Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the changing social environment.  If the influence of tradition becomes unduly pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability.  If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable and to lose authority.  It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure and function—­of what is called the traditional with what is called the ideal—­that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its reality.  Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found this hard to understand.  In a vain desire for an impossible logicality they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed to them because of the impressive authority its dicta seem to convey.  The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions, so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.

We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with “morality” in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly affecting our sexual morality.  A transference of values is constantly taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral, what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard.  Such a process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality.  The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god.  Our sexual morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality but an immorality.

The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves, to reach a stage in which there seems to be an opposition between different standards lies in the fact that as yet we really have no specific sexual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to “sexual morality.”  And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality which we apply to the