Three Aspects of Weltanschauung

JEROME ASHMORE,Case Institute of Technology

VALUESand norms are indelible properties of society. Their pres-

ence is recognized in considering personality structure, functional
imperatives, cultural model components, and other sociological
concepts and in much nonstatistical treatment of social questions,
such as in Parsons' social structure and systems, in Simmel's gov-
erning web of attitudes, and in the implications of Pareto's deriva-
tions and derivatives. There is an ingredient in both the individual
and the social aspects of the human predicament that seems to
contain both values and norms and besides, to be a primary force
in attitude, behavior, and other influences within the dynamics of
any social group. The ingredient is called Weltanschauung, and a
review of some points that seem germane to its nature and genesis
might be of interest.
Weltanschauung is a highly elastic term, but it usually denotes
a perspective and interpretation of the universe and its events held
in a sustained way by an individual or by a group. The perspective
functions normatively, and as a point of articulation. It implies
cognition and values and may or may not include a supporting
theoretical structure. A Weltanschauung is something like an in-
voluntary precipitate that has crystallized in the mind of an indi-
vidual or in the collective outlook of some group, as in the case
of Hellenic Greece or medieval Europe. In these cases the outlook
is well defined and explicit; in cases of groups of other historical
intervals it often is less determinate. Somehow it seems a Weltan-
schauung develops, but the conditions and factors in its develop-
ment are not easily seen. The surge of historical events persists in
its transitive way and the minds of men immersed in it acquire an
implicit vision that serves as a basis of conceptual reaction to the
process. From a Weltanschauung a meaning may be ascribed to

2IC
216 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

an environment that otherwise would be moot and alien, and, as

the next step, a Weltanschauung may function as a kind of preju-
diced tribunal, before which issues that confront the mind appear
for adjudication and are resolved according to the character of the
prevailing Weltanschauung: in Hellenic Greece the future of the
individual soul was something trivial; in medieval Europe it was
something paramount.
The task of providing a description of Weltanschauung is dif-
ficult. As a concrete condition it emphatically resists exhaustive
definition and forces anyone studying it to confine himself to sug-
gestions concerning it rather than to determinations of truths about
it. The elements participating in the whole that is Weltanschauung
are a confluence rather than a mechanical assembly, and any at-
tempt to analyze the whole can be only nominal. WeZtanschauung
is not a resultant of some given unit in external relations; it is a
vital totality. It is something imponderable and can be treated
only speculatively. The subsequent points are offered with such a
restriction in mind. Within such limits three aspects of Weltan-
schauung will be considered. These will be called respectively the
relative, the categorial, and the phenomenological.

I
The relative aspect of Weltanschauung may be seen as following
from the operation of two classes of factors. The members of one
class are fixed and external; those of the other class are variable
and internal.
Among the fixed, external factors are race, place, climate, and
natural resources. Race is a factor about which little or no un-
qualified knowledge is available. One may observe that in the
strongest nations of the western world what could be called a pure
race does not exist, and that, while race is something permanent,
subraces always are changing. Yet, in some undetermined way,
race seems to affect Weltanschauung. There are certain general
differences of attitude between occidental groups and those of the
Orient. In the domain of action there may be some effect of race
on Weltanschauung found in the evidence that the races of the
north have more material accomplishments to their credit than
races of the south, and that in the majority of military conflicts
between the north and the south, the north has won.
The influence of the factor of place is more amenable to dem-
 Three Aspects of Weltanschauung 217
onstration. Consider one attribute of place, namely size, which sets
limitations of one kind or another on the activities of human groups
and to some extent determines their outlook. In some cases there
is a relation between size and illiteracy. The United States and
China, two places of vast area, may be compared with Denmark
and Switzerland, two places of meager area. In these examples
there is an astonishing proportion of illiteracy in the places marked
by large area and a scant proportion in the places of small area.
Denmark and Switzerland are reported to have the lowest per-
centage of illiteracy in the world. But it may be that the same
kind of percentage is high in Guatemala and low in the Soviet
Union.
Another attribute of place is its tolerance for movement within
it. If place permits free and easy travel, as in the United States,
the way of life it encourages will be accompanied by one kind of
viewpoint, and if place tends to make travel difficult, as in Green-
land, the result will be a viewpoint of a different kind. But even
with the facile transportation in the United States today we may
see differences in the outlook of people occupying different parts
of the country. Between typical groups of residents of the New
England area and that of the Southern states there are obvious
differences, For instance, a typical New Englander, in the name of
good manners, is not likely to engage in extended conversation with
a random visitor, as a typical Southerner might do to demonstrate
his “hospitality.” Perhaps these differences are a heritage from pre-
vious periods when movement over distances of ground was not as
easy as it is today. Insofar as differences in outlook among various
sections of the United States are regularly diminishing, they show
the results of antecedents which include movement within a place.
Insofar as these same differences still are tangible they show the
vestiges of an era of restricted movement.
Another attribute of place is degree of isolation. This attribute
exhibits the influence of the boundaries of a place on its human
population. In this context a significant question is: “To what ex-
tent do the boundaries exclude or admit other people and hence,
other ideas?” Natives of the Hawaiian Islands, a pIace entirely sur-
rounded by water, have developed many thoughts about fishing
that would not occur to a native of Tibet, a place entirely sur-
rounded by land. Germany, bounded by eight countries and within
easy access of six others, traditionally has an attitude towards
218 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

