation, but many of the clergy began to
enter into some forms of trade even becoming inn
keepers to the scandal of their competitors. The
princes of the empire and the highest ranks of the old
aristocracy had still sufficient power to deal effectively
with the new economic conditions, but the peasants
and the knights were suffering. The peasants were
forced into the very depths of poverty; the knights
grew landless and otherwise impoverished while the
church was forced to pronounce its blessing upon
capitalism. Further, these Germans of ah classes dis
liked to see a continuous stream of gold setting from
Germany to Rome, particularly as German towns in
the sixteenth century had become relatively rich
because of manufacturies and commerce.1
1 Germany was at the same time passing through a period of legal
confusion because of the attempt to supplant the original German law,
which was to a very considerable extent unwritten and uncodified, by
the Justinian Code. This attempt was to the benefit of the great
princes, but it subjected the people to a serious loss. To the common
man the lawyer became as much a beast as the robber knights. In

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 59
Such over-emphasis of the economic origin of the
Reformation knows of Martin Luther, but he becomes
about as important as a modern college professor in
the socialist party. The economic situation is the one
emphasized and the spiritual ferment and particularly
fact to Sebastian Brant in his satire The Ship of Fools the lawyer
seems to have been in a more despicable state than the robber knight
for at least the robber knight exposed his body to the storm. " The
other hides behind his ink-well." See Vedder, The Reformation in
Germany, Introduction (not extreme) and the review by Harvey,
American Journal of Theology, (1915), p. 129. Harvey in his article
" Economic Self-interest in the German Anti-Clericalism of the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries " {American Journal of Theology,
xix (1915), pp. 509-528) cites the following as among the sources of
the economic causes for hostility to the clergy: compulsory tithing,
rents, services, death taxes, fees for religious services such as baptism,
masses, extreme unction, burial, surplice fees, voluntary contributions
insisted on at intervals, purchase of candles, widespread begging on
the part of the monks and nuns in addition to the friars, the endow
ment of anniversaries and similar services for the dead, charges in
connection with relieving souls from purgatory, the indebtedness of
many to ecclesiastical foundations which charged interest notwith
standing usury was forbidden by the canon law. This article by Pro
fessor Harvey should be read by all those who wish to get in touch
with a mass of information seldom mentioned in general histories.
Harvey, however, refuses to conclude that the Protestant Revolt was
essentially an economic movement. " It is more sane," he says, " and
more in accord with all the facts, to affirm merely that the economic
factor was much more widely and generally operative in the success of
Protestantism than historians have, heretofore, been able or willing
to concede." On the relation of Calvinism and Capitalism see Engels,
Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, and especially Weber, Archiv fur Social-
wissenschaft und Socialpolitik, xx, xxi, xxx " Protestantische Ethik
und der ' Geist ' des Kapitalismus "; and the criticism by Troeltsch,
Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, i, 607-794.

60 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the theological ferment tend to be regarded as inciden
tal. Luther becomes the product of German bourgeois
unrest, Calvin the child (or father) of Capitahsm, and
Protestantism the behef of dohchocephahc men.1
When one studies the documents of the Middle Ages
as found in the great collections, it is at once apparent
that however important were the economic forces in
estabhshing conditions by which the church was so
largely shaped, long before the Reformation there
were constantly emerging not only among the ecclesi
astics but among the masses, motives and ideas which
are distinctly non-economic. The church could not of
course escape from an economic world, but it did the
best it could to prevent economic as well as political
forces from becoming supreme in civilization.2 Pro
testant historians have perhaps given a relatively
too prominent position to Luther, and it is still very
difficult to make the average man believe that the
Reformation did not give everybody rehgious hberty
— the one thing above ah others which the Reforma
tion did not give. It must be admitted also that the
economic forces at work to produce the storm and
stress of the sixteenth century have been overlooked
by the older historians of the Reformation. But after
one has made all of these concessions — and for my
1 Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, pp. 247-249.
2 See for instance the efforts of Puritanism in Cunningham, The
Moral Influence of the Church on the Investment of Money and the Use of
Wealth.

• TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 6 1
part I am in genuine sympathy with those who would
recognize the influence of these economic conditions
to which I have referred — there yet remains the mass
of historical material which shows that the Reforma
tion movement, imperfect and fuh of bitter social
antagonisms as it was, lacking though it did any true
sense of rehgious tolerance and destined to plunge itself
into the protestant scholasticism of the seventeenth
century, was none the less marked by rehgious hopes
as weh as nationalistic aspirations. He who would
interpret the Reformation must know something of
theology. He must be able to sound the depths of
passion which lies in such words as " sacramentarian ",
" crypto-Calvinist ", " good works ", and which blazed
forth in the Anabaptists, those democrats born out of
season. It is hard for the historian who has always
fought shy of rehgion and of the church to understand
these formulas. Therefore he is tempted to ignore
them or give them a condescending foot-note in his
scheme of economic forces. But in the same propor
tion as he yields to this temptation is he a poor his
torian, for they represent some of the driving forces
which actuahy shaped up modern Europe. If it had
not been for the religious convictions of these seven
teenth century leaders, history would have taken
a very different turn. We might never have had
the Dutch Repubhc, the Puritan Commonwealth, the
colony of Massachusetts Bay, the Social Contract, the

62 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
French Revolution, or the Hohenzoherns in Prussia.
Reahy to understand history, one must see that this
Reformation movement, which to such a large extent
rooted itseh in the economic conditions of Europe,
reahy got its fighting ideahsm from rehgion. Imper
fect as that rehgion was both within and without the
Roman Catholic Church, it was far better in its human
appeal, in its recognition of moral values and its sense
of the Divine presence than any the Middle Ages had
known. Luther, Melanchthon, Farel, Calvin, Sir
Thomas More, Cranmer and William of Orange were
not driven solely or chiefly by economic motives but
by that inner spirit of hfe which was springing up in
ah Europe and which gave to what otherwise would
have been mere pohtical and economic revolution a
moral grandeur which still makes the period an
inspiration for our day. Ill
Facts such as these, gained by a consideration of the
process of history either in whole or in great epochs,
have had their influence upon the supporters of the
economic interpretation of history themselves. I have
already quoted Engels' statement regarding the over
emphasis laid by himseh and Marx upon the economic
factors in history. To this should be added bis words
in a letter written in 1895.

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 63
" According to the materiahstic view of history the
factor which is in last instance decisive in history is the
production and reproduction of actual life. More than
this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But when
any one distorts this so as to read that the economic
factor is the sole element, he converts the statement
into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The
economic condition is the basis, but the various ele
ments of the superstructure — the pohtical forms of
the class contests, and their results, the constitutions
— the legal forms, and also ah the reflexes of these
actual contests in the brains of the participants, the
pohtical, legal, philosophical theories, the rehgious
views . . . — ah these exert an influence on the
development of the historical struggles, and in many
instances determine their form."
Nietzsche objects strenuously to the behef that " ah
human actions and impulses are subordinate to the
process of the material world that works unnoticed
powerfully and irresistibly," and has emphasized in
his own characteristic fashion the futility of the con
ception of history as a mere series of causes from
which one may generalize. In this he certainly touches
upon a mistake in method into which sociahsts have
fahen in their use of history. Although working for
the welfare of mankind they have too often shackled
human progress by a materiahstic reading of the past.
The emphasis put by ah economic historians upon the

64 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
matter of origins as well as the supremacy of produc
tion is in itself an indication of a failure to look upon
human hfe as essentiahy human. The proper approach
to an understanding of the economic elements of his
tory is through the consideration of the problems of
consumption. It is the wants of men that bring prog
ress and wants are not to be identified with their
occasion or even with forces from which they grow.
This fact is becoming more generahy recognized
even among those who would magnify the economic
elements in history. Professor Ross says truly
" Nothing can rescue us from one-sided theories save
a knowledge of human wants and a recognition of the
great variety of the springs that incite men to action." J
Discontent with existing conditions is the source of
many of these wants, and discontent is something
more than a hunger for bread and circus. It involves
the desire for justice and the recognition of human
rights. Powerful as these conceptions are they are too
frequently minimized. And is it not a striking fact
that these wants (hke pessimism) are often in dispro
portion to economic advantages ? It is as men taste
the good things of hfe that they particularly realize the
injustice in others' privileges, which, because hitherto
regarded as mviolable, have become rights. And this
induced feeling is certainly not to be identified with
the desires for better economic conditions by which it is
occasioned. It is just as truly a spiritual hunger.
1 Foundations of Sociology, p. 181.

TENDENCIES IN HISTORY 65
Furthermore, consumption is something that can be
controlled by idealistic legislation, as is illustrated by
prohibition in America and in Russia. Economic
wants are always being determined by non-economic
ideals furnished by the school, the state, and the
church. This too is recognized in the newer type of
socialist thought which is breaking away somewhat
from the materiahstic orthodoxy attributed to Marx.
With it the economic interpretation of history is
secondary to a view of the life process which strives
vigorously to find pragmatism rather than history in
the writings of both Marx and Engels. Professor
Urwick 1 has admirably said, " We conceive of the
social process as a constant push and puh of diverse
factors, ah related to one another as factors in a single
movement directed to some end, which though always
indefinite, we are nevertheless compehed to regard as a
moral end." Teleology, however, must not be too
precise. It is the sense of direction that gives the
elan vital, to use Bergson's almost too happy term, its
spiritual value. So much we can see clearly and posi
tively. Further we must " faintly trust the larger
hope " thrust upon us by the process of human social
hfe. In the end doubts wih' be laid and rival interpreta
tions wih be determined by the perspective of those
genetic changes within the psychical as weh as the
outward hfe of humanity which constitute history.
1 A Philosophy of Social Progress, p. 213.

66 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
As we stand on the bow of some great steamer
hurtling itself across a trackless ocean, we feel only the
rush of change, the toss of waves and the buffeting of
winds. But as we stand on the stern of the vessel we
see the wake, boiling out even as we watch, stretch
unswervingly behind us. Then we know that we are
held to a course. We cannot see our port, but we know
we are going some-whither because we have come
some-whence. The past is the wake of history, the argument for
direction, the prophecy of an equally rational tendency
in the future.

LECTURE III
THE SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL FOR
PHYSICAL CONTROL
In the preceding lecture it was argued that the general
movement of history whether viewed as a whole or in
some of its chief epochs is away from the less personal
forms of life in which the action of men is directly
determined by the geographic and economic conditions
under which they hve. We know that humanity has
left its earhest harbors. Can we tell the direction of
its voyage ? In reply we wih consider certain data
which suggest direction rather than origins.
By direction I do not mean a miraculous control by
God just as Augustine taught, or the strict teleology of
Herrmann, or the Weltgeist of Hegel. It wih be neces
sary later to recur to this topic and consider how far the
fact of process from the less to the more personal con
ditions may be held to evince the presence of a supreme
Reason in social evolution. In the present and the two
succeeding lectures I wish to examine three inductions
which rise from the study of social evolution. These I
would express in a threefold thesis; namely, the course
of social evolution tends to set from materiahstic
67

68 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
situations toward (i) the substitution of the authority
of inner sanctions and inhibitions for appeal to force;
(2) the increasing appreciation of the personal worth
of the individual; and (3) the transformation of the
fight for rights into a giving of justice. If these induc
tions are legitimate there is discernible in history a
basis for interpreting social development as a pas
sage not only from the simpler to the more complex
form of social organization, but also from occasion and
control by impersonal forces and economic wants to
the spiritual freedom which hes in inner self-direction
toward spiritual ends.
In the present lecture we consider the first of these
three inductions: the substitution of the authority of
inner sanctions and inhibitions for that of outward
force.

If one moves up the current of history, it is amazing
how every tributary and even the main current itseh
lead the investigator into the region of force. Whether
or not, as the great disbehever of Rome insisted, fear
made the gods, it can hardly have fafled to make social
customs. " Spare the rod and spoil the child " is an
educational apothegm now decidedly out of favor, but
at one time it was the domestic epitome of social con
trol. Primitive society abounds in brutalities which
are both purposeful and merely customary, but even

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 69
the habits of primitive peoples must mark an advance
over those of prehistoric persons who, first of their
race, defended seh, property, and child against attack,
and made the physicahy less vigorous, servants or
wives. The " blonde beast " of Nietzsche ruled his
weaker brethren until by combination they ruled him
by force.
Down through the reahy historic ages, rehance upon
force has always persisted. One has only to look at the
monuments of Egypt, the tablets of the Assyrians, the
arches of the Roman Forum, the Arc de Triomphe in
Paris, the victory monuments of London and Berhn, to
see how often pohtical power has rested ultimately
upon the ability to conquer and hold in subjection
other nations. " I tell you," says Thrasymachus in
the Republic, " justice is simply the advantage of the
stronger." J The kaleidoscopic changes of history in
the Near East from the days of Alexander the Great
to those of Mahomet were due largely to the fact that
both by temperament and by history the nations of
that part of the world were untrained to support a
social order which was not enforced by the soldier —
a lack of education manifest today more tragically than
ever. Rome, it is true, went far in the development of
peaceable social control, but when Rome succumbed
to bad economic pohcy, pohtical ineptitude, and Teu
tonic restlessness, Europe again reverted to a social
1 Plato, Republic, (Jowett's trans.) I, iii, 15.

70 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
order perilously near that of the time from which the
" undifferentiated Aryan brain ", to use again Grant
Ahen's term, had emerged.
But this is by no means ah of the story. The history
of these same countries is also a commentary upon the
futility of ah efforts to base politics permanently upon
external force. Not one of the mihtary empires of
antiquity exists today, though unwarlike China still
flourishes despite its incoherent politics.
From the point of view of logic, it might indeed
appear that national energy and order can be built up
by establishing an attitude of fear. This is the real
essence of the " wih to power " about which so many
radicals swarm. This was the desperate program of
the doctrinaire mediocrities of the Convention in
France during the year 1793-4. And it must be
admitted that terror is effective as a momentary incen
tive. When once the Convention had voted " terror
was to be the order of the day," x a new efficiency
immediately appeared. Assailed by practicahy an
entire continent in arms, with its best general gone
over to the enemy, its armies defeated, its monetary
system based upon an all but valueless paper, its king
and queen conspiring with emigre' nobles who wished
to retake their lost privileges and, supported by foreign
armies, sought to punish the new state, with provinces
in revolt and traitors suspected on every street corner,
1 The motion was made by Barere, September 5, 1793.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 71
France was certainly at the very point of disintegra
tion. The Reign of Terror was not only a genuine
pohtical experiment, a "despotism of hberty" as
Marat said; it brought France back to national
health. But permanent government could not be
built upon it. Human nature in France triumphed
over force. The cohapse of the Terror and the Terror
ists was an indication of returning national stabihty
and sanity. The nation was not only renewed economi
cally by the distribution of the church lands and
inspired by the unaccustomed pride of proprietorship
in government, it was also possessed of a new spirit.
The Reign of Terror in a few months had furnished J
the reductio ad absurdum of direct action in politics.
Robespierre and his fehow philosophical terrorists
served humanity well; for they showed the fahacy of
the theory that the ultimate basis of society is fear. It
was the Code Napoleon with its recognition of coopera
tive citizenship and not the Terror that became the
model for European states. Law is indeed something
more than codified fear.
1 I have discussed the political significance of the Reign of Terror
in The French Revolution, chs. 16-18. Stephens, The French Revolu
tion, II, chs. 9, 10 has a much fuller treatment with references to litera
ture. The great authority is Mortimer-Temaux, La Terreur. See also
Hamel, Histoire de Robespierre; and the works of Aulard.

72 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
II
Let us look in more detail at the general course of
this developing social control as it moves away from
rehance upon physical force toward inner self-control.
Social history may be said to begin with the rise of
social customs. Human society is doubtless geneti
cally joined with that of animals, but at the outset the
human was distinguished from the animal group by
language and thought; and these in turn may be
traced back to the original differences between men
and beasts in power of mental associations. This
mental capacity of the new race soon expressed itseh
in the development of customs which made the hfe of
groups more possible and purposeful.1 The various
members of social groups feh into ways of action
which became fixed and were inherited as social habits.
Just how these habits grew up it is impossible to say;
but in their development, so far as can be observed in
the most primitive existing social hfe, that of the
aboriginal Australians and the negroes of Africa,
imitation had no small share. Like language and
thought this principle tended to perpetuate efficient
activities by extending them from neighbor to neigh-
1 Arthur J. Balfour has a brief but admirable discussion of the
difference between animal and human morality in Theism and Human
ism, p. 108 sq. A more elaborate discussion of the animal basis of
morality may be found in Sutherland, The Origin and Growth of the
Moral Instinct.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 73
bor, from father to son, from old men to those being
initiated into the status of manhood, until the question
of their origin was no longer raised and men performed
them simply because they were ancient.
The individual as a part of society became subject
to these customs, and independence toward which
individuahty tends was restrained by folkways. The
economic situations into which rival groups were
brought laid special limitations on the individual, who
in the very nature of the case became a sort of organ
of the group by which he was controlled. Our knowl
edge of primitive customs makes it probable that at the
start, and to less extent subsequently, force must have
been used to compel the conformity of the individ
ual, but the pressure of the economic needs of the
group which were shared, of. course, by its individual
members, tended to solidify custom into a conserva
tive force which prevented the development of the
individual hfe on the one side and the progress of
the group on the other. Primitive civilization, though
arrested, no longer depended on force alone.1
New customs, however, arose in some of the tribes.
Just what may have been their source we can only
conjecture, but not impossibly they were due to
changes in habitat, new economic pressure because of
1 The great authority upon this aspect of history is Wester-
marck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (with full bibli
ography).

74 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
changes in population, and the absorption of mem
bers of other tribes into a tribe or phratry through
capture and exogamy. The legends and traditions of
many nations also preserve the other and significant
fact of the appearance of leaders possessed of unusual
insight and vision. But whatever the cause of the
disintegration or distrust of custom, antagonisms
between champions of the new and of the older order
fohowed and new social ideals emerged. Appeal
would again be made to force, and out of the struggle
emerged law, the product of the conscious social mind.
A familiar example of such antagonism may be seen
within the Hebrew people. There the struggle was
between customs which the Hebrews had brought
from their desert wanderings and those mores which
they found possessing the new land into which Joshua
led them. To a considerable extent these were inter
woven with different economic experiences and
pohcies. The customs of the Canaanites were more
those of urban and commercial people than were those
with which the Hebrews were acquainted.1 The
struggle between these two groups with their different
economic and cultural aims had, however, an outcome
akin to that which is always found when such struggles
arise between groups controhed by economic and social
1 See Wallis, Sociological Study of the Bible; Smith, The Prophet
and his Problems, although not from the same point of view or with the
same presuppositions.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 75
customs belonging to different stages of social evolu
tion. Under the guidance of their rehgious leaders the
Hebrew people reorganized and idealized their own
customs and social standards, to some extent enriching
their inherited rehgion with elements from the prac
tices of the Canaanitish peoples. Thus there developed
a new type of social control, the law of Jehovah,
which, although never fuhy operative, was to have its
influence upon their entire subsequent experience as a
nation. Rehance upon force was supplemented and,
at points, was even supplanted by other forms of
social control.
When conquered nations are subjected to the cul
tural processes of their conquerors, we can see that
after the first appeal to force the influence of education
and of social inheritance is sufficient to estabhsh the
authority of the new customs. Greece could give
culture to its Roman masters, although the customs
of masters also become the manners of subjects. The
influence of Normans upon the Anglo-Saxons was
never complete, but the Enghsh language is testimony
to the tiansforming power of a common national hfe.
Alsace and Lorraine, conquered by Louis XIV,
became thoroughly galhcized; reconquered by Ger
many, the apphcation of mihtary and pohce force
changed language and customs which were typically
French. Less than fifty years later, in those sections
of the territories which have reverted to the control of

76 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
France, social hfe goes on about as it was. And it is
altogether probable that if the much-desired territory
is retained by France it wih require httle force to
make it possible for the inhabitants to re-assimilate
French ways of living. Imitation and national pride
wih be sufficient influence. Ill
In this rise of customs is to be seen the social origin
of that powerful master and director of human hfe, the
conscience. But conscience itself evolves from emo
tional attitudes due to the fear of physical vengeance
or of divine punishment in this hfe or the next, to a
conscious regard for righteousness whatever may be
its content.
There seems to be as much uncertainty as to the
exact point in the development of civilization at which
the moral sense emerges in a people as there is doubt
concerning the same matter in the case of an infant.
Westermarck1 holds that the origin of the moral
judgments in men is emotional and due very largely to
the fear of vengeance which under the pressure of social
custom has been associated with certain actions.
Doubtless a large element of truth is to be seen in this
conjecture, but one needs to recah that the fear of
social retribution is not always attached to the same
1 Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, especially in vol. i,
chs. 1-3.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 77
object by different people at the same time or by the
same people at different times. The most that such
fear can engender is that the commission of an act
which is under the disapproval of society should be
discovered and fohowed by punishment. If, however,
social disapproval is not expressed, the commission of
such an act carries with it no sense of guilt. Thus
there is always an opportunity for growth or retrogres
sion as regards the sense of guilt for the same act. The
fundamental element in moral action is decreasingly
the act itseh and increasingly the attitude of men
towards society. Compare the difference between and
yet the fundamental identity of honor and honesty.
That the same act is given different moral worth in
different societies and in the same society at different
stages of its development, is a commonplace in social
progress. Thus among the Bflochs there is the saying
" God wih not favor a man who does not steal and
rob." 1 Compare the proverb " All's fair in love and
war." But even in these two fields where anarchy
tends to reign, there has been decided progress in
social control.
The attempt to find any objective criterion by which
to decide whether a given act is right or wrong has
pretty generahy failed, and we are driven to give ulti
mate importance to attitudes toward personal values
as generahy embodied in rehgion. For social control
1 Spencer, Ethics, i, p. 470.

78 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
always carries with it an idealistic element which
urges men away from the realistic to the spiritual, be
it never so crude. Therein hes the dynamic of moral
evolution.1 In ah societies moral sanctions and inhibitions are
generahy given by rehgion. Here again the first stage
of control is the fear of punishment. Practicahy ah
the ancient codes of the Semitic peoples, for instance,
are set forth hke the Hebrew as expressions of the
Divine wih, expressing itseh in blessings or curses.
The code of Hammurabi, the sixth king of the first
dynasty of Babylon — something about two thousand
years or more before Christ — in its epilogue states
that the gods Ilu and Baal have called Hammurabi to
create justice, to destroy the wicked and to make men
happy. The king then proceeds to give his legislation
which he fortifies by curses.2 But long before the
Babylonian king had thus made his god the basis of
legislation, primitive man had learned to expect some
sort of misfortune to follow from the violation of
whatever type of law a particular deity had estab
lished. Sometimes this divine law dealt with cult
alone, at other times with social crimes. Thus one
native tribe of Borneo has a god Batara, who created
the world, approves of industry and honesty, but
punishes thefts, injustice, adultery and immorahty
1 Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 420 sq.
2 See Harper, The Code of Hammurabi.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 79
among the unmarried. And while this may be a some
what higher conception of the divine legislation than
is found among other primitive peoples, it is certainly
by no means unique.1
Among many primitive people as well as certain of
the more civilized races, though not among the pre-
exilic Hebrews, the practical difficulty of proving that
the gods did work vengeance because of violation of
their laws led to the postponement of such vengeance
to after death. We have at our disposal a very con
siderable mass of such behefs many of which obviously
are the extension into the world to come of the types of
vengeance permitted in this world. Most generahy
such divine justice seems an extension of ideals of
social justice not practicable in this world. Thus
among the natives of Central India a murderer in the
spirit world is a slave of the man he murdered. With
the Pentecost islanders the murdered man tehs the
ghosts to whom he goes who killed him and when the
murderer arrives he is not permitted to join respect
able ghostly society. Where torture has become a
characteristic method of social vengeance, this is also
expected after death.
In more developed religions this forcible control of
humanity by the power of the divinity found expres
sion in the behef in a Day of Judgment. Rehgion
1 For discussion see Westermarck, op. cit., n, chs. 48-52; King,
Development of Religion, pp. 287-305.

