are an impossibility where such a spirit prevails. Where there are no
doubts, no questionings, there can be no attempt at rational
construction.

Fortunately for the cause of human enlightenment there are forces at work
which tend to arouse men from this state of lethargy. Horizons are
broadened, new ideas make their appearance, there is a conflict of
authorities, the birth of a doubt, and, finally, a more or less
articulate appeal to Reason.

Even a child is capable of seeing that paternal and maternal injunctions
and reactions are not wholly alike, and it sets them off against each
other. Nor have all the children in the home precisely the same nature.
One is temperamentally frank and open, but unsympathetic; another is
affectionate, and prone to lying as the sparks fly upward. The virtues
and vices are not spontaneously arranged in the same order of importance
by children, and differences of opinion may arise. Nor does it take the
child long to discover that the law of its own home is not identical with
that of the house next door. At school the experience is repeated on a
larger scale; many homes are represented, and, besides that, two codes of
law claim allegiance, the code of the schoolboy and that of the master.
They may be by no means in accord.

And when, in college, the student for the first time seriously addresses
himself to the task of the study of ethics as science, he comes to it by
no means wholly unprepared. He has had rather a broad experience of the
contrasts which obtain between different codes. He is familiar with the
code of the home, of the school, of the social class, of the religious
community, of the civil community. There sit on the same benches with him
the sensitively conscientious student who doubts whether it is a