ABSTRACT
The ethos of reticence introduces us immediately into a further group of values, which can no longer pass as dispositional in the strict sense, but still are values of conduct. They are more on the surface of human nature, where it exists in the outward contact of individuals, in the friction, as it were, of social intercourse. Existing custom is of course historically accidental, perishable, a conventionality, and it is never possible to know a priori why it is just so and not otherwise. The separate existing custom as such is never of absolute value; yet it is relatively so; for it is altogether an absolute value that, in general, customs of some special kind should prevail. Without established customs mankind sinks into formlessness and savagery. The entire domain of social intercourse is a border region of the ethical table of values.
