Whether we notice it or not, Morality is already taking a new status, independent alike of an absentee (or absent) Deity, and of an indifferent Cosmos. But its new domain, narrow and self-governing, essentially _sui generis_, has sanctions and imperatives only the stronger for being man-made and man-regarding. And, one may add, only the more austerely binding on the present that we shall recognize them as different from those of the Past and different, no doubt, from those into which the Future will transform them. Thus we are already conceiving of punishment only as a mechanism, successful or not, for social defence. And we scarcely ever hear more than the last echo of those incentives to virtue and deterrents from vice of the _Sandford and Merton_ type of my own childhood’s copybooks. Still less of the Stoical, and (alas!) Platonic mendacities about remorse torturing evil-doers, and the unhappy life of Browning’s _Instans Tyrannus_ with his “Then _I_ was afraid.” Neither do we talk any longer of the virtuous glows which (failing the increase of flocks and herds!) used to reward the virtuous acts of the generation adorned by Butler’s Mr. Pontifex. We are getting to think of our own virtues, supposing we have any, as conducive not to our own advantage but to that of other folk. Consonantly with the psychologist’s recognition that, of the two polar feelings determining human action, the (positive) attraction of pleasure is far less potent than the (negative) repulsion of pain, it seems as if our future ethics would emphasize not good actions but bad ones. That will be following up the rule-of-thumb wisdom of the Commandments, of which the surviving ones are all “thou _shalt not_”; the positive ones about loving God and honouring Father and Mother having become either difficult to enforce or optional. I am glad of that word _optional_, because it leads to the remark that Intelligence is surely abolishing that neutral territory whence “good actions” can issue at “good” people’s good pleasure and as an expression of their goodness, but which no one has a right to insist upon; indeed, which they have a perfect right to withhold, since they are patted on the back for doing them, or have their hands kissed, as children were taught to kiss those of the “revered author of their being.” I expect that before so very long Intelligence may bluntly suggest that if the action, whatever it happen to be, is _really good_, that must mean that it is _really needed_; and if it is really needed, your fellow men can claim it and oblige you to claim it from your unwilling self. And to dishonour that claim may become in their eyes (mirrored in your own), mean, disgraceful, dirty. In the language of contemporary youth, it will not be _decent_.[1] That substitution of the word _decency_ for the word _virtue_ gives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more