50 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



same theories, which have been already dealt 

 with. 



But it may, perhaps, be suggested that laws 

 of our nature, from which such a rule may be de- 

 rived, are to be found in the final causes and pur- 

 poses of the several organs and powers which ex- 

 ist in that nature ; and that the use of any of 

 those organs or powers in a manner aberrant 

 from their proper causes and purposes is a breach 

 of natural morality. I do not pause to inquire 

 whether the idea of "cause" and "purpose," 

 which is involved in such a view, can be verified 

 apart from religion. But such a rule would, at 

 best, be far from coextensive with the whole field 

 of morality ; some most necessary parts of a 

 moral code (such, e. g., as the regulation of the 

 relations between the sexes) being incapable of 

 being deduced, with any approach to certainty, 

 from the mere constitution of our nature. As to 

 some of our faculties, the determination, with 

 sufficient accuracy, to furnish a rule of life, of 

 their final causes and purposes, might involve 

 difficult philosophical inquiries. As to others, 

 though there might be no such difficulty, it is to 

 be remembered that we have a complex nature, 

 in which the forces which operate, either me- 

 chanically or in a way resembling the mechani- 

 cal, upon the will, are constantly in practical an- 

 tagonism to the regulative faculty. The faculties 

 of which the final causes are most obvious exist, 

 not apart from, but in combination with, other 

 elements of our nature which (either generally or 

 often) result in tendencies to their use without 

 any direct view to the fulfillment of their proper 

 purposes. The gratification of some of those ten- 

 dencies (such, e. g., as eating and drinking for the 

 mere pleasure of taste, and not for nourishment) 

 can hardly be condemned as immoral, on natural 

 grounds, unless carried so far as to overpower 

 reason, or impair strength or health. When it 

 is carried to that excess (as in the case of intem- 

 perance), it is still true that the origin of the vice 

 has been in the natural constitution of men's 

 bodies, by which a sensible gratification has been 

 found in its indulgence : which (as it seems to 

 me) goes far to prove that this conception of a 

 physical law cannot be relied upon, even in the 

 cases to which it is most directly applicable, as 

 a practical basis of morality — a view which is 

 confirmed by the actual prevalence among men 

 of that class of vices, even when, to all natural 

 safeguards, is superadded the external influence 

 of religion. 



When we proceed to take into account the 

 moral instinct or sense, we come upon the bor- 



der-ground, if not into the proper territory, of 

 Religion. To a man who believes in a moral 

 government of the universe, in the distinctness 

 of the Ego, the real man, from his bodily organ- 

 ization, and in the doctrines of moral responsi- 

 bility and moral adjustment in a future state, 

 nothing can be more real, nothing more intelli- 

 gible, than this moral instinct or sense, with its 

 suggestions of right and wrong, of duty, guilt 

 and sin, and its judicial conscience. But, if all 

 these postulates are denied, what is then to be 

 thought of this moral instinct or sense ? Why is 

 it, on that hypothesis, less a mere accident of the 

 nervous system, or of some other part of the 

 bodily organization, than the religious instinct, 

 which is already supposed to be set aside, as rest- 

 ing upon no demonstrable ground ? As a phe- 

 nomenon, and in some sense a fact, it exists, just 

 as the religious instinct does (if they be not really 

 the same); but those principles of thought which 

 explain away the one, as having no proper ob- 

 jective cause, and as indicative of no objective 

 truth, may as easily explain away the other also. 

 The one is not more susceptible of sensible and 

 experimental demonstration than the other. If 

 man were merely a higher order of the organiza- 

 tion of matter, homogeneous with, and produced 

 by spontaneous development from, inorganic sub- 

 stances, plants, and inferior animals, and under 

 no responsibility to any moral intelligence greater 

 than his own, what reality would there be in the 

 conception of a moral law of obligation, inappli- 

 cable to all other known forms of matter, and 

 applicable only to man ? 



These questions are practical. Experience, 

 on the large scale, shows that men who disregard 

 the religious, cannot generally be trusted to pay 

 regard to the moral, sense. A moral sense, not 

 believed in, can never supply a practical founda- 

 tion for morality. On the other hand, a moral 

 sense, believed in, is (in reality) itself religion — 

 possibly inarticulate, but religion still. Such a 

 belief cannot exist, without accepting the evi- 

 dence of the moral sense as equally trustworthy 

 concerning those things of which it informs us, 

 as the evidence of the bodily senses is concerning 

 those things of which they inform us. It is, of 

 course, only from the impressions made upon our 

 own minds that we can know anything about any 

 of the subjects, either of physical, or of intellect- 

 ual, or of moral sensation : their intrinsic nature, 

 abstracted from those impressions, is to us, in 

 each case alike, an inaccessible mystery. But 

 belief in the sense is belief in the truth of the in- 

 formation which the sense gives to us ; that is, 



