Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/472

468 while others can invariably be counted upon to do the wrong thing. Halfway between, most of us stand by in hesitation. These naturally moral individuals who seem to have an innate sense of honor and proportion are found in all walks of life. They appear to be types whose general attractiveness and good sense are recognized by all classes with whom they come in contact.

Thus moral conduct which is the result of repression of anti-social impulse is but a negative social virtue. Moral conduct which is the result of spontaneous action is a positive social virtue. The former is analogous to the veneer which covers up the basic crudeness; the latter is analogous to the solid rare wood.

Historically considered, moral conduct seems to have been most frequently of the psychological sort—very rarely of the biological sort. Rigid customs and established usages have from time immemorial sought to reduce variable human units in China and India, to spiritless followers of prescribed conduct. Each new generation is remorselessly trained to mechanical practises, the following of which is thought to signify moral conduct. Oriental peoples have proceeded farther than Occidental peoples in the direction of rigidly standardizing conduct. May not the adoption in recent times of some of the freer western standards by the supposedly tradition-bound east, be taken to signify the superior practicability and greater value of plastic standards over rigid ones?

But moral conduct by compulsion is a social policy not exclusively confined to Oriental peoples. We of the western world have had our experience with political and religious intolerance. Often the compulsory production of moral conduct has been carried to such extremes that it has become more than a repressive force, it has become a selective agency. Witness the case of the Roman Catholic inquisition. By the exaction of celibacy and by the torture and death of unorthodox and original persons, the perpetuation of the most intelligent stock was hindered. The enforcement of compulsory standards of moral conduct and the extermination of the intellectual, effectively rooted out of society many of those people who had within them the possibilities of genuine social conduct. In this way customs have been so rigidly preserved that it seems as if their chief object has been to crush without discrimination all variation from the prescribed conduct. The ultraconservative elements of society seem to consider that the extension of the sphere within which custom works to the line in ironing out all' innovation and in rigidly standardizing conduct, is the best possible evidence of moral progress.

In recent times we have begun to think that genuine moral progress consists in the loosening up and in the simplification of binding customs. That flexible state of tradition which is consistent with the