In the past fifty years, sociology has made a strong and increasingly successful bid for recognition as a scientific discipline alone capable of arriving at the truth concerning all aspects of human life, including religion. Albert Salomon, distinguished sociologist and scholar, here suggests that the social scientists have thrown little genuine light on religion and have often rather been engaged in offering substitute religions of their own.
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So great is modern man’s faith in the potentialities of science that he takes it for granted that the science of sociology must have much of importance to say concerning religion; and so estranged is modem man from the religiosity of the past, that he is quite certain that religion can have nothing worth-while to say about society. That this is so can be verified by even a casual glance at any college curriculum or syllabus. In the history of Western civilization, this is a relatively recent development. After all, religion has been a part of human experience for centuries, whereas sociology is an upstart. Yet so complete has sociology’s victory been, that any critic of the present situation is dismissed as an “obscurantist” or “eccentric.” Be that as it may. . . .
Actually, so low is the standing of religion in academic circles that the specifically American tradition of empirical social science has apparently not even thought it a subject worthy of systematic study. There are scattered studies in American sociological and psychological literature of the way communicants of different faiths differ from one another with regard to such matters as neurosis, intelligence, wealth, and so on. But this sort of inquiry does little beyond determining the impingement of religion on some other social categories; it obviously has little interest or concern with the phenomenon of religion itself. Here the main contributions have come from the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who studied the meaning of religion by way of primitive religion in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (reprinted, in 1948, by the Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois), and the German sociologist Max Weber, who studied the great historical religions in their impact on social life, as well as the personal and social structure of specific religious phenomena such as inspiration, prophecy, grace, and salvation in many of his writings (some of these are in English in From Max Weber, translations by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford, 1947). The closest approach to a sociology of religion in American sociology is in such writers as Talcott Parsons, who have concentrated on the interpretation of Durkheim and Weber to an American audience.
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It would be, fundamentally, a rather sterile procedure simply to pit religion against sociology or vice versa: the relationship between the two is more complicated than that, and it is exactly this relationship which, when examined closely, yields some unexpected results. For while there is a profound antagonism between sociology and religion, there are also profound affinities.
Religion has traditionally claimed to express an inner relation to a being beyond and higher than ourselves. It takes itself to be a primary phenomenon which in the last analysis is irreducible to anything else, be it science or poetry. Religious men consider the whole of reality as a unity impregnated with a divine meaning. But within the religious framework two distinct perspectives emerge: the perspective of the “visionary” and that of the ecclesiastic, that of prophet and that of priest.
The visionary is the man who founds and refreshens religions. In Hegel’s terminology, he opens the window into eternity. He is a man of mystical vision who intuitively experiences the infinite—his is the spiritual capital which all religions draw upon and expend. But there are also religious men who insist on translating the vision into more common terms and on applying it to the workaday world. Whereas the visionary stresses the radical contrast between the communion of men with the divine and the community of men in society, the ecclesiastic attempts to locate the holy in the profane. Where the visionary is acutely sensitive to the ultimate precariousness of any realization of the divine in social institutions, the ecclesiastic is impelled toward the identification of the divine with a church, a man, a sacred text, a state, or some other concrete form.
So an opposition arises between the visionary, the man of the original insight, and, on the other side, the priest, theologian, and ecclesiastic, who take the primary spiritual experiences as given and preoccupy themselves with the erection of creeds and institutions. Both types are integral to the religious life. The visionary busies himself with the divine, and with the human as a reflection of the divine; the ecclesiastic is busy arranging compromises with intellectual and social necessities in the world.
It is in the figure of the ecclesiastic and his works that religion may be most readily seen as a historical phenomenon properly lending itself to sociological analysis. The ecclesiastic attempts to identify the city of man with the city of God, and, since the socially conditioned can never be recreated in the image of the metaphysically unconditioned, this attempt is bound to fail. With regard to this failure, sociology can tell us how a theological creed became the ideological weapon of a certain class; it can describe the role religious institutions have played in social conflict; it can analyze how, and to what degree, ideal values become subordinate to material ends. In other words, sociology can and does relate the drama of the defeat of the religious intention.
