Hence the growing importance of personal rationality or intelligence, in moral theory if not in practice. That current customs contradict one another, that many of them are unjust, and that without criticism none of them is fit to be the guide of life was the discovery with which the Athenian Socrates initiated conscious moral theorizing. Yet a dilemma soon presented itself, one which forms the burden of Plato's ethical writings. How shall thought which is personal arrive at standards which hold good for all, which, in modern phrase, are objective? The solution found by Plato was that reason is itself objective, universal, cosmic and makes the individual soul its vehicle. The result, however, was merely to substitute a metaphysical or transcendental ethics for the ethics of custom. If Plato had been able to see that reflection and criticism express a conflict of customs, and that their purport and office is to re-organize, re-adjust customs, the subsequent course of moral theory would have been very different. Custom would have provided needed objective and substantial ballast, and personal rationality or reflective intelligence been treated as the necessary organ of experimental initiative and creative invention in remaking custom. We have another difficulty to face: a greater wave rises to overwhelm us. It is said that to derive moral standards from social customs is to evacuate the latter of all authority. Morals, it is said, imply the subordination of fact to ideal consideration, while the view presented makes morals secondary to bare fact, which is equal to depriving them of dignity and jurisdiction. The objection has the force of the custom of moral theorists behind it; and therefore in its denial of custom avails itself of the assistance of the notion it attacks. The criticism rests upon a false separation. It argues in effect that either ideal standards antecede customs and confer their moral quality upon them, or that in being subsequent to custom and evolved from them, they are mere accidental by-products. But how does the case stand with language? Men did not intend language; they did not have social objects consciously in view when they began to talk, nor did they have grammatical and phonetic principles before them by which to regulate their efforts at communication. These things come after the fact and because of it. Language grew out of unintelligent babblings, instinctive motions called gestures, and the pressure of circumstance. But nevertheless language once called into existence is language and operates as language. It operates not to perpetuate the forces which produced it but to modify and redirect them. It has such transcendent importance that pains are taken with its use. Literatures are produced, and then a vast apparatus of grammar, rhetoric, dictionaries, literary criticism, reviews, essays, a derived literature _ad lib_. Education, schooling, becomes a necessity; literacy an end.