=Conventional and Genuine Virtue.=--When we take these social changes on a broad scale, in the gross, the point just made is probably clear without emphasis. But we are apt to forget that minor changes are going on all the while. The community's formulated code of esteem and regard and praise at any given time is likely to lag somewhat behind its practical level of achievement and possibility. It is more or less traditional, describing what used to be, rather than what are, virtues. The "respectable" comes to mean tolerable, passable, conventional. Accordingly the prevailing scheme of assigning merit and blame, while on the whole a mainstay of moral guidance and instruction, is also a menace to moral growth. Hence men must look behind the current valuation to the real value. Otherwise, mere conformity to custom is conceived to be virtue;[184] and the individual who deviates from custom in the interest of wider and deeper good is censured. =Moral Responsibility for Praise and Blame.=--The practical assigning of value, of blame and praise, is a measure and exponent of the character of the one from whom it issues. In judging others, in commending and condemning, we judge ourselves. What we find to be praiseworthy and blameworthy is a revelation of our own affections. Very literally the measure we mete to others is meted to us. To be free in our attributions of blame is to be censorious and uncharitable; to be unresentful to evil is to be indifferent, or interested perhaps chiefly in one's own popularity, so that one avoids giving offense to others. To engage profusely in blame and approbation in speech without acts which back up or attack the ends verbally honored or condemned, is to have a perfunctory morality. To cultivate complacency and remorse apart from effort to improve is to indulge in sentimentality. In short, to approve or to condemn is itself a moral act for which we are as much responsible as we are for any other deed. =Impossibility of Cataloguing Virtues.=--These last three considerations: (1) the intimate connection of virtues with all sorts of individual capacities and endowments, (2) the change in types of habit required with change of social customs and institutions, (3) the dependence of judgment of vice and virtue upon the character of the one judging,[185] make undesirable and impossible a catalogued list of virtues with an exact definition of each. Virtues are numberless. Every situation, not of a routine order, brings in some special shading, some unique adaptation, of disposition.