However, in the person of the visionary, the case is different. The religious visionary claims to possess immediately an ultimate truth, transcending all historical and sociological frames of reference. And here sociology and religion are in irreconcilable conflict, for science, too, claims to serve the one truth. The visionary obtains his truth from divine revelation. The sociologist insists that all truths derive from intellectual analysis and experiment upon a universe which is completely intelligible in terms of physical, social, and psychological processes. Between these two radical assertions there can be ultimately neither compromise nor mediation. To take a specific example: is Jewish history to be explained in the same way as the history of any other people, or is it inexplicable except in relation to a divine intention? Both interpretations are available to us, but they are mutually exclusive. Sociology, simply by being a natural science, cannot ever conceivably admit that Jewish history is anything but entirely secular history; to do otherwise would represent an act of suicide.
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Within the last fifty years, however, the pretensions of science have come under closer scrutiny, and it is becoming more and more evident that science, including the science of sociology, is itself built upon untested and untestable metaphysical premises. The recognition of this fact has had little effect on the physical sciences, which do, after all, “work,” even if they no longer pretend to give us absolute truths about the nature of reality. For sociology this is much more damaging, since sociology has never been able to justify itself by its “works”; instead it has received its prestige second-hand from the supposed authority of scientific method to find out the real truth.
With the realization that the so-called scientific theories of sociology have no claim to “absolute” or “neutral” truth, sociology suffers the same fate as did the church when its claim to absolute truth was disputed by science—sociology becomes an object of study for sociology. Sociologists then sit down to study how and why the sociological theories of their predecessors, considered at the time to be scientific truths, came to be “ideologies” serving specific social and political forces;, how, for instance, the sociological theory of the state in 19th-century Germany reflected the situation of the German bourgeoisie or aristocracy, or the Marxian theory served the Soviet dictatorship, for Marxism too claimed to be “scientific” sociology. Sociology here is relating the defeat of the scientific intention, just as before it related the defeat of the religious ideal.
But, under these circumstances, sociology exposes itself as an object of study for the religious mind, too. As a matter of fact, religions have always viewed science as a rival faith, suspecting sociology of the ambition to set itself up to be, so to speak, the pretender-messiah of modem mankind. For just as every religion leaps from elemental individual experiences to universal meanings, so sociology, especially in its early forms, made the jump from scientific methods to humanitarian values and from these in turn to visions of social salvation. Possessed of Weltanschauungen rather than dogmatic creeds, the vision of perpetual progress instead of the hope of personal immortality, it became, and in effect still remains, a “religion of humanity.”
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In sociology, the diseases of our civilization—and this the founders of sociology knew right well—are inevitably exposed. These men recognized that no stable civilization required a sociology—because it possessed a fixed and unchanging center of belief, and a fixed horizon toward which all its members aspired together. That is why neither the classical nor the medieval worlds developed a sociology; scholars in both ages (who, it may be granted, were as perceptive and intelligent as our modem PhD’s) concerned themselves with broad truths about the cosmos which they accepted a priori, and from which they deduced truths about man and his community, regarding these latter as chiefly important not for themselves, but as infinitesimal instances of universal verities.
Sociology, in contrast, confines its interest to man and his society, setting these up as the be-all and end-all of inquiry. Furthermore, it makes the revolutionary gesture of surrendering the ancient religio-metaphysical concern and limiting itself to human affairs and their management. This renunciation of the cosmos in favor of the social scene was made by the founding fathers of sociology (Saint-Simon, Marx, Comte, Durkheim, et al.) with a stated and express purpose in view—the discovery of those scientific procedures that would enable men to predict and control the processes of social reform and social transformation. Mankind, Karl Marx asserted, would leap “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” without the assistance of a messiah, and before the “end of days,” and Auguste Comte was of the same mind. Thus there came into being the religion of sociology, a humanistic religion which would accomplish on earth what previous religions had promised in heaven, which would have man redeemed by himself and not by God—a religion which lives so potently in all sociological thinking, and which has been so vital in the spiritual experience of modem man.
