It is out of these practical virtues that our conception of virtue has been formed. We may be sure that no quality is likely to have become esteemed as a virtue which did not somewhere and sometime produce at least the appearance of happiness. The virtues are grounded in experience; they are not idle suggestions inadvertently adopted because somebody took it into his head one fine day to proclaim a new ideal. There are, to be sure, certain residual and obsolete virtues which no longer correspond to anything in our own experience and now seem utterly arbitrary and capricious. But the cardinal virtues correspond to an experience so long and so nearly universal among men of our civilization, that when they are understood they are seen to contain a deposited wisdom of the race. 4. _From Clue to Practice_ The wisdom deposited in our moral ideals is heavily obscured at the present time. We continue to use the language of morality, having no other which we can use. But the words are so hackneyed that their meanings are concealed, and it is very hard, especially for young people, to realize that virtue is really good and really relevant. [p227] Morality has become so stereotyped, so thin and verbal, so encrusted with pious fraud, it has been so much monopolized by the tender-minded and the sentimental, and made so odious by the outcries of foolish men and sour old women, that our generation has almost forgotten that virtue was not invented in Sunday schools but derives originally from a profound realization of the character of human life. This sense of unreality is, I believe, due directly to the widespread loss of genuine belief in the premises of popular religion. Virtue is a product of human experience: men acquired their knowledge of the value of courage, honor, temperance, veracity, faithfulness, and love, because these qualities were necessary to their survival and to the attainment of happiness. But this human justification of virtue does not carry conviction to the immature, and would not of itself break up the inertia of their naive impulses. Therefore, virtue which derives from human insight has to be imposed on the immature by authority; what was obtained on Sinai was not the revelation of the moral law but divine authority to teach it. Now the very thing which made moral wisdom convincing to our ancestors makes it unconvincing to modern men. We do not live in a patriarchal society. We do not live in a world which disposes us to a belief in theocratic government. And therefore insofar as moral wisdom is entangled with the premises of theocracy it is unreal to us. The very thing which gave authority to moral insight for our forefathers obscures moral insight for us. They lived in the kind of world which disposed them to practice [p228] virtue if it came to them as a divine commandment. A thoroughly modernized young man to-day distrusts moral wisdom precisely because it is commanded.