838 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Just as proverbs lose their value because of the growing vari- ety of judgment upon life, so ceremonies lose their impress- iveness because of the growing diversity of taste. When the lines of individual development are so divergent that there is no form or rite that affects all in the same way when that which moves one is meaningless to another and ridiculous to a third the age of symbol is over. The building up of a complex culture and the intellectual differentiation that goes on in society ushers in the era of speech-making. As language presupposes no such agreement of taste and imagination as does the symbol, the occa- sion once signalized by ceremony is now marked by the oration.
But the appeal that leans so much on reason cannot be sure of sweeping away reason in a tide of sentiment. We must recognize that the age of ceremony is nearly over and we have nothing so effective to put in its place. It behooves society, therefore, to guard with care the little valuable cere- mony yet remaining to it in church sacraments or public inau- gurals. Ceremonies are not exposed so much to disintegration as beliefs, but still they suffer in a critical, rationalistic age like the present, that cannot divine their virtue. And what is lost is not replaced. It is as hard for a sophisticated age to make new ceremony as to make new myths or new epics. We Amer- icans, with our detachment from the past, our reliance upon the rational, and our hypertrophied sense of the ridiculous, have little ceremony left, but that little we should keep, for it has been well winnowed by time.
EDWARD ALSWORTH Ross. STANFORD UNIVERSITY, California.