For it can be demonstrated that each great sociological system, while it starts by limiting its horizon to this world and adopting the rigors of scientific method as its philosophical basis, ends with a new religion. Surprising as this may seem, the transition is logical and inescapable. Scientific method, while it furnishes descriptions of social processes and techniques for achieving goals, is perforce silent as to directions and ends—that is, the raison d’être of the goal itself. This must be supplied from some other source than the observable and measurable fact—and this lack is what the “system-building” sociologist undertakes to fill. He constructs a theory of human emotions and values to serve as guide to the technician, and so “religions of progress” come into being, atheistic and socialistic religions, like Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity” and Saint-Simon’s “new Christianity”—religions ministered to by sociologists rather than priests; “religions” in that they wish to refashion the world according to some idea of perfection and not merely to report on what exists. These “religions” of sociology have been secular religions, in that they have tried to bring about salvation in this world by elaborating schemes that would ensure final harmony and continuity in the social process.
Sociology has, indeed, always been more than a set of theories and techniques for understanding the thoughts and acts of modern men. From its very origins, all of its methods, from the statistical to the interpretive, cooperate toward the achievement of a shared goal: the comprehension and improvement of modem industrial societies and the lot of modem man. This goal was explicitly avowed in the early days of sociology, when the citizens of the new-born industrial order dared to hope that scientific progress might bring the millennium. It is less visible today, when sociology is primarily an academic discipline. But the ambition and the pretension are still there, nevertheless; and they wield a profound influence, not only in the universities, but in literature, social planning, politics, and in many of the religious denominations.
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It is of special interest to observe how large has been the role of Jews in this, the new peculiar church of modem man. It was among young Jews that Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon found their followers. Emile Durkheim, for example, who was much more a disciple of Comte than he himself was prepared to admit, and who made religion itself an object of “scientific inquiry” (an endeavor in which he far surpassed both Malinowski and Pareto who came after him), was the son of a rabbi. He is in many ways a classic example of the sociologist of religion.
What was it that Durkheim had to say? Durkheim argued first of all on behalf of the symbolic quality of the sacred: the Holy was to him primarily a sense of moral obligation to society, a piety toward social authority. More profoundly considered, it was—and this is the key concept in his sociology—the collective social consciousness, which Durkheim identified with the absolute, the divine. Society was God.
Once the divine and the social were equated, there took place a repetition of that pattern of thought to which Durkheim, as the son of a rabbi, was habituated from youth—except that God, the old hero of the tale, yielded the scepter to his successor, society. It was now society which was the source and goal of salvation; where once the divine design had been discerned, there was now detected an immanent progress in man’s collective life. The kingdom of God—good, old Jewish dream—is reasserted, but in the here and now, without supra-natural intervention and reference. And as for the sanction for this new faith, science and technical progress take the place of revelation—except that science here has been smuggled out of the laboratory and transformed into a myth.
Nor was Durkheim alone in converting the old Jewish messianism into a new “scientific” eschatology. This was the occupation of most of the young Jews who were conspicuous among the disciples of Comte and Saint-Simon; from among them, incidentally, came almost all of France’s leading sociologists. In countries other than France, too, Jews could be noted among the apostles of the new pseudo-religion of sociology. Karl Mannheim, the German, for instance. In him one finds deep humanitarian sympathies, a profound, passionate enthusiasm for mankind and its salvation, for the “Third Way” (his capitals), that synthesis of freedom and planning to which he looked for human deliverance. And with this fervor goes an insistence on the scientific in general, and scientific sociology in particular, as solvent of all problems, as the sole and universal key to the gate of the good life on earth.
The religion of sociology has become at one and the same time a universal religion and also peculiarly American. It appears that today among many American sociologists their science has become their religion, which, if they had their way, would be erected into the unofficially established national church (they are, for libertarian reasons, opposed to official churches). To this state of mind contributions have been made by all the forces and tendencies operative in Europe, plus one more. Thanks to its special heritage with its accent on optimism, there is in America a strong attachment to the vision of the kingdom of God on earth, whether religiously or secularly envisaged. The influence of the Calvinistic tradition of pragmatic spirituality (the good life by good works) predisposes Americans to cast about for techniques, to invent tools for the attainment of their ideas. As a result, the sociological approach has become an integral part of the American mind, combining social theory and the technical sciences in order to attain happiness in modem society.