military preparations and a military life vastly different from Aus-

tralia, bounded entirely by water and geographically remote from
other countries.
The next factor is climate with its attributes of temperature,
light, and moisture, which will affect fashions, diet, working habits,
recreation, physiological functioning, and the corresponding think-
ing about each. As one example, consider that light in the United
States is more intense than in England, and that there is a con-
comitant variation between this attribute and nervousness. The
point is seen in cases of many Englishmen who become residents
of the United States and then develop tensions they never experi-
enced in their native land.
Another factor is natural resources. Man takes forests, mines,
waters, and fields, and builds them into a means of life for him-
self, and so furnishes a frame of reference for his thinking. At a
time when agriculture dominated the South, Birmingham, Alabama,
had a character and viewpoint different from that of other South-
ern cities. The difference may be traced to coal, iron ore, limestone,
and dolomite near Birmingham, which led to the development of
the steel industry there.
Besides these constant factors-race, place, climate, and natural
resources-there are factors that are variable and, rather than being
physical and external, are psychical and internal.
The first of these factors appears in the case of a pattern of
thinking which has become a conceptual guide for a multitude of
minds, that is, what Francis Bacon called an “idol of the theatre.”
Individuals, thinking imitatively and as if struck by something con-
tagious, will subject themselves to certain theoretical models that
thereupon become active in shaping Weltanschauungen. Among
theories having this kind of effect are Newton’s mechanics, Dar-
win’s organic evolution, and Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Bacon was quite sensitive to influences on the operation of man’s
mind and another of his examples is given the name “idols of the
cave.” These point to the condition that each man possesses a
temperament from which he cannot escape, and that this factor
contains numerous variations in disposition and accordingly in the
development of Weltanschauung. For example, when presented
with statements or data purporting to impart knowledge, one in-
dividual will react skeptically and so suspend commitment to be-
 Three Aspects of Weltanschauung 219

lief; another will accept the same statements or data readily and
be a dogmatist.
Disposition also influences the selection of modes of living,
such as public or private, rural or urban, political or military, each
of which tends to affect Weltanschauung differently from the others.
These kinds of variations are suggested by Balzac’s La Come‘die
humuine, which, though not completed, offers ninety-one stories
each based on manifestation of different human dispositional en-
dowments that identify themselves with a different Weltanschau-
ung, fictionally corroborating Bacon’s idols of the cave.
Another psychic factor in Weltanschauung is that resulting from
the presence of morals. It is obvious that there are different moral
outlooks among individuals in any group just as there are different
habits and different manners. In fact, these three human attributes
are not readily distinguished. Presumably theological doctrine has
a bearing on them. Men are almost unaware of their presence, and
yet they are part of the characteristic attitude each man will as-
sume. The consolidation of morals, habits, and manners usually is
called conventional morality. It permeates Weltanschauung and
together the two are responsible for judgments guiding human ac-
tion. Moreover, both are subject to change. In the recent past in
some communities in the United States, wearing of shorts in public
by females was considered a civil offense and prohibited by mu-
nicipal ordinance. Subsequently conventional morality and Welt-
anschauung changed to produce almost national acceptance of
shorts as part of female attire. But again, conventional morality
and Weltanschauung, although remaining together, may have more
than one response to the same data. Consider human consumption
of alcohol. By some groups this practice is rejected as sinful; by
others it is approved as a mark of social grace.
Still another psychic factor is present in the kind of organiza-
tion of man’s thoughts that is called technology. Obviously the
products of technology have an immense and subtle effect on how
man behaves and thinks. The example of the automobile in the
United States is sufficient to make the point.
These psychic factors are difficult to treat, and the outcome of
reflecting about them is not at all neat, lucid, or complete. As com-
ponents of a survey they are perhaps adequate even though lead-
ing to inconsistency. On the other hand any attempt to portray
220 THE S O C I O L O G I C A L QUARTERLY

