376 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



but rests entirely on feeling, due to natural disposition. 

 It is, however, the greater or less proportion of such 

 persons in any community that determines the action of 

 the next most powerful incentive to morality — public 

 opinion ; since dread of the criminal law is not so much 

 dread of the punishment itself as of the disgrace attending 

 it. To the great majority of educated people this is 

 undoubtedly the most powerful incentive to abstain from 

 immoral conduct ; while the correlative approval of society 

 has a large share in producing actively moral conduct, 

 especially under conditions when such conduct is more or 

 less open to public notice. 



The other two causes enumerated above have, com- 

 paratively, very little influence on conduct. Innumerable 

 examples show that the firmest belief in the doctrine of 

 future rewards and punishments has hardly any influence 

 on conduct in cases where it is not enforced by the 

 approval or disapproval of public opinion. It is now 

 generally admitted that the believer in religious dogma is, 

 on the average, neither more honest nor more moral than 

 the Agnostic or the Atheist. No doubt, in exceptional 

 cases, religious enthusiasm acts upon character and con- 

 duct in a very powerful degree. We are, however, concerned 

 here, not with exceptional cases, but with the average 

 individual, and it has not been shown by any statistical 

 inquiry that belief in the system of future rewards and 

 punishments leads to exceptionally moral conduct. The 

 same may be said of the believers in the essential reason- 

 ableness of a moral life as the best guarantee of 

 permanent happiness. It is doubtful whether such a belief, 

 however firmly held, really influences any one in time of 

 temptation, or leads to any change of conduct which 

 society does not condemn, but which is yet fundamentally 

 immoral. It was, and is held by great numbers of persons, 

 both religious and sceptical, that slavery was absolutely 

 immoral ; yet, probably, not one in a thousand followed 

 the Quakers in refusing to purchase slave-grown sugar. 

 Neither will it be maintained that any belief in the 

 abstract principle of the beneficial results of morality would 

 restrain a poor, selfish, and naturally unsympathetic man 



