562 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



one to be found, which has been equally active in the whole arena of 

 industrial and commercial intercourse. This is the constant multipli- 

 cation of intervening agents middle-men, factors, brokers, speculators, 

 contractors, and distributors of every sort between the producer and 

 the consumer, or between the primary owner and the ultimate owner 

 of almost everything which is the subject of ownership and trade. 

 Those two, who are the actual persons brought chiefly into relation- 

 ship by the thing in question, are put quite out of sight of one another 

 in most of the transactions of modern industry and commerce ; and it 

 is easy to see how much more energy in the forming of a notion of 

 right is required to preserve the integrity of the line of conduct 

 between them, through indirect dealings like these. 



The truth, then, seems to be that the civilizing process in society 

 has, thus far, had two quite contrary moral effects : one, to cultivate 

 and quicken in men the intelligence which apprehends their relations 

 to one another, and which perceives a right line in all the conduct that 

 is incident to those relations ; the other, to complicate and obscure 

 one prominent group of such relations, and to make the apprehension 

 of them more difficult. If the former effect has not yet overcome the 

 latter, in that sphere of conduct where the conflict between them is 

 greatest, there is nothing to wonder at in the fact. It is quite accord- 

 ins; to the nature of our moral cognitions that men should sooner learn 

 not to steal than not to cheat : because stealing is an assault direct 

 uj^on that fact of 2^ossession which we have seen to be at the bottom 

 of the idea of a right of property ; whereas cheating takes most of 

 its suo^o-estions from the absence of that fact. It is certain that civ- 

 ilization has diminished downright robbery, depredation, theft, and 

 not so much by its police, nor by the force of its penal laws, as by 

 cultivating the notion of right conduct which condemns them. If it 

 has not yet curtailed the devices of fraud, and if men make dishonest 

 use of the knowledge and the skill that they have gained in every art, 

 even more, perhaps, than their fathers used the scantier methods of 

 fraud which they knew, the reason seems to be explained, and I can 

 find nothing in the fact to argue against a final ripening of moral 

 fruits in this region of human conduct, as well as in the rest. 



" But what then ? " every reader will ask. "Is it enough to account 

 in this way for our notions of right ? Is it enough to satisfy ourselves 

 that they are formed like our mathematical notions, by the same facul- 

 ties, in the same way, and that they have the same intellectual gene- 

 sis ? Is there not something more which this doctrine leaves still 

 unexplained? that something which distinguishes a moral notion from 

 every other that is formed in the human mind ; that something in it 

 which is mandatory and urgent ; that sometliing which we call con- 

 science, sense of duty, obligation ? " I say. Yes ; there certainly is 

 something involved in morals beyond the knowledge of right and 

 wrong ; some kind of a force, or some kind of a law of feeling in man, 