them as forming a calculus having consistency would be in effect a

reductio ad absurdurn. One of the most perverse of the psychic
factors is that which may be designated as thought and language.
In general form it is the case of two closely allied phenomena
about which the question arises: Which one is primary and which
one is derivative, or are they otherwise related, and, if so, how?
Such a question applied to thought and language is of long stand-
ing. The suggested answers have been inconclusive, but that fact
is not relevant to the present undertaking. Whatever may be the
relation between its components, the thought-language alliance
bears decisively on Weltanschauung.
Cultural anthropology long has held the belief that each lan-
guage offers a veritable Weltanschauung. Cassirer has been con-
spicuous in developing this point. He considers man’s given en-
vironment as a moving chaos and that men view the world more
with words than with eyes. From this standpoint the world is a
function of syntax and verbal habits more than it is a function of
objective relations one might claim to End in it. When man speaks
there is at once a whole way of thinking embedded in language,
which precedes and goes beyond any individual thought. It fol-
lows that physics is deployed in logic, while logic is deployed in
grammar. Dufrenne has remarked that languages, even if lexical
and grammatical similarities exist among them, nevertheless divide
the verbal universe into multiple sectors, and that, if one holds
that language represents a kind of destiny so far as human thought
is concerned, diversity of language leads to a radical relativism.
Peirce said that if Aristotle had been Mexican, his logic would
have been different.
The language-thought dilemma may be seen in a different light
by noting that although language acts to express thought, it also
acts to retain thought. When retaining thought by means of lan-
guage, a process of selection occurs. Seemingly the selection is
made distributively by individuals, but it often is guided by some
human institution or group, wherein language necessarily serves
as part of its character. A professional baseball player will d 8 e r
from a carpenter in selecting thought for retention through lan-
guage. Selection made by members of a Zulu tribe will differ from
that made by members of an American fraternal order, and the
selection made by members of the medical profession will differ
from all of these.
 Three Aspects of Weltanschauung 221

Language truly retains thought. But the thought retained acts

back, by its own nature, on language, and changes language.
Thought generates new thought or variations of thought, simul-
taneously demanding a creation of language to describe the emer-
gent. The behavior of thought is responsible for adding new terms
to language, such as spin system, performative utterance, prenex
normal form, and dacron, and also for changing the meaning of
words; for example, the word, communism, in its Russian applica-
tion has taken on a different significance in each of the first five
decades of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, as language is being
remade, so is Weltanschauung.
The two kinds of factors just reviewed-the fixed, exoteric and
the variable, esoteric-apply both to the individual and to the group
of which he is a member, often acting directly upon the individual
and through numerous individuals upon the group, and then from
the group back to other individuals. The conceptual currents gen-
erated by these factors are not at all easy to follow. There is one
from the individual to the group, but it does not exclude another
from the group to the individual. Those factors whose main line
of influence is from the group to the individual may be called
social factors.
One of these social factors is class, and indigenous to class is
the principle that in any group, at any time or at any place, there
will be a distinction between the rulers and the ruled. One im-
mediate consequence is that there will be a Weltanschauung
among the rulers different from that among the ruled. Each of
these divisions will develop its distinctive point of view. There is
no implication that members of each division are readily discern-
ible. The rulers and the ruled cannot be distinguished by external
appearances, or by governmental or business position, or by the
front page or social column of a newspaper. More often than not
a ruler is obscured from the public's eye and, in the case of politics,
may be a person whose name never has appeared on a ballot, and,
in the case of business, may be someone whose name is not at the
top on the organization chart or may not b e there at all.
Also there is no implication that division of the factor of class
into rulers and ruled excludes alternate divisions. I t is quite ad-
missible to look at class and Weltanschauung as expressed in oc-
cupations : for example, landlords, clergy, politicians, business men,
engineers, and educators. In spite of anything anyone can do, each
222 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

