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out what is worthy of our imitation,-in their vices what we cannot imitate, without being unworthy of the glorious endowments of which we are conscious; and unworthy, too, of the love of Him, who, though known to us by His Power, is known to us still more as the Highest Goodness, and who, in all the infinite gifts which he has lavished on us, has conferred on us no blessing so inestimable, as the capacity which we enjoy of knowing and loving what is good. To say, that an action excites in us this feeling, and to say, that it appears to us right, or virtuous, or conformable to duty, are to say precisely the same thing; and an action, which does not excite in us this feeling, cannot appear to us right, virtuous, conformable to duty,-any more than an object can be counted by us brilliant, which uniformly appears to us obscure, or obscure, which appears to us uniformly brilliant. To this ultimate fact, in the constitution of our nature, the principle, or original tendency of the mind, by which, in certain circumstances, we are susceptible of moral emotions, we must always come in estimating virtue, whatever analyses we may make, or may think that we have made. It is in this respect, as in many others, like the kindred emotion of beauty. Our feeling of beauty is not the mere perception of forms and colours, or the discovery of the uses of certain combinations of forms; it is an emotion arising from these, indeed, but distinct from them. Our feeling of moral excellence, in like manner, is not the mere perception of different actions, or the discovery of the physical good which these may produce; it is an emotion of a very different kind,-a light within our breast, from which, as from the very effulgence of the purest of all truths,

"Is human fortune gladden'd with the rays
Of Virtue, with the moral colours thrown
On every walk of this our social scene,
Adorning for the eye of gods and men
The passions, actions, habitudes of life,

And rendering Earth, like Heaven, a sacred place,
Where love and praise may take delight to dwell."

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That we do feel this approbation of certain actions, and disapprobation of certain other actions, no one denies. But the feeling is, by many sophistical moralists, ascribed wholly to circumstances that are accidental, without any greater original tendency of the mind to feel, in different circumstances of human action, one or other of these emotions. If man could be born with every faculty in its highest excellence, capable of distinguishing all the remote as well as all the immediate consequences of actions, but free from the prejudices of education, he would, they suppose, look with equal moral love, or rather, with uni

* Pleasures of Imagination,-Second form of the Poem, B. II. v. 151–157.

form and equal indifference of regard, on him who has plunged a dagger in the breast of his benefactor, and on him who has risked his own life for the preservation of his enemy. There are philosophers, and philosophers, too, who consider themselves peculiarly worthy of that name, from the nicety of their analysis of all that is complex in action,-who can look on the millions of millions of mankind, in every climate and age, mingling together in a society that subsists only by the continued belief of the moral duties of all to all,-who can mark everywhere, sacrifices made by the generous, to the happiness of those whom they love, and everywhere an admiration of such sacrifices,not the voices of the timid and the ignorant only mingling in the praise, but warriors, statesmen, poets, philosophers, bearing with the peasant and the child, their united testimonies to the great truth, that man is virtuous in promoting the happiness of man;there are minds which can see and hear all this, and which can turn away, to seek, in some savage island, a few indistinct murmurs that may seem to be discordant with the whole great harmony of mankind!

When an inquirer of this class, after perusing every narrative of every nation, in every part of the globe,-with a faith for all that is monstrous in morality, as ready as his disbelief of prodigies in physics less marvellous, which the same voyagers and travellers relate, has collected his little stock of facts, or of reports which are to him as facts, he comes forward, in the confidence of overthrowing with these the whole system of public morals, as far as that system is supposed to be founded on any original moral difference of actions. He finds, indeed, everywhere else, parricide looked upon with abhorrence; but he can prove this to be wholly accidental, because he has found, on some dismal coast, some miserable tribe, in which it is customary to put the aged to death when very infirm, and in which the son is the person who takes upon him this office. For almost every virtue, which the world acknowledges as indicated to us by the very constitution of our social nature, he has, in like manner, some little fact, which proves the world to be in an error. Some of these he finds even in the usages of civilized life. What is right on one side of a mountain, is wrong on the opposite side of it; and a river is sometimes the boundary of a virtue, as much as of an empire. "How, then, can there be any fixed principles of morality," he says, "when morality itself seems to be incessantly fluctuating?

Morality is incessantly fluctuating; or rather, according to this system, there is no morality, at least no natural tendency to the distinction of actions, as moral or immoral, and we have only a few casual prejudices, which we have chosen to call virtues,prejudices which a slight difference of circumstance might have reversed, making the lover of mankind odious to us, and giving

all our regard to the robber and the murderer. We prefer, indeed, at present, Aurelius to Caligula; but a single prejudice, more or less, or at least a few prejudices additional, might have made Caligula the object of universal love, to which his character is in itself as well entitled, as the character of that philosophic emperor, who was as much an honour to philosophy as to the imperial purple. And in what world is this said? In a world in which Caligula has never had a single admirer, in all the multitudes to whom his history has become known,—a world, in which, if we were to consider the innumerable actions that are performed in it, at any one instant, we should be wearied with counting those which furnish evidence of the truth of moral distinctions, by the complacency of virtue, or the remorse of vice, and the general admiration or disgust and abhorrence, with which the virtue when known to others, is loved, and the vice detested, long before we should be able to discover a single action that, in the contrariety of general sentiment with respect to it, might furnish even one feeble exception.

Some apparent exceptions, however, it must still be allowed, the moral scene does truly exhibit. But are they, indeed, proofs of the absolute original indifference of all actions to our regard? Or do they not merely seem to be exceptions, because we have not made distinctions and limitations which it was necessary to make?

