orality's ability to justify itself. At the same time they represent
a protest against replacing the intrinsic truth of morality by the
arbitrary standards of authority {39} and convention. Now, while there
is little need in the present day of protecting individual judgment
against encroachments of authority, there can be no doubt of the great
need of protecting it against the more insidious encroachments of
convention. This is peculiarly an age of publicity. The forces of
suggestion and imitation operate on a scale unparalleled in the history
of society. Standards and types readily acquire an almost irresistible
prestige, simply through becoming established as models. And the
sanction of opinion may be gained for almost any formula, from a
fashion in hats to an article in theology. Convention can no longer be
accounted conservative. It sanctions promiscuously usages as venerable
as civilization itself, and as transient as the fad of the hour.
Democratic institutions and universal educational privileges have bred
a social mass intelligent and responsive enough to be modish, but
lacking in discrimination and criticism.

The tyranny of opinion, the fear of being different, has long since
been recognized as a serious hinderance to the development which
political freedom and economic opportunity ought properly to stimulate.
But the moral blindness to which it gives rise has never, I think, been
sufficiently emphasized. We require of business men only that measure
of honesty that we {40} conventionally expect in that type of
occupation. A politician is proverbially tricky and self-seeking. The
artistic temperament would scarcely be recognized if it did not
manifest itself in weakness and excess. It is as unreasonable to
expect either tunefulness or humor in a musical comedy as to expect a
statement of fact in an advertisement. In short, where any human
activity is conventionalized, standards are arbitrarily fixed; and
critical discernment grows dull if it does not altogether atrophy. It
simply does not occur to the great majority of men that any activity
should be judged otherwise than by comparing it with the stereotyped
average of the day. This is, to be sure, only that blindness of the
common mind which Socrates and Plato observed in their day, but it is
now aggravated through the greater massiveness and conductivity of
modern society.

These considerations will serve both to introduce and to justify my
p