ndicraft, the
tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, the vast learning
and the incomparable dialectic. We know also the social
injustices, the misery and squalor the ignorance in which
the mass of the people lived.

We can stop, therefore, neither in perpetual adoration of nor
perpetual caviling at the past. Each age had its special excellences
and its special defects, both from the point of view
of the ideals then current, and those current in our own day.
In so far as the past is dead and over with, we cannot legitimately
criticize it with standards of our own day. We cannot
blame the Greeks for sanctioning slavery, nor criticize James I
because he was not a thoroughgoing democrat. But in so far
as the past still lives, it is open to critical examination and
revision. Traditions, customs, ideas, and institutions inherited
from the past, which still control us, are subject to
modification. We are justified in welcoming changes and
modifications which, after careful inquiry, seem clearly to
promise betterment in the life of the group. Thus to welcome
changes which upon experimental evidence show clearly the
benefits that will accrue to the group, is not radicalism. Nor
is opposition to changes on the ground that upon critical
examination they give promise of harmful consequences, conservatism.
Verdicts for or against change reached on such a
basis reflect the spirit and technique of experimental science.
They reflect the desire to settle a course of action on the basis
of its results in practice rather than on any preconceived
prejudices in favor either of stability or change. To the critical
mind, neither stability nor change is an end in itself.
There is no hypnotism about "things as they are"; no lure
about things as they have not yet been. The problem is
shifted to a detailed and thoroughgoing inquiry into the
consequences of specific changes in social habits, ideas and
institutions, education, business, and industry. Whether changes
should or should not win critical approval depends on the kind
of ideals or purposes we set ourselves and, secondly, on the
practicability of the proposed changes. Change may thus
be opposed or approved, in a given case, on the grounds of
desirability or feasibility. Whether a change is or is not
desirable depends on the ideals of the individual or the group.
Whether it is or is not feasible is a matter open increasingly to
scientific determination. Thus a city may hire experts to