]

+232. Mores and morals; social code.+ For every one the mores give the
notion of what ought to be. This includes the notion of what ought to be
done, for all should cooperate to bring to pass, in the order of life,
what ought to be. All notions of propriety, decency, chastity,
politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence,
cooperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which
good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn,
are in the mores. The mores can make things seem right and good to one
group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of
human nature. The thirteenth century bred in every heart such a
sentiment in regard to heretics that inquisitors had no more misgivings
in their proceedings than men would have now if they should attempt to
exterminate rattlesnakes. The sixteenth century gave to all such notions
about witches that witch persecutors thought they were waging war on
enemies of God and man. Of course the inquisitors and witch persecutors
constantly developed the notions of heretics and witches. They
exaggerated the notions and then gave them back again to the mores, in
their expanded form, to inflame the hearts of men with terror and hate
and to become, in the next stage, so much more fantastic and ferocious
motives. Such is the reaction between the mores and the acts of the
living generation. The world philosophy of the age is never anything but
the reflection on the mental horizon, which is formed out of the mores,
of the ruling ideas which are in the mores themselves. It is from a
failure to recognize the to and fro in this reaction that the current
notion arises that mores are produced by doctrines. The "morals" of an
age are never anything but the consonance between what is done and what
the mores of the age require. The whole revolves on itself, in the
relation of the specific to the general, within the horizon formed by
the mores. Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to
reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on
an unalterable principle, is a delusion. New elements are brought in
only by new conquests of nature through science and art. The new
conquests change the conditions of life and the interests of the members
of the society. Then the mores change by adaptation to new conditions
and interests. The philosophy and ethics then follow to account for and
justify t