so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality is misplaced.  We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves.  Morals is based on nature and can at the most only be modified.  As Crawley rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses.  The evil of them only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead, they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital reaction to the environment.  They thus provoke new forms of ideal morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and practical morals or morality proper.  For not only is theoretical morality the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own spontaneous growth, to modify them.  This action is diverse, according as we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of theoretical morality:  traditional and posterior morality, retarding the vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality, stimulating the vital growth of moral practice.  Practical morality, or morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of theoretical morality.  Practice is perpetually following after anterior theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley.  Posterior or traditional morality always follows after practice.  The result is that while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond to either of its forms.  It always fails to catch up with ideal morality; it is always outgrowing traditional morality.

It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three chief forms in which the word “moral” is used, although under one shape or another they cannot but be familiar to the reader.  In the discussion of prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined by the context.  But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use.  In this chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior morality.