would be very narrow-minded, or, in fashionable phrase, very one-sided, to try every thing before the tribunal of this solitary power. Here also is a complete denial of responsibility. Something, it is true, appears to be allowed to conscience; a part is given it to play; and the point professedly disputed is not its existence with an appropriate function, but its exclusive pretensions and absolute authority. Unhappily, however, when this much is discarded, it is only in semblance that any thing remains. A moral faculty with a merely concurrent jurisdiction, or from whose decisions there is some appeal, is a palpable self-contradiction. Martineau.

Do we want to know whether the distinctions of right and wrong, as they appear to our puny intellects, are identical with the distinctions perceived by His omniscience. The answer is clear. That knowledge which we possess He gave. Our intuition is His tuition. The fundamental axioms of the reason were given by Him to afford us a basis of thought. Even the inductions of the understanding are all drawn by the mental machinery with which He has provided us, from the visible universe His hands have made.

The only difference which can exist between divine and human knowledge of moral distinctions is, that God knows all the goodness of good - all the evil of evil, and we know but a part of either.

An Essay on Intuitive Morals.

184

ETHICS REST ON MORAL SENSE.

The law of the Will must be found in the Reason, that is, in our power of immediate intuition as to the ends of our being and foundations of our constitution. But, if so, there is no answer to the inquiry why we regard guilt in ourselves with a different feeling from that with which we behold all other confusion and ruin; with a feeling which does not decide what is right and wrong, but one which, the fact of the right and wrong being given, attaches to these a sense or emotion of approval and blame. I speak not of the moral law, but of the moral Sanction.

Sterling.

Science is nature seen by the reason, and not merely by the senses. Science exists in the mind, and in the mind alone. No science ever defines its object-noun. For instance unity, quantity, space, force, matter, value, are all incapable of definition; but forms of unity, forms of quantity, forms of space, &c., are capable of definition. If the reader supposes that a science ought to define its object-noun, he has only to refer to the mathematical sciences, not one of which ever attempts to offer a definition of its noun substantive major. Were a geometrician to offer the smallest speculation as to what space is, he would have departed altogether from the province of geometric science. Theory of Human Progression.

This is equally true in moral science.

Before we can define Ethics, we must find the special quality in human nature on which moral phenomena de

pend. There would seem to be some extraordinary difficulty in naming the common characteristic of all moral phenomena, and separating the property or endowment of man to which they belong. It is represented by all the writers who acknowledge its reality, as a separate faculty, performing its function like our other faculties; some, after Butler, classing it with the active principles, making it monarch of the instincts; others, with Shaftesbury, giving it a perceptive character, treating it as a supreme taste; and not a few, like Price, comparing it with intellectual intuition, by which we have cognizance of good and evil, no less than of number or possibility.

A body of Morality must be the result of a Theory of Morality. One is a system of instructions for the guidance of the Will, the other a series of beliefs recommended to the understanding. Of the former you cannot affirm, as of the latter, that they are true or false; but only that they are fit or unfit for certain ends. The order of the things to be done for any end must be widely different from the order of the reasons for doing them. The classification of precepts in a code will follow the order of our external business and relations; a classification of the reasons for those precepts will follow the order of our internal moral constitution. The one will regulate its divisions by the occasions of action, the other by the principles of action. Precept is not deducible from precept as truth is from truth. I can no more infer one commandment from another, than, from the rules of perspective, I can learn how to mix colors.

186

THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS

When once we have secured a complete and inflexible set of precepts, the Moralist has simply to determine whether this or that case does or does not come within the scope of a certain definition. If that definition was framed by some omniscient mind, whose intent must be an unerring guide, and whose formulas can be neither too large nor too narrow for the cases they are designed to embrace, then will this process of legal construction yield us verdicts of absolute right and wrong. But the value of the subordinate decisions is entirely measured by that of the general rule; and if, instead of being the true expression of a natural law it is only a rough generalization of our own, picked up from common life, hitting off the majority of instances, but having no pretension to unimpeachable precision, what do we gain by finding that here it fits and there it fails? The great office of the Moralist is antecedent to this, and bears analogy to the task not of the Magistrate but the Legislator. He has far other work than to weigh expressions and to analyze definitions; viz. to shape into language a code yet unformed, faithfully representing the moral sentiments that characterize and consecrate human nature, and embracing the problems of external action that can be foreseen in human life. We must get our Rules before we can interpret them. Moral axioms are statements of Psychological facts, belonging to the province of Knowledge; they are a chapter from the science of human nature and society.

Shortened from the Prospective Review.

The Moral Law requires us to feel the Sentiments which are right, no less than to do the Actions of a corresponding character.

The philosophic ground of the objection to all attempts to assimilate morals to geometry is this: That it is impossible ever to give to morals a terminology to be compared for accuracy to that of mathematics. Sentiments cannot be defined by any accurate terms, for they " vary with every fresh condition of humanity." In each person's mind each sentiment acquires a peculiar character, corresponding to that of the mind in which it dwells, and this character changes visibly every year, actually every hour of life. We should require a language for every individual, and for every hour of his life, were we to define love and hatred, gratitude and resentment, as they exist in the souls of the virtuous or vicious, magnanimous or base, sanguine or phlegmatic, happy or miserable; and even then the word which would express his own sentiment to a man's own apprehension would fail to convey a just apprehension of it to another whose mental experience was different. And were we to exclude the consideration of Sentiments, and limit our study of morals to moral Actions, we should still find that the circumstances under which they take place, modify them so entirely, that, short of a description of the circumstances, no term can be invented to define any one action.

The Emotions, and the no less spontaneous Thoughts, called forth without any act of choice on our parts, cannot have a Moral character, for with regard to them we are