80 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
has always derived its interpretative concepts from
social experience in general, but particularly from the
field of politics. The state constituted the most
extensive and supreme expression of power which a
pre-scientific age knew, and it was natural that the
most elaborate religions should utilize the pohtical
concepts in exposition of their teachings. The various
behefs in a coming day of judgment for the world
must be regarded both as a part of this extension of
pohtical experience into rehgion and as a new and
increasingly powerful factor in social control. And
the tendency of its influence was always in the direc
tion of substituting social experience for physical
force. The relations of the gods or of one supreme
God to humanity were conceived of as analogous to
those of kings to their subjects. As civilization
advanced the judicial power of rulers became increas
ingly prominent and even came to surpass their
mihtary power; indeed mihtary campaigns and the
terrible sufferings inflicted by monarchs on rebels
became an expression of the justice of the ruler — a
philosophy of war not yet outgrown. In the same
proportion that the judicial grew superior to the mih
tary functions of the state, did the relation of men to
God become crystallized in terms of a general assize in
which sentences of bhss or suffering were passed.
Various nations, however, viewed this judicial aspect
of the Deity in accordance with the general develop-

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 8 1
ment of their own pohtical ideals and practices and
consequently with differing distinctness.
The Egyptian rehgion undoubtedly furnishes the
earhest conception of an actual judgment of the dead,
but the origin and early stages of this behef are
unknown. When we are first able to discover its
constituent elements, it partook of the relatively high
development of the Egyptian civilization. In the
earhest sources of the Old Kingdom we find alongside
of the state rehgion, a distinct conception of immortal
ity altogether unusual among oriental religions. No
civilization, not even the Peruvian, ever made such
elaborate provision for the hfe after death.1 The
1 The Egyptian believed that the " Ka," or vital force which was a
sort of counterpart of the body, was to continue in life after death
although its exact relation to the body and the soul were never sys
tematically developed. The lower world to which the Sun God went
every night was to be inhabited by the departed spirits, who were
conceived of as traveling to it generally in a ferryboat with its ferry
man, less often as carried thither by one of the sacred birds or by the
aid of some friendly spirit. The ferryman (" He who faces back
ward ") in a certain sense played the part of judge for he would take
in his boat only the man of whom it could be said " There is no evil
which he has done " or " Who was righteous before heaven and earth
and before the isle."
This belief was further developed by union with the Osiris myth.
Osiris had come to be regarded as not only the king of the dead but
also as one who had been slain by his brother Set and who had, accord
ing to one version of the story, been acquitted after being unjustly
accused of obtaining his throne by deceit. Those who entered into
the nether world were regarded as destined to share in this vindication
of Osiris, but in early Egyptian faith this element was undeveloped.

82 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
rehgious faith of the Middle Kingdom increasingly
identified the destiny of the dead with the triumph of
Osiris, but only on condition that they, like him, had
been able to undergo the judgment which followed
death. The ethical import of this judgment became
much more pronounced. The heart of the dead man
was weighed against a feather, the symbol of Truth,
while he pled " not guilty " to forty-two different
sins. The gods Horos and Anubis made the test, and
the god Toth wrote down the result of the trial and
carried it to Osiris the judge.
Aside from character, protection for the dead was
found in charms, and magical formulas were put inside
coffins and grew into what is commonly known as the
Book of the Dead.1 This magical deliverance is not
to be identified, however, with the ethical test, which
in the course of time, under the influence of the priest
hood, seems to have disappeared in the magical. But
in both cases the power of the gods was subject to
non-physical control.2
1 Renouf , The Book of the Dead.
2 The sacred beetle was cut from stone and was buried with the
dead. On it is inscribed the words " Oh, my heart, rise not up against
me as a witness." This, as well as other contents of the tombs would
serve to argue that while the conception of judgment continued, it was
believed that the judges of the nether world could be made propitious
by magic. During the second period of the empire the religious ideals
still seem further to have degenerated toward magic on the part of
the common people and toward an esoteric state-religion of the
Pharaohs and the priesthood. The future life still had a religious

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 83
While, thus, behef that the happiness or the misery of
the future hfe was dependent upon moral status was
never fuhy developed, the idea of judgment grew less
one of force and served to maintain standards, cus
toms and other forms of social control.1
In the Babylonian rehgion 2 we have many peniten
tial prayers in which Marduk and Istar are asked to
forgive and to grant good gifts to the repentant soul.
There is in these prayers, however, no expectation of
post mortem judgment day, but the interest seems to
be centered upon temporal blessings. At the same time
there were in the Babylonian rehgion elements which
were later to have a bearing upon the doctrine of a
judgment day. That the Babylonian rehgions beheved
in the realm of the dead is evident from the story of
the descent of Istar to Hades, as weh as other myths.
But to the Babylonians, as to the Hebrews, the realm
of the dead was a realm of shades oVer which the gods
of the upper world had no control. The fate of the
influence in mortal life, to judge from the monuments, but anything
like a genuine judgment has all but disappeared, to be replaced by the
use of charms, worship of animals symbolical of the gods, and other
non-ethical elements of religious practice.
1 See Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient
Egypt (especially valuable for the period of the Pyramid Texts);
History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest.
Good brief treatment in Moore, History of Religions, i, chs. 8, 9.
2 See for general treatment Jastrow, Aspects of Religious Belief and
Practice in Babylonia and Assyria. Excellent brief exposition in
Moore, History of Religions, i, ch. 10.

84 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
dead was apparently not ah the same. Those, for
instance, who fell in battle, were apparently somewhat
more happy than others, and the condition of the
dead could be also affected by offerings from their sur
viving relatives. There is also a sort of rudimentary
judgment passed by the Anunnaki, the " great gods "
of the underworld, upon the dead as they entered the
underworld. But on this particular point there is great
obscurity. The dead were classified, i. e., drank clean
water or eat refuse, according as they were properly
buried or left unburied. This fate was fixed by
Mamaneter " who fixes fate." 1 These various
Babylonian myths, although their part in social control
is obscure, contain elements which subsequently had
an effect upon the Jewish behef in a day of judgment.
These are to be seen particularly in the story of the
struggle between Marduk and Tiamat in which Tiamat
is destroyed. While this is a part of the Babylonian
creation cycle the struggle between the good God and
the representative of evil influenced the development
of the apocalyptic portrayal of the final struggle
between the Christ and the anti-Christ which formed a
part of the conception of judgment in Jewish and
subsequently Christian teaching.2
1 Gilgamesh Epic x, 6: 35-38.
2 For other illustrations of the early belief in a judgment see Moore,
History of Religions, pp. 67, 140, 348 sq., 364-402. An interesting
argument from the belief in Rhadamathus and Minos will be found
in Justin Martyr, / Apology, ch. 8. The terrible pictures of hell so fre-

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 85
The influence of the concept upon social action wih
be better considered in connection with the entire
matter of rehgion as a phase of social control. Before
passing to that highly important matter, however, I
would once more recah the tendency in these ancient
societies, from force to custom; from custom to divine
sanction and punishment; from unrestrained divine
punishment to the power of magical or rehgious con
trol of the gods themselves; and then to the extension
of more highly developed social practices to the divine
government. IV
The development of rehgious sanctions might almost
be said to move parahel, although somewhat tardily,
with social practices and ideals. In it the same move
ment is traceable from outer control to inner direc
tion. Rehgion not only thus reflects the growth of
inner as opposed to physical authority, but throws
hght upon the interpretation of social evolution.
Rehgion is coming to be regarded as a phase of the
life process of humanity. Life is ever seeking to derive
protection and help from the environment in which
an organism finds itseh. A personal hfe like that of
mankind seeks to get such assistance personahy from
personal environment. Such personal environment as
is furnished by society is, of course, evident, and many
quent in Christian literature after the Apocalypse of Peter were of
Greek origin.

86 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
rehgious customs of later times may well be traced to
social customs of the ancient world. Such matters as
the tabu can very probably be regarded as some
standardized custom interdicting certain acts at the
cost of divine and human penalties. But the human
soul has not been content to leave rehgion in the field
of inhibition. It is constantly tending to extend its
social experiences into that superhuman region within
which it finds itseh located, and to those cosmic forces
upon which more or less intelligently it beheves itseh
dependent. Rehgion thus becomes an idealized social
order. In entering upon this great and epoch-making
venture of faith in the possibility of establishing per
sonal relations with elements of a universe which did
not appear personal, the proto-rehgionist of prehistoric
days transcendentalized his social experience. He
treated that upon which he was dependent as amen
able to the laws of spiritual relations as he knew and
practised them. Thus he derived, crudely enough
of course, the fundamental rehgious conception that
man's relation to the universe is not only imper
sonal, but may become personal as weh. To estabhsh
friendship with and so to derive help from super
human forces in a personal way became a characteristic
human interest. Thereafter as social hfe developed
there remained only the task of ever more complete
reinterpretation of this personal relation, and of
vindicating the reasonableness of faith in the existence

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 87
and helpfulness of the personal elements in the
universe.1 It is not my purpose to discuss the development of
rehgion as such 2 but I cannot fail to cah attention to
the fact that humanity today as truly as in prehistoric
times is facing the alternative whether it shah move
into the impersonal or the personal attitude towards
the universe. If ah that there is about us is mechan
istic, the operation of physical and chemical forces,
then rehgion, even though it be Picton's rehgion of the
universe and Comte's rehgion of humanity, is doomed.i
Ah the mass of learning of the anthropologist and the
historian of rehgion wih not avail to save faith if once
men take the position of materiahstic determinism.
The universe becomes a machine and human beings
creations of physical and chemical forces.
On the other hand, if one take the rehgious position,
he must choose ultimately between two tendencies:
the impersonal pantheism of Brahmanism, or the
social theism of Jesus with its cah to an altruism born
1 This search for reconciliation with the personal elements believed
to be in the environing world is something far more important than
the forms in which it has been expressed. The failure to recognize
this distinction lies beneath much of the agnosticism which masquer
ades as anthropology.
2 Those interested I would refer to my articles " The Evolution of
Religion," American Journal of Theology, 1911, pp. 57-82; " The
Social Basis of Theology," American Journal of Sociology, xviii (1912),
289-317; " Theology and the Social Mind," Biblical World, xlvi
(1915), 201-248.

88 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
of a recognition of man's likeness to a good God. But
whichever decision the man or the group makes
between these two possible personal relations towards
the universe, the history of Hinduism and Christianity
alike show that there wih result a new group of inner
sanctions and inhibitions far superior to those of
external force. Both rehgions look beyond the natural
order for the supreme vindication of their claims. In
both alike we must look beyond rehgious practices of
the masses. For if Hinduism has its devil-worship,
superstitions, subjection of women, caste and vast
idolatry, it has also the promise of absolute peace in
Brahma. And Christianity, although it, too, has its
secondary forms, its veneration of rehcs, quasi-magical
rites, asceticism and worship of saints, has ever before
it the advancing ideal of the Son of Man who brought
men the message of dehverance from sin and death at
the cost of the Cross. I am not now comparing the
ultimate values of these two rivals in religious thought
and practice, although as to the relative worth of the
two ideals of the destruction and the endless develop
ment of individual personal worth there can be no
question. The real point of emphasis is that both of
the two rehgious movements — and Buddhism may
well be a third — ¦ tend away from rehance upon even
transcendentahzed physical authority.1
1 The social effect of Buddhism upon a subject people is a matter
worthy of careful study. For instance, what share has Buddhism had
in Chinese history ?

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 89
True, the use of force to annihilate people who hold
rehgious convictions, and so to destroy their rehgion,
is not altogether out of the range of possibilities, but
rehgious convictions themselves have seldom been
exterminated by fear of force. The hterature of times
of persecution shows this emphatically. Thrust into
the choice between such convictions and suffering or
death, faith has the more consohdated itseh in opposi
tion to doubt and denial. This loyalty to rehgion has,
one might almost say, been in proportion to its
spiritual quality. While men of one national rehgion
have often massacred those of another, Christianity
has furnished most of the reahy rehgious martyrs of
history, and, speaking generahy, these martyrs have
always suffered at the hands of those who were spiritu
ally less intelligent and more brutal than themselves.
Yet force has never yet succeeded in replacing the
sanctions of Christian faith, although in the case of
the Waldenses and the Huguenots there has been
widespread destruction of the Christians themselves.1
Within the development of rehgion the passage
from submission to outer, to the acceptance of inner
authority has been marked. If Durkheim be correct 2
the first powers of which the human mind had any idea
1 A more thoroughgoing destruction of a religion through the
destruction of its adherents is to be seen in the policy of Japan in the
sixteenth century. But the persistence of Christian ideas in Japanese
religious thought is not impossible.
2 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 366.

90 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
were those which societies had estabhshed in ordering
themselves, and these powers have been the basis of
rehgion. I have serious doubts as to the historical
accuracy of Durkheim's conception of the nature of
rehgion, but that primitive society compehed rehgious
conformity by more than threats of heavenly penalties
seems undeniable. But primitive rehgious conformity
was doubtless in the region of the tabu rather than in
that of doctrine, although that too was protected by
the practice of initiation. Higher rehgions do not rely
exclusively upon force even when some of their rep
resentatives have been persecutors. Transcendental
disciphne tends to replace earthly. The influence of
the priest, or whoever has been held to exercise divine
control in human forces, increases. When priestly
control is broken by the growth of intelligence, the
individual seeks to place himseh directly in depen
dence upon spiritual forces. In the case of Greek
rehgion the gods who conquered the giants — fit
symbols of materiahstic forces — -were themselves
seen to be subject to Fortune or Necessity. In the
case of Hinduism, saints and gods disappear in uncon
scious Being. In one or the other of these two forms
of despair men have stopped except as they have
grasped partially or whohy the Christian's God of
Love who is also the God of Law. Unfortunately this
progress has by no means been constant, and wherever
rehgion has been institutionalized, the danger of its

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 91
losing its spiritual quahty must be admitted. The
elaborate standardization of Hebrew religion by the
rabbinical teachers, the development of a spiritual
empire in the Roman Cathohc Church, the combina
tion of theological precision and spiritual inertia in the
Greek Cathohc Church, the surrender of the Reforma
tion movement to the Protestant scholastics and state
control of the seventeenth century, not to mention
many another but less familiar example; ah show how
easy it is for even high religions to pass from the hfe of
the Spirit to submission to the authority of organized
leadership.1 But while ah this must be granted, it also must be
granted that wherever a society to any appreciable
degree participates in progressive intellectual move
ments, spiritual sanctions tend to replace ecclesiasti
cal. More nations than the English have had their
epoch-making Nonconformists and Separatists. The
most serious charge that can be brought against reh
gious conservatism is that it overestimates the suprem
acy of ecclesiastical customs, doctrinal formulas and
religious survivals backed by outward, if not physical
authority. It thus questions the finality of the spirit.
Even the chfliastic Christian, like his predecessor the
Jewish messianist, hardly dares to trust God's abihty
to bring about spiritual results by spiritual means,
and looks to cosmic catastrophe. But materialism,
1 See Sabatier, Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit.

92 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
whether it be refined or brutal, is never final in rehgion.
Whether they are Roman emperors throwing Chris
tians to the wild beasts; Spanish inquisitors pursuing
the Jew or the Protestant; French politicians prepar
ing for St. Bartholomew's eve; German Lutherans
prosecuting crypto-Calvinists; Russian orthodox send
ing Evangehcals to Siberia; Enghsh churchmen
enforcing acts of conformity or burning Unitarians;
New England Puritans exiling Quakers and Baptists
into the forests; persecutors are working against a
spiritual force which is bound to undo their very
success. They represent social atavism, not social
prophecy, and in the long run, in rehgion as in other
phases of hfe, external force gives way to the inner
compulsion of duty and faith. Orthodoxy, however
truer it was than its contemporary heresies, was
estabhshed by the state and enforced by pohceman
and soldier; in modern days it must maintain itseh by
proving itself more truthful than its rival systems.
When it entrenches itself in petty persecutions it finds
itseh threatened with the loss of ah those who value
enforced conformity less than the search for truth.
The final attestation of rehgion is the rehgious hfe.
Rehance upon miracle, historical criticism, bibhcal
promises, ah tend to yield place to the inner authority
of the experience of God within humanity and one's
own inner hfe. Just as the old nature rehgion of
Greece yielded to the Olympians, they in turn to the

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 93
Oriental gods who promised inner salvation, and these
bowed before the Christ of sacrifice, is there today the
struggle within the citadel of the spirit as to whether
the law of love shah be regarded as a sort of slave
morahty, or actually is in accordance with the
fundamental principles of the universe itseh. Here
the modern world particularly needs the steadying
influence of a proper interpretation of historical
tendencies. Mencken,1 insists that no one has ever
successfully controverted Nietzsche's view that if
Christianity were to become universal, and every man
in the world were to foUow Christ's precepts to the
letter in ah the relations of daily hfe, the race would die
out in a generation. Nietzsche, therefore, holds that
the human race should abandon the idea of self-
sacrifice altogether, and submit itseh to the law of
natural selection, to the end that the race of super
men may appear. Here as in no other contrast do
we see the distance between the conception of the
ultimate spiritual worth of hfe as the sacrificial
sodal-mindedness of Jesus, and as the super-moral
wih-to-power of Nietzsche.
Our opinions as to the direction in which rehgious
history is tending wih be very largely at the mercy of
temperaments, unless we seriously consider the actual
course of social progress as it is reflected in rehgion.
I beheve it wih appear that the entire movement of
1 Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 144.

94 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
history, and particularly recent developments within
the more intelligent civilizations, estabhsh the fact
that sacrificial social-mindedness, that is to say, the
love embodied and taught by Jesus Christ, is not only
becoming more widely professed, but is actuahy
exercising a more considerable influence in rehgion,
and through rehgion upon social hfe than ever before.
Is it not true, for instance, that our generation has
developed a far more ethical conception of God than
ever obtained even in Christian teaching ? The origin
of this better conception is to be found in many quar
ters, but one thing at least is undeniable: our social
experience in passing from the imperialistic to the
monarchical, and thence to the democratic conception
of the state; our new sense of the worth of the individ
ual, which has tempered our penology; are both effect
and cause of a keener appreciation of finality in the
ideals of Jesus and therefore of a more spiritual and
moral conception of God. And if, in a world like ours,
where the moral sense is growing more intense, and
our hatred of sham, hke our hatred of vice, so often
prompts us to revert to some hasty appeal to force, we
can thus move forward in our conceptions of God, we
have clear evidence of a tendency which is not merely
the ideal of this or that great master-spirit, but is an
expression of actual social evolution which today, as in
the days of the past, reads itself over into its rehgion
and so may be judged by its rehgion. Indeed, a civih-

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 95
zation can be judged by no truer standards than the
ideals of its rehgion. For in its views of its gods a
civilization expresses its supreme social values and
controlling conceptions. Gods at first regarded as
autocrats governing by force are replaced by infinite
Wisdom and Love. You can measure the progress
and the tendencies of humanity by comparing Moloch
and Jesus. V
As in growing social life and rehgion, so in an equally
distinct fashion does the general tendency for society
to rely upon inner rather than outward control show
itseh in the development of law. It is with hesitation
that as a layman I enter into this field, yet with some
assurance I would cah attention to general tendencies
in this important field of human activity.
The origin of law is probably to be found in the
existence of social practices, at least such practices are
pre-supposed by the legislation we know. That these
customs grew up peacefuhy we have already indicated
to be unlikely.1 But in this antagonism between rival
social practices generic principles gradually are per
ceived. Primitive times in which these customs
developed were not academicahy peaceful, as our
earher codes clearly argue. The Twelve Tables of
Rome which he beneath the entire structure of Roman
1 The assumption of the contrary is the error of what is Savigny's
otherwise correct argument that customs precede organized codes.

96 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
jurisprudence are obviously announcements and
declarations of procedure and practice with which the
people were already familiar. They were not based
upon general theory, but upon a careful study of
Roman and, through one of the first legal commissions
of history, Greek procedure. Yet they reflect the
brutal literalness of early practice, even to the extent
of permitting the actual division of a defaulting debtor
among his creditors. The very legal term of the
Roman law for property, mancipium, indicates a social
practice based on physical force. Property by the
very derivation of the word is seen to be that which one
has taken in his hand, that is, of which he is in actual
possession — a bit of philology that may possibly
throw some hght upon the difference between the
Roman and English law of Sales.
But law transcended authoritatively codified cus
tom. As the Romans ceased to be a local body and
gained through the extension of their arms a knowl
edge of the laws of other nations, they discovered that
general principles underlay the variety in execution in
different nations. This fact was thrust home on them
also as the number of those who were not strictly
Roman citizens and entitled to jus civile increased in
Rome. Jus gentium, the law which developed among
ah peoples because of common needs, and is the teach
ing of a common reason, then became one of the bases
of the later Roman law.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 97
But it would be a serious mistake to overlook the
fact that the rise of law through legislation in Rome
or elsewhere was never peaceful. The codification
of what the social wih regarded as the proper limita
tion of individual or group action, was conditioned
by struggle and rehance upon the power of a group to
enforce its legislation. As to the fact that1 the
enforcement of legislation depends in no smah degree
upon the abihty of a group to enforce its formulated
decisions in case of lawlessness, there can be no fair
question. The records of the past are too distinct to
be mistaken. The pohceman and soldier have always
stood beside the judge; the scales of justice have
always been guarded by the sword.
We shah later return to the question of rights and
justice, but in the present connection attention must
be centered on the immensely important fact that this
rehance upon force ceases to be in the forefront of
social consciousness. Here again Rome (as later
England) furnishes us needed evidence of an advance
in social attitudes. The perception of a certain phil
osophy of practice and of general principles lying
beneath the variant practices of Roman and other
nations led the great lawyers of the Empire to attempt
the process of codifying the enormously extensive legal
1 This is the truth so vigorously argued by Ihering in his well
known essay The Struggle for Law. Law, according to his view,
whether it be outward (that of the state) or inward (legal right of the
person) meets with opposition and is obliged to fight for its existence.

98 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
material of the Roman state in the interests of unity.
There thus developed not only the great codes, but
as it were, a philosophy of legal principles which were
to be extended by judges into ah cases similar to those
lying within the various codifications.
At this point Roman becomes typical of ah legal
history. The emergence of the law-abidirig spirit is
superior to fear of punishments. By the time of
the Antonines and even more by that of Theodosius
and Justinian, the administration of law had become
so ingrained in the hfe of the Empire as to be itseh a
source of social control. The instinct to imitate
which had once operated in the formation of customs
now operated quite as truly in the field of law. By
degrees the Roman law spread itseh over the various
national laws of the more civilized nations which
formed the eastern hah of the Empire and thus gave
rise to an attitude of mind which became a basis for
a very elaborate civilization.1
In the west, law was built into the very development
of society in Spain and Gaul where Roman influence
was pecuharly creative. So thoroughly was the law-
respecting attitude of mind ingrained in the Roman
world of the west that the Teutonic invaders them
selves were forced not only to use the Roman codes in
governing their conquered peoples, but graduahy
themselves came under their influence.
1 See Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den ostlichen Provinzen
des rbmischen Kaiserreichs, especially chs. 4 and 7.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 99
Nor was this ah. The church came under the control
of the same conceptions and there grew up within the
church the canon law which shaped up the adminis
tration of the great institution which perpetuated the
ideals and the administrative methods of the Empire
which de facto although not dejure disappeared.1
In England the conception of law has been as in the
early days in Rome a matter of practice. The com
mon law is reahy an authoritative record of the way
men have decided cases in the hght of previous
practice.2 This growing body of common law in England was
closely connected with the growth of general customs
on the one side and judge-made law on the other.
From the earhest times of Enghsh monarchy the king's
judges knew better than the men of any particular city
or county what the custom of the realm was. What
ever may have been local usage, they would be the
1 Taylor, Mediaeval Mind, ii, 268 sq., points out that in the
Middle Ages there emerged the use of the Bible as the jus gentium of
theology. See also, Gierke, Mediaeval Political Theories, pp. 172.
2 The Roman law is markedly much less in evidence in England
and the United States than on the continent of Europe or in Louisiana
in America where the Code Napolion has been the basis of most
legal codes. Yet it has undoubtedly had some unnoticed influence
upon the development of common law, although the latter has never
been thoroughly codified except in Califorma and a few western states
where the codification of the common law by David Dudley Field
was adopted. Georgia has a local code which has all but never con
sciously deigned to look to its older rival for assistance or direction
in its development.

