ABSTRACT
T He last chapter touched briefly on the moral implications of a sense of religious humility springing from a consciousness of the individual's dependence on forces greater than man, and offered as proof that at least vestiges of this sentiment existed a number of replies to a question about on. The same question (‘People say that we are the recipients of on from the moment we come into this world. What do you think?’) was answered by fifteen people out of the hundred by referring to the on of ‘society’ or of ‘neighbours’. In answer to other leading questions a large number of people (though by no means the overwhelming majority one would expect in view of the fact that these ideas formed an essential part of the ethics teaching in pre-war schools) 312 acknowledged that they had received on from their parents, from their school-teachers, from the Emperor, from ‘the State’, from employers, or from individuals who had helped them earlier in their lives. And most of these acknowledged further that the receipt of these favours entailed certain corresponding obligations; in part obligations of loyalty and devoted service to those who had vouchsafed these favours—filial piety towards parents, for instance, or, in the case of the Emperor and the State, obeying laws and paying taxes—in part the obligation of living up to certain generalized standards of moral conduct which these honoured superiors had enjoined.
