Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/16

4 mixed up together, and even to cause them occasionally to change their places. Thus, in our own régime, undue emphasis is habitually laid upon the ceremonial side of life. Examination of the Ten Commandments reveals six that are roughly describable as utilitarian, the remaining four (a large proportion) referring to religious observance. In common conversation, attendance at church, and careful regard for other so-called religious duties are habitually placed on a level with, or even higher than, the careful fulfillment of secular requirements. Popular ideas concerning the Sabbath furnish a striking illustration of the point to which we now refer.

2. We pass now to the pre-ethical code of conduct arising from what we here term the social, or, better, the ceremonial root.

Casual consideration might lead one to suppose that ceremonial factors have played a relatively unimportant part in the history of civilization. Such a supposition, however, as further investigation could soon prove, would involve an entire misapprehension of the facts of human development. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is with the ceremonial code that such a discussion as this ought to begin, since out of it, in the consolidation of social life, both the regulations that we call religious and the regulations that we call political have been gradually evolved. Ceremonial government, as Mr. Spencer has shown, is not only the earliest and most general kind of government, but is also a government which "is ever spontaneously recommencing." Moreover, it has ever had and continues to have, as the facts of daily existence show us, the largest share in regulating men's lives.

It thus happens that distinctions of right and wrong constantly refer to a standard of convention, all questions of the tendencies of actions and of their wider relations to life being consciously or unconsciously left out of account. Like the theological code, therefore, the ceremonial code habitually passes over the inherent qualities of actions. Its sanctions are generally extraneous, not essential, and its inevitable trend is to confuse the really important with the relatively unimportant in conduct, often with the most unfortunate results. How far the ceremonial code demands respect, to what point it is mainly useful, and under what conditions it passes into a tyranny, crushing individuality and repressing the vital forces of life, are questions which, though to the last degree important, can not here be considered. What we have now to do is to notice the wide area over which the social code operates; the imperative character of its enactments; and the confusion to which it frequently gives rise—a confusion resulting from the fact that in the conflict of influences by which we are daily met, the morally right is again and again sacrificed to the socially correct. The "proper and therefore wrong" of