angers. But while burgling with a fairly easy conscience,
he does flinch at breaking the code of honour set up by his
fellow-burglars. And at the other extreme we have the "gentleman" with
his code of honour which forbids him not to pay a gambling debt, but
takes no count of keeping a poor tradesman out of his money. In each of
these cases the determining factor is not theory but fact, and the fact
here is association with our fellow countrymen or with a special social
class. Morality, in short, is social or nothing. Moral laws are
meaningless apart from social life. Every moral command implies the
existence of a social medium, and it is no more than a study in history
to see how this social medium has been continuously shaping and
reshaping human nature. The determination here is not conscious, but it
is real, however much disguised it may be by various forms or theories.
And when we realise this, it is no more than a truism to say that a
change in religious belief can no more destroy morality than a change in
government can destroy society.

But in saying that the essence of morality is unreasoning I do not mean
that it is unreasonable. All I mean is that it can receive a reasonable
justification, and that no matter how lofty the development it has its
basis in the fundamental conditions of associated animal and human life.
We may surround the subject with a vague and attractive idealistic
verbalism, but we come back to this as a starting point. The love of
family, with all its attendant values, rests upon the fact of crude
sexual desire, refined, of course, during the passing of many
generations, but dependent upon it all the same. Remove the sexual
desire and the family feelings are inexplicable. Thus, the _reason_ for
the existence of the sexual instinct is race preservation, but the end
has been achieved in a quite unreasoning manner. In the animal world at
large there is certainly no conscious desire for the production of
offspring, nor is there with the mass of human beings. There is the
desire to gratify an impulse, and very little more. And for the
strengthening of an instinct there need not be, nor is there, any
consciousness of its social value. All that is necessary is that it
shall be useful. Natural selection attends to the rest.

This will, I think, supply an answer to the contention that secular
ethics can supply a "must," but not an "ought"; that is, it may show
that an individual should act in accord