We need to distinguish, in this connection, between moderate change, which is usually wholesome, giving us the stimulus needed to keep our minds awake, and radical change, involving displacement. By this term I mean such a break in the conditions of personal life that one can scarcely adapt himself to them by any gradual and normal process; there is a kind of shock which may easily upset his character. We are dependent for moral health upon intimate association with a group of some sort, usually consisting of our family, neighbors, and other friends. It is the interchange of ideas and feelings with this group, and a constant sense of its opinions that makes standards of right and wrong seem real to us. We may not wholly adopt its judgments, or that of any member of it, but the social interplay is necessary to keep the higher processes of the mind in action at all. Now, it is the general effect of social displacement to tear us away more or less completely, from such groups. When we move to town, or go to another country, or get into a different social class, or adopt ideas that alienate us from our former associates, it is not at all certain that we shall form new relations equally intimate and cogent with the old. A common result, therefore, is a partial moral isolation and atrophy of moral sense. If the causes of change are at all general we may have great populations made up largely of such displaced units, a kind of “anarchy of spirits” among whom there is no ethos or settled system of moral life at all, only a confused outbreak of impulses, better or worse. Or the prevalent beliefs may break down under the impact of strange ideas, and with them may go the ideals, sanctions, standards, which have heretofore lived in the minds of men and sustained their daily striving. Whole communities may thus be demoralized. Indeed mental strain enters largely into all demoralization by change. The adaptation of a social group to its conditions is normally a matter of generations of experiment and adjustment. It is too much to think out all at once, and no wonder if untrained minds, confused and discouraged by attempting to do so, give it up and live by impulse.