Sensible people get the greater part of their own living done during their own lifetime. A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood (a person legitimately descended in dynastic line from any of a realm’s hereditary monarchs). People do not have fortunes left them nowadays; men have to work and women marry for money. It is a dreadfully unjust World. There is no doubt that the growth of urban life and the associated collectivistic activities which are for the benefit of all, but belong to no individual, demand for their full enjoyment a system of taboos, either automatic and instinctive or self-imposed by an effort of discipline. It is only so that the municipal organization of books and pictures and music and gardens and fountains, and all the privileges and the conveniences of urban life, become possible. The individual in whom the taboos necessary for such organization are not either automatic or self-imposed is an anti-social individual, and his elimination would be for our benefit. Pain of mind is relieved by an abstraction of solid thought. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 5

For a while, some of the taboos in question are objectified in rules and regulations with penalties for their violation, many could not be carried out by force, even with an army of officials, unless supported by the general taboo-observance of the community. Many skills are learned by observational learning, or modeling. Observational learning is achieved by watching and imitating the actions of another person or by noting the consequences of a person’s actions. In other words, information is imparted by example, before direct practice is allowed. The value of learning by observation is obvious: Imagine trying to tell someone how to tie a shoes, do a dance step, crochet, or play the trumpet. I believe that anything can be learned from direct experience can be learned by observation. Often, this allows a person to skip the tedious process of experimenting with various methods of doing something until one finds the most successful stage of learning. The recognition of the permanence of the unmentionable-observing impulse, and the constant tendency to develop new taboos, may enable us to face with calmness the counterbalancing fact of the falling away of anathemas which have served their purpose and are no longer required under changed social conditions.

In every life, go it fast, go it slow, there are critical pausing-place. When the journey is renewed the face of the country is changed. That process is always going on, and in some spheres, it has during recent years moved with unusual rapidity. The reality of the changes that have thus taken place, whether they are to be approved or condemned, we may thus all accept. As often happens, it is small things—small yet significant—which enable us to grasp the reality of change. When we read Ryan Phillippe’s Diary, it is the minute points which fascinate us, for they enable us to realize profound differences in the attitude of seventeenth-century people compared with modern humans; as when Ryan found lice in a strange bed he slept in, which made us merry. I always recall as significant (so that I noted it in my Impressions and Comments for 23 March 2016) the first occasion on which I observed a young woman on a street in Sacramento, CA pausing a moment to adjust her stocking without embarrassment and without going a step out of her way. I had been brought up in the Victorian period when, if a woman even of the poorest class (though, for a matter of that, it is women of low class who are most prudish) wished to pull up her stockings, she retired into the darkest alley she could find wither face to the wall. The difference is typical of a revolutionary change in the whole attitude of women.

That was wartime, and the Great War undoubtedly had its influence in the movement we are here considering, not indeed by generating but by accelerating it. All the social changes which were witnessed during the war in the belligerent countries would have taken place without it. However, they would have taken place more gradually and unevenly, not in so dramatic and spectacular a shape. Never think of anything until you have first asked yourself if there is an absolute necessity for doing it, at that particular moment. Thinking of things, when things need not be thought of, is offering an opportunity to Worry; and Worry is the favorite agent of Death when the destroyer handles his work in a lingering way, and achieves premature results. Never look back, and never look forward, as long as you can possibly help it. Looking back leads the way to sorrow. And looking forward ends in the cruelest of all delusions: it encourages hope. The present time is the precious time. Live for the passing day: the passing day is all that we can be sure of.

The whole series and changes, so far as women have been concerned—and it is in connection with women that the violated taboos have caused most uproar—were the outcome of a single movement: the movement for making women the companions of men. They were not that in mediaeval theory; women for that theory were either above an or she was below him; as Miss Eileen Power remarks, she was Janus-faced: in one of her aspects, she was Mary, the mother of God and the savior of men; in the other, Eve the seducer of man and the cause of all his woe. By the nineteenth century this theory had become reduced to an empty shell of convention, but it still retained influence, even though within the shell new conceptions were germinating and causing to crack. The woman moulded according to these new conceptions is no longer the angel-devil which her predecessor seemed to imaginative eyes, but obviously made to be—as witnessed even by her hair and her skirts and the simple fashion of her garments—the social equal and companion of man, whether in work or play, even perhaps the play of the sex. Life is so constructed that the event does not, cannot, will not match the expectation.