sformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing
things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness,
frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are
looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of
life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the
atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the
November days[34] and proselytes of every description: you can see
that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of
an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too
closely--unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion.

All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The
values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the
collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediaeval bloom of
Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions
of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and
communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did
homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper
classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of
courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an
ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of
faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork
of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to
politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world.

The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes,
and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective
shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as
positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness,
the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian
and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at
bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule
of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and
their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed.

We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an
idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western
nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they
believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean
by "esprit gaulois," or "English character,"