But viewed empirically the development of humanity is haphazard. Much is preserved from the past that ought to be cast aside. Many traces of past error remain unexpunged in the life of the present. A mixed stream, compounded of good and evil, passes through our veins into our successors’. The empirical fact is simply the fact of partial reproduction, partial augmentation and partial transmission. The ethical conception of progress depends on the view that there is an ideal pattern of the spiritual relation in the mind of man, destined to become more explicit as it is tested out and that the present generation ought to appraise the heritage of the past according to this pattern, preserving and rejecting and adding its own quota in such a way as to enable the succeeding generations to sift the worthful from the worthless more successfully, and to see the ideal pattern more explicitly.
The three-fold reverence has been described as reverence towards superiors, equals and inferiors. For this inadequate description I would substitute the following: In place of reverence towards superiors, reverence for the valid work of ethicizing human relations already accomplished in the past, reverence for the precious permanent achievements and for those who achieved them,—the “Old Masters.” The human race has gained a certain ethical footing in the empirical sphere. The general task has not to be begun ab initio. In the act of separating what is worth while from what is worthless, in the very process of revision and reinterpretation, we manifest our reverence for the past. It is thus that true historicity is distinguished from blind conservatism. And besides, by studying the old masters, we acquire a certain standard of excellence. Since those who have contributed epoch-making advances in philosophy, in religion, in science, inspire us by the grandeur of their attack on the great problems; and the spirit of their attack, is unspeakably stimulating to us, even when we reject their solutions. We cannot too humbly sit as disciples at the feet of the great masters if discipleship has this meaning.
Reverence of the first type prescribes the same attitude towards preëminent personalities among our contemporaries. They rank with the great predecessors inasmuch as they are in a way for us predecessors. They are in advance of us. To revere them is to endeavor to come abreast of them, to obtain the advantage of the forward movement which their superior capacity enabled them to initiate, and to start where they leave off, adding our small quota.
The second kind of reverence is directed toward those who are, in respect to their gifts and opportunities, approximately on the same level with us, but whose gifts differ from and are supplementary to ours. In our relation to them we may learn the great lesson of appreciating unlikeness, and working out our own correlative unlikeness by way of reaction.
The third kind of reverence is directed toward the undeveloped, among whom I include the young, the backward groups among civilized peoples, and the uncivilized peoples. We are to reverence that which is potential in all of these individuals and groups, and we do so by fitting ourselves to help them actualize their spiritual possibilities. Reverence of the third kind takes the highest rank among the three. The spiritual life of the world is a deep mine as yet explored only near the surface. The unrealized possibilities of mankind are the chief asset. But in order to effectuate our purpose with respect to the undeveloped, we must have reverence toward the great Old Masters, to gain a certain standard of excellence; and reverence towards unlikeness in others to become ourselves differentiated individualities, and in order to respect the unlikeness which we shall presently likewise find in the backward and the young. So that the three reverences play into one another and are inseparable from one another, the first two being indispensable to the third. They are in truth a “trinity in unity.” But the third reverence is the supreme one. The chief objective must be the undeveloped, because our face must be turned toward the future, because the task of mankind is as yet in its early stages. The third reverence is supreme. Now it is only when we have grasped the meaning of the triple reverence that we can fully appreciate the significance of the family as the first matrix in which the reverential attitudes are to be acquired. It is only then that we can rightly conceive of the organs of education, and of the end upon which the activities of school and university should converge. And similarly we shall find our interpretation of the vocation, the state, and the international society illuminated by this conception of the three-fold reverence.
In popular religious teaching the individual is thrust into the foreground. His salvation as a detached entity is the principal object. In positivism and evolutionalism society in its empirical aspect is exalted, and the individual tends to be regarded as a stepping-stone. In the spiritual interpretation of the collective task as outlined, the individual remains integral and sacrosanct. The spiritual society of which the image is to be imprinted on human society is a society of indefeasible ethical personalities.[70] The individual even now at his station in the present attributes to himself this lofty character and the various obligations which he already recognizes, and which he endeavors to fulfil, afford him ample opportunity to vindicate his spiritual selfhood. If in addition he looks forward longingly to the future, and to the greater spiritual fulfilment that may be expected among posterity, this expectation is founded on the belief that what he already possesses in germ will then be more unfolded, that the ideal of the indefeasible worth of man of which he is already conscious in himself will then be more completely recognized and its infinite implications be more fully understood.[71]
CHAPTER II
THE FAMILY
The family is in process of change. We should fix attention on the kind of change that is desirable. The change desirable is the more perfect expression of the ethical ideal in the life of the family. One striking fact is that in the past the family was never supposed to exist merely for the “benefit” of its individual members. The latter view is an individualistic novelty of our age, and, as commonly understood, it is radically false.
Under the caste system the family subordinates the welfare of its members to the function of the caste. Society being stationary and stratified, the family is the organ for the reproduction of a stratified social system.