morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with
new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and
practical morals or morality proper. For not only is theoretical morality
the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the
general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it
reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own
spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as
we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of
theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the
vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality,
stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. Practical morality, or
morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of
theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior
theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is
anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior
or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that
while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always
closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond
to either of its forms. It always fails to catch up with ideal morality;
it is always outgrowing traditional morality.

It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three
chief forms in which the word "moral" is used, although under one shape or
another they cannot but be familiar to the reader. In the discussion of
prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom
of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined
by the context. But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned
with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is
necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use. In this
chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily
with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of
a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior
morality.

Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily
constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the
changing social environment. If the influen