However, the mathematicians are not concerned with the right or wrong of play for money. They seek to demonstrate the inequalities of chance, hoping thus to dissuade humanity from its pursuit. Their efforts are idle. “The proverb which advises us to throw a sprat to catch a whale, shows that mankind consider a chance of a gain to be a benefit for which it is worth while to give up a proportionate certainty.” These gentlemen have extended their conjectures to the risks of loss or gain in general commerce; the probable continuity of life and duration of marriage; the contingencies in political results and the verdicts of juries; the distributions of sex in births, and even the probability of error in any opinion that may be generally received. In fact, should their guesses be heeded by the world, enterprise and hope would depart. Another class of moralizers reject and deride the idea of “innate notions.” Truth, they maintain, is not to be found in worn out abstractions and moral senses, which are the weak reproductions of material organisms. In ethics, if they are to be followed, we must set out with the convictions that our materials are relative and not absolute, and that our highest moral conceptions must partake of the same character. As stated by Posnett, systems of ethics, more or less perfect in their day, have vanished in the progress of society and mind. Systems of ethics, whether we see or care to see it, are gliding from amongst us at this moment, while others, “with strange faces are growing familiar by the slowness of their approach.” To illustrate from Chenebix: Nothing can appear more definite than virtue; yet, in Asia, the term may denote submission; in Europe and America, resistance; to Mussulmans war; to Christians, peace. Honor, too, which its votaries describe as one and incorruptible, assumes various significations. In some countries it prescribes revenge for an injury received; in others, forgiveness. Here, the violation of female chastity is a disgrace, elsewhere it is a duty. To a Mussulman the eating of pork is “vile and unclean: fills his soul with aversion, repugnance, disgust. To this habit their antipathy is deep and intuitive. To the natives of Western India, eating beef is sacrilegious and revolting. In Spain, any other worship than that established by the Catholic church is impious and in the highest degree offensive to God. The people of all Southern Europe regard a married clergy as irreligious, indecent, unchaste, gross and disgusting. Wherever the Puritans have been sufficiently powerful they have endeavored to put down all public, and nearly all private amusements: music, dancing, the theatre and public games.”