ogmas, logical fallacy,
delusion, and current false estimates of goods worth striving for.

+38. The ethical policy of the schools and the success policy.+ Although
speculative assumptions and dogmatic deductions have produced the
mischief here described, our present world philosophy has come out of
them by rude methods of correction and purification, and "great
principles" have been deduced which now control our life philosophy;
also ethical principles have been determined which no civilized man
would now repudiate (truthfulness, love, honor, altruism). The
traditional doctrines of philosophy and ethics are not by any means
adjusted smoothly to each other or to modern notions. We live in a war
of two antagonistic ethical philosophies: the ethical policy taught in
the books and the schools, and the success policy. The same man acts at
one time by the school ethics, disregarding consequences, at another
time by the success policy, in which the consequences dictate the
conduct; or we talk the former and act by the latter.[65]

+39. Recapitulation.+ We may sum up this preliminary analysis as
follows: men in groups are under life conditions; they have needs which
are similar under the state of the life conditions; the relations of the
needs to the conditions are interests under the heads of hunger, love,
vanity, and fear; efforts of numbers at the same time to satisfy
interests produce mass phenomena which are folkways by virtue of
uniformity, repetition, and wide concurrence. The folkways are attended
by pleasure or pain according as they are well fitted for the purpose.
Pain forces reflection and observation of some relation between acts and
welfare. At this point the prevailing world philosophy (beginning with
goblinism) suggests explanations and inferences, which become entangled
with judgments of expediency. However, the folkways take on a philosophy
of right living and a life policy for welfare. Then they become mores,
and they may be developed by inferences from the philosophy or the rules
in the endeavor to satisfy needs without pain. Hence they undergo
improvement and are made consistent with each other.

+40. The scope and method of the mores.+ In the present work the
proposition to be maintained is that the folkways are the widest, most
fundamental, and most important operation by which the interests of men
in groups are served, and that the process by which folkways are made is
the chief one to which elementar