INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 75 



tion, if it be justified, precludes any consideration 

 of morals. 



The diversion of intelligence from discrimina 

 tion of plural and concrete goods, from noting 

 their conditions and obstacles, and from devis 

 ing methods for holding men responsible for their 

 concrete use of powers and conditions, has done 



V more than brute love of power to establish in 

 equality and injustice among men. It has done 

 more, because it has confirmed with social sanc 

 tions the principle of feudal domination. All 

 men require moral sanctions in their conduct: the 

 consent of their kind. Not getting it otherwise, 

 they go insane to feign it. No man ever lived 



with the exclusive approval of his own conscience. 

 Hence the vacuum left in practical matters by the 

 remote irrelevancy of transcendental morals has to 

 be filled in somehow. It is filled in. It is filled in 

 with class-codes, class-standards, class-approvals 

 with codes which recommend the practices and 

 habits already current in a given circle, set, calling, 

 profession, trade, industry, club, or gang. These 

 class-codes always lean back upon and support 

 themselves by the professed ideal code. This latter 

 meets them more than half-way. Being in its pre 

 tense a theory for regulating practice, it must dem 

 onstrate its practicability. It is uneasy in isolation, 

 and travels hastily to meet with compromise and 

 accommodation the actual situation in all its brute 



