study in practical
rather than in theoretical morals. Dr. Westermarck's great work,
_The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, is a more modern
example of the objectively scientific discussion of morals,
although this is not perhaps clearly brought out by the title. It
is essentially a description of the actual historical facts of
what has been, and not of what "ought" to be. Mr. L.T. Hobhouse's
_Morals in Evolution_, published almost at the same time, is
similarly a work which, while professedly dealing with ideas,
i.e., with rules and regulations, and indeed disclaiming the task
of being "the history of conduct," yet limits itself to those
rules which are "in fact, the normal conduct of the average man"
(vol. i, p. 26). In other words, it is essentially a history of
practical morality, and not of theoretical morality. One of the
most subtle and suggestive of living thinkers, M. Jules de
Gaultier, in several of his books, and notably in _La Dependance
de la Morale et l'Independance des Moeurs_ (1907), has analyzed
the conception of morals in a somewhat similar sense. "Phenomena
relative to conduct," as he puts it (op. cit., p. 58), "are given
in experience like other phenomena, so that morality, or the
totality of the laws which at any given moment of historic
evolution are applied to human practice, is dependent on
customs." I may also refer to the masterly exposition of this
aspect of morality in Levy-Bruhl's _La Morale et la Science des
Moeurs_ (there is an English translation).

Practical morality is thus the solid natural fact which forms the
biological basis of theoretical morality, whether traditional or ideal.
The excessive fear, so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality
is misplaced. We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves. Morals
is based on nature and can at the most only be modified. As Crawley
rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral
traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to
suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an
attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses. The evil of them
only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead,
they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital
reaction to the environment. They thus provoke new forms of ideal