of these occupational divisions is going to have its own viewpoint

which may be altered slightly by tumbling against that of the
others but nevertheless will not lose its own character.
Another social factor in the formation of Weltanschauung is
that of function. In one sense function is closely related to class,
for a man’s function more often than not will place him in a class.
That is, a doctor, a butcher, a mason, a school teacher, a barber,
or an inventor will be placed in a class because of his function.
But functions must be present in any society and will have a part
in coloring the outlook of the individual who functions. The social
status of function and the regard for the views associated with it
will vary with time. Functions which in the past were deprived of
esteem may today hold a status which is admired and vice versa.
For example, the distinction between professions and trades is less
sharp now than it was a hundred years ago, and the difference in
the Weltanschauung of each is modified accordingly.
More forces affecting Weltanschauung are revealed if society
is seen as an aggregate of intragroups. These may be of two types.
One consists of such structures as the family, the neighborhood,
the political unit, the occupational complex, and so on. To this
type the human individual is unescapably bound. The other type
of intragroup is one in which man has a choice of whether or not
he will be a member of it. Within this type are the political party,
the lodge, the club, the church, and similar bodies. But, regardless
of whether membership is compulsory or optional, the respective
intragroups possess a characteristic viewpoint that shows its effect
on the members. Then, too, each intragroup engages in interaction
with other intragroups structurally external to it, which, in the
interest of making a point, might be called extragroups. An inter-
play of outlooks between a given intragroup and a multiplicity of
extragroups will be another factor contributing to the Weltanschau-
ung of the intragroup and accordingly to the Weltanschauung of
its members.
From another standpoint, one might say that WeEtanschauung
is a function of history. Every intragroup has its historical heritage,
that is, the body of prejudices and dispositions that has come to it
from the past. At any moment, associations, like the church, the
business complex, the school, and the state, and institutions, like
matrimony and transportation, that act to form Weltanschauungen,
 Three Aspects of Weltanschauung 223

are, in one sense, the result of history. Consider any individual and
it appears that there is scarcely a fraction of his thinking that has
not been influenced by inherited conditions. The belief of Croce
that “all history is contemporary history,” and of Tennyson that
“we are the heirs of all the ages,” is not without foundation.
In the complicated process responsible for Weltanschauung
there is the central factor of evolution. It may be presupposed that
mind did not always exist in the universe, and that originally there
was only matter, regardless of whether or not mind was latent in it.
From original matter new forms evolved. In the earliest state of
the solar system matter probably was all electronic; later it attained
to atomic and molecular form; later still to colloidal organic mat-
ter; and recently to living matter. Life, simple in the beginning,
attained greater complexity; mind, negligible in lower forms of life,
became of greater and greater importance until it reached its pres-
ent level in man. Where there is mind, there is Weltanschauung;
and if mind, by evolution, has emerged from a prepsychozoic period,
Weltanschauung has done the same.
The relative aspect of Weltanschauung suggests the question
as to how much the self alone and how much the universe, as it
stands over and against the self, has to do with establishing Welt-
anschauung. This question, in turn, suggests two alternative ap-
proaches. In one, Weltanschauung is considered as an integration
of the inner state of man and something from the outer state of
the universe with their effective relation being reciprocal and with
neither having priority as a force in determining the result. In the
other, Weltanschauung is considered as something subordinate to
a structure subsisting independently of the self. These two ap-
proaches lead to the remaining two aspects of Weltanschauung-the
categorial and the phenomenological-which, because of space
limitations, will be examined in only a summary fashion.

