le of wisdom.
As well might a person investigate the caprices and desires of some
huge and powerful monster in his keeping, studying how it is to be
approached, and how handled,--at what times and under what
circumstances it becomes most dangerous, or most gentle--on what
occasions it is in the habit of uttering its various cries, and further,
what sounds uttered by another person soothe or exasperate it,--and
when he has mastered all these particulars, by long-continued
intercourse, as well might he call his results wisdom, systematize
them into an art, and open a school, though in reality he is wholly
ignorant which of these humours and desires is fair, and which foul,
which good and which evil, which just and which unjust; and therefore
is content to affix all these names to the fancies of the huge
animal, calling what it likes good, and what it dislikes evil, without
being able to render any other account of them,--nay, giving the
titles of "just" and "fair" to things done under compulsion, because
he has not discerned himself, and therefore cannot point out to
others, that wide distinction which really holds between the nature
of the compulsory and the good.[1]

[Footnote 1: Plato: _Republic_ (Golden Treasury edition), pp. 209-10.]

Throughout human history, there have been periods of
individualism, of self-assertion against the traditional morality,
which have been marked by loss of moral restraints,
by a breakdown of the old standards without a substitution
of new and sounder ones. There has been, in the beginning
of almost every advance toward a new stage of moral valuation,
the accompaniment of liberty by license.

Reflection upon morals is not likely to produce immediately
good results. The established morality is at least established.
In so far as it is controlling in men's actions, it keeps those
actions ordered and regular. The traditional code by which
a man's life is governed may be a poor code, but it is more
satisfactory than no code at all. On discovering the inadequacy
of the morality by which he has lived, a man may reject
morality altogether. From that time forth he may have
no other standard than his own selfish desires. When a whole
society, as at the time of the Renaissance, throws its traditional
morality to the winds, it may make havoc of its freedom.
In place of a bad moral order it may cease to have any
moral order at all.

The discovery that the codes by which we have lived are
misle