Our discussion of the psychic facts of sex has thus, it will be seen, brought us up to the question of morality.  Over and over again, in setting forth the phenomena of prostitution, it has been necessary to use the word “moral.”  That word, however, is vague and even, it may be, misleading because it has several senses.  So far, it has been left to the intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the context in what sense the word was used.  But at the present point, before we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what precisely are the chief main senses in which the word “morality” is commonly used.

The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is theoretical morality.  It is concerned with what people “ought”—­or what is “right” for them—­to do.  Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with such theoretical morality:  what “ought” people to seek in their actions?  The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the whole of it, is concerned with that question.  Such theoretical morality is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only be based on what is, not on what ought to be.

Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a shade of contempt, “moral.”  These two kinds of theoretical morality are traditional morality and ideal morality.  Traditional morality is founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest years.  It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the individual himself no longer accepts them.  Many persons, for example, who were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances were “right,” they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the automatically aroused voice of “conscience,” that is to say the expression within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.

Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community but to its future.  It is based not on the old social actions that are becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but on new social actions that are as yet only practiced by a small though growing minority of the community.  Nietzsche in modern times has been a conspicuous champion of ideal morality, the heroic morality of the pioneer, of the individual of the coming community, against