Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/130

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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY.

and its first-born child, the Reformation. Constantinople, forced to surrender to the Crescent of the Tartar, freed Europe from the Cross of Byzantian Christianity—a travesty on the original message of the lowly Nazarene. Old Rome and Greece rising from the tomb, and old Judea's literature once more addressing its appeal in its original tongue to a world craving for freedom, in opening to students access to the true thought of Aristotle and Moses and Jesus, wrested the scepter from the hands of the peripatetic and the prophets crippled, as was Jacob by the Angel, by Arab and other commentators. Rationalism and criticism are the next movements in the centuried symphony leading away from the prelude of formalism and literalism up to the fully orchestrated finale of emancipation. But even they are merely introductory to it. It was reserved for our day to find and speak the redeeming word, ending for all time to come the reign of the schoolman. Evolution, the proclamation but in more profound apprehension of the Heracelitean conviction, πάντα ῥεῖ enabled man at last to come to his own. Truth is not a fixed quantity. No truth is revealed to man—but in the fullness of the time. And the truth found by one generation cannot limit the curiosity nor blunt the desire for more truth of the next. Tradition as a living force, not as a dead weight, is conditional to progressive life. Repetition and transmission of things known are not final operations. The storehouse of things known supplies data from which to proceed to the finding of new things as yet unknown. And even the acquisition of the known data is not as the schoolman believed a mechanical process. "Was du ererbt von deinen Vaetern hast, erwirb es um es zu besitzen!" This counsel of Goethe compresses into a nut-shell the educational faith of our age. The schoolmen made the book supreme; the sun around which our thought swings is man and life. The book is made by and for man, not man by the book or for the book.

The preeminence of Germany in the republic of science is due to the historical circumstances which allowed her to be the protagonist in this contest for freedom from scholasticism. More clearly by her thinkers than by those of any other nation