From the wider psychological standpoint we recognize that we have to conciliate opposing impulses that are both alike founded on the human psychic organism.
In the preceding volumes of these _Studies_ I have sought to refrain from the expression of any personal opinion and to maintain, so far as possible, a strictly objective attitude.

In this endeavor, I trust, I have been successful if I may judge from the fact that I have received the sympathy and approval of all kinds of people, not less of the rationalistic free-thinker than of the orthodox believer, of those who accept, as well as of those who reject, our most current standards of morality.

This is as it should be, for whatever our criteria of the worth of feelings and of conduct, it must always be of use to us to know what exactly are the feelings of people and how those feelings tend to affect their conduct.

In the present volume, however, where social traditions necessarily come in for consideration and where we have to discuss the growth of those traditions in the past and their probable evolution in the future, I am not sanguine that the objectivity of my attitude will be equally clear to the reader.

I have here to set down not only what people actually feel and do but what I think they are tending to feel and do.
That is a matter of estimation only, however widely and however cautiously it is approached; it cannot be a matter of absolute demonstration.