Man is a vegetable, but something more; and so it would be a mistake to try to write his life in terms only of the gropings of a plant for nourishment. He is an animal, but something more; and so his activity cannot always be explained as an instinctive response to a particular situation and a search for sensuous satisfaction. His vegetable and animal functions may fill almost all his time and occupy the foreground of his attention. But it is the flickering moment of deliberation and the lurking moment of reason that chiefly engage our notice in any discussion of a specially human problem of conduct.

Such as contraception. Even so, the problem may be considered from various angles—medical, psychological, economic, political, historical, artistic. But ultimately the scientific discussion resolves itself into a question of philosophy. Anybody who has dipped into the literature of the subject will recall how quickly and how constantly the idea of right or wrong crops up. Most people, I suppose, in the face of a personal problem of conduct, apply the test of principles that attempt some sort of approximation to the fundamental nature and decencies of things. Other considerations have their place, but the last word on contraception belongs to that science which deals with human affairs at this depth.

This science is called ethics. Unfortunately, the word has come to suggest an arbitrary collection of prohibitions and grudging permissions, some rather stupid to our brave new world of scientific humanism, all rather galling.