ague and even, it may be,
misleading because it has several senses. So far, it has been left to the
intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the
context in what sense the word was used. But at the present point, before
we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is
necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what
precisely are the chief main senses in which the word "morality" is
commonly used.

The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is _theoretical
morality_. It is concerned with what people "ought"--or what is "right"
for them--to do. Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with
such theoretical morality: what "ought" people to seek in their actions?
The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the
whole of it, is concerned with that question. Such theoretical morality
is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only
be based on what is, not on what ought to be.

Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very
different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each
regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a
shade of contempt, "moral." These two kinds of theoretical morality are
_traditional morality_ and _ideal morality_. Traditional morality is
founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the
stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and
surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest
years. It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in
favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the
individual himself no longer accepts them. Many persons, for example, who
were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will
recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances
were "right," they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the
automatically aroused voice of "conscience," that is to say the expression
within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to
be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.

Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community
but to its future. It is based not on the old social actions that are
becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but
on ne