I1
The categorial aspect of weltanschauung reveals a character com-
plementary to that of the relative aspect, which assumed that
Weltanschauung had largely an empirical basis. The individual
was taken to be the central agent in forming Weltanschauung and,
even though outside influences acted upon him, his experience dic-
tated what the outcome was to be. In the categorial aspect the
224 THE SOCIOLOGICAL Q U A R T E R L Y

main medium in which Weltanschauung arises is not a self-sufficient

ego; it is a fixed state of affairs overarching the atomistic character
of the relative experience of the ego and providing a framework or
category serving as a conceptual harness on the consequences of this
experience.
Historically, the use of categories as interrelated with human
thought and as a restriction of a completely empirical interpretation
of the outer world is fairly common among philosophers. Two of
the best known men employing this medium within their philo-
sophical proposals are Aristotle and Kant. It must be understood
definitely that when Aristotle and Kant presuppose categories they
are not specifically concerned with Weltanschauung. The only point
urged is that the categories of Aristotle, Kant, and other philoso-
phers are evidence that there is a categorial aspect of Weltan-
schauung.
Aristotle’s categories are a consequence of his definition of
philosophy as a science of universals. This definition leads him to
ask how the physical and biological sciences are reIated to philos-
ophy, and he answers that they are related in the manner of part
and whole. Philosophy itself he calls first philosophy and the other
sciences are called second philosophy. He stipulates that first phi-
losophy embraces and contains all of the principles of second
philosophy. Aristotle is seeking knowledge of all reality and phi-
losophy is the primary instrument in his search. However, he re-
quires another instrument, namely, language. Through language
the philosopher designates things as he conceives them and Aristotle
believed that the usual ways of designating things, that is, the ele-
ments of discourse, correspond to different forms which make these
elements conceivable. The forms are Aristotle’s categories, spe-
cifically substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position,
state, activity, and passivity. These directly signify the modes of
being of things of the universe. Aristotle previously had asked
whether logic and reality were objects within the same science or
within two different sciences. From the premise that the data of
logic and the principles of reality apply universally he concluded
that logic and reality share alike in first philosophy. The presenta-
tion of the categories is a development of this belief.
Aristotle’s categories are especially pertinent in the present con-
text, because, presumably, they provide all the types of possible
predicates. All terms that are not composite, that is, nouns, verbs,
 Three Aspects of Weltanschauung 225

adjectives, or adverbs standing alone will be conjoined with some

category: man is a substance, six feet tall is a quantity, red is a
quality, twice is a relation, Athens is a place, then is time, standing
is a position, armed is a state, to heal is activity, and to be healed
is passivity. Then Weltanschauung cannot be something independ-
ent of the categories, insofar as it cannot be something independent
of discourse. To be articulate it requires these impersonal forms,
universal in scope, that integrate with its human expressions.
When thinking of Weltanschauung as manifesting itself in a
judgment, the Kantian categories come to mind. They are similar
to those of Aristotle in only a few respects: that of being universal
in character, that of being relevant to Weltanschauung, and that of
being complementary to a part of individual experience. For Kant
judgment was a function of the understanding, However, sensi-
bility furnished understanding with the materials of knowledge, in
that way making knowledge a common product of sensibility and
understanding. After having the materials of knowledge which sen-
sibility has supplied, it becomes the function of the understanding
to judge. For the present purpose something not found in Kant is
being interpolated into his doctrine, that is, the supposition that
weltanschauung Iurks somewhere in most judgments. The basis of
this supposition is that whatever one’s Weltanschauung may be, it
comes to definition in the medium of judgments.
Kant held that, in judging, the understanding follows logical
forms or categories, and that there are as many categories as there
are kinds of judgments, which, according to the logic of his day,
were twelve, which, however, could be divided into four groups
of three members each. T‘he four groups were determined respec-
tively by Kant’s four main categories, which is to say by the cate-
gories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, Among these four
main categories relation is sovereign, since every judgment ex-
presses a relation. The categories are an unalterable matrix enduring
in the mind, are nonempirical, and permanently await the content
that sensibility brings to them. They have been introduced here, not
as something conclusive, but only as a background against which
to think about an a priori factor as potentiaIly implicated in Welt-
anschauung.
226 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

