MORAL STANDARDS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 2 April 1930, Page 6

MORAL STANDARDS

THE INWARD CENSOR "As far as 1 can analyse my own feelings, I should say thai. I lie motive which keeps me from a had action is ;i feeling thai as 1 contemplate i! I do not like (he look of il or the smell of it. 1 feel it l.ii be ugly or foul or nol de-cent--not the sort of thing with which

I want to be associated," writes Pro lessor Gilbert Murray in "Harper's Magazine." •'And, similarly, the thing that nerves me toward a good bill difficult action is a feeling that il seems beautiful or fine, the sort of thing thai I love as 1 look at it and woidd like to have for my own. Though nol infallible, this moral or aesthetic instinct is a true fact. ... I refuse, then, to bo frightened, though sometimes, no doubt, 1. feel concerned. We. are passing through a time of strain and change, and managing the necessary readjustments on tho whole wild good success. ■ 1 trust for the general maintenance and gradual raising of the moral standard in a society such as ours: first to the influence of the. facts of life and the lessons taught by experience; next to the social instincts and the reaction of a well-organised society upon its members by example, education and training, by liking and disliking, admiration and disapproval; and, most of all to this inward censor of whom the psychologists tell us, this inborn moral or aesthetic instinct, the ineradicable heritage of humanity, by which men have from the, very beginnings of civilisation rejected and denied what they feel to bo vile within them, sought what they Jove, ami imitated what they admire."