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The sociology of religion is a far cry from the religion of sociology and has an altogether different history behind it, the line running from Fontenelle and Bayle, through Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Voltaire, to Max Weber.
It was Fontenelle and Bayle who first in modem times—in the late 17th and early 18th centuries—ventured to apply rationalistic thought in a systematic fashion to religion. In this enterprise they were anything but unprejudiced. Their purpose was not to make an objective analysis of religion but to expose its final irrationality and unintelligibility, and to establish all creeds as pre-rational modes of scientific explanation, outmoded and inconsequential in the modem world. The sociology of religion came into existence with an odium theologicum.
Montesquieu approached religion altogether as a social scientist, concerned not at all with its inner content but only with its impact on the conduct of the individual and the group. This method treats religion as a historical phenomenon, a social fact, an influence, both constructive and destructive, on political and economic behavior. It is weighed according to whether it strengthens or weakens political institutions, enriches or impoverishes commercial and industrial resources. Voltaire observed that human interests make history and that religion is merely one of these interests. To this thesis Max Weber, at the turn of the 19th century, added the notion of man as a meaning-seeking creature who, unable to content himself with the possession of things and the acquisition of power, is forever fabricating assurances of moral and spiritual election.
Max Weber was an interesting and paradoxical thinker, who, in reaction to Marxism and positivistic sociology, tried to establish the autonomy of religion—only to destroy his own structure, and end up with an even more radical positivism. Weber set out by carefully drawing the line between spiritual experience and sociological subject matter. In the realm of primary religious experiences, where spiritual revolutions are effected and new religions founded, the sociologist is an alien. His work begins only when spiritual movements have settled, when ecclesiastical institutions have been established, and when he can inquire into the effects of legal and economic forces on religious institutions, or into the clash between spiritual and secular powers. Out of these investigations, he may be able to throw light on the vulnerability of spiritual gospels when caught in the gears of power politics. Yet Weber could not abide by his own rules, and inevitably so. A commitment to science cannot be hedged, and scientific method cannot, by its nature, recognize sacred, inviolable precincts—all must in the end be explained. Man, for Weber, is only a “meaning-manipulating animal,” dissatisfied with mere material achievement, who wishes to be entitled to his happiness and to deserve his success. In Weber’s three volumes on the sociology of religion, religion is reduced to one factor among many, especially important in times of social crisis. That is, for Weber religion is ultimately, and in the nature of the case, “ideology”—a man-made and man-manipulated tool.
This is more or less openly acknowledged by the distinguished Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, a follower of Weber, when he asserts that people regard the life of the spirit either as theologians or as scientists, and that only the latter has warrant. Basic to the method of the sociology of religion—and regardless of any personal sentiments on the part of the sociologists themselves—is the thesis that religion is merely one among the elements of civilization, and that it can be adequately accounted for by the detached analysis of the social scientist.
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The visionary per se has only one report to make—that God exists and that he awaits man’s turning toward him. But there is also the type of what might be called the “spiritual thinker” or religious philosopher—one who accepts divine revelation as true and yet is sufficiently secular to be able to abstract himself from the religious situation in order to survey the history of humanity and its religions. Such men exist in a state of permanent tension, committed to one revealed truth, yet not blind to the passionate and profound claims of other religions, and, indeed, of scientific rationalism itself. They are the living and distressed witnesses to the fact that God and the world are no longer, and not yet, one.
Just as the sociologist applies his “truth” to religion, so the spiritual thinker can and does apply his “truth” to the social order. Where the sociologist accounts for—and explains away—the history of religious movements as the inevitable upshot of social forces, the spiritual thinker interprets them further in terms of sin or degeneracy, of virtue and redemption. Both consider the same facts, but in different perspectives and with different vocabularies. The sociologist remains within the process of social action, organizing his findings in terms of causal analysis. The spiritual thinker, perilously balanced on the margin between the divine and the secular, refers the human condition to a redeeming and saving God. For the spiritual thinker, human action and conduct always are related to a divine being whose commands are constitutive elements in the spiritual adventure of mankind.
