[542] I may perhaps add something here which the shall caution us a little bit against the too great emphasis on the relativism^a. Now I gave you already a few examples of this. If you would say, "There is an absolute law^b: 'you should not kill'," then you sould [sic.] say there are many tribes and cultures where special forms of killing---for instance, blood vengeance and other things--- are demanded, so that the demand not to kill is relativistic. This is empiricist-superficial. It is the superficiality in which very often empirical statements are made in this large and vast and newly discovered realm of ethics and anthropology. If the word "killing" sounds like "bringing somebody else into the state of corpse," which is probably the definition of killing, then you think there are different cultures in which it is allowed what in others are forbidden. IT IS NOT AS

EASY AS THIS! I would call this "qualitative analysis," in order to sound scientifically sound. But this qualitative or structural analysis of a culture would show, for instance, that as in the Old Testament commandment, it is MURDER which is forbidden (qatala [?sp] means "murdering"), so in many other cultures special forms of killings are considered to be murder and are therefore forbidden under the same law. Here are much more universal experiences at work, in spite of the element of relativism, so that the middle axioms, although they are never absolute, are in their variation at the same time much more structurally uniform than our modern scientific relativism believes. You have the same thing with adultery, where the modes of life, with respect to the sexual life, are infinitely different in cultures---even in the history of CHRISTIAN culture, we have VERY different ways (the Protestant is not the ONLY Christian form which has appeared in the