IOO SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
only ones who had knowledge of what the general
usage could have been. Common law, therefore,
rapidly became, as Pohock says 1 "a specialized
branch of learning worked out by rule as the common-
law writers say. Much of the usage which determined
its form was by the nature of the case professional and
official usage." But in common law as in the early
Roman law the tendency was observable to see
beneath customs certain principles and to extend those
principles into regions where custom was not yet
organized. Thus legislation re-embodied the course of
fundamental law. In England as elsewhere in the
hands of both judge and legislator there was a distinct
tendency to build up a conception of law as something
other than a mere massing of precedents. True, the
emergence of new laws always resulted in struggle —
sometimes in revolution. But peace and spontaneous
action have resulted in an increasing law-abiding atti
tude of mind. A good citizen is not kept from breaking
the law by fear of the penalty, but by the moral inertia
of his mind. That is to say, the concept of law itseh
has developed as a source of control within human hfe
quite independent of the state as a body with punitive
powers. Thus again is to be seen the tendency away from
conduct which at first is determined by outward
authority ultimately based on force towards an inner
1 First Book of Jurisprudence, p. 243.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL ioi
and habitual action in accordance with principles.1
Customs themselves cease to be tyrannical and are
judged in the hght of new principles expressed in
legislation. The social mind, accustomed to such
legislation, becomes its own master. This, of course,
is not to say that any social order has reached a posi
tion in which even on the part of its better citizens
there is no need of outward control. The agitation in
the United States, for example, for the control of
trusts is an indication that even among men who in
many matters are regardful of law, there is need of a
certain degree of force. But here as elsewhere the
tendency is toward less rehance upon coercion and
larger rehance upon general regard for law as a basis
of social cooperation. It is in this sphere undoubtedly
that the final answer must be given to the question of
civil hberty. If the individual can be trusted to
develop a respect for the social wih, he wih act from
social-mindedness rather than from fear, from social
instinct rather than from conscious submission to
external authority.
In a way this same tendency is to be seen in the con
cept of law itseh. From the days of Spinoza, there have
been those who would regard law as ultimately resting
on force, either Divine or strictly social. But such views
are no more complete than is the view that law is, as
1 Ihering, The Struggle for Law (Lalor's trans.), p. 12. " The idea
of the law is an eternal Becoming."

102 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
it were, an expression of calm, impersonal nature.
Theories of utility have also had their day, but they
in turn have given way before the conception of law as
the immanent wih of the state expressed in legislation
and born of a community of human experience.
Indeed one might almost say that since the days of
Grotius there has been an increasing tendency for the
development of law to take a new direction. Instead
of relying solely upon catalogued custom or duties,
when once it is thoroughly worked into the social
mind, it becomes the expression of a consciousness of
social interest in social ends and personal welfare
expressing itself in legislative enactment, obedience to
which is enforced by pubhc opinion and self-respect.
The influence of rehgion in this development is an
evidence of the same tendency. This is to be seen not
only, as has already been indicated, in the primitive
habit of seeking divine sanction for social customs and
legislation, but also in the fact that rehgion has con
stantly tended to extend its noblest ideals into the
social wih. " If there were not a God," Voltaire once
said, " it would be necessary to invent one," that is,
for the purpose of furnishing the unintelligent masses
with a basis of control. Indeed so large a share has
rehgion had in shaping pubhc morahty expressed in
law that one of the charges brought against rehgion by
radicals of various schools is that it was invented by
the strong men to keep the poor and the weak people

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 103
in order. Undoubtedly it has played this r61e, but
whoever looks at the history of society with the anti-
religious presuppositions of Nietzsche is certain to
underestimate the constructive capacity of the idealiz
ing influence which rehgion contributes or, if social
psychologists be right, is immanent in actual social
customs. In the Middle) Ages, for instance, the influence of the
Church was very decided in substituting these inner
sanctions more or less supported by rehgion for the
appeal to force. The Truce of God, for example,
tended to offset the Trial by Arms which played so
large a role in the earher feudal society. In fact it was
in large measure due to the influence of the Church
that such rough and ready methods of establishing
right were abandoned. In our modern world, the
influence of rehgion upon the attitude of regard for
law is obvious enough to any one who is ready to look
upon human action as anything more than tropism
under the influence of economic and impersonal
forces. It was something of that idea, I think, which
led an Indiana politician to remark in my hearing that
he would not want to be a minister, but he would not
want to hve in a town where there was no church.
Whatever may be his theological view, a student of
history cannot deny that the substitution of inner
sanctions taught, evoked and enforced by rehgion, has
made the operation of law far more effective. There

104 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
could hardly be a more profound sociological state
ment than that of Paul that love is the fulfilling of the
law.1 This attitude of regard for law which possesses a
value independent of the force which is behind it has,
however, only imperfectly extended across the bound
aries of states. Whatever may be the judgment of
the future as to the rise of nations, it can hardly
be doubted that nationahsm has involved mutual
enmities. Patriotism until it is Christianized wih be
a fighting virtue. Even yet a patriot wih die for his
country more readily than he wih pay taxes for its
support. The border between nations has too often
been a line of cleavage in morals. Up to the frontier
men are to love each other as fellow-citizens, but men
across the border are to be regarded as potential
enemies. Law is far enough even yet from formulating
with any effectiveness the rights of enemies and a
reahy moral way of deahng with them. True there
has been progress made. The laws of war mentioned
by Josephus 2 were hardly more than a modification
of the general permission for massacre, robbery and ah
forms of violence. But the laws of war at the present
time attempt to limit the operations of mihtary force
and to protect the hves and wehare of non-combat-
1 This is most evident in states founded (or attempted) by religious
groups like the Anabaptists in Germany, the Quakers in Pennsyl
vania and the Nonconformists in New England.
2 Ant., iv, 41, 42; Ag. Apion, ii, 30.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 105
ants. The fact that they are so readily suspended by
recourse to reprisals should not obscure the facts as
they actuahy exist. The tendency is increasing to
limit mihtary operations to actual combatants and the
only thing upon which such pohcy can be based is the
sense of moral values on the part of the nations
involved. No Christian nation would adopt the,
terrible pohcy fohowed by the ancient Assyrians and
by the Turks in their dealing with the Armenians.1
However far we are from having organized a univer
sal code of international law it cannot be denied that
from the days of Grotius to the Hague tribunal and the
Drago doctrine, there certainly has been advance.
Out from the welter of conflicting nationalities there
have emerged certain ideals of national cooperation.
It requires courage to make such statements in days
when we are told that treaty-making is futile unless a
nation has sufficient military strength to compel
other nations to keep their word, but he has a very
imperfect view of the relations of nations even in the
present tragic moment who thinks that the rule of
force is always to be the ultimate court of appeal.
Little by httle the conviction is developing that a moral
principle which is fit to control legislation governing
1 A contemporary discussion of this matter will be found in
McDonald, " Has International Law Failed ? " in Proceedings of the
Conference on International Relations (1916), pp. 1-24. See also
Hobson, Towards International Government (1915); Hill, World
Organization as Affected by the Nature of the Modem State.

106 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
individuals and social classes is also fit to control the
relations of nations. The present discussions of sub
marine warfare make it plain that nations have already
come to recognize the observance of certain limitations
of mihtary and naval activities as demanded by
international respectability.1 Despite our disappoint
ments and our temptation to say in our haste that ah
men are war-lovers, we must recognize the under
current of pubhc opinion 2 which is setting towards the
recognition of the same regard for cooperative expe
diency in the relations of nations as among people
within national boundaries. In the presence of that
tendency we cannot altogether lose faith in the coming
of international justice. Such a Utopia may not come
in our day. Even to plan for it may seem futile. Be
that as it may. In any case it is better to plan for
Utopia than for Heh. VI
As we look back over this epoch-making movement
in which humanity has struggled out from the bru
tahty of early civilization into the incipient ration-
1 A summary of some of these international agreements is given by
Pollock, Cambridge Modern History, XII, ch. 22.
2 Since 1828, 233 arbitration treaties or constitutions have been
enacted. Of these 229 were in force in 1914. One hundred and
seventy-five of these have been adopted since 1904. The United
States had 28 (not including the so-called " Bryan treaties "), Great
Britain 17, France 16, Germany 1 — with Great Britain which ex
pired July 12, 1914. The tendency towards such treaties is especially
marked in South America.

SUBSTITUTION OF MORAL CONTROL 107
ahty of our present cooperative life, we are certainly
justified in reasonable hopefulness. Human nature is
certainly not without its capacity of spiritual control
even in the midst of surroundings which constantly
tend to make it revert to lower practices. It is at least
a suggestion of better days to come that each nation
now at war claims that some other began hostilities;
and even more hopeful is the criticism of Christianity
for not having prevented the conflict. For such criti
cism implies a new sense of what Christianity reahy is.
It is indeed a far cry from the Crusades and from Wars
of Rehgion and creeds that contain no hint of Christian
brotherliness to this new sensitiveness as to war's
incompatibility with the gospel preached by Jesus.
The very shock given by war to our faith in spiritual
forces has compehed us to re-examine the meaning of
our rehgion. And we are seeing that this is vastly
more than ecclesiastical regularity. For the heart of
a real Christianity is faith that God is Love and that
therefore moral perfection is to be loving. Therein is
the finality of the Spiritual Order. The cross may be
foolishness to the militarist, but it is the sign by which
civilization is to conquer. For it is the symbol of a
sacrificial social mind.
There once came into my office a young negro from
Africa bearing on his cheeks the tribal gashes of primi
tive savagery. He had never seen a white person until
he was eight years old, and then he had come in con-

108 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
tact with the missionaries and had been educated. He
had cahed upon me to ask about courses in advanced
Semitics. In his brief lifetime he had passed from
primitive savagery to an inner hfe fit to enter a gradu
ate school of a university. Such an experience is an
epitome of what history has actuahy accomphshed in
human society. In society as in the hfe of this young
man, altruism, righteousness, education, social control,
and rehgion, imperfect as they yet are, have proved
more potent than appeal to force. They and not
savagery mark the destination of social evolution.
History has moved away from submission to physical
nature, economic pressure and control by appeals to
men's fear of human or divine vengeance, and is pos
sessed of a new sense of personal values which society
must forward. Such a tendency is as truly a fact as
the events by which it is so frequently obscured.
And as a projection of the past it is truly prophetic.
For from the ever-growing primacy of personal values
wih be built the Kingdom of God, the society of the
sacrificiahy social-minded.

LECTURE IV
THE GROWING RECOGNITION OF THE WORTH
OF THE INDIVIDUAL
The tendency for rehance upon inner authority to
replace submission to physical force in the course of
history has always involved the question as to the
worth of the individual. Is he a cog in a social process,
of no more significance than the wolf in the pack ? Or
has he an independent value which the course of his
tory is seen to recognize ? The answer which we give
to this question must be drawn from history rather
than metaphysics. We must break across the artificial
barriers of definitions and syllogisms if we are really to
find freedom. In historical tendencies is more revela
tion than in debates over free wih. For we seek not
what can be thought but what has been hved. And
this history can show us.
Whatever may be the position taken by radicals
among those who magnify the materiahstic interpreta
tion of history there are few who would champion any
thing like genuine determinism.' And this hesitation
is eloquent of a behef that history is the complex of
the doings of real persons. Now in the hfe of a real
person there is always what he regards as at least some

HO SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
freedom of action. Philosophers may argue that such
freedom is a delusion. If they are correct, delusion
itseh is creative in history. Else what would mean the
series of appeals, discussions, threats, persecutions by
which men have attempted to change the opinions of
others ? Why did martyrs choose to die, monks to
leave the world, women to become nuns rather than
wives ? The reply in its simplest terms is that they
wanted to; for they believed they had a power to
choose and reasons for this choice. Ah the determin
istic philosophy in the world cannot take from human
-nature this conviction of some sort of freedom. Even
the determinist chooses to disbelieve in spiritual
freedom. Nor need we fear lest personal values wih disappear
in the Dark Tower of statistical averages. Convenient
tools as they are of hfe insurance companies, stock
brokers, and habitu6s of Monte Carlo, averages indi
cate only partially the limits within which actions
of individuals are to be studied. True, history is
made by social groups, but there is a vast difference
between group action and mathematical averages of
the actions of individuals. In group movements indi
viduals are no more lost than rays of hght are lost in
white hght. They can always be rediscovered. Even
an army can be analyzed into men by the spectrum of
defeat. But the general curves of statistics are not
composed of individuals. They are only the fences on

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL III
each side of the road we individuals travel at our own
pace, and they in no way prevent some of us every
now and then from jumping over the fence.
The place of the individual in the development of a
social group is often obscure, particularly to the stu
dent who prefers figures to folks and consequently is
keen to magnify the impersonal forces which condi
tion humanity and which offset individual activities.
But even thus, if we look back far enough over social
evolution, we shah discover a general tendency to
recognize the worth of the individual as a real person
rather than as a mere economic factor. Let us then
pass between the hons of metaphysics and statistics
into the house of history.

At the outset we meet the age-long question of the
relation of great men to history.
Herbert Spencer x insists that " you must admit that
the genesis of the great man depends on the long series
of complex influence which has produced the race in
which he appears and the social state into which that
race has slowly grown. Before he can reahy make his
society, his society must make him. Ah those changes
of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief
causes in the generations he descended from." But is
this not to deny that the great man is a person and to
1 See Study of Sociology, pp. 33_35-

112 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
assert that he is merely a " great somewhat "? If he
were truly a person he might have something to say
about what he did. But being gripped in the sequence
of causes which run back through social institutions
and economic disharmonies to physical causes, he is
not reahy a person. He is, as that appeahng character
of Professor Lewis's in Those about Trench, Saadi
Shereef, would say, a " gaseous vertebrate."
Such a view seems to me to be not history but
sociological dogmatism. If we watch the process of
history we shall find plenty of facts hard to under
stand but we shah no more have explained them by
referring them to social evolution than the biologist
has explained hfe when he refers it to a " vital prin
ciple." Unfortunately the search for causes sooner or
later descends from the limbo of conjecture into the
netherworld of dogmatism. The positive method of
science, whether physical or historical, is to watch
actual operations rather than go backward to con
jectural causes. You can always trust the Mississippi
to help you find its mouth, but if you go up-stream to
seek its source you may find yourself in the Missouri
or even in the Chicago Drainage Canal.
Professor James in his well-known essay upon
"Great Men and Their Environment"1 with charac
teristic lucidity defines a genius as " a social ferment."
" The community," he says, " may evolve in many
1 Republished in The Will to Believe.

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 113
ways. The accidental presence of this or that fer
ment decides in which it shah evolve." Just what
the relationship of the individual to society may be
philosophically I do not propose to discuss but would
refer those interested to the older discussions of
Carlyle 1 and Spencer 2 and the more recent thought of
Royce.3 The historian need only insist that the
formula — which wih be later discussed — is not " the
individual and society," but " the individual in
society." And the historian can safely lay down the
thesis that social situations' do not produce great men;
they give a great man the opportunity to exercise and
develop his powers by doing great things. For, from
the point of view of history, it seems careless thinking
to confuse character and abihty with achievement.
By way of illustration I turn not to masters of poetry
and philosophy, for their influence as spiritual factors
may weh be admitted. Rather let us look at cases
which just now are passing through the fires of
economic determinism.
If we say that Luther could not have been the
Luther of history had he hved at the time of Huss, we
are not saying that Luther the individual was produced
by his times. What produced Luther was the human
matings that finally culminated in a miner's family in
1 Heroes and Hero Worship.
2 The Man versus the Slate.
3 The World and the Individual.

114 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Eisleben.1 But once born with his capacities he found
stimulus and opportunity in a chain of social situa
tions, both economic and socially psychological,
unlike those that conditioned Huss (assuming that
Huss was the equal of Luther). In and because of
these situations he found such self-expression as to
direct the course of events as weh as to have his
actions shaped by them. He thus precipitated the new
historical situations which assure him his present place
in German and universal history. Similarly in the
case of Napoleon.2 The extraordinary rise of that
super-man within ten years from a sub-heutenant in
the French army to the ruler of the nation was due as
much to his innate capacity as to the extraordinary
social circumstances into which he entered and which
offered opportunities pecuharly adapted to his powers.
Great men happen neither biologically nor histori
cally. They are both creatures and creators. They
can be understood best when they are regarded as
personal forces in situations which are themselves
creative but which great men are to some extent able
1 How much social situations affect the ancestry of an individual
biologists seem unable to unite in saying. The tendency seems general
to minimize the transmission of acquired characteristics. The un
known dead of Gray's Churchyard may have bred " great " men.
See the quotation from Child, infra.
2 Johnson, Napoleon, A Short Biography, p. 4, puts this sharply.
So Fournier, Napoleon the First (ed. by Bourne), p. 59: " Fortune did
not make a slave of him, he understood controlling it and making it
serve his ends."

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 115
to direct. They are individual dominants mating
with social dominants to produce social — and rarely
individual — descendants.
Whatever period of history we examine might have
been markedly different if it had not been for certain
individuals. It is, for example, easy to speak of the
spread of Hellenism under Alexander the Great as if
Alexander was the figurehead of a vessel driven and
guided by social forces along trade routes. But did
ever another man of the galaxy of soldiers and adven
turers who have attempted similar conquests succeed ?
And would Alexander the Great have spread Greek
civilization if there had never been an Aristotle ?
Or take the relation of Jesus to the Messianic
ideahsm of his time. Jesus was indeed, as the creeds
have stoutly maintained, one with us as regards his
humanity; that is, he was integrated in the social
currents of his day. It would be indeed difficult to
think of him as developing his particular message of
divine salvation in the midst of any other surround
ings than those of the Jewish people. But after the
hopes and prayers of Pharisaism, the passions and
behefs of the Jewish piety of his day, had passed
through his own individual experience, they became
something new. Scattered parahels, similarities in
words between Jesus and the philosophers of Greece
or the master rabbis of the Jews, are beside the mark.
They no more account for Christianity than chemical

Il6 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
elements out in the sunlight account for acoms.
Acorns are made of such elements after they have been
manipulated by some tree. Jesus contributed himseh
and his individual experiences to history and historical
forces were recombined in him. He was indeed the
Vine with branches.
Recur again to the Reformation. Luther and
Melanchthon partook of essentiahy the same social
mind, and were subject to essentiahy the same eco
nomic, geographical, and social forces. But had the
one attempted the work of the other, the difference of
their reaction would have produced a different histor
ical movement. For they themselves were different
persons. If Luther, for example, had possessed the
broader tolerance of Melanchthon, Protestantism
might have been spared many a conflict. Similarly,
when one compares Calvin with Luther and Mel
anchthon on the one side, and, let us say, Erasmus and
the Enghsh Humanists on the other, one can see the
contribution which his own personahty made to his
tory. What a different world would that be in which
we now hve if the fugitive Calvin had not happened to
cah on Farel that night when he stopped for a few
hours' rest in his journey across Switzerland. What
other man than Cromweh could, without hypocrisy,
have mingled a reign of saints, a Commonwealth with
out a Parhament, a massacre of Drogheda, a passion
for biblical quotations and pious letters to a daughter?

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 117
How much of the later vacillation of that strident
social mind in France which, as Jefferson lets us see,
was already shaped up in 1789, was due to the fact
that in Mirabeau it had a first-rate mind ungoverned
by moral scruples, and in Robespierre moral scruples
dominating a mediocre mind! A mihtary empire is
hable to develop in any transitional stage when a
nation obsessed with abstract ideals is forced into war;
but who would say that Europe at this moment is not
reaping some of the results of Napoleon's personahty
as it is also reaping the results of the titanic individu-
ality of a Bismarck who dared change the wording of
diplomatic messages in order that Prussia might
cement a German Empire with the blood of France!
How much modem England owes to the philosophy
preached through half a century by Jeremy Bentham!
Or finally, take our own country. How far its destinies
have been directed by the individual temperaments of
Jefferson and Jackson ! How much was contributed to
its history by Abraham Lincoln, and for the past few
months how repeatedly the course of our pohtical and
international development has been affected by the
personahty of Woodrow Wilson!
Such illustrations as these could be duphcated
indefinitely. It is as futile to make history a succes
sion of social processes as of Carlylean heroes. We
have to deal with concrete men and women who
through institutions, inheritances, pohtical organiza-

118 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
tions and similar passions, increasingly work together,
but always under leadership; who prefer death to
disloyalty; who are stirred to passion by appeals of
demagogues and fanatics; and who are given approxi
mate sanity and adventurous outlook by philosophers,
poets, and prophets. If acorns come from oaks, oaks
also come from acorns. II
To recognize the place of the great individual in his
tory is, however, not to proceed very far into the
interpretation of the tendency of history itseh. As we
have seen, great men are great within the limitations
set by the conditions and forces of the social order to
which they minister and their individualities tend to
extend themselves into social forces. A second and
more practical question is whether the general ten
dency of human hfe has been to give larger worth to
the less outstanding individual. Does he exist only as
a contributor to the weh-being of society ? Such a
question may be raised more intimately. Ever since
August, 1914, we have found it facing ourselves. On
the one side has been democracy like England " mud
dling through " its difficulties as best it could, and on
the other side the marvelous efficiency of the Prussian
state. The difference is radical. On the one side is the
behef not yet thoroughly systematized, not fuhy
trusted, but definite and sincere, that the chief end of

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 119
society is the personal welfare of real individuals for
whom the state exists. On the other side is the equahy
sincere behef that the nation is the true unit and that
ah individual welfare must be secondary to it. Does
history give us any intimation as to its tendency
toward the one or the other goal ? What is the end
toward which it moves — a highly organized paternal
state, or individuals reaching larger self-expression in
a democracy ?
It is of course difficult to answer such a question,
particularly in a moment in which it is a burning
issue. But none the less as one looks back over the
course of history, particularly of the last century,
there are several great fields of social experience in
which a definite tendency can be seen toward the
democratic ideal because of a larger recognition of the
worth of individuals.
1. Individuals are no longer regarded as the prop
erty of other individuals. Slavery was born of eco
nomic needs and was normal in ancient societies x and
continued even to our own day with the approval of
broad-minded and rehgious souls. It has been main
tained by arguments from the Bible and by the
1 This fact is so universal that references are superfluous. A good
popular account of the lower classes in the Roman Empire will be
found in Davis, The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome, pp. 194-
247. The works of Ferrero also deal fully — although in rather a
journalistic fashion — with the economic structure of Roman society,
particularly in the period of the Republic.

120 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
development of vices like the use of hquor and opium.
It has been justified as a means of rehgious conversion
as weh as by biological casuistry and appeal to
economic theories.1 But it has disappeared. The
process of its disappearance has varied in different
nations. Sometimes it has graduahy been advanced to
serfdom, sometimes it has yielded, as in British pos
sessions, to peaceful emancipation, and sometimes it
has been abohshed in the tragedy of civil war. But it
has disappeared. We have not always been wise in the
treatment of emancipated slaves; we have been some
times too harsh and sometimes too optimistic in the
programs by which we have sought to make them into
citizens. But the social conscience of Europe and
America and Japan has refused to permit human
beings to be regarded as property. This much civili
zation in these latter days has settled. Problems of
education and social integration, confusion as to the
relations of advanced and backward races, experi
ments in economic stabihty and efficiency still face us,
but the slave has become a person.2
1 Reference might well be made to the policy of the Spanish con
querors. As to the actual extent to which religious motives operated
among slave-holders in the American Colonies, see Jemegan, " Slavery
and Conversion in the American Colonies," American Historical
Review, xxi (1916), pp. 504-527.
8 In view of subsequent events it may not be without interest to
recall that Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was given
the monopoly of furnishing slaves to Spanish colonies, and that in
1750 by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle she was allowed an indemnity

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 121
2. Women have been taken from the position of
property either of the father or the husband and have
been advanced into the field of persons. This tendency
while incipient in such a high civilization as that of
the Roman Empire is even yet by no means universal.
The women of many societies of Asia are not far in
advance of their condition a hundred years ago;
African women still are mere drudges and child-
bearers; but in ah countries where the ideals of what
we cah Christian civilization have come, the position
of women has immediately become more personal. An
over-zealous Chinese Repubhc ventures upon limited
woman suffrage and Japan which sees hundreds of
thousands of women operatives in its new factories
projects protective legislation and founds women's
coheges. The struggle in Europe and America to
bring about the treatment of women as actual persons
has been long and in some localities they are still
regarded as charming members of the legal trio, the
other two members of which are idiots and infants.
But in ah civilized countries the tendency is steady
towards emancipating the wife from the control of her
husband, of giving her the right to manage and
bequeath her own property as weh as pay taxes upon
the same. The extension of suffrage in Finland and
of £100,000 for surrendering this right. The enforced slave trade was
one of the grievances urged against Great Britain by the Virginia
colonists in 1770.

