=II. Direct Perception No Guarantee of Validity.=--This suggests our second objection. The existence of immediate moral quality, the direct and seemingly final possession of rightness, as matter of fact, is not adequate proof of validity. At best, it furnishes a presumption of correctness, in the absence of grounds for questioning it, in fairly familiar situations. (a) There is nothing more direct, more seemingly self-evident, than inveterate prejudice. When class or vested interest is enlisted in the maintenance of the custom or institution which is expressed in a prejudice, the most vicious moral judgments assume the guise of self-conscious sanctity. (b) A judgment which is correct under usual circumstances may become quite unfit, and therefore wrong, if persisted in under new conditions. Life, individual and social, is in constant process of change; and there is always danger of error in clinging to judgments adjusted to older circumstances. "The good is the enemy of the better." It is not merely false ideas of the values of life that have to be re-formed, but ideas once true. When economic, political, and scientific conditions are modifying themselves as rapidly and extensively as they are in our day, it is reconstruction of moral judgment that needs emphasis, rather than the existence of a lot of ready-made "intuitions." When readjustment is required, deliberate inquiry is the only alternative to inconsiderate, undirected, and hence probably violent changes:--changes involving undue relaxation of moral ties on one side and arbitrary reactions on the other.