Recently, a significant volume has appeared which accepts the religious vision as not only one among many motivations of culture, history, and society, but as the final and primary constituent. In his Abendlaendische Eschatologie (A. Francke Verlag, Bern, 1947), Jacob Taubes suggests that the key intellectual and social values of the Western world take their origin and power from the messianic vision. His work is a comparative typology of the messianic pattern as established by the Jewish prophets, taken up in the revolt of the Franciscans of the 13th century, by the founders of German philosophical idealism, and finally by the antithetical doctrines of Kierkegaard and Marx. He finds that it was the messianic vision which made possible all theories of progress, reformation, and revolution in modem times. Its stamp is even discernible, though not in its own name, on the atheistic revolutions of the industrial world of today.
Writing from his marginal position, Taubes can see religion from within and from without. From without, religion is certainly only a part of civilization. But religion brings something into being which transcends the frontiers of civilization, and establishes itself as civilization’s very ground: it brings into being that which is within religion—the meeting of man with God as the root of human destiny. For Taubes, religion is the primary phenomenon of human life, for it is the religious experience which describes the circumference of meaning for human history and human society.
It should be emphasized that the spiritual thinker is not to be confused with the theologian. The latter philosophizes within ecclesiastical institutions and on the platform of their accepted doctrinal paraphernalia—they constitute his unchallenged premises. The spiritual thinker returns to and proceeds from the root religious experiences which he knows at first hand. He is, therefore, an uncompromising radical, for he knows not only the externals of ecclesiastical institutions, but their inner logic and necessity. Sharing the primal passion behind organized religion, he is capable of a thorough disrespect for religious institutions.
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For the spiritual thinker, the Jewish prophets set the precedent. They turned the religious ardor that burned in them into a ruthless exposure of man’s weakness and the sinfulness of all social institutions, including religious institutions. In the Christian world of nascent modem civilization, the Franciscan Spirituals played the same role, transforming the words of prophetic personalities into a collective revolutionary movement. By virtue of their messianic hope, they saw very clearly the sins that were degrading all institutions, the church most especially, into sordid business enterprises. Nor were they content merely to catalogue and announce offenses whereby the ecclesia and ecclesiastics were corrupted. They went further, tracing the evils against which they inveighed to the power-lust and cupidity, the thirst for prestige and privilege that degraded the clergy and caused them to subordinate spiritual aims to power politics. It was these Franciscan Spirituals who evolved, out of their spirituality, the first thoroughgoing analysis in modem times of the process of social change, particularly of social degeneration.
Erasmus of Rotterdam provides us with an outstanding example of a marginal spiritual thinker at work. On the one hand, he is awake to the reality of absolute moral and social principles, astir with an ineffable love for the Divine. On the other, embracing standards of natural and spiritual reason, he is able to explain from first-hand experience why men, though they profess these standards, depart from them so often and widely. His so-called satirical works are really sociological analyses devoted to describing the processes whereby men know the truth and may still elect error. His Praise of Folly, in particular, is one of the few truly wise inquiries into the role, constructive and destructive, of man’s unconscious and irrational powers. A further instance of the radicalism of that social criticism which can spring from participation in key religious insights is Erasmus’s sociology of opinion. Repeatedly, in the preface to his editions of the Church Fathers, he stated that the basic verities of the Gospel were simple and unambiguous, that if they evolved into complex dogmatic systems it was under the pressure of hostile and contending sects, themselves often “fronts” for other forces.
Erasmus’s Consultatio de Bello Turcica dealt realistically with such down-to-earth topics as the hidden motives behind the proposed crusade against the Turks, the role of bankers and speculators in sugar in whipping up the war sentiment, the interrelation between domestic crisis and foreign policy. At the same time, this grim, penetrating sociological analysis is of universal import, and is written from a vantagepoint of absolute spiritual values supplied by religious doctrine. The spiritual thinker is able to detect and explain the corruption and depravity of man because in his absolute principles—and the saints who embody them—he has an ever present canon of what ought to be, what can be. Little wonder, then, that it was Erasmus, loyal to absolute religious ideals of goodness, who formulated the Law of Degeneracy—the thesis that all social institutions, including religious institutions, are driven by their desire to survive into programs of selfentrenchment and self-aggrandizement, in the course of which their original faiths and ideals are perverted and abandoned.
