Things Worth While 15 



precious stones ; so that I think it is safe to say that the 

 common life of our fathers was not unlike that of thou- 

 sands of years gone by, if, indeed, at its best it ever at- 

 tained some of the refinements of the fortunate people 

 who lived about the Mediterranean Sea, 



Nor was the intellectual world of our fathers very 

 different. The vast majority of educated folk were busy 

 thinking over the thoughts of the past, puzzling over the 

 problems raised by Socrates and Plato and Paul; con- 

 cerned with that interpretation of the world handed to 

 our Teutonic or British ancestors by missionaries, and 

 especially revived by the ferment of the Reformation. 

 In my own boyhood days we were still discussing the 

 freedom of the will, the divine sanction of slavery, modes 

 of baptism, and the possibility of mental somnolence, 

 under the query, "Does the mind sleep?" 



Remember, I am not criticising the employments, in- 

 tellectual or other, of the generation past; not at all: I 

 mean only to say that we have within fifty years, per- 

 haps without knowing it, passed through a new intel- 

 lectual renaissance, perhaps the most notable in the his- 

 tory of the race, comparable only to the revival at the 

 close of the middle ages. We are confronted by a dif- 

 ferent view of the world ; we see the whole world differ- 

 ently ; man 7 s thought about himself and the universe can 

 never again be the same, and new problems have filled 

 the entire horizon of our philosophy ; if not to the exclu- 

 sion of the old discussions, at least to their profoundest 

 modification. New thoughts, new purposes, new plans 

 have taken possession of men's minds and all old things 

 are changed, or at least seem to have passed away for- 

 ever. 



