some time? Who can mind his manners without being mannerly in accordance
with the usages of some race or people?

Those who content themselves with enunciating very general moral
principles may, it is true, be of no little service to their fellow-men;
but that is only because their fellow-men are able to supply the details
that convert the blur into a picture. Some twenty-four hundred years ago
Heraclitus told his contemporaries "to act according to nature with
understanding"; we are often told today that the rule of our lives should
be "to do good." Had the ancient Greek not possessed his own notions of
what might properly be meant by nature and by understanding, did we not
ourselves have some rather definite conception of what actions may
properly fall under the caption of doing good, such admonitions could not
lead to the stirring of a finger. Who would appeal to his physician for
advice as to diet, if he expected from him no more than the counsel to
eat, at the proper hours, enough, but not too much, of suitable food?

If, then, we confine our admonitions to the group of abstractions which
constitute the universally acknowledged standard of virtue when all the
individual differences which characterize different codes have been
ignored, we preach what, taken alone, no man can live by, and no
community of men has ever attempted to live by. If we leave it to our
hearers to drape our naked abstractions with concrete details, each will
set to work in a different way. The method of the composite photograph
seems unprofitable in attempting to solve the problem of morals.

3. DOGMATIC ASSUMPTION.--There is, however, a second way by which the
variations which characterize different codes may come to be relegated to
a position of relative insignificance. We may assume that our own code is
the ultimate standard by which all others are to be judged, and we may