194 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



the Greek is precisely with human life, its needs and its 

 possibilities, individual and collective. The spiritual 

 truths of the world religions are among the leading data of 

 its problem, but they are truths that have to be disengaged 

 from a historical setting which can no longer maintain 

 itself. Stripped of this historical framework, they are 

 seen as truths concerning the soul of man, the position 

 of man in the world, the relations of man to man, and so 

 the fundamental life of society. But whether they are 

 whole truths or part truths is another question, and one 

 which the religions that taught them could not impartially 

 investigate. So the whole problem of life had to be taken 

 up anew, but it could not be taken up precisely where the 

 ancient thinkers had left it. It had been complicated by 

 the deeper conflicts opened up by the fuller religious experi- 

 ence which the world had lived through. For under the 

 influence of religious idealism moral laws acquired a 

 sanctity and an absoluteness which they never possessed on 

 the common sense plane. They were touched, we may 

 venture to say, with that same breath of the Infinite which 

 all through distinguishes modern from classical modes of 

 thought. To adjust their claims to the actual conditions 

 of social life involved a reconstruction alike of ethics and 

 religion which could only be effected by investing social 

 life itself with the same infinitude of meaning. 1 



The relations of the individual and society no doubt are 

 still the pivot on which controversies turn. But the problem 

 is not merely to reconcile their interests. The individual is 

 now a potential centre of resistance, not necessarily on selfish 

 but on the highest ethical grounds. The claims of con- 

 science on the one hand, the order and welfare of society on 



J A single illustration may suffice. No ancient thinker would have 

 hesitated to sanction infanticide as the solution of a sufficiently acute 

 population problem. To the religious mind this solution is barred by the 

 sanctity of parental love and of the new-born life. Modern rationalism 

 would admit this sanctity as one of the conditions of true human 

 development, but cannot, as the religious spirit may, refuse to consider 

 the problem of reconciling it with other conditions equally sacred. It 

 can find a solution only if it can show how to maintain parental 

 responsibility at full power while joining to it responsibility for parent- 

 hood to society. 



