422 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



American 

 struggle 

 for inde- 

 pendence. 



sciousness and responsibility arose before the American 

 struggle for independence and the consequent constitu- 

 tion based upon the declaration of rights. What was 

 then done was fifteen years later repeated and modified 

 in the French constitution of the year 1791, after the 

 Revolution had swept away a great part of the older 

 institutions and landmarks. It is not likely that 

 European thinkers of the foremost order would all of 

 a sudden have given so much attention to what is now 

 termed the social problem l had it not been for the 



ending in renewal of the old state 

 of things ; for in the absence of 

 such expressions as 'rights,' 'social 

 contract,' &c., everybody would 

 have been unable to think in any 

 but terms of 'status' (as Maine 

 expresses the underlying concep- 

 tion of the old order)." 



1 This term is commonly used to 

 denote some problem or problems 

 which are at the moment of special 

 practical importance. In this sense 

 the problem is one of practical or 

 applied philosophy and does not 

 come into the programme of this 

 History. Both in this narrower 

 and in the wider sense the term 

 forms the title of a comprehensive 

 work by Dr Ludwig Stein : ' Die 

 Soziale Frage im Lichte der Philo- 

 sophic' (2nd ed., 1903), which, as 

 we learn from the Preface, has met 

 with a large circulation on the Con- 

 tinent, having been translated into 

 French and other foreign languages. 

 I desire to recommend this work as 

 giving the reader a wide view of 

 the enormous modern literature 

 and the complexity of the subject, 

 and to express my indebtedness 

 to the author. At the same time, 

 his use of the term is not quite 

 identical with the plan of the 

 present chapter. This might per- 

 haps be more adequately described 

 as the anthropological problem : 



the study of man as a member of 

 an aggregate called Society and in 

 his relations with external nature. 

 And this as the introduction and 

 foundation, not only of the pheno- 

 mena of collective life, but also of 

 psychology as the science of the 

 individual mind. This is another 

 instance how, in recent times, the 

 study of phenomena in their isola- 

 tion is more and more giving way 

 to a preliminary study of such 

 phenomena in their "Together," 

 what I have termed the " synoptic " 

 aspect. We have one of the most 

 instructive examples of this de- 

 velopment of thought in the life- 

 work of so eminent a thinker as 

 Prof. Wundt in Germany, who has 

 crowned his philosophical researches 

 which started with a very special 

 problem of physiological psychology 

 by his great work on anthropo- 

 logy : ' Volkerpsychologie.' From 

 this point of view, with all acknow- 

 ledgment of Dr Stein's valuable and 

 encyclopaedic work, I miss the due 

 appreciation of such writings as 

 Lotze's ' Microcosmus,' though we 

 may perhaps be forced to consider 

 this important work to be no more 

 than a first approximation for the 

 solution of the great problem. 

 This problem is defined by Lotze 

 in the question : " What signifi- 

 cance have man and human life 



