THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



APEIL, 1902. 



IS THIS A DEGENEEATE AGE? 



By Professor J. J. STEVENSON, 



NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. 



n~^00 many writers and speakers, in discussing the intellectual and 

 -*- social conditions of our time, find little of good and a super- 

 abundance of bad. Everywhere they discover evidence of individual 

 and social degeneracy. The love of literature and of pure science is 

 disappearing ; college training is debased in that the purely intellectual 

 side is neglected for the practical ; everything is dominated by an intense 

 commercialism, which destroys men's finer instincts and lowers the 

 general moral tone of the community. 



One may not ignore these utterances; nor may he dismiss them 

 flippantly as wailings of disappointed or unsuccessful men, who would 

 make a virtue of necessity. Men's goals may difiPer, but their ambition 

 is the same; it ill becomes one to scoff at another; scoflBng is bred of 

 ignorance as much in the fortune-chaser who ridicules the student as 

 in the student who contemns the man with the muckrake. The indict- 

 ment against our age has been drawn by men, who, from their stand- 

 point, have been successful and have no grievance against the world. 

 Many of them belong to the class which, for a long period, dominated 

 thought and controlled the policy of nations. Their statements deserve 

 such careful consideration that one does well to inquire whether or not 

 the conditions are as represented and to what extent they are evidence 

 of either intellectual or social degeneracy. The subject is a broad one 

 and, in treating it, one may adopt only the rambling method of the 

 essay, that he may move hither and yon as necessity may dictate. 



Prior to the Civil War, our colleges, modeled for the most part 



VOL. LX. 31. 



