when those acts injure no one except themselves. The
social censure, or the judgment of opinion, rightly extends much
further, though it is often based on very imperfect knowledge or
realisation. It is probable that, on the whole, opinion judges too
severely the crimes of passion and of drink, as well as those which
spring from the pressure of great poverty and are accompanied by great
ignorance. The causes of domestic anarchy are usually of such an
intimate nature and involve so many unknown or imperfectly realised
elements of aggravation or palliation that in most cases the less men
attempt to judge them the better. On the other hand, public opinion is
usually far too lenient in judging crimes of ambition, cupidity, envy,
malevolence, and callous selfishness; the crimes of ill-gotten and
ill-used wealth, especially in the many cases in which those crimes are
unpunished by law.

It is a mere commonplace of morals that in the path of evil it is the
first step that costs the most. The shame, the repugnance, and the
remorse which attend the first crime speedily fade, and on every
repetition the habit of evil grows stronger. A process of the same kind
passes over our judgments. Few things are more curious than to observe
how the eye accommodates itself to a new fashion of dress, however
unbecoming; how speedily men, or at least women, will adopt a new and
artificial standard and instinctively and unconsciously admire or blame
according to this standard and not according to any genuine sense of
beauty or the reverse. Few persons, however pure may be their natural
taste, can live long amid vulgar and vulgarising surroundings without
losing something of the delicacy of their taste and learning to
accept--if not with pleasure, at least with acquiescence--things from
which under other circumstances they would have recoiled. In the same
way, both individuals and societies accommodate themselves but too
readily to lower moral levels, and a constant vigilance is needed to
detect the forms or directions in which individual and national
character insensibly deteriorate.

FOOTNOTE:

[23] See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Volonte_, pp. 92, 116-119.

CHAPTER VII

It is impossible for a physician to prescribe a rational regimen for a
patient unless he has formed some clear conception of the nature of his
constitution and of the morbid influences to which it is inclined; and
in judging the wisdom of various proposals for the m