122 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the United States is a further indication that society
is coming to feel that not only are women persons, but
that they must bear the responsibilities of persons.
That such tendencies wih be given impetus by the new
industrial status of women in the nations now at war
is one of the hopeful elements in the present reign of
scientific violence.
3. Equahy pronounced is the growing tendency to
recognize the personal rights of childhood. A Child
Welfare week turns the attention of an entire nation
to the betterment of neglected children. The wisdom
and indeed the legitimacy of the act of a physician
who refused to try to save the hfe of an infant born
deformed, and destined, if permitted to hve, to illness
if not worse, enjoys the attention of a nation. The
fact that there should be condemnation of such a
decision marks very sharply the advance in our atti
tude toward children as compared with that of both
ancient and modern non-Christian peoples. Few
indeed have been the civilizations — some of them
even as high as those of Greece and Rome and China —
where parents have not been justified by pubhc opinion
in refusing to bring up their infants and in exposing
them, especiahy if they be girls, to death or in selling
them as slaves. The change is not one of mere senti
ment, but it is based upon the fundamental conviction
that the child has worth as an incipient person. This
recognition of the personal worth of children doubt-

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 123
less springs in part from the biological impulse which
ah hfe has in a new generation but it is already
something far more idealistic.1 Genetic psychology
makes it probable that many of our social customs
have a biological basis, and Westermarck2 may be
correct in holding that marriage is an inheritance
" from some ape-like progenitor." Be that as it may;
there can be nothing disgraceful in such origin, for
origins are points of departure, not of arrival. Mar
riage in Christian civilizations is not a mere permanent
mating but is a co-partnership of persons sanctified by
the noblest ideals of rehgion itseh. Reahy to appre
ciate the growing sense of the worth of the child we
need only compare its place in the best organized
animal society we know with the modern regard for
eugenics, education and general social oversight. The
care of permanently mated animals and birds for their
offspring, and this modern spirit of care for children
are as far apart as instinct and morahty. For the child
has more value than that accorded it by the family,
high as was that value in older societies.
We are barely entering upon this uewer estimate of
infants and children, for the transition from the con-
1 John Fiske is now generally recognized as the first to call atten
tion to the influence of the prolonged infancy of human beings upon
the development of civilization. See Darwinism and Other Essays,
p. 45 sq.
2 History of Human Marriage, ch. 3; Origin and Development of
the Moral Ideas, i, pp. 364-489.

124 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
ditions of family hfe set by simple economic organiza
tion to those developing in our present industrial order
has come upon us so suddenly that we are only
beginning to realize that since society has disorganized
the old it must reorganize new conditions in which the
family as an institution must function. And this
reorganization is already in process. The social regard
for the worth of children is beginning to give content
to society's obhgation to the family itseh. Though
we are as yet hardly more than experimenting in this
field, we are not reverting to impersonal social control,
but to a new adjustment of social influences to per
sonal rights both of the living and of the unborn.
True, it is almost starthng to see how modern society
is organizing itself upon some of the hnes of Plato's
speculation as to the bringing up of children. They
are now taught and sometimes fed during school hours
at pubhc expense. The unique solidarity of the home
which marked the earher phases of tribal and even of
our earher democratic civilization is being rather
clumsily and often tragically personalized, but society,
even though it permits increasing freedom in divorce
and is often bewildered by the over-frank super-
individuahsm of the " emancipated " woman who
claims to want a child but not a husband, has not for
gotten its obhgation to children as persons. It is
astonishing to see how both politically and by volun
tary action, society is endeavoring to furnish protec-

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 125
tion for boys and girls for whom the family circle in
this period of transition can or wih do httle. The
modern boy may very thankfuhy say, " When my
father and my mother forsake me, then the Boy
Scouts wih take me up." From such experience as I
have had, I am convinced that the motives leading to
these new organizations for the care of children are
more intelligent even than those which led the Roman
emperors to estabhsh orphanages. In them is dis
closed a new appreciation of children not only as future
citizens but as future persons. Therein is the secret of
our sacrificial determination to guarantee the rising
generation some degree of proper social direction.1
4. The same attention is now being given to old age.
Primitive social groups have sometimes honored their
old men and women, but quite as frequently have they
kihed those who have passed the age when they can
help supply the two elemental demands of the tribe,
children and defense. Lexicography argues that even
the Greeks, at least in their earher days, distinguished
sharply between the stages of human hfe, childhood,
manhood and old age.2 As compared with the helpless
ness of childhood, that of old age is more pitiable. In
an industrial age like ours when any semblance of
patriarchal authority is denied the old laborer, it is
1 A wealth of material bearing on this new regard for the young
will be found in Forbush, The Coming Generation.
2 The man of years was not the ivf/p but the ykpuv.

126 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
society alone that can assure his support as a true
person when he has been deposed from industrial value
by a more efficient because younger successor. And
society is facing its task. Old Age Pensions are only
one provision by which the new sense of the rights of
the aged are appreciated. The crude methods of the
poorhouse and charity are being replaced by institu
tions, ahowances and charities, which respect the
domestic rights of the aged, as men and women who
have rendered society real service and are to be treated
as persons rather than as worn-out machines.
5. Similarly in the case of the unfit. The laughter
of the Gods of Olympus as they watched lame Vulcan
waiting on their table was an echo of the ancient
world's attitude toward the unfit. For them there was
httle hope of livelihood except in beggary. But our
modern world is growing distrustful even of charity
and looks toward a better order of things in which
society shah give the unfit larger opportunity for
such personal development as they are capable of
attaining, while at the same time they are prevented
from propagating their unfitness as a perpetual
source of individual misery and social weakness.
Ill
Such facts lead us to appreciate the even more sig
nificant subordination of the economic efficiency of
individuals to their personal values. This is a char-

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 127
acteristic of the developing social order too often
overlooked in the study of group action.
1. The earhest type of such subordination is un
doubtedly that of self-preservation. A man will give
almost anything economic in exchange for his hfe.1
When this attitude of self-preservation becomes
nationalized, it is transformed into patriotism. Such
a transformation introduces new struggles between the
economic and idealistic elements in history. But even
here the personal asserts itseh. Few nations fail to
identify their self-preservation with a sense of idealistic
mission to the world. One of the paradoxes of hfe then
ensues. Ethical ideals, however abstractly formulated,
when once in the consciousness of a nation not only
spur that nation to self-expression in the contemporary
form of its highest social efficiency, but they become
the justification of wars which culminate in economic
advantage or loss. Thus, when the French nation
became a devotee to pohtical hberty, it not only threw
the bodies of nobles and kings into lime-pits, but it
undertook to carry its new gospel by force to the entire
world. The Philistine mind, especiahy it cynical, is
tempted to pronounce the speeches of the French
generals, and particularly of the young Bonaparte, as
French armies started out upon conquest of surround-
1 For a paradoxical presentation of the thesis that " the rights of
property are more important than the right to life " since if " property
is secure, it may be the means to an end, whereas if it is insecure it will
be the end itself," see More, Aristocracy and Justice, pp. 127-148.

128 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
ing nations in the name of hberty, as hypocritical
buncombe. But such judgment is unjust. In those
early expansions of the French Republic — I am not
speaking now of the later wars of the Napoleonic
Empire — in which a nation intoxicated with the fresh
draughts of hberty undertook to compel the world to
share in its joys, France was as sincere as it is given to
a nation to be sincere. Mistaken of course it was, but
no more mistaken than a nation which in seeking self-
preservation justifies mihtary efficiency in the name
of a cah to spread its culture, or than a nation which
would make foreign missions a phase of national ex
pansion. The attempt to enforce ethical ideals upon
unwilling races resembles a story told of Frederick
William I of Prussia, who at one period of his hfe was
fond of walking up and down the streets of his httle
capital. In these wanderings he was accustomed to
disciphne his subjects without waiting for courts, and
his cane became an object of dread. One day as he was
walking he met a man coming up a cross-street. When
this unfortunate saw that it was the king he was about
to meet, he turned to run, whereupon the old king
seized him by the collar and gave him a thorough
thrashing, shouting out between the blows: "You
miserable rascal, why did you run away ? Don't
you know I want my people to love me ? "
But this analogy tehs only half the facts. Whenever
a national sense of personal values and ideals precipi-

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 1 29
tates war, it is clear enough that economic motives,
however they may have operated in the shaping up of
a situation, are subordinated to the non-economic.
That wars have been fought confessedly and without
disguise for land and trade requires no arguing, but
there have been many other wars in which men have
run counter to ah rational economic forecast, fasci
nated by a sense of their mission to the welfare of
humanity. Recah the usual vindication of the wars
waged by the Hebrews in the name of Jehovah.
National self-preservation leads to wars of defense;
but a sense of mission to other nations makes nations
fanatic — not averse, it is true, to being repaid for
altruism by territory and indemnities — but none the
less fanatic. How else shah one describe our war with
Spain — not to mention a more recent exponent of
militaristic ideahsm ?
Yet it may be replied that such motives do not
include the welfare of individuals and that at the best
the justification of war by professions of sacrifice for
others is national hypocrisy. In many cases this wih
have to be admitted. War is certainly destructive of
individuahsm because of the exigencies of discipline.
But this is only temporary in modern warfare. Not
only have nations in addition to economic or pohtical
necessity genuinely imagined they fought to bring
education, rehgion, and hberty to the individuals of
other nations, or parts of nations, but such additions

130 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
to individual well-being have often resulted, directly
as weh as indirectly. Recah as only one illustration
the spiritual renascence of Prussia after the Napo
leonic conquest. This addition of a spiritual motive
to the pressure of economic needs does not detract
from such impersonal needs, but is not this multiple
motive to be seen in the wars of France and the
United States I have just mentioned, as weh as in
the case of Gustavus Adolphus, the assistance given by
the French court to the American colonies in their war
with Great Britain, the Civil War in the United
States, and in the imperialistic plans for Africa organ
ized by Cecil Rhodes ? 1 Economic causes lay back of
these wars beyond doubt; but a conscious desire to
further individual weh-being was there as weh.
2. Clearer evidence of the subjection of economic
efficiency to personal values may be found in recent
non-military history. Conscientious scruples have led
many a nation to sacrificial acts. Take the case of
slavery. Slavery is one of the methods by which men
have undertaken to provide a dependable labor supply.
The supply of slaves was originahy furnished by the
slave trade. When the moral sense of Christendom
rose against slavery and the slave trade was abohshed,
the economic situation of many tropical lands was
seriously menaced. Particularly was this the case in the
1 The argument by which Cecil Rhodes based British control of
South Africa upon the existence of God is too well known to need
repetition.

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 13 1
British West Indies and in the Dutch possessions in
Java. The new conscience of England led in 1834 to
the abolition of slavery and the substitution of a form
of contract labor, which while by no means ideal,
recognized in theory the personal worth of negro
laborers.1 In Java slavery persisted somewhat longer, but
there, too, it was technically abohshed, only to cause
serious economic difficulties. The emancipated native
had so few wants that he would not labor. To meet
the difficulty there was worked out a method (in part
suggested by British pohcy in Jamaica) of compehing
the natives to pay a tax in kind to the government.
The government indicated the fields on which certain
commodities were to be raised as weh as the amount of
those commodities that should be raised, and the
natives were compelled to bring their quota of produce
sometimes from long distances across the mountains
and the forests. Under this administration the Dutch
colonies in Java were prosperous, but the condition
of the natives grew miserable. In the course of time
the Dutch conscience was touched and it recognized
the iniquity of a condition equivalent to slavery but
without even the few advantages which slavery grants
its victims, and the system was abohshed.2
1 The fact that " Slavery " is not contained in the index to the
final volume of the Cambridge Modern History is eloquent tribute to
our new conscience.
2 See Day, The Dutch in Java.

132 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
More notorious was the treatment of the natives of
the Congo Free State by the representatives of the
various companies mostly controlled by King Leopold
of Belgium engaged in the rubber traffic. The method
there employed was very similar to that which had
been adopted in Java, and it is to be found even yet in
force in certain Portuguese possessions. Natives were
compehed to bring in to the government a certain
amount of produce, particularly of rubber. When
such returns were not forthcoming, punitive expedi
tions were sent against the native villages. The situa
tion became so terrible as to appear an international
scandal, and after no small agitation the Belgian
Government took over the king's private share, and
since that time the Congo Free State, while hardly to
be described as a Paradise in which human personahty
is supreme, has had its economic efficiency at least
tempered by a respect for the welfare of its negroes.1
Possibly the most outstanding element of the
moralizing of an economic process on the large scale is
the treatment accorded the Phihppines by the United
States. We look back across half a generation since we
somehow found ourselves possessed of the Phihppines
as the outcome of a war which has been variously
regarded as the height of altruism and the depth of
national hysteria. These years have certainly wrought
a notable change in the attitude of the American
See Harris, Intervention and Colonization in Africa, pp. 20-64.

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 133
people as regards the holding of lands in the tropics,
but no man can now charge the United States with
insincerity in its protestations that it would under
take to educate the inhabitants of the Phihppines
into a capacity of self-government. In all the history
of the deahngs of white races with tropical peoples,
there is nothing comparable with the development of
education through the American school system in the
Philippines. The United States has not looted the
Islands. In fact, in the minds of many people it has
been singularly indifferent to their extraordinary
economic resources. However imperfectly and waver-
ingly the duty has been faced, the United States has
undertaken to build up among the Fihpinos ideals of
personal value and indeed of individualism. What the
future holds for the Islands none dares forecast in
detail. But of one thing I think practicahy every
American is convinced, namely, that a democracy
cannot have a colonial pohcy after the fashion estab
hshed by Great Britain and attempted by Germany
in the nineteenth century. But this conviction is not
of economic origin. It springs rather from a recogni
tion of the worth of men and women which a democ
racy must recognize on the basis of equahty rather
than of subjection.1
1 In this estimate of the attitude of the United States toward the
Philippines I am not unmindful of the role force has played in the
establishment of order in the islands. The main point of my conten
tion concerns the attempt to give the Filipinos something more than

134 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
3. Ihustrations of similar subordination of economic
efficiency to personal values are also to be seen in the
new spirit developing in our modern industrial world.
Thus the tendency to rise from estimating industrial
conditions by formulas of price and production to a
recognition of the personal well-being of the workman
appears in recent legislation in the United States. I
wih mention only one of the many phases of this
important matter.
During the last ten years we have been rebuilding
our nation on the basis of the power given Congress by
the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce. Not
to mention the legislation deahng with trusts and
combinations, who of the fathers could have imagined
that on the basis of this power of Congress we should
have legislation compelling railroads to put safety
devices on their freight cars, insuring the proper
inspection of meat, punishing gentlemen poisoners
who dealt in foods made attractive by dyes and
poisons, imprisoning procurers, and restricting the
amount of labor which children should be cahed upon
to give in various factories ? Evidently we are
the status of prosperous subject peoples. The control of a backward
nationality by an advanced state may give social stability without
ultimate independence and self-direction. Examples of this sort are
too numerous to mention, but the policies of Great Britain in Egypt
and India and of Japan in Korea are in point. Particular attention
may be called to the publications of the imperial government of Japan
describing the immense economic progress made in Korea.

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 135
beginning to recognize that human welfare is more
important than profits.
There are also new movements within the com
mercial world itself. Competition, once the unques
tioned hfe of trade and economic theory, is by no
means decadent in American hfe; but whereas com
petition between manufacturers was once regarded as
a form of war in which it might have been charity, but
certainly not business, for one competitor to share his
efficiency methods with another, there is developing
at the present time a cooperative attitude among
competitors. Whatever may have been the motive
which inaugurated the free interchange of experience
and conclusions among executives engaged in the same
lines of business, there is no doubt that, as one of them
says, such interchange of trade secrets not only fails to
injure each other's business, but it certainly makes
competitors " feel better towards each other." " To
feel better towards each other " is not far removed
from kinship with the Golden Rule.
However much men may hesitate to plead altruistic
motives for business pohcies, it is nevertheless true
that there is developing in our economic hfe a new
sense of the worth of the man in business as distinct
from the business man. Even those who would justify
the installation of wehare work in their factories by
the plea that it is good business know in their hearts
that they are altruistic sheep in economic wolves'

136 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
clothing. They know their employees have rights as
men and women.1
Finahy, when we estimate the entire drift of the
labor-capital struggle, it wih appear that even though
it has not yet wholly emerged from the semi-barbaric
stage of violence, the tendency on the part of the
movement as a whole is towards the humanizing of
industrial relationships. Organized labor with ah its
defects has been educating the industrial world to
regard workmen as co-producers. Our economists are
less keen than formerly to regard labor as a com
modity. That in itself is a gain because as soon as
labor is seen to be a personal element in production
comparable with that of the entrepreneur, a long step
has been taken toward the recognition of justice in the
distribution of products. Indeed the passage is already
begun from an exclusive estimate of production, an
impersonal process, as the proper approach to the
struggle between labor and capital, to an emphasis on
consumption, a personal process.
This long struggle in the midst of which we now find
ourselves, began in an age which was unwilling to look
upon the workingman as having rights or even real
personahty. The leaders of the then " dismal science "
always began their work with the naive assumption of
economic men starting off society anew on desert
1 For a very complete presentation of this entire matter see Hen
derson, Citizens in Industry (with good working bibliography).

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 137
islands. In the pursuit of their deductive method
economists forgot that they were deahng with real
folks when they talked about laborers. Naturahy
such depersonalized thinking had its counterpart in
ignorant antagonisms and the destruction of newly
invented machines. That attitude, of course, has by
no means disappeared, and among certain leaders
of labor is being erected into a sort of philosophy.
Yet even syndicalism, particularly in France, is in
sistent upon the personal rights of the laborer him
seh, thus introducing into the economic struggle
spiritual values which are bound to be increasingly
recognized by those who wih have nothing to do with
syndicalism. The humanizing of the laborer is being recognized
as a phase of social justice rather than of charity. To
appreciate this fact we no longer need to make our
point of departure slavery or serfdom, the peasantry
of the eighteenth century, or even the legislation of
Bismarck. When one compares the state of mind
regarding labor unions during the middle of the nine
teenth century with that, let us for the sake of mod
eration say, of the National Civic Federation, it wih
immediately be seen that there has been a very radical
change in the mode of approach as weh as in the ele
ments into which the labor-capital struggle is being
analyzed. In other words, we are finding personal
values in our economic processes. Compensation Acts,

138 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
for instance, are no longer a novelty, but they involve
a new view of law. The injured workingman does
not have to prove neghgence on the part of the
employer. The fact that more than a majority of
injuries are not due to neghgence on the part of either
employer or fellow-workmen has made it obvious
that it is a duty for society to see that necessarily
hazardous employments shah provide compensation
for their victims.1
The marked tendency of our economic thought it
seh is in the direction of recognizing personal values.
It would be impossible nowadays for any economist to
get a hearing for the philosophy of his early- Victorian
fehows. The industrial order has been found to be full
of other than economic motives. The men who have
to make their living have their loves and hatreds, their
desire for leisure and play, the impulses born of family
responsibility and the ambition to have their children
get more out of hfe than they themselves have pos
sessed. Sociahsm has far larger range than economic
hfe. At ah points, it is true, personal desires touch the
economic realm, but they are in every case independ
ent factors quite distinct from the world of machines
which the workmen wish to control. A thorough-going
socialist of the modern type hke Spargo can even speak
1 Boyd, " Important Constitutional Questions, New in Form,
Raised by the Texas Workmen's Compensation Act," Yale Law
Journal, xxv (1915), pp. 100-121.

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 139
of the spiritual aspects of Sociahsm and the Christian
elements in Marxian Sociahsm.1
Such conditions as these are not merely biographical.
They are genuinely social and therefore historical.
They not only make plain the tendency in hfe away
from the primacy of economic conditions which
occasioned if they did not originate human activities,
but they show positively that in1 our modern social hfe
with its interplay of social forces, humanity passes
into a new stage of self-estimate. Men are less prone
to look upon themselves, or even upon their fehows
as cogs of an economic machine, and despite the
injustice which stfll exists, whether consciously or
unconsciously, they are increasingly giving weight
to the personal values of the individual which emerge
in the economic process.2
This recognition of personal values is producing a
morality and a rehance upon character which is more
than economic astuteness. True, there are those who
are ready to hft society into too high an eminence and
to accord it disproportionate importance in our present
efforts at reconstruction of social affairs. But such
behtthng of individual values is already correcting
1 An interesting collection of sources bearing upon " human beings
as economic factors " is contained in Marshall, Wright and Field,
Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics, pp. 105-156.
2 A discussion of this tendency in its most difficult and recent
phase, the employment of women, will be found in Abbott, Women in
Industry, especially chs. 12, 13.

140 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
itself as we gain a more accurate understanding of
human hfe. If, as must be admitted, society is some
thing more than a mere aggregation of individuals, it
is not something apart from individuals. Nor does
it tend to destroy their worth. Rather are we coming
to see that it enriches as weh as directs their self-
expression. Here as always the concrete practice and
tendency of history is of more weight than the literary
exposition of theories or philosophies. And except in
moments of crisis, both in legislation and social prac
tice, group action looks increasingly toward the wehare
of the individual. War alone, that enemy of individual
ism, forces the group to act directly and exclusively for
its own good. Nationahsm, which in segregated units
preserves the old anti-individuahsm of an imperial
istic state, is, however, yielding, though slowly, to the
regard for higher individual values.
Similarly the class struggle — so much akin to
national militarism — reduces the worth of individuals.
But solidarity as an ultimate good is decreasingly to
be seen except in moments of struggle. Then it may
find expression in an unquestioning class loyalty. In
normal conditions class consciousness is subordinated
to individual welfare. Therein we can trace the same
progress as in the development of government. Group
action : is for the personal welfare of the members of a
1 Thus a socialist like Walling, Larger Aspects of Socialism, p. 113,
says, " Socialism like sociology is forced, first of all, to meet the great'

RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 141
group. The individual is emerging as a self-conscious
end, daring to criticize and, if need be, to antagonize
his group even while he sees his hfe is bound up in the
bundle of hves of others. The labor movement as it
has grown intelligent has become a movement of
laborers, and, despite its temptations to take up the
r61e of master which the capitahst is beginning to
abandon, it cannot escape the force of the historical
movement. The woman movement is recasting the
position of women in family and industry as weh as in
politics in the interest of larger personal freedom.
What the future has in store for our industrialized
society we do not know. But of one thing we can be
sure; society is not headed toward slavery or even
the economic subjection of machine-workers to class
movements or machine owners. The progress of the
future we may weh expect wih be written in terms of
persons, not of mere producers.
This tendency of history is history in the making.
underlying question: how is the freest and fullest development of the
individual to be secured while society is doing more and more of the
things which were formerly done by individuals?" And (p. 138)
" Socialism demands that every individual born into the world be
given equal opportunity and a function in society corresponding to
his native abilities." Walling's entire chapter 6 on " Society as God "
seems to show that the individual in society rather than society is
ultimate. See also from not strictly socialistic points of view, Hobson,
The Crisis of Liberalism, and Nordau, The Interpretation of History,
especially pp. 76-81. Reference also should be made to the various
programs in which socialistic idealism is set forth.

