its long struggle upward has so effectually blacklisted that only a few perverts now lapse into them; we have execrated out of existence whole classes of cruelty and vice.  But with the changing and ever more complex relations of society new forms of sin continually creep in; these we have not yet come to brand with the odium they deserve.  Leaders of society and pillars of the church are often, and usually without disturbance of conscience, guilty of wrongdoing as grave in its effects, or graver, than many of the faults we relentlessly chastise.  On the other hand, many really useful reforms are blocked because they awaken old prejudices or cross silly and meaningless conventions.  The air is full of proposals, invectives, causes, movements; how shall we know which to espouse and which to reject, or where best to lend a hand?  We need a consistent and well-founded point of view from which to judge.  To get such a sane and far-sighted moral perspective; to see the acts of our fellow men with a proper valuation; to be able to point out the insidious dangers of conduct which is not yet as generally rebuked as it ought to be; and at the same time to emancipate ourselves and others from the mistaken and merely arbitrary precepts that are intermingled with our genuine morality, and so attain the largest possible freedom of action, such should be the outcome of a thorough study of ethical principles and ideals.

PART I

THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OP PERSONAL MORALITY

In almost any field it is wise to precede definition by an impartial survey of the subject matter.  So if we are to form an unbiased conception of what morality is, it will be safest to consider first what the morals of men actually have been, how they came into being, and what function they have served in human life.  Thus we shall be sure that our theory is in touch with reality, and be saved from mere closet-philosophies and irrelevant speculations.  Our task in this First Part will be not to criticize by reference to any ethical standards, but to observe and describe, as a mere bit of preliminary sociology, what it is in their lives to which men have given the name “morality,” of what use it has been, and through the action of what forces it has tended to develop.  With these data in mind, we shall be the better able, in the Second Part, to formulate our criteria for judging the different codes of morality; we shall find that we are but making explicit and conscious the considerations that, unexpressed and unrealized, have been the persistent and underlying factors in their development.  How early in the evolutionary process did personal morality of some sort emerge?  Of course the words (in any language) and the explicit conceptions “morality,” “duty,” “right,” “wrong,” etc, are very late in appearance, presupposing as