It often happens, that, by contending for too much in a controversy, we fail to establish truths that appear doubtful, only because they are mingled with doubtful, or false propositions, for which we contend as strenuously as for the true. This, I think, has taken place, in some degree, in the great controversy as to morals. In our zeal for the absolute immutability of moral distinctions, we have made the argument for original tendencies to moral feeling appear less strong, by extending it too far; and facts, therefore, have seemed to be exceptions, which could not have seemed to be so, if we had been a little more moderate in our universal affirmation.

Let us consider, then, what the species of accordance is for which we may safely contend.

That virtue is nothing in itself, but is only a general name for certain actions, which agree in exciting, when contemplated, a certain emotion of the mind, I trust I have already sufficiently shown. There is no virtue, no vice, but there are virtuous agents, vicious agents,—that is to say, persons whose actions we cannot contemplate without a certain instant emotion; and what we term the law of nature, in its relation to certain actions, is nothing more than the general agreement of this sentiment, in relation to those actions. In thinking of virtue, therefore, it is evident that we are not to look for any thing self-existing, like the VOL. III.-Q

universal essences of the schools, and eternal, like the Platonic ideas; but a felt relation and nothing more. We are to consider only agents, and the emotions which these agents excite; and all which we mean by the moral differences of actions, is their tendency to excite one emotion rather than another.

Virtue, then, being a term expressive only of the relation of certain actions, as contemplated, to certain emotions, in the minds of those who contemplate them, cannot, it is evident, have any universality beyond that of the minds in which these emotions arise. We speak always, therefore, relatively to the constitution of our minds, not to what we might have been constituted to admire, if we had been created by a different Being, but to what we are constituted to admire, and what in our present circumstances, approving or disapproving with instant love or abhorrence, it is impossible for us not to believe to be, in like manner, the objects of approbation or disapprobation, to him who has endowed us with feelings so admirably accordant with all those other gracious purposes which we discover in the economy of nature.

Virtue, however, is still, in strictness of philosophic precision, a term expressive only of the relation of certain emotions of our mind to certain actions that are contemplated by us ;-its universality is coextensive with the minds in which the emotions arise, and this is all which we can mean by the essential distinctions of morality, even though all mankind were supposed by us at every moment, to feel precisely the same emotions, on contemplating the same actions.

But it must be admitted, also, that all mankind do not feel at every moment precisely the same emotions, on contemplating actions that are precisely the same; and it is necessary therefore, to make some limitations, even of this relative universality.

In the first place, it must be admitted, that there are moments in which the mind is wholly incapable of perceiving moral differences that is to say, in which the emotions that constitute the feeling of these moral differences do not arise. Such are all the moments of very violent passion. When the impetuosity of the passion is abated, indeed, we perceive that we have done what we now look upon with horror, but when our passion was most violent, we were truly blinded by it, or at least saw only what it permitted us to see. The moral emotion has not arisen, because the whole soul was occupied with a different species of feeling. The moral distinctions, however, or general tendencies of actions to excite this emotion, are not on this account less certain ; or we must say, that the truths of arithmetic, and all other truths, are uncertain, since the mind, in a state of passion, would be qually incapable of distinguishing these. He who has lived for ears in the hope of revenge, and who has at length laid his foe at his feet, may, indeed, while he pulls out his dagger from the

heart that is quivering beneath it, be incapable of feeling the crime which he has committed; but would he at that moment be abler to tell the square of four, or the cube of two? All in his mind, at that moment, is one wild state of agitation, which allows nothing to be felt but the agitation itself.

"While the human heart is thus agitated," it has been said, "by the flux and reflux of a thousand passions, that sometimes unite and sometimes oppose each other, to engrave laws on it, is to engrave them not on sand, but on a wave that is never at rest. What eyes are piercing enough to read the sacred characters!"

"Vain declamation!" answers the writer from whom I quote. "If we do not read the characters, it is not because our sight is too weak to discern them, it is because we do not fix our eyes on them; or if they be indistinguishable, it is only for a moment."

"The heart of man," he continues, " may be considered, allegorically, as an island, almost level with the water which bathes it. On the pure white marble of the island are engraved the holy precepts of the law of nature. Near these characters is one who bends his eyes respectfully on the inscription, and reads it aloud. He is the love of Virtue, the Genius of the island. The water around is in continual agitation. The slightest zephyr raises it into billows. It then covers the inscription. We no longer see the characters. We no longer hear the Genius read. But the calm soon rises from the bosom of the storm. The island reappears white as before, and the Genius resumes his employment."

That passion has a momentary influence in blinding us to moral distinctions, or, which is the same thing, an influence to prevent the rise of certain emotions, that, but for the stronger feeling of the passion itself, would arise, may then be admitted; but the influence is momentary, or little more than momentary, and extends, as we have seen, even to those truths which are commonly considered as first entitled to the appellation of universal. The moral truths, it must be allowed, if I may apply the name of truths to the felt moral differences of action,-are, to the impassioned mind, as little universal as the truths of geometry.

Another still more important limitation of the universality for which we contend, relates to actions which are so complex as to have various opposite results of good and evil, or of which it is not easy to trace the consequences. An action, when it is the object of our moral approbation or disapprobation, is, as I have already said, the agent himself acting with certain views. These views, that is to say, the intentions of the agent, are necessary to be taken into account, or, rather, are the great moral circumstances to be considered; and the intention is not visible to us like the

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