Most of us are not so definite as that, but most of us are deeply tinged with the spirit of compromise between the past and the future; we profess an unbounded allegiance to the prescriptions of the past, and we practise a general observance of its injunctions, but we qualify to a vague, variable extent with considerations of expediency. We hold, for example, that we must respect our promises. But suppose we find unexpectedly that for one of us to keep a promise, which has been sealed and sworn in the most sacred fashion, must lead to the great suffering of some other human being, must lead, in fact, to practical evil? Would a man do right or wrong if he broke such a promise? The practical decision most modern people would make would be to break the promise. Most would say that they did evil to avoid a greater evil. But suppose it was not such very great suffering we were going to inflict, but only some suffering? And suppose it was a rather important promise? With most of us it would then come to be a matter of weighing the promise, the thing of the past, against this unexpected bad consequence, the thing of the future. And the smaller the overplus of evil consequences the more most of us would vacillate. But neither of the two types of mind we are contrasting would vacillate at all. The legal type of mind would obey the past unhesitatingly, the creative would unhesitatingly sacrifice it to the future. The legal mind would say, "they who break the law at any point break it altogether," while the creative mind would say, "let the dead past bury its dead." It is convenient to take my illustration from the sphere of promises, but it is in the realm of sexual morality that the two methods are most acutely in conflict. And I would like to suggest that until you have definitely determined either to obey the real or imaginary imperatives of the past, or to set yourself toward the demands of some ideal of the future, until you have made up your mind to adhere to one or other of these two types of mental action in these matters, you are not even within hope of a sustained consistency in the thought that underlies your acts, that in every issue of principle that comes upon you, you will be entirely at the mercy of the intellectual mood that happens to be ascendent at that particular moment in your mind.