quence that the
_parts of man_, I mean his separate organs, rise in value. His brain,
his sex, his stomach--each strives for mastery in attention; a faithless
age has manias of sexuality, of intellect, of gastronomy.[117:1] These
manias are the result of low values really placed on man himself. How do
we discover that low value? It is not so much a matter of opinion; far
more important than the opinion of the public is the wide-spread,
always-acting, fundamental public feeling, expressed in the atmosphere
of our society. Every smallest detail of life, our aims and hourly
habits, everything that makes up the secret imaginations and the
un-willed purposes of life--all have a part to play in deciding what our
estimations of life will be, the things we shall seek as desirable, what
avoid as unpleasant. If our estimations and hidden desires in actual
fact rise in goodness, if we find better aims to satisfy our lives than
the excitements of sexual satisfaction, then this department of morality
will rise.

The question is one of great complexity, and the surest means of
improvement are very difficult to decide; not to be settled in a spirit
of Sunday-school optimism. The bad boy does not always come to harm, or
the good boy gain the reward that he ought to have. It is not so simple
as that. Even if all vulgar and evil desires could by some magician's
wand be transformed into their opposites, so that all of us bubbled and
seethed with virtues, I do not believe we could count on the results.
Our very virtues might hasten us to perdition: both higher and lower
aims, if ill-adjusted to form a complete life, may lead astray. The
savage in us all has to be reckoned with as the angel, and the dreamer
who ever looks to heaven often stumbles over a tiny stone. Thus a
helpless romanticizing, a too ideal as well as a too low view of love,
may lead easily to a self-deceiving resort to prostitution.

All forcing of goodness, in my opinion, is dangerous. Often the cause of
virtue is injured, like the cause of religion, not only when virtue is
allied with routine, dullness and narrowness, but also when appeal is
made to aspirations, which the young rarely feel spontaneously,
aspirations ill-adapted and too high for their immature characters and
the needs at the stage of virtue that has been reached. Certainly they
_appear_ to respond, fall in with our plans of salvation and often
accept them with seeming joy; I venture, however, to think th