556 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ness, more cheating, more fraud, more overreaching, more adultera- 

 tion, more sham, more outside pretension and inside falsity ? Are 

 they as true in political action to the state in which they have united 

 and incorporated themselves ? Is there as much genuine patriotism ? 

 Is there not more political corruption and neglect of political duty ? 

 These are certainly the questions which stagger the optimist most. 



Here, then, we discover that the particulars of conduct between 

 which the widest difference of progress in moral culture appears are 

 precisely those that we have already separated by one of the broad 

 differences that were found when we classified the relations to which 

 human conduct is incident. It is natural to conjecture that the one 

 difference may connect itself with the other. It becomes still more 

 natural when we perceive that the characteristic difference which dis- 

 tinguishes the two sets of relationships in question has been widened 

 by the process of civilization. On one side, the direct^ primary rela- 

 tions that exist between men, in their purely personal attitude toward 

 one another, have been steadily pressed into greater intimacy and 

 closeness, at every step of advance wliich has been made in the diffu- 

 sion of knowledge and in the social organization of the race, while 

 they have been more and more generalized in the same operation. 

 On the other side, as the industrial, commercial, and political mechan- 

 ism of society has acquired more complexity and greater extension, 

 the indirect or secondary relations, which involve the fact of ])ropertv, 

 etc., have been all the time undergoing variation and multiplication, 

 and have been shaped into forms of greater remoteness, as between 

 the persons and the things that are concerned together in them. The 

 effect in the one case has been to set out the relationships in question 

 more clearly, to define them more distinctly, and to render them more 

 easily recognizable as they widen ; and it is within the sphere of this 

 effect that we have the jDrogress of moral culture most marked. In 

 the other case the effect has been to obscure most of the relationships 

 in question, and to render the clear perception of them more difficult 

 as they lengthen out; and it is within the range of this effect that we 

 find most doubtful evidences of moral growth in the process of civili- 

 zation. 



From this I shall now venture a generalization, to see whether it 

 will be justified by further scrutiny of the moral history of mankind, 

 and I offer it in the following propositions : 



1. That moral notions, or notions of rightness in conduct, are 

 formed in the mind by the perception of certain relations to which 

 human conduct is incident ; that they are exactly akin in nature, 

 therefore, to mathematical notions, and have their genesis in the 

 operation of the same faculties ; that there is no more need, in conse- 

 quence, of a special " moral sense " to account for tliem than there is 

 need of a distinct mathematical sense to account for the perceptions 

 and reasoning processes of arithmetic and geometry. 



