PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 591
of ideals, and they went from one to the other by abrupt tran- sitions without any difficulty. They had intense feelings and enthusiasm for their ideals, but when an intense feeling instead of deep knowledge is the basis of conviction there is no mental or moral consistency.
I have maintained that the religion comes out of the mores and is controlled by them. The religion, however, sums up the most general and philosophic elements in the mores, and incul- cates them as religious dogmas. It also forms precepts on them. For an example we may note how the humanitarianism of modern mores has colored and warped Christianity. Human- itarianism grew out of economic power by commerce, inven- tions, steam, and electricity. Humanitarianism led to oppo- sition to slavery, and to the emancipation of women. These are not doctrines of the Bible or of Middle-Age Christianity. They were imposed on modern religion by the mores. Then they came from the religion to the modern world as religious ideas and duties, with religious and ecclesiastical sanctions. This is the usual interplay of the mores and religion.
DISCUSSION
President John H. Finley, College of the City of New York
I asked for the American Social Science Association the privilege and honor of representation at this great associational festival, not that I de- sired its President to be heard on any of the social, economic, or political questions of the day, but because I wished the noteworthy services of this most venerable and distinguished institution to have filial remembrance; for she is now the mother, the enfeebled mother I regret to say, grand- mother, or aunt, of most, if not of all of the associations now existent in the territory where once she dwelt alone in her omniscient interest. She sits in old age impoverished by the very activity, the highly specialized and splendid activity, of her learned and scientific children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces, who have so intensively cultivated each its field of the once wide-stretching territory, that nothing is left to her except to live of their fruits and in her own memories. I will not believe that she has not yet years before her of usefulness — perhaps, in correlating all these knowledges here represented, the Presidents of these various descendant