142 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
With that conviction we may look confidently for a
stih further extension and enrichment of the social
process by which individuals in society are regarded
as capable of becoming of more individual and social
worth. Civilization itseh is growing less impersonal
as economic values yield to the recognition of imma
terial goods which he in the non-economic realm of
individuahty and spiritual freedom.1
In this tendency is to be found not only an explana
tion of the rise of new rights and duties but also an
appeal to every earnest soul for cooperation. In its
hght pohtical economy instead of being the " dismal
science " of Carlyle becomes an exposition of human
ity's unquenchable ambition to hve not by bread alone.
The development of economic efficiency is being slowly
transformed into a new opportunity for expressing the
fraternity of the spirit.
1 Reference may well be made here to Lamprecht, What is History
(especially lectures i and 4) in which the socio-psychological character
of history is set forth.

LECTURE V
THE TRANSFORMATION OF RIGHTS INTO
JUSTICE
The third positive tendency to be seen in history
and particularly in the more highly developed states
both ancient and modern, is the outcome of the two
tendencies already discussed; it is the substitution
of the giving of justice for the struggle for rights. The
data at our disposal here are more obscure and less
recognized than those indicating the rise of inner
authority and the increase of regard for individuahty,
but they are none the less in evidence.
The two words " justice " and " rights " are fre
quently used without careful distinction. Their
differences may be said to be not so much in their con
tent as in their approach to a situation. " Rights " is a
term of acquisition and " justice " is a term of exten
sion. We seek our rights; we give justice. To give
justice is to recognize the other man's rights, and
among such rights is that of having justice done him
— that is to say, of having his rights recognized.
But what are rights ? About this question has
centered controversy ever since men began to think.1
1 For a general statement from the legal point of view see Light-
wood, The Nature of Positive Law, especially chs. 5-7. Maine,
143

144 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
In the minds of some persons, particularly the phil
osophers of the eighteenth century and their suc
cessors, there are such things as natural rights — that
is, the rights which a man enjoys as man independent
of society. These rights came into being in a state
of nature which is supposed to have existed prior to the
organization of society. Since they are independent of
society they cannot be destroyed by society, although
the state of nature has suffered at the hands of those,
who, acquiring control of their fehows in one way or
another, have deprived them of their natural rights.
That this hypothesis is not without its truth may be
admitted, but when the historian asks for the evidence
of the existence of such a state of nature before society
he gets no answer. And with good reason. As far as
anthropological research can show, humanity always
was social and to search for a state of nature in which a
man had rights antedating society is like an attempt to
find a state of hght rays before the existence of hght.
What we cah rights are the creatures of a mixed
ancestry. Their basis is the impulse of human hfe to
express personal worth so that it may become greater
in the process of a social hfe itself possessed of personal
values. But rights themselves are not their basis or
their philosophy. They are not things, but expressions
of concrete social attitudes. A right emerged when a
Ancient Law has been to some extent replaced by more recent exami
nations of primitive societies.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 145
group recognized as inviolable some advantage
enjoyed by one or more of its members.
Rights may have originated in economic advantages
which emerged in elemental societies when the supply
of tihable land or other useful things was not sufficient
to supply ah the needs of a group. Whether or not
Professor Carver 1 be correct in maintaining that
economic scarcity is the chief basis of moral values,
scarcity is very probably the mother of property. The
right of individuals to breathe the air has never been
questioned because it is one of those things in which
the element of scarcity has never figured. When things
that were useful were also scarce, there developed by
custom, doubtless protected by force, the recognition
as inviolable certain advantages enjoyed by one man
but not enjoyed by another. How this man acquired
these advantages it is idle to speculate at this late day,
although philology suggests that he got them by his
good right arm. But however gained such advantages
were admitted by the group to which their possessors
belonged and whoever attempted to deprive a man
of them felt the vengeance of the social group. As
Westermarck points out, this character of inviola
bility was included in the concepts of rights among
primitive peoples.2 Such an explanation, however, in
the nature of the case is speculative rather than his-
1 Essays in Social Justice, ch. 2.
2 Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, I, 139.

146 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
torical, and it may very likely be that the origin of
what we regard today as rights was something very
different. Yet whatever their origin, rights involve a
social recognition of the inviolability of exclusive
control of some natural agent, some economic, pohti
cal, social or other advantage.1
Here as so often in history the occasion of develop
ment in history is economic and impersonal. But just
as true is it that the human element is the factor that
makes history, refusing to serve in some Egypt of
inherited privilege. Any new social ideahsm questions
that inviolability which precedent and practice have
recognized. To learn the secret of the rise of democ
racy one needs to study this skepticism as to the
finality of social sanction which makes monopolized
advantage inviolable. For in it hes the explanation of
that sharing of rights to which we give the name
Justice. I
When we pass from the question as to the origin of
rights to what men have claimed to be rights, it is clear
that we have to do not only with concrete advantages
but with human motives and reasons. For rights can
exist as such only as men's attitudes toward the invio
lability of advantage persist unchanged. The growth
1 Ihering, Geist des romischen Rechts, III, 60, defines a right as " an
interest protected by the law." But law is only one way of expressing
social regard for inviolability.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 147
of the sentiment of justice is a phase of social psy
chology. Rights are democratized in proportion as
society refuses to sanction the monopoly of advan
tages. But the first stage of such a process is a struggle
for new rights — a struggle that has generahy been
marked by war and revolution.
1. Consider first the right of property. Men not
only have property but they have what they beheve is
a right to hold property. When this sense of right
appears, men feel they are backed by more than might
or convention or social concession. Thus the Stoics
justified a fundamental right by an appeal to the
rational order of the universe. Roman thinkers like
Cicero anticipating later thought maintained that
every man had the principles of right — i. e., the
recognition of others' rights — innate within himseh.
Following him the Roman jurists spoke of a lex
naturalis — a law which was immanent in the very
nature of things. Thus they could speak of rights
which were more fundamental than any human law
granted. This view which maintained itseh through
out the history of the Middle Ages came to marked
expression in the philosophy of Locke and later in that
of Rousseau, while back of both lay the Covenant
which served so admirably to express both the rehgious
and the pohtical thought of the days of Hooker. These
writers with their fehows were not concerned in
anthropological investigation or in the history of

148 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the development of those attitudes of mind which
they unconsciously assumed in their discussion. For
instance, in discussing the state of nature the rights of
men were not positively distinguished from those of
women. Yet if this thought was a priori, it none the less
profoundly influenced the development of history.
Property was a fundamental right — an inviolable
advantage, " the periphery of one's person extended
to things." 1 Men were moved to revolution not merely
for the sake of their property, but for tne defense of
their right to manage their property. This I take it
was one of the fundamental motives in the American
Revolution.2 Our national forefathers undoubtedly
wished to organize a government that would give
financial and industrial stabihty to the united colonies,
and as democrats they may have looked with more
favor upon agrarian than upon commercial property,
but economic rights were not ah they wanted when
they rebehed from England. They had their property.
They wanted the right to use it as they judged to be
right. For this they fought and died. American
democracy was assured when the colonists first began
to question the inviolability of the advantages mono
polized by the mother-country.
1 Ihering, The Struggle for Law, p. 55.
2 Burke, on Conciliation with America, states this explicitly as it
relates to taxation.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 149
The same attitude of behef in the inviolability of
acquired economic advantage hes at the basis of
capitalism. Just when and how this form of economic
right developed we do not now undertake to discover.
Capitahsm has a long pedigree. In its present form it
perpetuates economic advantages which, inherited
from mediaeval and even ancient practice and laws,
grew into amazing proportion with the invention of
machines and the private exploitation of newly dis
covered natural resources in unoccupied continents.
The inviolabihty of such economic control of the
agents and the materials of production rests upon laws,
royal charters, patents, concessions, and above ah
upon the inertia of the social mind. For generations
the sanctity of property was extended without dis
crimination to conditions which were unlike those in
which property rights were first evolved. Capitahsm,
though it has lost some of its inviolabihty through
being subjected to limitations in present legislation, is
yet a right and wih so continue so long as our present
economic order continues. For it embodies social
sanction of the right to property.
2. The right to property is the prototype of other
rights. In the course of history non-economic advan
tages are recognized by the various social groups as
inviolable, and this estimate in the course of time
becomes so habitual as to make any interference with
such advantages hable to social punishment. In

150 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
general, these other rights have varied according to the
complexity of a civilization. Thus the rights of women
in a primitive civilization were narrowly individual,
based on their biological and economic functions in
the tribe, whereas the rights of men were not only
personal, but pohtical as weh. Whatever weight
we may give to the evidence of early matriarchal con
trol, when social orders really began to develop, only in
rare instances did the woman seem to have the right
to head the state. Such queens as Semiramis, Alex
andra and Cleopatra were certainly exceptional in
ancient states. Even in such relatively high civiliza
tions as those of Greece and Rome, the position of
women was non-political and subject to the control of
father or husband. In Athens the hetairai enjoyed
freedom that married women were denied, but their
position was anomalous in the state. True, in Rome
the development of social life led to a tendency to
abohsh the cum manu position of married women,1 but
the Roman matron never enjoyed the fuh rights of
citizenship, however in exceptional cases she might
study, enter professions and even become a gladiator.
And in Rome the new woman found satirists only too
ready to misjudge or bemoan her new liberties. The
status of Jewish women 2 as weh as that of those of the
1 See Fowler, Social Life at Rome, ch. 5; Marquardt, Das Privat-
leben der Rbmer, passim.
2 See Mielziner, Jewish Law of Marriage and Divorce; Amram,
Jewish Law of Marriage and Divorce; Oesterley and Box, The Religion
and Worship of the Synagogue, pp. 284-303.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 151
Graeco-Roman world is clearly implied in the letters
of Paul. In Christ there was no male or female x but in
the social order the woman was the weaker vessel,
wearing a veil because of the angels, and in church she
was to be silent, permitting the men to exercise the
gifts of the Spirit and fill the church offices.2
Parents had rights over their children, custom per
mitting a parent to treat his children much as if they
were his property.
Within certain limits also there was in ancient
societies the right to worship, but according to the
temper of various groups the right to perform magic
was not recognized. The terror of the Witch of Endor
lest her surreptitious dealing with the shades in Sheol
should come to the attention of Saul is an illustration
of activities which could not be carried on as rights
because they lacked social sanction.3
Further, the movement in history has developed in
addition to these individual rights, social advantages
deemed inviolable, such as group rights or class rights.
Slave-owning communities are notable for their insis
tence upon the prerogatives of the freeman as over
against the slave. With the rise of large land-owning
famihes, the tendency towards the enjoyment of
special rights by certain groups became evident. Thus
1 Gal. 3:28.
2 1 Cor. 7; 11:1-16; 14:34-36; Eph. 5:22, 23.
a 1 Sam. 28:3-25.

152 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
to the general group of rights which members of such
classes possessed is to be added the particular right
to enjoy the rights accorded to the class.
Ihustrations of how individual rights vary according
to the class to which the individual belongs wih be
found in the history of every country where pohtical
and social classes have existed. Thus in the ancient
Frankish kingdom the Sahc law shut out women from
royal succession and the practice of composition clearly
mdicates the difference in " honor " or the right to
share in the recognition accorded the class to which a
man belonged. Under feudahsm a people always
tends to break up into strata superimposed upon each
other with rights increasing in proportion to the
removal of a class from the lowest social group or that
of serfs. These have practicahy no rights which hft
them above the condition of slaves except the fact
that they are immovably attached to a given estate.
From this class of rights may have sprung the caste
system, that of India being the most complete. In
that vast country apparently successive waves of
immigration superimposed themselves upon the
native people and then, graduahy subdividing them
selves in industrial and other groups, so monopolized
their rights as to make it impossible for the members
born in one group to pass into another.1 The caste
1 A good brief account of the rise of the caste system in India will
be found in Jones, India, Its Life and Thought, pp. 91-149.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 1 53
system, with all its inequalities, and one might almost
say insanity of rights, developed. The most perfect
pohtical contrast in history is not between democracy
and some highly organized absolute monarchy, but
between democracy and a society organized on the
feudal or the caste system. For the fundamental
conception of democracy is that such advantages
monopolized by individuals or classes and so crystal
lized as rights cannot be regarded as inviolable; that
so far as their relations with society are concerned men
should have equahty of rights.1 That is to say, what
ever may be true of nature and the aberrations of
heredity, democracy protests that society shah play
no favorites. How far we are from this condition of
ideal democracy is easy to see, but the movement
within history toward such an ideal is also traceable.
To this we shah return later. At present I cah atten
tion only to the tendency of economic advantages to
pass into rights and these rights to furnish norms for
the recognition of non-economic advantages as invi
olable. We shah see how the growing sense of the
personal worth of individuals tended to modify or to
destroy this social recognition of inviolabihty, and
thereby to substitute justice for rights. The spiritual
quahty of such a readjustment of social attitudes is
too evident to demand exposition.
1 Napoleon recognized this with characteristic precision when he
declared that Frenchmen of his day wanted liberty less than equality.

154 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
II
In considering this new stage in the historical pro
cess, we may weh center our attention on the typical
struggle for rights in Enghsh society which began with
Magna Charta and has tended to develop the concep
tion of justice as democratized rather than monopo
lized advantages. The course of this development we
shah see has always involved the attack upon an exist
ing or a threatened social assent to the inviolabihty
of some monopoly of advantages. That is, it has been
due to a growing recognition of spiritual values.
In calling attention to this particular development,
I would not be understood to overlook the remarkable
development which also took place within the Roman
Empire. While checked by a variety of forces which
the pohtical theories and economic limitations made
it impossible for the Roman Empire to overcome,1
Roman law, as has already been pointed out, tended
to conceive itseh as based upon principles which,
implied in the customs codified in jus civile and lex
gentium or lex naturalis, could be extended to ah fields
of human activity. Such an extension of principles
became in Rome as in England a basis for the extension
of rights, that is the giving of justice; and this, the
1 For a general account of the decline of the inner life of the Roman
Empire, see Cambridge Mediaeval History, vol. I, especially chs. i, 2,
14, 15, 19; Davis, The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome, pp. 314-
335-

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 1 55
Roman social mind conceived, was society's enforce
ment of the principle of suum cuique. That it did not
reach even the present limit of socialized privilege is
due to causes too complex for treatment here.
Magna Charta is now generahy held to have been
not a demand for new rights, but a recognition of the
inviolabihty of those formerly enjoyed. It planned to
resurrect and assure the conditions of the past rather
than to force new concessions from King John. It
was a correction of royal abuses in the field of long
estabhshed customs and prerogatives rather than a
philosophy of rights of the subject as an individual.
This first expression of a united desire of the church,
the barons and the commons, summed up the tradi
tional liberties of these three classes of the nation as
distinguished from the king. The church was guaran
teed hberty in elections to church offices; the barons
and their sub-vassals were given limitation and
safeguards in the fulfilling of their feudal duties of
scutage and aids, rehefs, wardships and marriages,
and prevented from too general ahenation of fiefs; the
commons, that is, ah freemen, both townspeople and
landowners below baronial rank, were protected
against unjust increase of rents and customs and
forcible seizure of certain property in times of war, and
were given influence upon taxation through representa
tion in the national council. Other provisions assured
the maintenance of judicial processes threatened by

156 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Norman oppression. These and other rights were
guaranteed by a recognition of the right of rebelhon in
case the king failed to keep his share of the compact.1
The hst of rights set forth in Magna Charta shows
clearly that the rights guaranteed were already funda
mentally those of Englishmen, rather than those of
men as such; that they concerned the relation of
Enghshmen of different grades to the king; that they
concerned very largely the economic privileges includ
ing the rights of property and taxation. It would be,
therefore, a mistake to consider Enghsh constitutional
history either as beginning with Magna Charta or as
interested primarily in abstract rights. The rights
which were to be preserved were practices actuahy
enjoyed in the past, and which were hable to repudia
tion on the part of Enghsh kings until the confirmation
of the charters by Edward I eighty years after the
historic meeting on Runnymede.
The subsequent history of the conception of rights
in England proceeds, though by no means without
breaks and reactions, along the hnes thus laid down.
Parhament graduahy gained power, particularly in
the way of granting supphes, and these powers soon
became a part of the Enghsh constitution and so con-
1 The charter is printed in full in Stubbs, Select Charters. Among
the many discussions of its significance see Gneist, Englische Verfas-
sungsgeschichte, pp. 240-255; Taylor, Origin and Growth of the English
Constitution, I, pp. 380-391 ; Stubbs, Constitutional History of England,
I, S69-S83.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 1 57
stitute the rights of Englishmen. Such a development
is of particular significance to the student of history as
indicating the actual way in which the idea of rights
developed out from concrete situations rather than
from abstract a priori doctrine. Rights in England
with the noteworthy exception of the recognition of
the rights of foreign merchants in time of war were
rights of Englishmen.1 Nor is this statement to be
changed in any marked degree by the hterature of
later pohtical theorists hke Locke. With them, it is
true, there is a very considerable recognition of the
rights of an individual as over against the state, and in
fact as antecedent to the state. The state was held to
be composed of those who assented to certain limita
tions of their own rights. As a matter of fact, however,
it would be difficult to show that these views had any
deep influence upon the course of events of the seven
teenth century. Concrete history is here of more
1 Thus Burke in his speech on Conciliation with America in describ
ing the colonists' love of hberty says, " They are not only devoted to
liberty, but to hberty according to Enghsh ideas and on English prin
ciples. Abstract hberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be
found." He closes his speech with these words: " Let us get an
American revenue as we have got an American empire. Enghsh
privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will
make it all it can be." But as Jellinek {The Declaration of the Rights
of Men and Citizens) has shown, the American colonists had advanced
in theory from devotion to the rights of Englishmen to those of men
(or rather of male citizens) . We have yet to see clearly that patriotism
in a nationalistic sense is still to be taught a similar lesson.

158 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
importance than literary theories. Even Locke him
self, when he came to draw up a constitution for North
Carohna, seems not to have attempted to put his
theory of absolute right into operation. Writers on
law, however, did take the matter up, and there began
to develop a certain philosophy of rights which later
was to have value in furnishing a theoretical basis for
actual practice. At this point, therefore, we see the
transformation in theory of the rights of Englishmen
based upon Enghsh economic and pohtical practice to
rights of men enjoyed by Enghshmen. What led to
this partial transformation of rights into justice ?
The answer is to be found in history rather than in
pohtical philosophy. True, such philosophy furnishes
the new process phrases and justifications. Man was
conceived of as having in a state of nature — that is to
say, in an imagined state prior to government — cer
tain rights which were his simply by virtue of the fact
that he was a man. But suppose we undertake to hst
their rights as claimed by the men of the eighteenth
century. There were, first of ah, the right to the
enjoyment of hfe and hberty, the acquisition and
possession of property, pursuit of happiness and safety.
These were, held to include the right to be protected by
government in his enjoyment of his hfe, hberty and
property according to laws. Every freeman also was
entitled to appeal to the courts, could participate in
legislation and elections and was at hberty from other

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 159
laws than those to which he had given his consent; he
was to be regarded as innocent until proved guilty,
and could not be dispossessed of property or estate,
hfe or hberty, without due course of law; he could
worship God according to the dictate of his own
conscience without interference, and was not hable to
taxation except by his own consent.
In this hst of rights drawn from those claimed in the
various Bills of Rights of the American colonies, it
wih seem as if the most specific and strictly pohtical
are drawn from the fundamental rights which were
held to belong to a man in the state of nature, but
that is only superficially the case. Their real origin
is not in literary speculation on politics or deductive
logic, but in a concrete historical process set up by
various conditions both in England and in the Ameri
can colonies. And these conditions were not funda
mentally economic but rehgious — the rise of rehgious
Independency.1 There were, of course, economic conditions which
made this attitude of mind possible. From one point
of view rights might almost be regarded as a sort of
transcendental extension of the conception of property
— what one is " to have and to hold." Calvinism and
capitahsm march into history hand in hand. But
economic causes by no means account for the very
1 See Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens.
My obhgation to Professor Jellinek at this point is great.

160 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
remarkable development within the group of men that
held that every rehgious congregation should have the
right to maintain its own affairs. This became a matter
of conscience which was substantiated by texts from
the Bible.1 The Separatists of England driven out by
the estabhshed church went first to Hohand and then
to America with the ideal of a self-adniinistering con
gregation. That they belonged to the same economic
class was less potent than that they wished the right
to worship according to their own conscience.
But Independency at this stage was a struggle to
acquire and enjoy rights. Within these congregations
there was no recognition of the right of others to
rehgious hberty as such. Individuals in the Massa
chusetts Bay colonies were not granted the right to
freedom of conscience and worship. In the struggle
with the New World the sense of rights settled into
intolerance. Yet the new stage was close at hand.
Roger Williams, exiled from Massachusetts, founded
at Providence the first government with absolute
freedom of conscience. Maryland and Pennsylvania,
though with limitations, also granted similar rights to
others than their original colonists and this new social
ideal was finally embodied in royal charters.
Thus the idea of rights which had been first those of
Enghshmen, and then those of the individual, became
1 See, for instance, the illustrations given by Von Dobschutz, The
Influence of the Bible on Civilization, pp. 153-163.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 161
those inherent in a social order. In their speeches and
tractates, James Otis and Samuel Adams agitate for
the rights of the colonists as " men, Christians and
citizens." In 1765 a Declaration of Rights was issued
by the so-called Stamp Act Congress. In 1774 the
Continental Congress pubhshed its Declaration of
Rights, and in 1776 the Virginia Bih of Rights gave
them epochal formulation and became the model of
Bills of Rights prefacing the constitutions of most of
the states of the new union. And, so mighty is ideal
ism, this process of extending rights in actual society
reached over to France and found expression in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,
prefixed to the constitution pubhshed in 1791 by the
French Constituent Assembly. But with this new
view of rights as belonging to ah men, the inviolabihty
of monopolized advantage in so far was denied.
Privilege had been democratized. Rehgious ideahsm
had given birth to an incipient pohtical justice.
But the giving of justice was none the less induced
by the struggle to get rights.
This new sensitiveness to injustice and this world
wide struggle for rights gave birth to the century of
revolution. The inner motive of this struggle is to be
sought, not in the philosophy in which it expressed and
justified itseh, but in a new spiritual attitude toward
the world. How else could we explain the amazing
popularity of Rousseau in France ? This new attitude

1 62 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
arose from the perception that the inherited rights
enjoyed by representatives of state and church had
reahy ceased to be rights and had become privileges.
That is, their owners had lost the sense of social obhga
tion once implied by recognized monopolized advan
tages — let us say of feudal control and constitutional
absolutism — and were champions of an inviolabihty
of advantages which no longer were commensurate
with the power of the less privileged, like the bour
geoisie of France, or the ideals of the state, as in the
case of the American colonies. The cah to " rights "
became, therefore, a cah to free or enforced repudia
tion of monopoly hitherto unquestioned. The trag
edies of the eighteenth century were the outcome of the
clash between those who wished to maintain their
privileges and those who claimed them as their own
rights, i. e., as advantages to be shared by those in
revolt against an existing but outgrown social order.
The new advance toward democracy was not alto
gether but largely by way of bloody conquest.
It is to be noticed, however, that this demand for the
democratizing of privileges, now seen to be no longer
rights assured to their possessors, was by no means
unlimited. Slavery was permitted and in some cases
full freedom was given only to those citizens who were
actual church members.1 But by the time of the out-
1 An instructive illustration of this fact is to be seen in the legisla
tion of the American colonies as to the effect of the acceptance of

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 163
break of the French Revolution the conception of
rights which pertained to individuals as members of a
state was a revolutionary force. Men fought enthusi
astically for their rights as elements of a world order.
Nor was this demand for rights limited to pohtics.
Heaven itseh was not permitted to practise absolutism.
This sense of rights lay back of the spiritual move
ments in the latter part of the eighteenth and early
part of the nineteenth centuries. John Wesley taught
that the common people should claim their rehgious
rights of salvation undeterred by foreordination, elec
tion and divine decrees. In Unitarianism humanity
dared stand before a sovereign God and proclaim its
rights in much the same spirit as the revolutionists in
France and America had faced their earthly sovereigns.1
The doctrine of the total depravity of human nature
because of original sin was the object of attack, and
men, particularly in New England, regarded them
selves as possessed of inherent natural rights which
God himseh must needs in justice recognize.
At this point the struggle to get rights was to lead
to an effort to extend rights and so give justice.
Christianity and baptism by negro slaves, as well as the unwillingness
of many if not most slave-holders in the eighteenth century to have
their slaves become church members. References to contemporary
sources will be found in Jernegan, " Slavery and Conversion in the
American Colonies," Am. Hist. Review, xxi (1916), 504-527.
1 See the works of Channing, especially his essay on " The Moral
Argument against Calvinism," Works, i, 217-242. See also Emerton,
Unitarian Thought, ch. 3.

