CIVILIZATION AND MORALS. 557 



2. That " Tightness " in conduct is just as absolute a quality as 

 " straightness " in mathematical lines (from which it takes its name), 

 and can no more depend for its existence upon the "utility" that is 

 found in it, or upon its coincidence with the experience of liappiness 

 among men, than the existence of the quality of straightness in mathe- 

 matical lines can depend upon the utility with which it serves the 

 architect and the engineer, and coincides with the necessities of me- 

 chanical art. 



3. That our moral notions of right and wrong, w^ith reference to 

 each particular of conduct, are distinct and complete in exact propor- 

 tion to the clearness and fullness of our perception of the relations 

 which that particular of conduct appertains to ; that their influence 

 in the guiding of our conduct depends upon the distinctness w^ith 

 which they have thus been formed; but that our obedience to the 

 guidance they offer depends upon something else, which we shall 

 have to investigate hereafter. 



Let me illustrate these propositions as briefly as possible : 

 It seems to be historically certain that man's cognition of the 

 alter ego, or other " self," with Avhich he finds himself associated in 

 existence at every turn, is slowly acquired at the beginning of it, and 

 that his conception of that other "self" (or fellow-man) is formed 

 gradually by the projection upon it of ideas that have grown in his own 

 self-consciousness. There are social states still existing, as I have said, 

 in which one man's cognition of another seems to be very slightly 

 difierent from his cognition of brute creatures, and we may take these 

 to repi'esent one of the primitive stages of human development. But 

 progress occurred in the evolution of consciousness, until the attri- 

 butes of the subjective "self," which it had cognized first, became 

 more or less perfectly projected upon an objective " self," and one 

 man recognized in another a repetition of the same fact of existence 

 which he found in his own being ; in other words, he arrived at the 

 recognition, more or less perfectly, of a human fellow. At this stage 

 moral notions and sentiments had their beginning, exactly as mathe- 

 matical notions began when two external objects were distinguished 

 from one another, and yet cognized together as two instead of one. 

 There would follow some perception of a relation between this con- 

 scious "self" and that other cognized "self," and it would be per- 

 ceived as the definition of a rule of conduct between them, just as surely 

 as there followed in the other case a perception of the relation in posi- 

 tion that exists between one object and another, and which conditions 

 every act that involves the two. In both instances the fundamental 

 idea generated by the perception must be the idea of a line a " line 

 of conduct " in the first, a " line of motion" or a " line of position " 

 in the second and the quality of " rightness " which attaches to the 

 conception of the one is identical in kind with the quality of " straight- 

 ness " that attaches to the other. 



