vicious, or that mercy, truth and temperance are virtuous." [Footnote:
_The Science of Ethics_, chapter i, Sec. 1.]

In other words, these writers would teach us that men are, on the whole,
agreed in approving, explicitly or implicitly, some standard of conduct
sufficiently definite to serve as a code of morals. But that there is
such a substantial agreement among men has not impressed all observers to
the same degree. Locke, who wrote before Butler, based his arguments
against the existence of innate moral maxims upon the wide divergencies
found among various classes of men touching what is right and what is
wrong. [Footnote: _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_, Book I,
chapter iii.] The historian, the anthropologist and the sociologist
reinforce his reasonings with a wealth of illustration not open to the
men of an earlier time. They present us with codes, not a code; with
multitudinous standards, not a single standard; with what has been
accepted here or there, at this time or at that; and we may well ask
ourselves where, amid this profusion, we are to find the one and
acceptable code.

2. WHAT CONSTITUTES SUBSTANTIAL AGREEMENT?--To be sure, we may be very
generous in our interpretation of what constitutes substantial agreement;
we may deny significance to all sorts of discrepancies by relegating them
to the unimpressive class of "disputes about particulars." Such an
impressionistic indifference to detail may leave us with something on our
hands as little serviceable as a composite photograph made from
individual objects which have little in common, a blur lacking all
definite outline and not recognizable as any object at all. No man can
guide his conduct by the common core of many or of all moral codes. Taken
in its bald abstraction, it is not a code or anything like a code. Who
can walk, without walking in some particular way, in some direction, at