164 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
The philosophical explication of this struggle for in
dividual rights which naturally followed became in the
long hfe of Jeremy Bentham a revolutionary pohtical
gospel in that utilitarian pohtical theory which had so
great a power in England during the first hah of the
nineteenth century. The individual was to go to the
courts not merely to gain an advantage for himself,
but in the interest of personal dignity, freedom. To be
indifferent to his rights as a property-holder or citizen
was to endanger property rights and citizenship in
general. " The greatest good for the greatest num
ber " was not only a phrase easy to remember; it
became a means of transition to the giving of justice.
For when examined closely, the real significance of the
Benthamite philosophy is seen to he not so much in its
insistence upon rights as upon the extension of rights.
This is a new attitude of mind and may very well serve
in theory, as it proved in fact, as a connecting link
between the belligerent demand for rights in the
eighteenth century and the cohectivist extension of
rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Ill
If it be granted that when rights are democratized
even in terms of the " greatest number " a new atti
tude of mind arises, it appears that rights are no longer
strictly final. There has emerged duty, the correlate
of rights. To give justice — i. e., to recognize rights

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 165
as social, the property of others — supplements the
gaining of individual rights. This social obhgation of
the mdividual appeared indeed in the highly ideahstic
constitution which the Legislative Assembly in France
drew up in 1793. That constitution was preceded by a
series of principles entitled " The Declaration of the
Rights and Duties of the Man and Citizen," and these
duties were there said to be summed up in the Golden
Rule. But the times were not ripe for such ideahsm
and the constitution was never put into operation.
In England, to continue the course of our illustra
tion, this new sense of rights which were not to be
monopolized by select classes became a ferment in the
new social mind. In the field of rehgion it worked out
into a new sense of responsibility, not for social recon
struction, it is true, but for social amehoration. The
Evangehcals in the Church of England with their
emphasis upon the sacrificial atoning work of the
incarnate God gave the needed rehgious dynamic for
ah sorts of social reforms in England. The abolition of
slavery, the better care of the insane, the reorganizing
of poor rehef, the extension of pohtical privilege, the
extension of foreign missions, the founding of the
Young Men's Christian Association, ah date from this
new sense of the worth of the individual as enjoying
rights which should be recognized by others. Professor
Dicey x has elaborated the parahel between Evangeli-
1 Law and Public Opinion in England, pp. 399-409.

1 66 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
cahsm and the Benthamite philosophy as an ele
ment in the pubhc opinion which lay back of and
was conditioned by the legislative opinion of Eng
land. By it the democratic movement itself was to
be ennobled.
From this point of view we can understand the
fact also mentioned by Professor Dicey that the enthu
siasm for democracy, which marked the early hah of
the nineteenth century, has very seriously diminished
because of lack of behef in its finality. That seems to
me to be, however, a very imperfect statement of the
case. What has happened is a change in social atti
tudes as yet not fuhy appreciated. This change was
born not so much of a lack of pohtical passion as of
a new conception of the relation of the individual to
•the state. Democracy is being transformed from an
effort to acquire to an effort to share rights. In the
various Bills of Rights almost as truly, although in
a different manner, as in the case of Magna Charta,
there was a sharp distinction between the individual
and the state, so that each was regarded as more or
less the enemy of the other.1 That is to say, what the
one obtained the other had to give up. Such a con-
1 Thus James Otis asserted in his argument in the writs of assist
ance that " every man, merely natural, was an independent sovereign,
subject to no law, but the law written on his heart, and revealed to
him by his Maker, in the constitution of his nature, the inspiration of
his understanding and his conscience." Quoted in McLaughlin, The
Courts, the Constitution and Parties, p. 190.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 167
ceptfon leads readily to a struggle between the two,
and democracy becomes an aggregation of individuals
who have banded together to fight to regain theoreti
cal rights lost in the organization of the state. The
decay of enthusiasm for such a theory is not strange.
The actual operation of human hfe discloses its f ahacy.
History did not begin and cannot re-begin with
natural men on desert islands; rights are evolved not
deduced. There is a genetic relationship in every
forward movement connecting reforms with conditions
which they seek to supersede. In that process we
always are aware of the fact that the past holds us stih
in mortmain. This fact, the outgrowth not of theory
but of the actual operation of hfe in its collective
expression, brings us to the most recent tendencies in
the socializing of rights. The individual is now seen
to be by no means independent in origin from the
society in which he hves, for economic and pohtical
rights are born of social experience. Such a conception
of the basis of democracy is far enough from being that
of the replevin of stolen rights and does not so easily
stimulate the enthusiasm of acquisition which char
acterized the early stages of the democratic movement.
It may be more blessed to give than to receive; but
there is not generally so much enthusiasm about the
larger blessing. Sacrifice for the good of society
requires a loyalty to ideahst values not so evident as
the immediate gratification of self-interest. It is stih

1 68 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
easier to arouse men to fight for rights than to lead
them by sacrifice to give justice.
Modern democracy is not the theoretical state of the
Bills of Rights, neither is it the appallingly efficient
state of a mihtary monarchy. It is rather a condition
in the making. The processes of which we ourselves
are a part and which we ourselves must stih further
spiritualize may be best described as involving, first,
a new conception of the individual as social, and
second, a new conception of rights as collective justice.
The mdividual is now no longer considered as over
against society but as in society.1 He has personal
1 The biological origin of individuals is discussed by Child, Individ
uality in Organisms. According to Professor Child (p. 202), the organ
ism is " fundamentally a specific reaction system in which quantative
differences initiate physiological mdividuation, development, and
differentiation " in which it acts essentially as a unit in inheritance.
" Development is not a distribution of the different qualities to differ
ent regions, but simply the realization of possibihties, of capacities of
the reaction system. The process of realization differs in different
regions because the conditions are different. Neither characters nor
factors as distinct entities are inherited, but rather possibihties, which
are given in the physico-chemical constitution of the fundamental
reaction system, but not necessarily localized in this or that part of it.
... If the organism is a unit in inheritance and development we must
expect to find that so-called ' acquired characters ' may be impressed
on the organism to such a degree that sooner or later the reaction
system may give rise to these characters without the action of the
particular external factor which originally produced them." This
description of a process in the elementary forms of life may well give
us the point of departure for the conception of human individuality
presented in the text. For a discussion of the human individual see
Shaler, The Individual; Kirkpatrick, The Individual in the Making,

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 169
wehare only as a part of a society which itself has
personal values. The test by which we estimate rights
is, therefore, personal but sociahy personal. We ask
not whether this or that law is good for the individual
or society as it is, but whether it is good in that it
conduces to action on the part of the individual in
society which leads him to become somewhat more
personal than he now is. That is to say, we must look
at personal values as more than individualistic; not as
static, but as dynamic; not as economic, but as social.
The individual does not have a mass of rights by birth
or creation, some of which are surrendered as the
colonies surrendered various rights of sovereignty to
form the federal government. He and society are
contemporaneous in origin and both have been and
ever wih be involved in a process, the value of which
must be judged from its personal outcomes in the
individual and society alike. When rights thus con
ceived are attacked, the duty to contest even with
force against the oppressor can be justified, only it
should be borne in mind that such justification hes not
in that rights as such are attacked, but in the fact
that danger threatens rights, the loss of which would
mean an injury to personal progress.1
especially ch. 6. See also Royce, The World and the Individual; Brad
ley, Principle of Individuality and Value; Smyth, The Meaning of Per
sonal Life, chs. 5,6; Jones, Social Law in the Spiritual World,pp.<tf-&4.
1 Ihering, op. cit., does not make this distinction clear although he
repeatedly uses language which implies such a position, and in a

170 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
This leads naturally to the other conception of
rights as not so many fixed goods already existing to be
apportioned or recognized, but as inherited conditions
in which not only the individual wih develop more
personahy, but in which society changes for the sake
of helping on that development. At this point we can
best decide just what rights reahy imply. The ten
dency to recognize individuals as personal gives us the
clue. A man's rights are ultimately set by his capacity,
in view of his biological, physical and moral inheri
tances, to realize his full personal possibihties in the
midst of his social relations. More briefly, the worth
of an individual is measured by his spiritual possibih
ties in society. To this worth consciously recognized
rights like honor, physical protection, and property
must be, and to a very considerable extent are, sub
ordinated by much modern legislation. Rights are to
be expressed in terms of equity rather than of equality.
The formula of justice is not to each according to his
needs, but to each according to his personal possibih
ties.1 The rights as a social person, for example, of a
normal man capable of large self-expression and of
service to his kind must be measured by such capacity.
footnote on p. 32 defends himself against the contrary interpretation.
He argues at length (55 sq.) that the connection of law with the per
son invests all rights with " ideal value."
1 " Philosophy . . . must absolutely oppose all glorification of the
natural, spiritually destitute individual." — Eucken, Life's Basis and
Life's Ideal, p. 364.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 1 71
So measured they wih be very different from those
which belong to a moron or a degenerate. There is
vast difference between that which can be expected
from and that which can be permitted to the strong
man and the moron respectively. Each has a different
worth in terms of future self-realization in social hfe.
IV
Clearly at this point we have passed from the eight
eenth century's struggle to gain our own rights to a
more genuinely social ideahsm in which we seek to
recognize the rights of other persons in society.
Therein hes justice. And " justice " rather than
" rights " is the watchword of a coming democracy.
True, the one term is not altogether free from the
uncertainties of definition that beset the other, but it is
richer in social content. It also calls for sacrifice on the
part of those who possess rights the inviolabihty of
which a more intelligent and ethical social mind refuses
longer to recognize.1 Obviously personal values must
here be the supreme end of social reconstruction if the
general tendency of history is to persist.
1 Mechem, " An Inquiry Concerning Justice," Michigan Law
Review (xrv), March, 1916, has made an interesting collection of
various attempts at denning " justice." Professor Mechem himself,
after admitting that we have " no precise and definite conception of
justice," and that " whatever may be our ideal we are unable to frame
any formula of justice which shall be at once concise and definite, and,
at the same time, accurately inclusive and exclusive " holds that it is

172 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Therein hes the justification of democracy with its
present imperfect social efficiency as over against the
more immediate efficiency of imperialistic states. An
empire with a philosopher as absolute ruler can more
promptly arrange social welfare; it can make a state
a better prepared mihtary power; it can estabhsh
commercial and other forms of group efficiency. But,
as the Empire of the Antonines proved, this efficiency
is short-hved because it is gained at the expense of the
self-directed energies of the individual. In a state as in
a family, paternalism means restrained individuahty.
And, whatever be its advantages, paternahsm if more
than a passing stage, is a reform against the course of
social evolution. A nation's ultimate worth may be in
reverse proportion to the ease of its preparedness to
wage successful war. Preparedness in the midst of an
unethical internationalism may be the less of two evils,
but it is no more an expression of ultimate social
forces than quarantine against yehow fever is superior
to proper methods of sanitation.
Face to face with so many arguments to the con
trary, I appeal again for justification of this faith in
democracy to historical tendencies.
i. This socializing of rights in the way of attempt
ing to enable others to express more fuhy their per-
possible in many cases to form a concept of justice " which will furnish
us with at least a general principle of conduct." This concept, how
ever, he would find by a study of individuals rather than of society as
such. They change in and are created by social process.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 173
sonal powers in social life is the determination to give
justice. Though as yet only incipient it is already one
of the marked characteristics of our day. Even after
we have made the necessary reductions, history shows
this tendency to be more marked since the collapse
of the Benthamite individualism as a basis of state
organization. We are no longer limited to state
action in the extension of rights. Take for example
the great development of free associations engaged in
ameliorating the condition of the poor, the growth of
charity, the organization of reforms of various sorts.
In a number of instances such as the Juvenile Court
and various municipal centers, park systems and play
grounds, the initiative has come from those who have
been particularly susceptible to the sense of rights of
other people. Private initiative has thus broken the
way for collective activity of more pohtical nature
and the entire conception of the state as that of an
institution which undertakes not only to protect, but
to socialize rights, is growing more dominant. We
begin to hear now of rights which the programs of the
German peasants, Charters, Petitions, and Declara
tions do not mention: the right to work, to own land,
to be compensated for injuries suffered in labor, to
marry, to enjoy leisure, to be protected from industrial
competition, to support in widowhood and in old age.
These certainly indicate how rapidly pubhc sentiment
is moving away from the formal and abstract concep-

174 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
tions of natural rights into a recognition of the obhga
tion of society as a whole to care for the individuals
who are in and of it.
2. An interesting illustration of the passage from a
sense of possessing rights to a recognition of mutual
personal obhgation is to be seen in the relations of the
sexes. The classical world was lacking in romance.
Love was not far removed from the desire for the pos
session of a woman by a man. Helen was the occasion
of the Trojan War, but she was a married woman, and
the Trojan War might be regarded as an elaborate
appeal to the higher law which even today permits the
injured husband to seek satisfaction for violence done
marital property rights. The sequestered position of
women of good social standing in the Greek states may
account for the fact that famous love affairs of the
Greek world are, like those of Damon and Pythias,
Socrates and Alcibiades, between men and men, pos
sibly quite as often as, in the case of Hero and Lean-
der, between men and women. The oldest Greek
romance at our disposal deals with a series of rather
melodramatic adventures of a boy and a girl during
their separation from each other in which the element
of love is not very prominent after the rather startling
first chapters.1 Plutarch's discussion of love throws
only a too vivid hght upon the lack of any clear sense
of sex morahty. 1 Greek Romances.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 175
The very modem society of Rome was, as is shown
in the cynical advice of Ovid, not unacquainted with
love affairs as weh as with less respectable relations
between the sexes, and in the later Latin hterature
romance plays no inconsiderable role; but even here
the ghost of sensuahty wih not be laid. True, the
Roman world was not the sex-orgy apologists have
sometimes pictured it. One has only to recah the
numerous inscriptions on the graves of husbands and
wives, or the charming story of Phny and his young
wife to see that in an age commonly held to be without
such redeeming characteristics, the course of true
love often ran clean and winsome. Further, in a world
like Rome where personal values were beginning to
dominate many social situations and to be recognized
by law, it is not surprising to find that the proprietary
rights of the husband in his wife represented by the
cum manu form of marriage steadily disappeared in the
more equitable and equal relationship in which the
woman maintained her own seh-direction, and did not
come into the actual control of the husband. It was a
far cry from the Blonde Beast carrying off his woman
to the highly conventionalized marriage relation in
which the wife passed from the control of her father to
that of her husband; but it was no unimportant journey
from that position to the freedom of the matron and
the independence of the maid of the Roman Empire.
But even in the hght of these facts the relations of men

176 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
and women of the Roman world were not free from
economic traditions.
The Middle Ages are commonly regarded as the very
chmax of romantic love and this description is certainly
not altogether untrue to the stories of the Minnesinger.
The attitude of the knight toward his lady-love was in
the highest romantic. For her he risked his hfe in
adventures, taught himseh music and poetry as well
as feats of arms, and if by any chance the lady-love was
unkindly he was hable to weep and even become insane
— a calamity which is said to have happened three
times to Launcelot.
The flaw in this romantic love of chivalry was that it
was not scrupulous in regard to the rights of others,
particularly of husbands. Many of the most cele
brated affairs were unlawful and the total effect of this
romantic elevation of women does not seem to have had
any marked influence upon their actual status in
society or before the law.1 Yet when one considers the
other tendencies of the Middle Ages this new romantic
love is certainly in the general line of a recognition of
something more than the traditional relations between
men and women. The idealizing tendencies of court
ship which have become one of the most precious
elements in our modern world are due in no smah
measure to the chivalric loves of the Middle Ages.
1 For well-balanced discussion see Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind,
II, chs. 23-26.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 1 77
When one considers the love affairs of the eighteenth
century as depicted in the novels of .the time, not to
mention the more serious treatises on morals, it at
first appears as if the attitude of men toward women
perpetuated the worst of the days of romantic chivalry.
The woman, unless she belonged to a social class equal
or superior to the man — and even then not always —
was never free from temptation. The unmarried man
was granted a hcense which is a sad commentary upon
the morals of the community at large. The ideas of
duty to womanhood were thus to him ah but overcome
in his right to sensual enjoyment. For woman was yet
without full personal rights. The heroines of the great
novels of the eighteenth century are, it must be con
fessed, rather insipid when compared with the heroes.
If they reahy represent the ideal of true womanhood
it is not difficult to understand the repressed position
of respectable women in England during the eighteenth
and the early part of the nineteenth centuries.
The gradual tendency, however, to view individuals
collectively and thus make the recognition of mutual
rights a prompting to doing justice has had a very
decided influence on the relation of the sexes. Eco
nomic reorganization has here been of undoubted in
fluence. Not only has the position of women as
economic individuals been recognized but their rights
both within and without the marriage bond are being
rapidly extended as a phase of justice necessitated by

178 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
both industrial and personal conditions. Whether the
institution of the family, as it has existed, is com
patible with the growing conception of men and women
as free spirits may weh be an element of anxiety, but
the general tendency in our modern world is towards
a recognition of social obhgation to women, not only
those who are married and others who are respectable,
but to their more unfortunate sisters. Prostitution
itseh can not obscure women's personal place in
society.1 Thus in a field where physical control over individ
uals has persisted perhaps as long as in any other, we
can see at the present time the emergence of a roman
ticism, no longer essentially selfish as in the days of
chivalry or licentious as in the eighteenth century, but
determined to see in sex no bar to reciprocal rights;
that is to say, to estabhsh justice in sex relations.
St. Paul undoubtedly brought to the home elements of
spiritual value which were not present in the non-
Christian civilization of the Roman Empire, but even
St. Paul did not undertake to free the Graeco-Roman
wife from the control of her husband. Yet in our day,
just where the task is particularly difficult, we can see
in sex morahty the growing movement towards giving
justice rather than insisting upon inherited rights.
1 See Thomas, Sex and Society. Radical views will be found in
socialistic views summarized by Walling, Larger Aspects of Socialism,
ch. 13 and in a new feminist hterature of which the writings of Ellen
Key are typical.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 179
3. As another illustration of this same tendency, I
need only briefly recur again to developments within
the industrial world.
When capitahsm first came into existence, both in
theory and in practice the question of economic rights
was answered in a one-sided fashion. As to the rights
of the employer and the capitahst there was httle or
no question; but that the workingman had definite
economic rights there was no such assurance. Theoret
ically, of course, he had freedom of movement, but
practicahy he was at the mercy of a relentless compe
tition which was steadily driving him toward a state
of economic slavery. The so-called " Iron Law of
Wages " was by no means so final as Lassalle found in
his interpretation of the wage theory of Ricardo, but
the early stages of our present industrial order fur
nished not a few facts with which such a view as
Lassahe's might be argued.
The history of the labor conflict since the beginning
of the so-called industrial revolution, has been marked
by much the same characteristics both as a whole and
as it has emerged between particular groups. There
has been, first, the attempt of the trades to form unions
for self-protection; then the opposition of this attempt
on the part of employers; in consequence when the
unions have struck the employers have endeavored to
carry the fight to a finish. Sometimes this has resulted
in favor of the one party and sometimes of the other,

180 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
but antagonism has gradually led to an intelligent
understanding between the two parties. -Collective
bargaining on the part of the laborer as weh as of the
owners of machines has fohowed. Contemporan
eously with the development of this stage there has
also been the development of some degree of enforced
arbitration on the part of the state. Thus in a general
way the struggle for industrial rights is running the
same course as that for pohtical rights. Already, the
stage of giving justice is in sight.
Actual economic operations are no longer based
upon the supposition that labor is strictly a com
modity but it is becoming more evident that laborers
are partners in the productive process, and as such
mustlbe recognized as possessing personal rights. This
new attitude of justice, as yet only in experimental
stage, appears in the industrial reorganization of
some of the great clothing houses of Chicago and in
such plans as the Protocol of New York which though
technically dead yet continues to hve in other forms.
As one of the most effective labor mediators in the
United States has said, the new type of labor union
which embodies this new tendency, differs from the
older type in that it seeks to cooperate with rather
than fight the employer. Therein is the giving of
industrial justice based on personal values.
The efforts of certain great corporations which stih
hesitate to trust trades unionism to reach a personal,

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 181
although of necessity collective relationship with their
employees,1 has caused no small amount of discussion,
but the principles which have been enunciated by Mr.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,2make it evident thatwhatever
may be the success of this particular scheme there has
come into the industrial order a new sense of the rights
of the laboring man. In other words, we have already
entered upon a type of industrial relationship in which
the struggle which was at first one of strength between
labor and capital, later becoming a struggle between
laborers and capitahst employers, is now leading to a
cooperation between two parties, each having rights
and consequent mutual duties. When one contrasts
these most recent developments in the industrial order
with the machine-breaking of the eighteenth century
and the " direct action " of the more radical modern
syndicalists, the hopefulness of the tendency becomes
apparent. In the hght of the entire movement for the
last one hundred and fifty years, arid without idealiz
ing conditions which are intolerable to one or the other
of the opposing parties, I am convinced that this
tendency toward cooperation represents the general
current of industrial development. The giving of
justice is supplementing and httle by httle is making
1 The most striking instance is that of the Colorado Fuel & Iron
Company. The details of the plan of this company are pubhshed and
widely circulated. Opinion as to their practicabihty is as yet
divided. 2 Atlantic Monthly, January, 1916.

1 82 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
unnecessary the struggle for rights. Personal values
are becoming the legitimate goal of economic striving.1
4. The change in penology is equahy significant.
Because the criminal is regarded as an individual
possessed of personal worth, the aim of punishment is
rapidly shif ting from a blind demand for retribution —
a sort of legitimatized lynch-law — to a serious
attempt to develop the personal values of the criminal
individual. The more we study the various classes of
criminals, women as weh as men, do we see that they
are as a rule physicahy defective and in need of proper
medical care. Our new type of penal institution is
now attempting to provide this care for the criminal
and to prepare him for such accretion of personal
worth in society as his physical, mental and moral
power make possible.
1 An important illustration of the growing power of this conception
of the workingman's right to personal recognition in the productive
process is to be seen in the history of the rise of social democracy in
Germany notwithstanding the early opposition of Bismarck. A
similar struggle is already beginning in Japan where industrialism has
developed with great rapidity during the past twenty years. Many of
the older leaders of Japanese thought are loath to substitute legal for
the old feudal relations of laborer and employer. Yet legislation is
already in process and a labor movement in the modern sense of the
term can hardly be long postponed.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 183
V
These facts point towards a very important social
principle which we are slow to see and concerning
which facts permit hardly more than prophetic con
clusions. The principle is this: Permanent social
wehare comes more certainly from giving justice than
from the fight for rights.1 No progress has come from
struggle for the sake of gaining rights that could not
have been accomphshed more effectively and per
manently had the possessors of rights that had
degenerated to legal privileges freely surrendered — or
better, democratized — them. The failure to meet
obligations to those without privilege leads to revolu
tion. When a privilege is seen to be a monopolized
social right, to democratize it is elemental good
sense. Those who care to test this thesis as it concerns
war wih find a mass of material weh worth considera
tion, whatever may be one's attitude toward pacifism,
1 Recall the noble words of Burke in his speech on Conciliation with
America. " I mean to give peace. Peace implies reconciliation; and
where there has been a material dispute, reconciliation does in a manner
always imply concession on the one part or the other. In this state of
things I make no difficulty in affirming that the proposal ought to
originate from us. . . . The superior power may offer peace with
honour and with safety. Such an offer from such a power will be
attributed to magnanimity." Burke had good arguments at his com
mand in the outburst of loyalty in the colonies which followed the
repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766.

