314 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
velop the intellectual and inhibitive mental functions, he is impulsive, easily loses mental equilibrium under the stress of high emotion, is mobbish in disposition and likely to be unrestrained and violent in the expression of feeling.
III. It is even more important to study his ethical pecu liarities as determined by the conditions of his life. The conditions which react so powerfully upon his intellectual and emotional life must have an important determining effect on his morality. Whatever may be one s theory of the origin of the moral sense, nobody will maintain that its genesis is to be found in the experiences of the personal life ; but it certainly is indefinitely modified in its strength and activity by the practices and habits of personal life. Per sonal habits may blunt the keenness of moral perception, pervert it, give it a onesided development ; and thus in gen eral determine the characteristics of the moral life. Study ing the life of the labouring man from this point of view, we see what we have every reason to expect, that in the primary virtues of truth and kindness he is quite the peer of his fel low men. His life-conditions tend to develop these funda mental virtues in him as strongly as they are developed in other men, possibly somewhat more strongly. Jane Addams has called attention to the kindness of the poor to one another, 1 and no one is better equipped by experience, sym pathy and scientific insight to interpret their lives. Though the labourer deals with reality in its crudest forms, as we have pointed out, it seems certain that the handling of phys ical things is as good a discipline as one can have in what we may call the truth-habit. Physical things do not lie; they act according to their laws; they do not deceive, and you can not deceive them. But without going into any over- refinements, it is sufficient to say that lying is a social vice which arises in the effort to mislead other men, and the labouring man s limited social relations and constant em ployment with physical things afford, at most, few oppor tunities to serve oneself by lying.
1 " Democracy and Social Ethics," pp. 19-22.
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