ABSTRACT
Of all the bewilderments of the present age none is greater than that of the conscientious and candid moralist himself. The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is an historical accident. It so happens that those who administered the affairs of the established churches have, by and large, failed utterly to comprehend how deep and how inexorable was the dissolution of the ancestral order. What modernity requires of the moralist is that he should see with an innocent eye how men must reform their wants in a world which is not concerned to make them happy. It is difficult for the orthodox moralists to believe that amidst the ruins of authority men will ever learn to do this. Since they are unable to find a principle of order in the authority of a will outside themselves, there is no place they can find it except in an ideal of the human personality.