1 84 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
in the volume by Norman Angeh, The Great Illusion.1
I wish, however, to call attention to three historical
illustrations of another sort which I beheve are
particularly significant.
The first is the surrender of feudal rights on the 4th
of August, 1789, in the States-General of France.
Students of the period immediately preceding the
French Revolution have been much impressed by the
insistence of the cahiers upon the need of abolishing
the abuse of rights and privileges which had survived
from older periods. The complaints of these cahiers
when organized and brought before the States-General
evoked not only indignation but self-sacrifice among
the hberal noblesse. In what Mirabeau cahed " an
orgy of self-sacrifice " the noblesse voted to surrender
privilege after privilege, right after right. Their atti
tude of mind was the outgrowth of the spiritual
development in France during the preceding hah
generation. The hberal members of the noblesse, some
of whom were to lose their hves in the course of the
Revolution, felt the injustice that was done the
peasantry and were ready to sacrifice rights in order
to give justice to others.2
1 One can only speculate as to what would have been the fruit of
Great Britain's adoption of the pohcy set forth so eloquently by
Burke in his speech on Conciliation with America.
1 See for a rather unusual treatment of " the spirit of 1789 " as
seen in the cahiers, Robinson, The New History, ch. 7.

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 185
Now the significant fact is that when the per
manent advance accomphshed by the French Revolu
tion is estimated, it wih be seen that it was httle more
than what was done freely on the 4th of August before
any serious violence had appeared. What is popularly
known as the French Revolution might almost be
described as a struggle on the part of the bourgeoisie
and, for a time, the proletariat of France to preserve
the rights which the feudal nobles had thus freely sur
rendered but which were threatened by the attempt
of Europe to force back the old regime upon the
Repubhc. A similar illustration was given by Japan during
the storm and stress period which fohowed the opening
of the empire to the world and the reestabhshment of
the power of the Mikado. It would have been easy for
the Shogun (who died only recently) to have organized
many of his nobles about him in a civil war. He,
however, saw that such a course would mean only
disaster for his nation and he therefore voluntarily
surrendered the rights which his family had held for
generations and retired to private hfe. The civil chaos
which was threatened was thus avoided and Japan
entered upon its remarkable career of adjustment to
the modern world order.
The third instance is not so distinct. I refer to the
entire course of our international relations with Great
Britain for the last hundred years. The state of mind

1 86 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
in the United States after the Revolution and the War
of 1812 was not one of complete friendhness toward
the mother-country, and yet for a hundred years there
has been peace between the two countries. In part,
of course, this has been due to economic interest, partly
to the racial similarities, common language and com
munity of traditions. But as a matter of fact the
hundred years of peace have not been years of peace-
ableness. There is not a foot of land on our frontier
over which we have not quarreled. There is not a
codfish on the Banks that has not been submitted to
arbitration. But notwithstanding their quarrels each
nation has been willing to sacrifice something for the
benefit of the other. And down to the present admin
istration, which has brought about the revocation of
a law alleged to violate treaty agreements relative to
the Panama Canal, the two nations have maintained
peace and friendship.
These three illustrations wih, I hope, serve to point
out what may fairly weh be said to be an incipient
movement that has been disturbed but not destroyed
by the outbreak of war. Both within society and
between nations the acquisition and defense of rights
are being supplemented by a recognition of a social
solidarity which leads to a recognition of social justice.
The creative power of this sohdarity is as yet in the
making, but it is even now a prophecy of a better day
when men shah see the good sense of the teaching long

RIGHTS AND JUSTICE 187
ago given by Jesus that it is better to love than to
quarrel, to forgive than to avenge, to give justice than
to fight for rights a sense of human brotherhood has
come to regard as the possession of ah rather than of a
party or a class.
We have not arrived at Utopia but we are beginning
to think in terms of a human solidarity in which the
giving of justice shah replace a competitive struggle
for economic supremacy.

LECTURE VI
THE SPIRITUAL OPPORTUNITY IN A PERIOD
OF RECONSTRUCTION
In the preceding lectures we haye considered history
as an actual process which involves both individuals
and society as a whole, and we have proposed the
question as to what sort of interpretation is to be
placed upon it in view of the facts at our disposal. We
found that no single interpretation is possible, but
that at least two interpretations are demanded: the
one impersonal, involving the operations of geographic
and economic forces; and the other personal. This
latter finds the significance of human history in neither
the environment or the human race itself, but in the
total situation of man-in-nature. In order to under
stand the actual movements of history, we first roughly
classified the materials which seemed to he properly
both within and without the range of an impersonal
materiahstic interpretation of history. The number
of those which implied personal elements we found to
be by no means smah. With these at our disposal we
proceeded to examine history as an actual process, a
concrete socio-psychological movement of hfe. In
this we found a uniformly present characteristic,
188

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 1 89
namely, that as social hfe grows it becomes decreas-
ingly impersonal. That is to say, history when
examined in the long perspective tends to move away
from those conditions primarily induced by geographic
and economic forces. We then proceeded to ask
whether this general tendency away from the imper
sonal contained within itseh positive characteristics.
These we found to be three: the tendency to sub
stitute inner sanctions and inhibitions for outward
authority based on force either human or divine; to
recognize the worth of the mdividual as personal rather
than as merely economic; and to substitute through
social action, itseh increasingly democratic, the giving
of justice for the insistence upon rights. In the course
of the development of each of these spiritual values we
saw the advance from physical to economic tensions
give rise to customs which in turn proceeded onward
toward free choice on the part of both individuals and
groups and of rational action in the hght of the more
personal values. In this evidence of process is also a
key to its understanding — to use Lamprecht's
words, the discovery of a " psychic energy." 1
Whether or not this treatment has brought convic
tion in every detail, I trust that it has adduced reasons
for believing that in the totahty of history there are
forces at work which are personal as weh as those
1 What is History, p. 27. Cf. his words (p. 29) " History in itself is
nothing but applied psychology."

190 SPLRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
which are economic. History I venture to hope has
appeared to be not only, as Herbert Spencer would
say, an evolution in the sense of a passage from homo
geneous conditions to highly multiple and hetero
geneous states by successive seh-differentiations, but
also as something more. If Tennyson's behef that
through the ages one increasing purpose runs may
seem too precisely teleological, Spencer's formula is
too impersonal. The one view must supplement and
control the other.
It may seem to some that there remains the decision
as to which of the two groups of forces is reahy ultimate
for the understanding of social experience. Personahy
I am suspicious of questions as to relative importance
of social forces. If there is any habit of thought more
dangerous than that of antithetical exposition — for
who of us reahy knows enough to set reahty in con
tradictories ? — it is that of constantly questioning
whether this or that fact is the more important. To
ask whether the individual or society is more impor
tant is like asking whether the oak or the acorn is
primary. Historical situations must be viewed syn
thetically, not analytically. I would again repeat the
caution that no simply monistic interpretation of his
tory is satisfactory. We must recognize the existence
of numberless forces in human hfe any one of which
may at times appear to be overcoming the other. The
practical situation, however, is that few historians

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 1 91
seem capable of holding firmly to more than one inter
pretative hypothesis. The habit of analyzing history
into minute problems capable of highly intensive
treatment serves to detract attention from the his
torical process itseh. Naturahy this mental attitude
tends to emphasize that force which for the moment
seems dominant, particularly if it is immediately
emphasized in events and documents. As a result the
nexus of historical events is most easily found in
economic conditions. Too often the impression made
by such a view of history, even when it admits its limi
tations, is that the only reahy appreciable forces in
history are geographic and economic. For these rather
than the spiritual forces are in the front rank of atten
tion. The effect of such an over-emphasis is far more
than a failure in scientific accuracy. It induces an
attitude of mind which tends to belittle anything
except economic forces, however much ideological
forces — to use the word of Marx — may be theoreti
cally admitted. As a consequence, the study of his
tory is, I fear, too often lacking in moral inspiration
and deadening from its atmosphere of materiahstic
determinism. There is, of course, also the similar danger already
mentioned, that an over-emphasis of the non-
economic forces of history may neglect concrete and
intelhgible economic causes. Yet, even in view of the
danger of such an over-emphasis of the spiritual hfe,

192 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
one cannot overlook the general tendency which
characterizes the past to elevate spiritual values. Now
a general tendency is not to be identified with the
various forces of which it is the resultant. Any one of
these may repeatedly seem to overpower the other. If
we neglect this general tendency it is by no means
difficult so to accumulate the triumph of economic
forces as to see in them predominance. But as we have
seen, when one comes to compare our present situation
with that of the dim past, we see the operation of
many forces but only one tendency. And that is
spiritual. Such a fact is certainly conducive to rational
optimism. True, when we take shorter views, this
tendency becomes less apparent, and special currents
of change obtrude themselves. Particularly in a
period of reconstruction like our own, when the ele
ments of disharmony and consequent struggle are so
prominent, is it easy to doubt the trustworthiness of
any idealistic conclusion based upon general tenden
cies. We are always subject to the influence of
Schopenhauer and his fellow-pessimists. Or, in place
of this type of pessimism, we are led to distrust history
because of the hyper-individualism of Nietzsche which
would teach us to look at the forces of social evolution
as lacking in moral quahties, and at the long stmggle
by which we have gained our present ideals as threat
ening the triumph of a slave-morality. But such
pessimism or even distmst of spiritual reahties in

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 193
human experience, the real tendency in history denies.
I am not interested to pass moral judgments upon the
past, but the tendency away from the economic to the
personal which is operative in the net result of forces
making history as a whole, cannot be neglected by an
historian with any regard for scientific completeness.

Whatever vocabulary we adopt, the steadiness of
tendency towards the ever increase of personal values
inevitably suggests if not a strictly teleological inter
pretation of history, at least the conviction of Fhnt,
that in history we can " obtain a veritable increase of
our knowledge of God's character and ways." To
analyze processes into efficient and final causes is in
my opinion hopelessly to misrepresent the movement
itseh. The only interpretation possible is a description
of the general resultant of the co-working of various
forces from the first observable terminus a quo to the
last observable terminus ad quern. If in this resultant
there can be found anything analogous to the opera
tions of reason, we cannot fairly deny Divine direction;
not, it is tme, in the sense of the older theological inter
pretations of history, but in the sense that we see
evidence of creative rationality in the laws of nature.
Indeed may we not expect even clearer vision of such
Reason ? For in a world of persons who of necessity
have sprung from and embody the forces of the

194 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
universe, should we not expect that the immanent God
would express himself in general personal progress?
This is just what we find. The words of Professor
Robinson l seem to me to furnish an appropriate
description of this tendency — "Even those of us who
have httle taste for mysticism have to recognize a
mysterious unconscious impulse which appears to be
a concomitant of natural order. It would seem as if
this impulse has always been unsettling the existing
constitutions and pushing forward, groping after some
thing more elaborate and intricate than what already
existed. This vital impulse, elan vital as Bergson cahs
it, represents the inherent radicahsm of nature herself.
... At last, perhaps, the long disputed sin against
the Holy Ghost has been found; it may be the refusal
to cooperate with the vital principle of betterment."
Such a statement, true as it is, leaves unsaid, however,
a truth which seems to me exhibited by the general
course of history, namely, that this elan vital, this vital
principle can be described only as spiritual — the
expression of a supreme Person. I find a similar
interpretation of history suggested in the statement of
Professor Giddings2 that social evolution is but a
phase of cosmic evolution. For, unless humanity is
utterly detached from such evolution — a supposition
impossible on its face — personahsm is found in cosmic
1 New History, p. 264.
2 Principles of Sociology, p. 363.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 195
evolution. Else whence emerged those activities to
which we apply the term " personal" ?
The Hegehan school of interpretation has suffered
of late something of an eclipse of interest, but whoever
would reahy get the fuh effect of ideahsm cannot
neglect Hegel. No man has emphasized more" clearly
than he the antithesis between spirit and matter, and
no one, unless possibly it be Nietzsche, has striven
more vigorously to show that the essence of the
spiritual life is freedom. The end of historical develop
ment he holds to be this freedom, and always repre
sents the course of history as a series of stages in the
development of freedom. It is true that the Hegehan
view when rigorously urged leads in two opposite
directions; on the one side, as viewed by Marx toward
determinism, and on the other in the succession of
Hegel, von Treitschke and the German, state-philo
sophers generahy to an identification of ideahsm
with the German Kultur. Each of these conclusions
seems an anti-climax, and may safely be left to the
adjudication of time. That which to my mind is
possibly the reahy permanent contribution made by
Hegel to our understanding of history is not so much
his unforgettable framework of thesis, antithesis and
synthesis, but that of the World Spirit, the Weltgeist.
With his opinion that this Weltgeist is migratory,
working not in the world at large, but in individual
states, we may weh hesitate to agree. The march of

196 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the Spirit from China to India, to Persia, Greece,
Rome, at last to emerge most successfuhy in Germany
is obviously artificial if not Chauvinistic. We cannot
so readily justify Prussian ideals. But with ah its
Teutonic provincialism, Hegehanism is none the less
an argument for the working of spiritual forces not to
be identified with man in human development.
The idealistic philosophy as it appears in Lotze is
more genuinely historical.1 In the thought of Lotze
there is no incompatibility between the mechanical
and the teleplogical view of the world. With him
there is no denial of the influence upon mankind of the
physical forces in the midst of which they hve. But
the chief end of history he insists is that of affording
mankind the opportunity for unselfish action and the
enjoyment of consequent happiness. This is doubtless
only another expression for the vital imperative of
personahty to seek to develop itseh by proper exercise
in the social whole. The process of Lotze like the
elan vital of Bergson cannot be kept within the limits
of non-personahty. The mind inevitably sees in this
tendency the operation of God, and while caution is
necessary in any positive affirmations, some thought
of World Spirit cannot be excluded from a conception
of history in which so many elements of personal prog
ress are to be seen. It is, I think, a most significant
fact that philosophies of history are so commonly
1 See especially Microcosm, bk. is.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 197
driven to a conclusion of this sort. There is indeed no
better theistic argument than an observation of social
progress. Tme it wih not explain the misery of the
passing experience, nor will it give us a super-monarch
in heaven, but it wih give us something more personal
than a Power not ourselves that is making for right
eousness. We cannot create God by capitalizing " power."
We must explain personal tendencies by supreme
personal forces. It is only contradiction to say that
" the spiritual hfe with its new world should be a
product of mere man, and that that hfe should
remain within man and at the same time lead in its
essence beyond him. This contradiction cannot be
overcome otherwise than by our recognizing and
acknowledging in the spiritual life a universal hfe,
which transcends man, is shared by him, and raises
him to itseh." 1 The God disclosed by the social evolu
tion of man from dependence upon physical nature
to an ever increasing spiritual freedom may not be
individuahstic personahty of the human sort, but if
He may be super-personal He cannot be impersonal.
For personahty is in the universe since men are men.
And persons with a Super-person can meet.2
1 Eucken, Life's Basis and Life's Ideal, p. 143.
2 See Rashdall, Philosophy and Religion, chs. 1, 2, especially pp.
54-56; Martineau, A Study of Religion, I, 196-235, 254-313; Illing-
worth, Personality Human and Divine.

198 SPLRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
II
With this discovery of an inner spiritual force in
history, dependent though its workings may be upon
natural and economic forces, comes the cah to become
dehberate co-workers in the spiritual tendencies of
our own day. History, let me once more insist, is not
a mass of abstract principles but of men and women
hke ourselves seeking, often with precise consciousness
of their efforts, to realize in the midst of the process
from the impersonal to the personal, their own spiritual
capacities in the adventure, not always simple or easy,
of actual living. This imperative within human life is
a phase of social psychology, a constant impulse of
the spiritual to rise above the destructible materi
ahstic forces of hfe. By the virtue of its very nature,
human life, while having its activities cahed into
operation by the struggle with nature and consequent
economic tensions, invariably presses on to subject
itseh to ideals and motives which are personal and
spiritual, moral rather than physical, socially minded
to the point of sacrifice rather than insistent upon
rights. In this human aspect of the cosmic process
we evidently have a hne of demarcation which cannot
be overlooked by any person who seeks to make his
hfe of reahy historical moment.
The fundamental moral distinction which men and
women entering upon hfe should make is not a choice

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 199
of this or that profession or occupation. It is rather
the choice as to whether they shah make their hves
count as personahy social or impersonahy acquisitive
agents. Shah they make the dominant aim of hfe
increased personal worth in the midst of and for the
sake of other persons as weh as themselves, or wih
they, disregarding the personal element in others,
seek to use them as tools for their own economic or
other aggrandizement? In other words, wih they
seek to cooperate with the general movement in
humanity toward larger personal values, or wih they
ally themselves with those who, discounting such
values, look only to their immediate advantage as dis
covered in the acquisition of impersonal goods ? Such
a question as this I fear is not always faced by men and
women who have their hves even partially in their own
keeping. The struggle for " rights " important as it
has been, too often obscures the higher values toward
which humanity as a whole tends and to which as
individuals we should constantly look. The issue is
sharply drawn by Jesus. But it is easier to give a sort
of aesthetic consent to moral ideahsm on the pages of
the New Testament or of Epictetus and Marcus Aure-
lius than it is to make the same ideahsm operative in
one's own hfe. The backward puh of inherited privi
lege and customs — often in the very process of being
outgrown — is too often honored as conscience. For
this reason too many men are content to be social

200 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
parasites, deriving such moral sanctions and inhibitions
as they may have from the general environment in
which they happen to find themselves. As the spiritual
urge of environment is seldom intense, and as the
appeal of the Wih to Get is extremely individual, such
men, while not avowedly abandoning the quest of
spiritual ideals, tend to accommodate these ideals to
the actual imperative of immediate pleasure or gain.
Admitting that they cannot serve both God and
Mammon, they organize, as it were, a sort of corpora
tion, " God-Mammon & Co. Ltd.," and serve the
corporation, hoping thus to get advantage from both
its elements. A " practicahy " minded man once
remarked, " the ' theoretical ' man cannot see that
there is a difference between business morahty and
moral morahty."
Such half-hearted, compromising spirituality is
sadly indifferent to the crisis in which we reahy find
ourselves. The pressure of materiahstic thought and
interests was never greater than today. He who is
not for materialism must be against it as the dominant
influence in our modern hfe. Anything less than
heroic devotion to the spiritual values of life is incom
parably dangerous today. Even respectability is too
often the worst enemy of justice.
But this cah to cooperation with the spiritual forces
within history is no cah to a forlorn hope. If our
interpretation of history as a whole is correct, the man

OPPORTUNITY LN RECONSTRUCTION 201
who chooses the vicarious hfe has not chosen the losing
side. He is cooperating with the unquestionable
tendency of human progress. He is not concerned in
having God on his side, but, to use the striking words
of Abraham Lincoln; can be " sure that he is on God's
side." And he wih see that what Jesus Christ meant
by sacrifice is simply such an ordering of the relative
values of hfe as to make the spiritual most valuable,
and therefore to surrender something, which though
it be hfe itseh, is of less value. The kingdom of God,
according to Jesus, must be gained by sacrifice, but it
is the sort of sacrifice which a merchant makes who,
finding a pearl which is worth more than ah his pos
sessions, exchanges ah for that incomparably valu
able jewel. m
Loyalty to spiritual values as the goal of human
struggle under the influence of physical and economic
forces is particularly needed in our modem world
where so much history is in the making.
1. One particularly loud cah for spiritual reinforce
ment comes from democracy, history's supreme experi
ment in the seh-administered cooperation of those who
mutuahy recognize personal values.
How frequently during the past months have we
reexamined our democratic ideahsm! How appre
hensively have we searched our minds lest we should

202 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
discover within us a fundamental distrust of that poht
ical ideal which our fathers organized and bequeathed
to us. That we are not a nation in the sense that
Prussia is a nation is apparent to us ah. The high
governmental efficiency which would make the nation
itseh rather than the personal worth of the individual
supreme has stirred our wonder and then our anxiety.
Are our own democratic ideals to cohapse ? Obviously
we have a conception of the direction of history radi
cally different from that of those who can think of the
state only as a self-centered unity protected by a free
trade within and by protective tariff and force of
arms from without. For such patriots the nation is
supreme and the mdividual has no value to be set in
defiance to the welfare of the state. Is this a truer
ideal than that of democracy ?
We yet maintain our ideal of the individual as one
who has a right to know about government, the right
to express an unfavorable opinion about state pohcies;
whose mind and hps are his own and whose mdividual
worth through development are ends which the state
must serve. In our estimate of democracy there has
been a divine ideahsm which has refused to conceive
of wealth as our ultimate goal. Dohar diplomacy has
never become with us dohar individualism. We have
looked to the fathers of our Repubhc and have seen
in them men who dared sacrifice for something more
than economic advantage.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 203
But at this point we of late have been cahed to halt
by those who challenge our faith in democracy by
insisting that httle is to be found in early American
history other than the influence of economic forces.
Thus Professor Beard rather summarily disposes of the
social mind that found governmental expression in the
election of Jefferson as President, and stih furnishes a
term with which to conjure: 1 " Jeffersonian democ
racy simply meant the possession of the Federal
Government by the agrarian masses led by an aris
tocracy of slave-owning planters, and the theoretical
repudiation of the right to use the government for the
benefit of any capitalistic groups, fiscal, banking or
manufacturing." It is idle to deny a large element of
fact in these words, although it is hard to beheve that
they are the chief goods for which our forefathers
fought and bled and died. Tme, Jeffersonian democ
racy as it developed in the struggle with Federalism is
a phase of practical as weh as theoretical politics.
But an historical fallacy bom of too exclusive selection
of data is in Professor Beard's word " simply." As a
matter of fact, even though Jeffersonian democracy
as a movement that gathered about Jefferson's per
sonahty and pohcies was probably not the transcen
dental affair some of his admirers have beheved, it
meant more than what is contained in Professor
Beard's formula. Back of it we find personal values.
1 Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, p. 467.