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The Erasmian procedure whereby sociological observation and spiritual vision interact to form one organic, perceptive whole has become a fruitful tradition since his time. Among the scholars molded by it was Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), who was “re-discovered” for our own time by Leo Tolstoy. In a book which has become a model for the writing of social history, the Impartial History of Churches and Heretics, Arnold wrote with all of those empirical techniques which modem sociology exhibits at its best, and yet also from the standpoint of a Protestant mystic. This enabled him to see organized Christianity steadily and as a whole, its destructive as well as its constructive aspects, the power of vested interests and self-preservation in determining its policies. He perceived that ruling bodies of churches will inevitably be suspicious of any spontaneous rediscovery of the verities on which they rest, that they will seek to outlaw such spontaneity as heretical or disruptive of the established order, that they will forever equate the living spirit of revelation with their interests, and that all this is an inescapable law of human institutions.
In our time, spiritual thinkers are represented by such men as Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Péguy, Leonard Ragaz, Gabriel Marcel, and others, all of whom base their analyses of the social order on their religious premises. The consequence is, as in the case of Niebuhr, an analysis of modem society equal in its radicalism to that of Marx, but proceeding from an altogether different source. An extraordinarily interesting modern representative is to be found in Georg Lukácz, the brilliant Hungarian Marxist, who insists on the necessity of the socialist revolution as a prelude to the true “end of days.” For, Lukácz argued, until that revolution is over and done with, men will never be able to experience that radical despair which is a prelude to their salvation. Only when the perfect social machine has been actualized, only after all men are properly housed, clothed, fed, and still find themselves lost, wretched and unredeemed, only then—in the depth of their disillusionment—will they perceive that technology is unable to save, and will they be forced into genuine spirituality. It was of spiritual revolution that Lukácz dreamed, that crisis of the individual soul which would come after the crisis of society had been successfully surmounted. Then, and not until then, would the veil of historicism be penetrated, and men would be able to part that curtain of political and economic amelioration which they mistook for the kingdom of Heaven. Then, and not until then, would they be free, indeed compelled, to consider, open-eyed and undistracted, the things of eternity. This was Lukácz’s position before he joined the Communist party.
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Out of this discussion a question arises: is there, can there be, in any serious sense, a sociology of religion?
We have seen that the spiritual vision, spanning finite and infinite, has time and again led to highly articulate and meaningful analyses of human society. Religion has continually furnished a background against which an understanding of given parts could be set; because of its transcendent insights, it has made possible meaningful discoveries concerning the human scene. In other words, the spiritual vision demonstrates its capacity to establish general truths about man and the social order.
On the other hand it should be apparent that sociology cannot, in the usual sense of the word, yield any knowledge of religion. About the evolution of religion, yes. About religious institutions, practices, externalities—even some internalities—yes. Insofar as religion expresses itself in social processes, sociology can handle it. But this means that there can be no sociology of religion but only of irreligion. Sociologists may be able to explain the motives and causes which impel people to accept at second hand the beliefs of other men or to surrender convictions they once held; to adopt or bargain away creeds and churches; to compromise religious requirements with political actualities. They may be able to describe the flourishing and degeneration of religions, their rise and decline as state churches. All this sociology can do, and make valuable contributions to religious history.
From this, however, there flows the classic blunder of modem, scientific, secular civilization concerning religion: the assumption that religion is just one other cultural motif, like some particular technology or philosophy, fully revealed in its social-historical expressions. Whereas, in fact, religion as a social constituent is of secondary significance. Primarily, the religious experience is the axis around which all other experience revolves. It sets the center and describes the horizon of the human scene, and so disposes into their places all the other goods of civilization without ever being itself disposed by them. Once the whole has been so experienced, a man will be better able to consider any aspect of reality, including that aspect which is society—the grandeur and misery of man’s lot.
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