stom, and the most highly valued of all. For where alert
and conscious criticism of existing folkways is habitual among
all the members of a society, that society is saved from
subjection through inertia to disserviceable habits. It acts as
a continual check and control; it prevents social and moral
stagnation. The habit of reflection upon conduct, if it could
be made generally current, would insure social progress.
For customs would be regarded merely as tools, as instruments
to be modified and adapted to new circumstances, as
provisional modes of attaining the good. Fixity and rigidity
in social life would give place to flexibility and wise continual
adaptation.

THE VALUES OF REFLECTIVE MORALITY. Some of these have
already been noted. We may briefly summarize the foregoing
discussion, and call attention to some additional values of a
morality based upon reason, as contrasted with a morality of
mere mechanical conformity to custom. It has already been
pointed out that intellectual preferences and valuations are
rooted in primary impulses; that is, our desires are anterior to
reflection. What we intellectually value and prefer has its
roots in primary impulses. Reason can discover how man may
attain the good; but what _is_ good is determined by the
desires with which man is, willy-nilly, endowed. Our preferences
are, within limits, fixed for us. As Santayana writes:

Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world already
wonderfully organized, in which it found its precursor in what is
called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and its
function in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations
harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which
they depend.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Life of Reason_, vol. I, p. 40.]

Our chief aim in reflective behavior is to discover ways and
means by which a harmony may be achieved, a harmony of
those very instincts which, left to themselves, would be in
perpetual collision, frustrating and checking each other.

Reflection not only seeks to find a way of life in which no
natural impulse shall be frustrated, but it is through reflection
that desires are broadened, and that new desires arise. Out
of reflection upon social relations, which is in the first instance
prompted by man's innate gregariousness, arise the conception
of ideal friendship and the thirst for and movement
toward ideal society. Out of reflection upon the an