I11
In the third, or phenomenological, aspect of Weltanschauung, man
is considered as a self whose experience and whose construction of
meanings is subsequent, rather than complementary, to something
a priori. It is not the accumulation of events met with serially in
man’s life experiences or in the life of the group that is crucial in
forming his Weltanschauung. It is the presence of a structure which
he must follow if there is to be a Weltanschauung at all. Only in
a derivative way is his weltanschauung empirically influenced. His
relation to natural objects in a spatiotemporal world on the basis of
his psychological organs and their functions exists, but it is not the
foundation of his Weltanschauung. In this third aspect what is pri-
mary is a nonnatural and purely a priori structure which inevitably
guides the ego’s mental processes. It is as a consequence of this
structure, and not of man’s individual endowments, that Weltan-
schauung gets under way. The structure is transcendental in the
sense that it is not located in man’s personal consciousness and not
conditioned by, nor subject to, space-time referends or expedient
ordinances of thought, such as the principles of identity, contradic-
tion, and excluded middle.
Twentieth-century phenomenology sees consciousness as having
two degrees, one of pure structure apart from time and space, and
the other naturally existing in the ego, but subject to guidance by
the timeless transcendental structure. However, the best example
of a phenomenological pattern for the formation of Weltanschauung
is not found in twentieth-century thought, but rather is the dia-
lectic of Hegel-the recurring pattern of three universal moments:
an affirmation, its annulment and absorption by negativity, and a
succeeding resolution at a more comprehensive level. This move-
ment represents a consecutive development of man’s mind, at any
point of which his Weltanschauung stands determined by the dia-
lectic it obediently traverses. Hegel’s dialectic leads mind on
through a process of self-enlargement, which when completed by
mind as found in a single person, goes on through the spirit of
mankind collectively. But throughout the course of both levels of
human representation the dialectic has been illustrating its pure
form, which is that of logic.
One of the main features of the dialectic is its exposure of a
paradox continually faced by individual consciousness and, though
 Three Aspects of Weltanschauung 227

appearing in multifarious guises, always consisting fundamentally

of the condition that anyone, in order to realize what h e is, must
become more than he is, or than he knows himself to be. The
beginning of the manifestation of the dialectic in individual con-
sciousness is in the elementary, unreflective stage of sense certainty,
which inherently contains a paradox which is resolved by the dia-
lectic movement when sense certainty is aufgehoben to sense per-
ception. But, alas, at this new level another paradox appears, which
is resolved when sense perception is aufgehoben to understanding.
And so on to new levels and a succession of new dresses for the
old paradox. After sense perception, mind under the dialectic is
widened to self-consciousness, and then to reason, the last of the
subjective phases. But paradox and the dialectic continue relent-
lessly. In its next phase, mind (Geist) becomes objective in the
ethical order of society, then in three successive phases of religion:
the natural, the aesthetic, and the revealed, and finally in the all-
inclusive and absolute Idee. Hegel's talent is prodigious and the
spectacle he presents is overwhelming. On his vast stage, the tragi-
comedy of man's career is enacted with all its ironies, incongruities,
strife, tension, continual transition to something else, and rhythmic
destiny. The Hegelian dialectic is a logic, not of abstract terms, but
of human persuasions: cognitive, ethical, social, aesthetic, and re-
ligious. Few people, if any, would refer to Hegel's writings as
treatises on Weltanschauung. Yet the whole course of his dialectic
is an exhibition of WeZtanschauung. The dialectic furnishes a pat-
tern to which Weltanschauung dances.
Three ways of viewing Weltanschauung have been suggested,
without any implication that there are not other ways. Weltan-
schauung is something that prevails within consciousness, yet it is
something quite elusive, and any attempts to account for it fully
and conclusively have large obstacles ahead. One of these is the
b d i n g question raised by the condition that weltanschauung seems
to involve the entire gamut of man's psychological functions. Then,
in what way do these functions combine to contribute to Weltan-
schauung and, in so doing, what is the mechanism of their contact
with the external world, which also is involved? There are, within
the psychological functions, existential features, such as sensing,
and nonexistential features, such as concepts. In the area of Welt-
anschauung these contrasting states of being somehow merge, But
whoever seeks to reveal what happens when what is existential
228 THE SOCIOLOGICAL Q U A R T E R L Y

merges with what is nonexistential strikes a rock on which many

theoretical enterprises have been shattered. Weltanschauung may
have its unique character and composition, but what they are re-
mains a secret.
Yet Weltanschauung demands consideration as a factor of
weight in social inquiry. Whether a social study is value-free or
value-oriented, norms and values remain embedded in social groups,
and valuation is the most persistent attitude in human nature.
Weltanschauung is a prime agent in determining norms and values,
if not in some respects identical with them. When they are recog-
nized as foundations of the social system, so is Weltanschauung.