Perhaps in nothing, not even in scientific outlook, is the contrast between the Modern Age and the Middle Ages more striking than in the changed attitude toward money and money-making. In the Middle Ages trade was frowned upon and the money-lender despised. In this attitude church and society generally agreed. The church was always castigating the sin of avarice. The making of money was designated by Thomas Aquinas as ‘turpitudo,’ even though he admitted its necessity. The thesis that the shop-keeper could only with difficulty please God was introduced into canon law. Usury, which meant not only extortionate interest but interest of any kind, was prohibited by several councils of the church, and to a usurer the privileges of the sacraments were often denied. Even in those days there were, to be sure, practical qualifications of these theoretical judgments, due to the need of money— a need often as keenly felt by the lords spiritual as by the lords temporal. Nevertheless the generalization is safe that money-making was regarded as socially degrading and morally and religiously dangerous. Today all this is changed. Money-making has become the chief aim of modern civilization. In countless ways, gross or subtle, it determines our lives and thinking. It entices into its service many of the best minds of our college graduates. Even our professions, law, medicine, the ministry (witness the vast development of ecclesiastical advertising), are more and more entangled in its net, while the commercialization of amusements, including our college sports, is notorious.

The philosophy of Josiah Royce speaks often of the Absolute and of God, but has left his readers somewhat in doubt as to his exact theistic position. Those who have expressed their doubts attack the Royce an conception of the Absolute from two directions. Some find it not unified enough, others too unified, to be theistic. The former of these call attention to certain discussions in which Royce explains his world unity as a unity of meaning, or a mathematical infinite, or an all-inclusive concept, drawing there from the inference that the unity which he intended was only that of a logical possibility. Or, further, it is insisted that even if Royce may have intended real unity, there is serious question as to the success of his philosophic achievement. The Absolute is made to comprise such contradictory and discordant features that its harmony at least seems incongruous or forced. A unity composed of vigorously conflicting selves must be an aggregate rather than an organic whole.