NOTES ON PHILOSOPHIES OF THE DAY 575 



NOTES ON CERTAIN PHILOSOPHIES OF THE DAY 



By ALEXANDER F. CHAMBERLAIN, Pn.D. 



ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASS. 



I. The Rule of the Dead. — M. Le Bon, himself now in the other 

 world, would have it that we are suffering inutterably from a sort of 

 universal mort-main. There is but one real ease of majority rule on 

 earth, that of " those who have gone before." Our masters and rulers 

 are neither the select few among the living, nor the many-headed 

 people, but the great hulking mass of the dead. 



With de mortuis nil nisi honum goes e vivis nihil honi. "We praise 

 the dead with our living tongues and let their inanimate hands act for 

 us. Our thoughts, no less than our bodies, are heirlooms from the 

 departed. Like the savage, we hear the dead whispering by the rivers 

 of life and speak their words after them. We bear the burden of their 

 sins ; we reap the harvest of their mistakes and their calamities. Paul, 

 the apostle, is not the only one who had the right to say " I die daily," 

 for all men and women are in uninterrupted intercourse with the dead. 

 Even children, just beginning to live, are schooled with dead languages. 

 The old, in their second childhood, are counted already dead. Youth, 

 so full of life, is taught the art of war, adding, by national command, 

 to the number of the dead. Only when dead are the races that were 

 here before us, like the Indian, " good." 



Yet many great ones of mankind have longed for emancipation 

 from the rule of the dead. Some adventurous psychologists hold out 

 the hope that some day we shall control the past instead of being abso- 

 lutely at its beck and call as we now are. The racial and the individ- 

 ual past shall both be ours and memory-guided progress will speed us 

 on to the destined goal. Then, indeed, shall " old men dream dreams " 

 and " young men see visions," and all who see in sleep, like Mahomet, 

 shall see truly. Eear of the unconscious and dread of the past shall 

 be lost in the conscious control of the experience of other days, of times 

 gone by. Then shall they be, as we have fondly imagined them 

 hitherto, the "good old days of yore." No longer shall we be the 

 living tombs of the dead past that will not bury itself; no more phos- 

 phorescent merely with the immemorially defunct. We shall then 

 have life, and life more abundantly. 



II. Mutability. — Everything changes. As the old Greek philos- 

 opher said, flux is the very nature of things. Flora, fauna, races of 

 men, civilizations, institutions, customs and habits, beliefs, ideas and 



