The spiritual atmosphere of our population, therefore, is one in which all stress seems to be laid on the soul, in which the severe standards are soul standards, and in which the importance of the body and its completeness are almost entirely overlooked. As an instance of this, it is interesting to note that there is no such thing to-day as a guilty conscience about bodily depravity. The results of hundreds of years of steady moralization has ended at last in the condition known as “guilty conscience” becoming restricted entirely to the soul and to the moral life. To say that so-and-so “can’t help it,” immediately stifles criticism and arrests nausea. This alone shows how purely moral our outlook is. Least of all are people able to despise themselves when their own teeth are false, or when they habitually assist normal functioning by means of artificial aids. And in all these matters the unanimity of the modern civilized world is so striking that the conclusion is forced upon us that here we are confronted with the outcome of certain ruling and fundamental values which must be common to all the people we have been discussing. From the nature of the uniform attitude to which these values have led, we are also obliged to infer that they must have taught at least two very definite doctrines with unswerving consistency—(a) the over-emphasis of the importance of the soul, and (b) the contempt and general slander of the body. Or, to put it less offensively, they must have taught mankind not only to place soul always before body, but also to leave the body out of the reckoning when valuing the quality of human beings. So much we know must have occurred, and we come to this conclusion merely from judging the results which we see about us to-day. When, however, we set out to inquire into the history of our population, and attempt to discover whether such values have indeed operated in forming their spiritual atmosphere, then, not only are our suspicions abundantly confirmed, but we are actually able to lay our finger on the body of doctrine containing the values whose existence we posited _a priori_. Having attained this end, while we may still continue to deplore the results we see about us, we can no longer wonder at them. Indeed, we should marvel if, in such an atmosphere, we had failed to degenerate, or ceased from degenerating. The wonder is, not that we have become a nation of decadents and crocks, but that it should have taken all this time to make us such a nation.