must turn the power behind it to good account.
The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized
expression.

We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself.
The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires
themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul,
neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of
all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the
family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to
transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power,
and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing folly,--to ignore this power
because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human
character is in these rooted lusts. The great error of the taboo has been
just this: that it believed each desire had only one expression, that if
that expression was evil the desire itself was evil. We know a little
better to-day. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many
interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

This supplies us with a standard for judging reforms, and so makes clear
what "constructive" action really is. When it was discovered recently
that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance to be chased by a
policeman, but a force that could be made valuable to civilization
through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform was given to the
world. The effervescence of boys on the street, wasted and perverted
through neglect or persecution, was drained and applied to fine uses.
When Percy MacKaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves
participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of
the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists
calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward a wealth of material
which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of "moral
equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same energies produce crime
and civilization, art, vice, insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each
individual the original differences are small. Training and opportunity
decide in the main how men's lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or
ignorantly tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric or morbid form.
Only by supplying our passions with civilized interests can we escape
their destructive force.

I have put it negatively, as a counsel of pru