204 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Even as early as the directions given by various col
onies to their delegates to the Stamp Act Congress of
1765, we can see a growing sense of pohtical self-
reliance and seriousness among the colonists. There
was something more at stake in that precursor of the
Continental Congress than the Stamp Act, just as
there was something more at stake in the revolt of the
colonies ten years later. Democracy at that time had
not been placed on a philosophical basis, and it was by
no means as mature as today.1 In the generation that
fohowed the Stamp Act Congress were not only a
determination to safeguard the right to property and
property itseh, but also a new sense of the worth of
human life, a new ideal of pohtical equahty, and a
stern resolve to maintain these in the interest of the
future of the new world. However much weight is
given to Jeffersonian distrust of the commercial and
financial classes and his over-estimate of agriculture,
Jefferson's democracy as a political creed was more
than his democracy as a pohcy of practical politics.
To doubt this is to overlook the sense of human
equahty enforced by pioneer American life, the ideal
izing of such experience through the sturdy Prot
estantism of German settlers in the western regions
of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the preaching of a
1 Even in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 there was practi
cahy no reference to the democracies of the ancient world, although
James Madison had made most elaborate studies in preparation for
the event.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 205
democratic Christianity by Robinson and other " New
Light " and Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist
preachers, the mingling of Calvinism with the three
R's in backwood schools. Ah these induced a social
mind which Patrick Henry embodied and to which
Jefferson, with or without the influence of French phil
osophy, gave allegiance.1 To this social mind it was
self-evident, not only that national politics must exalt
agriculture above commerce, but also that ah men were
created equal and that each had the inahenable right
to life, hberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That such absolute ideahsm was to be tempered by
experience and that economic interests found expres
sion in the Constitution and in the legislation set up
by the Federahsts, and that the pohtical conflict
which placed Jefferson and later Jackson in the Presi
dency concerned commercial, agrarian and financial
pohcies and vested interests, no student of American
history would be apt to deny. It may even be ad
mitted that the theory as to the nature of the Union
so urged in the storm and stress period preceding the
Civil War was possibly more apologetic than reahy
historical.2 1 I am indebted to an unpublished lecture by my colleague W. E.
Dodd for suggestions at this point.
2 Yet this concession is by no means beyond question. See the
admirable discussion of McLaughlin, The Courts, the Constitution and
Parties, especially 198 sq. in which it is argued that " as far as one can
find a consistent principle [in making the Constitution] it is this, that
by compact of the most solemn and original kind a new pohtical

206 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
But our national forefathers, while less truly demo
cratic than are we, were quite as much concerned to
protect the right to hold property as property itself.
Ideals as weh as economic interests were represented
in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. One cannot
judge the temper of the new American people by
simply classifying votes upon the acceptance of the
Constitution that Convention evolved. Attention
must be paid also to the more general discussion of
the new state constitutions and in particular the Bills
of Rights of the various states. Other elements than
financial appear in Jefferson's opposition to the Jay
treaty which so solidified the Repubhcan party he led.
And this spiritual inheritance is as truly ours as was
the conflict embodied in the compromises of the Con
stitution the tragical inheritance of our fathers.
Pohtical ideals formulated both in the Declaration of
Independence and in the Constitution have once and
again reappeared in our history as social impulses.
They wih stih appear. Men may be misled by them,
but they beheve them. If need be they wih die for
them. And what is even harder they wih pay taxes
to support them.
I cannot beheve that our present suspicion of the
faith in the supreme worth of democracy and even of
organization and a new indissoluble unit was being reared in America."
This " compact " theory was abandoned in the arguments of anti-
slavery interpreters of the Constitution. They insisted that the
" people " was older than the states.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 207
individuals in which we once gloried can ultimately
sink into a worship of a state organized for economic
and mihtary efficiency. The entire evolution of our
national hfe has rested on hopes which get their justi
fication not only in the necessary control of banks and
trusts, but in the conviction that in some way we are
organizing a human society in which mdividuals shah
have the opportunity to develop themselves according
to their own direction, where children shall have larger
equahty of opportunity than their parents, and where
economic determinism shah be offset by a pubhc wih
which, properly enlightened, shah fit more equitably
the law of the land upon the economic conditions which
help shape 'individual hfe. Though we may be at
times over-eager to beheve that what ought to be
reahy is, we are seeking to organize a democracy in
which rights shah be democratized, the individual
shah be given full opportunity for self-development,
and the stmggle for rights shah be superseded by the
collective giving of justice. It is an ideal to which
neither we nor humanity at large have yet attained,
but to which society is coming much nearer than some
apparently imagine. We need only again to take
account of stock of our spiritual assets and uncom
promisingly set ourselves against being forced into
idealistic bankruptcy. At ah events democracy has
not fahen to the state from which it hfted aristocracy.
Democracy of this newer age is weh worth a stmggle!

208 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Nor is it impracticable optimism to which we sum
mon generous and sacrificiahy social minds. In the
struggle for democracy in which we are now involved
we are not combatting but cooperating with the pre
vailing tendency of social evolution. Pohtical origins
are not social goals. In the growing venture of the
past to rely on the giving of justice rather than on the
fight for rights, we find the prophecy of real democracy.
In it alone can we hope to embody the forces that have
repeatedly hfted history from the pressure of imper
sonal nature and economic needs and external author
ity based on force, to a rehance upon moral persons
graduahy being taught the final worth of individuals
and the even more difficult lesson that it shah profit
nothing if they or their nations gain the whole world
and yet lose their own souls.
2. Such a cah to renewed loyalty to democracy is an
echo of the louder cah to loyalty to the fundamental
principles of hfe embodied in the rehgion of Jesus.
Here again there is no appeal to join a forlorn hope.
The recognition of spiritual values and forces in history
confirms the sanity and, if the expression may be used,
the good sense of Jesus. It is a pity that our sympa
thies and prejudices weaken our appreciation of Jesus
as an historical force. But such he must be considered
by any historian of modern culture. If we could rid
ourselves of ah conventional attitudes and professional
language with its suggestion of cant, our appreciation

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 209
of Jesus would be seen to be no expression of ecclesias
tical bigotry, but a thoroughly objective estimate of
his place in the process of human hfe from the physical
to the spiritual. Theology, important as it is to reh
gion, must ultimately shape itseh within the limits set
by religious-social experience in which faith in personal
values ever more perfectly revealed in history and the
cosmos has its indispensable office.
When we thus approach the spiritual history of
modern times we are at once struck with the failure of
professed Christian thought and ideahsm to appreciate
Jesus as a teacher or, better, revealer of elemental
spiritual laws. Christians have been very keen to
beheve the gospel about Jesus, but they have not been
so eager to receive the gospel of Jesus. Even a super
ficial examination of Christian thought and dogma wih
make this plain. It is certainly most remarkable that
only within the last century while democracy has reahy
been in the making have men seriously begun to study
the words and hfe of the Jesus of the Gospels. It is
the ignorance of his words, or rather, the failure to
build them into the constructive elements of our
creeds and doctrines that accounts for so much of the
rehance upon force which has passed itseh off as
Christian. We are not yet removed from that admira
tion of the Greek militaristic courage which so blazes
forth in that most unlovely of masterpieces, Michael
Angelo's Last Judgment. We have thought of Jesus

2IO SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
as standing for his own rights, as driving out the cattle
from the temple area, as casting a sword into the earth.
It is tme the proper interpretation of the Scriptural
passages upon which this so-called virile Christianity
has been built serves to question its final value. But
men of " virihty " are not eager to hsten to those who
would teach them that virihty, if it be not touched by
a willingness to give justice to others, may be easily
turned into mere bellicosity. He who reahy under
stands Jesus can see that his philosophy of life is
corroborated by an inductive study of the actual
progress of human experience. To give justice rather
than to insist upon rights, to rely upon inner rather
than outward moral control, to have every element of
hfe expressive of the same spirit of love that God him
self exhibits, and to regard love as not a desire to gain
popular approval or even to get friends, but as a
sacrificial determination to do to others as one would
like to have others do to one's seh — ah this can be
found as truly in any cathohc reading of the facts of
human history as in the words of Jesus. As has been
repeatedly said, social evolution conditioned as it is by
the impersonal and economic world is yet superior to
that world. It is a spiritual movement which, if it be
prolonged, will bring the world under the sway of the
ideals of Jesus himseh.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 211
IV
We can already see this advance of Christian
ideahsm in three important fields of our modem world.
It is possible only to mention particular phases of
the matter which would easily lend itseh to extended
treatment. First, spiritual forces are already having their
influence upon the intehectual transformation through
which the world has passed, particularly since the
days of Darwin. The influence of the Origin of Species
upon thought has been repeatedly emphasized of late
and with justice. But it is impossible to attribute our
entire change of logical method to the influence of the
Origin of Species. A new mind has developed, and the
scientific world has been affected by pohtical and social
movements as weh as contributing to their progress.
At the start the intehectual revolution was unfriendly
to rehgion because of the unfriendliness of theologians
to it. Ah readers of Huxley and of the hterature of the
second hah of the nineteenth century know clearly
enough how bitter the discussion was. And it has by
no means passed. Obscurantism and reaction are stih
in operation to a degree almost unbelievable by those
unacquainted with the matter, for the thinking of many
rehgious people is unaffected by the progress of recent
intehectual thought. In consequence the baldest
literalism is sometimes identified with the truly reh-

212 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
gious spirit by which it is accompanied. Yet a divorce
between the thought and the rehgion of the world
would be disastrous to our social order. The cah of the
day is as strongly for the influence of rehgion upon
science as of science upon theology. If the church has
much at stake in the success of scientific research, the
scientist has much at stake in the success of the
church. Living as we do in an age that is ever more
emancipated in its thinking, we cannot safely ignore
the sense of the Whole and the sanity which rehgion
can bring into a world that is steadily repudiating
confidence in authority based upon external force. If
spiritual control is to be exerted from within, our
intehectual hfe must itseh be brought under such con
trol. The rapidity with which this adjustment of
facts and faith is progressing is a double assurance
that ultimate failure cannot dog the steps of the man
who attempts to show that the god of Love is the god
of Law.
The second field in which spiritual influences operat
ing through the church are seen is in the field of social
reconstruction. Any period of reconstruction is, of
course, subject to criticism, but that of which we our
selves partake has proceeded so rapidly as to disclose
innumerable opportunities for those who wish reahy
to build their spiritual impulses and powers into the
course of social evolution. There is stih abundant
need, for example, for those who in the name of the

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 213
spiritual worth of the immortal individual should
undertake to rectify industrial injustice. How rapidly
we are proceeding in this particular is evident enough
to those who can recah the attitude of organized
Christianity toward industrialism and the labor con
flict twenty years ago. Far better than could have
been hoped in those days, we see organized Chris
tianity undertaking to become the spiritual leaven of
the labor conflict. The fact that the church does not
yet see its way clearly is an argument for earnest and
intehectual souls possessed of social sympathy to
enter this highly important field of human interest.
We do not expect the church to become the center of
economic agitation, but we may fairly weh demand
that the church shah train the individual in social
sympathy so that he may become the spiritual leaven
of a growing industrial democracy. The minister of
the church today is something more than a private
chaplain cooperatively sustained. He is in a tme
sense the successor of the Apostles organizing spiritu-
ahy-minded men and women into collective spiritual
forces. Never since the history of the church began
has there been such opportunity for the evangelizing
of the reconstructing forces of society as now.1
History, after ah, is a record of how folks act, and it
is the business of a church to make the ideals of folk-
1 On this matter the hterature within the last few years has become
vast. Particular attention may well be called, however, to Peabody,

214 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
action those of Jesus Christ. The minister should see
that the future grows out of the present and that per
haps the largest contribution that he can make to inter
national morahty, to industrial disputes, and to the
entire course of social evolution wih be a group of men
and women who share in his spiritual enthusiasm and
his confidence that Jesus has revealed how God is
reahy at work in the world. The New Testament
church gained its social significance, not because it had
a program, but because its members had a Christian
attitude of mind. For a variety of reasons it did not
undertake social reconstruction, but it embodied
ideals which inspired successive social minds. The
church can render the same service today, provided
that its leaders grasp the significance, not only of the
gospel about Jesus, but the gospel of Jesus. Here is
its supreme social task: not to draw up programs but
to beget in men the sacrificial social-mindedness which
God displays in Jesus Christ. In this moment of
storm and stress when civilization is being tested and
Christianity itseh is chahenged, the cry is ever more
importunate for a rehgious leadership that shah take
Jesus seriously and beheve that it is better to give
justice than it is to fight for rights, because of the
revelation in him that God himseh so acts.
Jesus Christ and the Social Question; Rauschenbusch, The Church
and the Social Crisis and Christianizing Social Order; Cutting, The
Church and Society; Mathews, The Social Teaching of Jesus and The
Church and the Changing Order.

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 215
The third great field of opportunity for the man who
would help spiritualize a world movement hes in
foreign missions. The modem missionary movement
is something vastly greater than even its progenitors
could have foreseen. Starting as it did with rather
limited rehgious outlook, it has become the effort of
Western civilization to carry to the world which it is
about to transform the fundamental principles of
ethics and morahty upon which it is itseh — be it
never so insecurely — based. No careful observer of
modem international relations or of the non-Christian
world can fail to see the stupendous importance of this
movement. The change of attitude is already appar
ent in the treatment accorded the missionary even in
our current literature. The foreign mission enterprise
is now so vast both in organization and in expenditure
of money as to demand serious treatment on the part
of the historian. Even more does it demand attention
on the part of those who are sociahy-minded. To have
a share in the transformation of civilization does not
come often to an entire generation, but this is the
opportunity which now faces America and Europe.
Japan has reached an independence of national hfe
strikingly akin to that of our Western world. China
is more in the making, but in both alike it is obvious
to thoughtful observers that the new social, industrial
and intehectual conditions have so undermined the
basis of the older morahty as to produce a profound

2l6 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
moral crisis. The thousands of students now gathered
in the educational institutions of Asia are seeking with
an earnestness that is pathetic as truly as inspiring, a
moral basis for the civilization into which they are
entering. There is no rehgion capable of sustaining
the weight of a Western civilization except Chris
tianity itseh. To carry the Gospel to these hundreds
of millions of men who are to have such a share in the
shaping up of the history of tomorrow is an oppor
tunity and an appeal. He who doubts the power of
spiritual forces in history needs only to look at the
history of foreign missions to be reassured.
V
The conviction thrust upon us by history that the
Christian rehgion is in accord with the tendency of
human progress is certainly a gospel for those of us who
find ourselves cmshed between the mechanism now
preached by the biologist and the determinism that
closely dogs genetic psychology. It teaches us that the
deeper meanings of hfe are not to be found in the
intensive study of separate phenomena any more than
a railway system can be understood by counting the
ties of its tracks. It compels us to see that in the ten
dencies of hfe, as truly as in the vast range of motive,
impersonal forces are points of departure rather than
goals. And believing thus, we dare cah others to join
with us in the adventure of bringing to the world the

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 217
spiritual blessings heralded in the message and the
example of Jesus.
Rehgion when studied in the historical spirit ceases
to be a mere survival of primitive customs personified
into a God who never existed except in the courts of
anthropomorphism. It is an ever developing attitude
of mind which on rational grounds seeks further
personal development by the appropriation of the
personal forces of the cosmos from which has come so
much of personahty as we humans possess. It sees in
the social order something more than forces making
toward the satisfaction of economic wants. It sees in
persons who not only are but are becoming, a possi
bility of something more personal than now appears.
Immortahty is no longer a rhetorical sentiment but a
phase of the world-process. The efforts of prophets
and poets, of rehgious leaders and rehgious institu
tions, are channels for the incoming of the divine
Spirit immanent in the universe, who may reinforce
and reinvigorate and regenerate the hves of those who
choose the personal surplus which for ah eternity
cannot be taken from them by economic or imper
sonal pressure. If the interpretation of history had
left us convinced that the real meaning of hfe is below
the hopes of Jesus, we might weh turn to the momen
tary struggles which constitute hfe and bow to that
Wih to Power which cahs so loudly to any strong man.
But any exclusively economic interpretation of his-

2l8 SPIRITUAL INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
tory or even any so-cahed " ultimate " economic
interpretation of history, is impossible when one con
siders the great forces and tendencies of actual human
hfe. Though we may face hfe without any fuhy
accepted system of philosophy or any complete under
standing of the goal toward which we move, we
none the less do possess a knowledge of a growing
recognition of personal values and we can beheve that
if we do not know whither we are actuahy going, we
certainly know the Way. Knowing Him, we may the
more courageously and with joyous sacrifice throw our
spiritual ambitions, our spiritual efforts, and our
spiritual ideals into that great process in which we
move, believing that our labor is not in vain in the
Lord. In an epoch of reconstruction like ours, the world
stands at the cross-roads of history. A few brief years
wih fix the course of centuries. Great crises wih come
again but they wih spring from the crisis of our day.
New mstitutions, new nations, wih be developed but
we shah help determine whether they shah be subject
to spiritual control.
No generation ever faced such possibihties of future
weal or woe as does ours as it sees nations being reborn,
civilizations looking to Christian people for guidance,
and yet sees the forces of evil, of war, of materialism,
growing more aggressive. The church of Jesus Christ

OPPORTUNITY IN RECONSTRUCTION 219
must grow sacrificial or it wih grow feeble. Christians
must sacrifice for their Master or see their Master put
to an open shame. The opportunity is marvelous and
appalling. It is a challenge to our generation to
spiritualize world-history in the making.
Here hes the supreme opportunity for spiritual
leaders. Social amelioration must be made to give
way to social reconstruction on the basis of social
justice to men and women and children who are to be
aided in the realization and expression of personal
worth as yet unrecognized. The makers of history in
the grand manner wih be those who, in the historical
process which reveals the presence of a God immanent
within itseh, shah stand prepared to institutionalize
their ideals in organizations which shah be the train
ing school of the sociahy-minded. Such leaders wih
be the leaven of that better social order that shah
make the world into the kingdom of brothers who,
free spirits in the midst of physical forces and economic
tensions, are the tme children of God the Father
Almighty.

INDEX

INDEX

Alexander, 115.
Allen, Grant, quoted, 14; on laws
of history, 16.
Alsace and Lorraine, 75.
American Revolution, character
of, 148, 203-205.
Angell, Norman, 184.
Art, influence in history, 29.
Augustine, view of history, 8-10.
Babylonian religion, 83, 84.
Beard, on the economic origin of
the American Constitution, 20;
on Jeffersonian democracy, 203-
206.
Bentham, influence of personahty
of, 117; philosophy of, 164.
Bills of Rights, 158-161.
Bismarck, influence of personahty
of, 117.
Brahmanism, 87, 88.
Bryce, quoted, 29.
Buckle, on laws of history, 16.
Calvin, 116.
Calvinism in history, 61.
Canon law, 99.
Capitahsm, 149.
Carver, T. N., on economic scar
city, 17, 145.
Caste, 152.

Childhood, rights of, 122-125.
Christianity, origin of, 51-57;
Nietzsche's view of, 93; superi
ority of to Hinduism, 88; and
war, 107.
City of God, Augustine's, 9.
Class struggle, 140.
Code Napoleon, 71.
Compensation Acts, 137.
Competition, not absolute, 135.
Comte, A., on laws of history, 16;
rehgion of, 87.
Congo Free State, abuse of natives
in, 132.
Conscience, origin of, 76.
Corporations and economic jus
tice, 181.
Cromwell, 116.
Customs, origin of, 72; power of,
7S-
Darwin, 211.
Day of Judgment in Babylonian
rehgion, 83, 84; in Egyptian
rehgion, 81-83.
Death, vengeance after, 79.
Deity in human affairs, 8, 193-197.
Democracy and justice, 166, 167;
final, 172; Jeffersonian, 206,
207; call to spiritualize, 208.
Determinism, 109,

224

INDEX

Dicey on Bentham, 161 ; on democ
racy, 165.
Dickens, quoted, 6.
Doctrine of God, 90.
Draper, on laws of history, 16.
Drews, 37.
Durkheim, E., 89.
Economic interpretation of history,
16-20; criticism of, 21-25; Selig-
man's criticism of , 2 1 ; omissions
in, 24.
Economic interpretation of Greek
history, 46-51; of early Chris
tianity, 51-57.
Economic scarcity as basis of social
evolution, 17.
Egypt, Judgment Day in, 81-83.
Engels, F., quoted, 18, 63.
Eucken, R. C, on spiritual life, 4;
quoted, 197.
Evangelicals and social justice, 165.
Feudalism, 152.
Flint, R., quoted, 193.
Force and social life, 68, 69.
Frederick William I, and anecdote
of, 128.
Freedom of the individual, 109.
French Revolution, 7, 70, 71, 127,
161, 165; August 4, 1789, 184,
185; Reign of Terror in, 70, 71.
Future hfe, reflection of social
experience in, 79.
Great Britain, relations of the
United States with, 186.

Great men in history, 27, 111-118.
Greece, religion of, 48, 49, 92.
Greek history, economic and spirit
ual elements in, 46-51.
Gustavus Adolphus, 130.
Habits among primitive people, 72.
Hammurabi, code of, 78.
Harnack, quoted, 45.
Hebrews, social struggle among,
74, 75; wars of, 129.
Hegel, philosophy of the Weltgeist,
67._
Hegehan interpretation of history,
195, 196.
Hinduism, 87, 88, 90.
History, interpretations of, 3, 4; a,
collection of facts, 6; theological,
7-12; geographic, 12; economic,
16; must regard tendencies, 35;
nature of, 3, 35-37; spiritual,
34. See also Spiritual interpre
tation of history.
Human nature an element in his
tory, 25, 26, 43-45.
Ideahsm, outgrowth of, 127.
Ideals embodied in social customs,
27.
Ihering, quoted, 148.
Individual, nature of, 168; in
society, 173.
Industrial world, new spiritual
forces in, 134-141.
Jackson, Andrew, influence of
personahty of, 117.

INDEX

225

James, William, on great men, 112.
Japan, revolution prevented in,
185; and slavery, 120.
Java, treatment of natives in, 131.
Jefferson, in French Revolution, 7 ;
influence of, 117; democracy of,
203-206.
Jehovah as king, 8; and war, 129.
Jellinek, W., on Bills of Rights, 159.
Jesus, ethical teaching of, 93-95;
relation to messianism, 115;
teachings confirmed by ten
dency of history, rg9-20i; need
of loyalty to, 208-210.
Justice, as distinguished from
rights, 143, 171.
Lamprecht, K., quoted, 189.
Language as basis of nationahsm,
28.
Law, origin of, 95; common, in
England, 99—101; Roman, 96-
98, 154; international, 104-106.
Lincoln, Abraham, influence of
personahty of, 117.
Locke, 147, 157, 158.^
Lombroso on revolutions, 13.
Lotze, interpretation of history of,
196.
Luther, 113, 116.
Magna Charta, 154-156.
Marx, Karl, quoted on social
evolution, 14; on the economic
interpretation of history, 18, 26.
Masefield, John, quoted, 14-
Mason, O. T., quoted, 13, 15.

Melanchthon, 116.
Messianism, 53, 54, 115.
Mirabeau, 117.
Moral and religious beliefs as
historical forces, 29.
Murray, Gilbert, on Greek religion,
48.
Napoleon Bonaparte, 114.
Nietzsche, quoted, 63; as to
Christianity, 93; individualism
of, 192.
Old age, rights of, 125.
Orosius, History of, n.
Parents, rights of, 122, 151.
Paul, Saint, not a reformer, 55; on
women, 178.
Persecution, 89-92.
Philippine Islands, treatment of by
the United States, 132, 133.
Picton on religion, 87.
Political economy, changes in,
136-138.
Pollock, quoted, 100.
Prehistoric man, characteristics of,
38-41.
Primitive man, 41-431 68, 73.
Process and tendencies as data for
an interpretation of history, 32-
34-
Property, rights of, 147-149-
Ratzel, F., on geographical influ
ences in history, 12, 16.

226

INDEX

Reformation, economic explana
tion of, 57-60; spiritual forces
in, 61.
Reign of Terror in France, 70, 71.
Rehgion, final attestation of, 92;
influence of upon obedience to
law, 102, 103; nature of, 85, 86;
as revelation of social morahty,
85, 955 restraining influence on
society, 102-104; more than a
survival, 217.
Rehgious freedom, 160.
Religious persecution, 89-92.
Rhodes, Cecil, 130.
Rights, origin of, 144; nature of,
169, 170; of property, 147-149;
of women, 149-151; of parents,
151; of worship, 151; class
rights, 151, 152; of English
men, 156-158; of men, 160; of
labor, 179-182; true recogni
tion of, 173.
Robespierre, on French Revolu
tion, 7, 71, 117.
Robinson, J. H., quoted, 194.
Rockefeller, J. D., Jr., 181.
Roman law, 96-98, 154.
Romantic love, 174-179.
Ross, E. A., quoted, 64.
Rousseau, 147, 161.
Seligman, E. R. A., on the eco
nomic interpretation of history,
21-23.
Semple, E. C, on geographical
influences in history, 12.
Separatists, 160.

Slavery, origin of, 119, 120; aboli
tion of in British West Indies,
130; in Java, 131.
Sociahsm, idealistic aspects in, 139.
Spencer, on laws of history, 16; on
great men, in.
Spiritual interpretation of history
defined, 31-34; based on data,
26-31; seen in comparison of
prehistoric and modern life, 44,
45; argued by general tenden
cies, 67, 68; general argument
for, 189, 190; in what sense
ultimate, 190-193.
Strabo, 46.
Tabu, 86.
Tendency away from fear of pun
ishment to regard for law, 100,
101.
Uneconomic passions, power of, 28.
Unfit, the, rights of, 126.
Unitarianism, 163.
Urwick, E. J., quoted, 65.
Von Treitschke, on mountains and
poetry, 13.
Walling, W. E., on Sociahsm, 19.
War, development of laws of, 104-
106; hostility of to individual
ism, 140; and economic motive,
130; and idealism, 128, 129;
and Christianity, 107.
Welfare work, 135.

INDEX

227

i9S-
Wesley, John, 163.
West Indies, British, emancipation
of slaves in, 131.
Westermarck, E., onorigin of moral
judgments, 76; on inviolabihty
of rights, 145.

Williams, Roger, 160.
Wilson, Woodrow, influence of
personahty of, 117.
Women, status of in primitive so
ciety, 121, 122; position of in
modern society, 122; rights of,
149, 150, 174-178.

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