ANTICIPATIONS
in relation to marriage, one may very reasonably anticipate, will be similarly recognised.
But this impending dissolution of a common standard of morals does not mean universal depravity until some great reconstruction obtains any more than the obsolescence of the Conventicle Act means universal irreligion. It means that for one Morality there will be many moralities. Each human being will, in the face of circumstances, work out his or her particular early training as his or her character determines. And although there will be a general convention upon which the most diverse people will meet, it will only be with persons who have come to identical or similar conclusions in the matter of moral conduct and who are living in similar ménages, just as now it is only among people whose conversation implies a certain community or kinship of religious belief, that really frequent and intimate intercourse can go on. In other words, there will be a process of moral segregation[1] set up. Indeed, such a process is probably already in operation amidst the deliquescent social mass. People will be drawn together into little groups of similar ménages having much in common. And this—in view of the considerations advanced in the first two chapters, considerations all converging on the practical abolition of distances and the general freedom of people to live anywhere they like over large areas—will mean very frequently an actual local segregation.
- ↑ I use the word "segregation" here and always as it is used by mineralogists to express the slow convergence of diffused matter upon centres of aggregation, such a process as, for example, must have occurred in the growth of flints.
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