834 SOCIAL STRUCTURE 



prevail over sentiment, and which manifests itself, first and fore- 

 most, in reflection upon a man's own personal interest, in the weigh- 

 ing and measuring of costs and results; but, secondly, also in a 

 similar reflection upon some common interest or business which a 

 person, from whatever motive, selfish or not, has made his own 

 affair; and, thirdly, in that unbiased interest in and reflection upon 

 the nature and causes of things and events, of man's individual 

 and social existence, which we call scientific or philosophical. 



All reflection is, in the first instance, analytical. I have spoken 

 already of the dissolving principle which lies in the pursuing of 

 one's own personal affairs, of which the chase after profit is but 

 the most characteristic form. But the same individualistic stand- 

 point is the standpoint, or at least the prevailing tendency, of 

 science also. It is nominalism which pervades science and opposes 

 itself to all confused and obscure conceptions, closely connected, as 

 it is, with a striving after distinctness and clearness and mathe- 

 matical reasoning. This nominalism also penetrates into men's 

 supposed collective realities (supernatural or not), declaring them 

 to be void and unreal, except in so far as individual and real men 

 have consented to make such an artificial being, to construct it, and 

 to build it up mentally. Knowledge and criticism oppose them- 

 selves to faith and intuition, in this as in most other respects, and 

 try to supplant them. To know how a church or a state is created 

 means the downfall of that belief in its supernatural essence and 

 existence which manifestly is so natural to human feeling and 

 intellect. The spirit of science is at the same time the spirit of 

 freedom and of individualistic self-assertion, in contradiction and 

 in opposition to the laws and ties of custom as well as of re- 

 ligion, so intimately connected and homologous with custom 

 which seem entirely unnatural and irrational to analytical rea- 

 soning. This reasoning always puts the questions: What is it 

 good for? Does it conduce to the welfare of those whom it pre- 

 tends to bind or to rule? Is it in consonance with right reason 

 that men should impose upon themselves the despotism of those 

 laws and of the beliefs sanctioning them? The classical answer has 

 been given in a startling fashion by one whom Comte called the 

 father of revolutionary philosophy. There is, says Thomas Hobbes, 

 a realm of darkness and misery, founded upon superstition and 

 false philosophy, which is the church; and there is, or there might 

 be, a realm of light and of happiness, founded upon the know- 

 ledge of what is right and wrong; that is to say, of the laws of 

 nature, dictated by reason and by experience, to check hostile 

 and warlike individual impulses by a collective will and power; 

 this realm is the true state, that is to say, the idea and model of 



