ow, science, and a wide-spread culture. Popular
education becomes a feature of the time. The new ideas, fermenting
among the people, break up old prejudices and established ideas, and
thus thought, at first constructive, becomes, among the masses,
destructive in character. Hence the popular thought, in a period of
enlightenment, issues in denial, scepticism, and disbelief. It is
merely negative in its activities and results. Authority, tradition,
and custom are wholly or partially destroyed. And since authority,
tradition, and custom are the cement of the social structure, there
results a general dissolution of that structure into its component
individuals. All emphasis is now laid on the individual. Thought
becomes egocentric. Individualism is the dominant note. Extreme
subjectivity is the principle of the age. All these features make
their appearance in the Greek aufklaerung. The Sophistical doctrine
that the truth is what I think, the good what I choose to do, is the
extreme application of the subjective and egocentric principles.

{121}

The early eighteenth century in England and France was likewise a
period of enlightenment, and the era from which we are now, perhaps,
just emerging, bears many of the characteristics of aufklaerung. It is
sceptical and destructive. All established institutions, marriage, the
family, the state, the law, come in for much destructive criticism. It
followed immediately upon the close of a great period of constructive
thought, the scientific development of the nineteenth century. And
lastly, the age has produced its own Protagorean philosophy, which it
calls pragmatism. If pragmatism is not egocentric, it is at least
anthropocentric. Truth is no longer thought of as an objective
reality, to which mankind must conform. On the contrary, the truth
must conform itself to mankind. Whatever it is useful to believe,
whatever belief "works" in practice, is declared to be true. But since
what "works" in one age and country does not "work" in another, since
what it is useful to believe to-day will be useless to-morrow, it
follows that there is no objective truth independent of mankind at
all. Truth is not now defined as dependent on the sensations of man,
as it was with Protagoras, but as dependent on the volition of man. In
either case it is not the universal in man, his reason, which is made
the basis of truth and morals, but the subjective, individual,
particular element in him.

We must n