An enquiry into the moral conceptions of some New Zealand school children
The world today has special concern with morality not that its people are less moral, but rather that two agencies in particular have acted to bring about conditions in which a high standard of morality is difficult to attain. First, the industrial conditions of the Great Society produced the Nation, which, according to Rabindranath Tagore, is an organisation of power breaking the living bonds society, giving place to a mechanical structure, so that the full reality of man is more and more crushed beneath its weight. Secondly the disintegrating influence of Democracy, accelerated by the situation which arose from the World War, has produced a renewed disposition to scrutinise opinion about all sanctions of conduct, whether legal, moral or religious, so that "what is sometimes called 'authority' does not count for what it did. Questions are being raised with freedom that is fresh, about the formulas which express the various kinds of faith."