men care for most. They renounced the ordinary standards of
welfare and happiness, and sought welfare and happiness in merely
denying the popular standards. The old world philosophies no longer
commanded faith, and they seemed to be rejected with active hatred, not
with mere indifferent unbelief. The poor and those who were forced to
live by self-denial joined these sects of philosophy or religion. The
age which saw extremes of luxury and vicious excess was also the age
which saw great phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each
school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life
in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the
"ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is
reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on
experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be
sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never
can be verified by experience. It purposely runs counter to all the
sanctions which are possible in experience. If any one declares evil
good and pain pleasure, he cannot find proof of it in any experiment.
The mores produced out of asceticism are therefore peculiar and in many
ways instructive.

+673. Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency.+ We have seen
that the mores are the results of the efforts of men to find out how to
live under the conditions of human life so as to satisfy interests and
secure welfare. The efforts have been only very imperfectly successful.
The task, in fact, never can be finished, for the conditions change and
the problem contains different elements from time to time. Moreover,
dogmas interfere. They dictate "duty" and "right" by authority and as
virtue, quite independently of any verification by experience and
expediency. All the primitive taboos express the convictions of men that
there are things which must not be done, or must not be done beyond some
limited degree, if the men would live well. Such convictions came either
from experience or from dogma. The former class of cases were those
things which were connected with food and the sex relation. The latter
class of cases were those things which were connected with the doctrine
of ghosts. There are also a great many primitive customs for coercing or
conciliating superior powers,--either men or spirits,--which consist in
renunciation, self-torture, obscenity, bloodshedding, filthiness, and
the per