el is peculiarly displayed by
those who see nothing but evil in the old. Against the outworn
past with its disillusions, its errors, its evils, and its
hypocrisies, the new shines out in glorious contrast. There
are persons who combine a very genuine sense of present evils
with a resilient belief in the possibilities of change. The
classic instance of this is seen in the Messianic idea. Even in
the worst of times, the pious Jew could count on the saving
appearance of the Messiah. Every Utopian is as sure of the
salvation promised by his prize solution as he is of the evils
which it is intended to rectify. The ardent Socialist may
equally divide his energies between pointing out the evils of
the capitalist system, and the certain bliss of his Socialist
republic. The past is nothing but a festering mass of evils;
industry is nothing but slavery, religion nothing but superstition,
education nothing but dead traditional formalism, social
life nothing but hypocrisy.

Where the past is so darkly conceived, there comes an uncritical
welcoming of anything new, anything that will take
men away from it. Nothing could be worse than the present
or past; anything as yet untried may be better. As Karl
Marx told the working classes: "The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

The past is, by its ruthless critics, conceived not infrequently
as enchaining or enslaving. Particularly, the radical
insists, are men enslaved by habits of thought, feeling, and
action which are totally inadequate to our present problems
and difficulties. War-like emotions, he points out, may have
been useful in an earlier civilization, but are now a total
disutility. Belief in magic may have been an asset to primitive
man in his ignorance; it is not to modern man with his science.
The institution of private property may have had its values
in building up civilization; its utility is over. We still make
stereotyped and archaic reactions where the situation has
utterly changed. The institutions, ideas, and habits of the
past are at once so compelling and so obsolete that we must
make a clear break with the past; we must start with a clean
slate. To continue, so we are told, is merely going further
and further along the wrong paths; it is like continuing with
a broken engine, or without a rudder.

CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE PAST. That both positions just
discussed are extreme, goes without saying. The past is
neit