advance with a great upbursting of
new power under more favorable conditions. It is to be noticed also that
reproduction responds to conditions of advance or decline. In decline
marriage and family become irksome. Celibacy arises in the mores. In
times of advance sex vice and excess reach a degree, as in the
Renaissance, which seems to constitute a social paroxysm. The sex
passion rises to a frenzy to which everything else is sacrificed. The
notion that mores grow either better or worse by virtue of some inherent
tendency is to be rejected. Goodness or badness of the mores is always
relative only. Their purpose is to serve needs, and their quality is to
be defined by the degree to which they do it. We have noticed that there
is in them a strain towards consistency, due to the fact that they are
more efficient when consistent. They are consistent also in aberration
and error when they fall under the dominion of any one of the false
tendencies above described. Hence we may have the phenomena of
degenerate mores characterizing a period; being a case of change in the
mores not due to any external and determinable cause, and analogous
either to vice or disease.

+105. The correction of aberrations.+ It is possible to arrest or avert
such an aberration in the mores at its beginning or in its early stages.
It is, however, very difficult to do so, and it would be very difficult
to find a case in which it has been done. Necessarily the effort to do
it consists in a prophecy of consequences. Such prophecy does not appeal
to any one who does not himself foresee error and harm. Prophets have
always fared ill, because their predictions were unwelcome and they were
unpopular. The pension system which has grown up in the United States
since the civil war has often been criticised. It is an abuse of extreme
peril in a democracy. Demagogues easily use it to corrupt the voters
with their own money. It is believed that it will soon die out by its
own limitations. There is, however, great doubt of this. It is more
likely to cause other evil measures, in order that it may not die out.
If we notice the way in which, in this case, people let a thing go on in
order to avoid trouble, we may see how aberrant mores come in and grow
strong.

+106. Mores of advance or decline.+ Seeck thinks that a general
weariness of life in the Greco-Roman world caused indifference to
procreation. It accounts for the readiness to commit suicide and for the
indi