CHAPTER IX.

VERACITY.

§ 156. Complete truthfulness is one of the rarest of virtues. Even those who regard themselves as absolutely truthful are daily guilty of over-statements and under-statements. Exaggeration is almost universal. The perpetual use of the word “very,” where the occasion does not call for it, shows how widely diffused and confirmed is the habit of misrepresentation. And this habit sometimes goes along with the loudest denunciations, of falsehood.

CHAPTER X.

OBEDIENCE.

§ 161. Under the one name “obedience” are grouped two kinds of conduct, which have widely different sanctions: the one sanction being permanent and the other temporary. Filial obedience and political obedience being thus bracketed, the idea of virtuousness is associated with both; and almost everyone thinks that a submission which is praiseworthy in the one case, is praiseworthy in the other also.

CHAPTER XI.

INDUSTRY.

§ 167. If we are to understand the origins and variations of the sentiments, ethical and pro-ethical, which have been entertained in different times and places concerning industry and the absence of industry, we must first note certain fundamental distinctions between classes of human activities, and between their relations to the social state.

CHAPTER XII.

TEMPERANCE.

§ 173. Such ethical, or rather pro-ethical, sentiments as attach to temperance, have primarily, like sundry of the associated pro-ethical sentiments, religious origins. As shown in The Principles of Sociology, § 140, the bearing of hunger becomes in many cases a virtue, because it is a sequence of leaving food for the ancestor, and, at a later stage, sacrificing food to the god.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHASTITY.

§ 181. Before we can understand fully the ethical aspects of chastity, we must study its biological and sociological sanctions. Conduciveness to welfare, individual or social or both, being the ultimate criterion of evolutionary ethics, the demand for chastity has to be sought in its effects under given conditions.

CHAPTER XIV.

SUMMARY OF INDUCTIONS.

§ 188. Where the data are few and exact, definite conclusions can be drawn; but where they are numerous and inexact, the conclusions drawn must be proportionately indefinite. Pure mathematics exemplifies the one extreme, and Sociology the other. The phenomena presented by individual life are highly complex, and still more complex are the phenomena presented by the life of aggregated individuals; and their great complexity is rendered still greater by the multiformity and variability of surrounding conditions.

Copyright, 1892,

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Printed at the Appleton Press, U. S. A.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

§ 193. The foregoing fourteen chapters have shown that ethical sentiments and ideas are, in each place and time, determined by the local form of human nature, the social antecedents, and the surrounding circumstances. Hence the question arises—How from all which is special and temporary shall we separate that which is general and permanent?

CHAPTER II.

ACTIVITY.

§ 199. In a systematic treatise the express statement of certain commonplaces is inevitable. A coherent body of geometrical theorems, for instance, has to be preceded by self-evident axioms. This must be the excuse for here setting down certain familiar truths.