28 MORALS AND MOEAL SENTIMENTS. 



Eventually these experiences may be consciously gen 

 eralized, and there may result a deliberate pursuit of the 

 sympathetic gratifications. There may also come to be 

 distinctly recognized the truths that the remoter results 

 are respectively detrimental and beneficial that due 

 regard for others is conducive to ultimate personal welfare 

 and disregard of others to ultimate personal disaster ; and 

 then there may become current such summations of expe 

 rience as &quot; honesty is the best policy.&quot; But so far from 

 regarding these intellectual recognitions of utility as 

 preceding and causing the moral sentiment, I regard the 

 moral sentiment as preceding such recognitions of utility, 

 and making them possible. The pleasures and pains 

 directly resulting in experience from sympathetic and 

 unsympathetic actions, had first to be slowly associated 

 with such actions, and the resulting incentives and de 

 terrents frequently obeyed, before there could arise the 

 perceptions that sympathetic and unsympathetic ac 

 tions are remotely beneficial or detrimental to the actor ; 

 and they had to be obeyed still longer and more gen 

 erally before there could arise the perceptions that they 

 are socially beneficial or detrimental. &quot;When, however, 

 the remote effects, personal and social, have gained 

 general recognition, are expressed in current maxims, 

 and lead to injunctions having the religious sanction, 

 the sentiments that prompt sympathetic actions and 

 check unsympathetic ones are immensely strengthened 

 by their alliances. Approbation and reprobation, divine 

 and human, come to be associated in thought with 

 the sympathetic and unsympathetic actions respectively. 

 The commands of the creed, the legal penalties, and 

 the code of social conduct, unitedly enforce them ; 

 and every child as it grows up, daily has impressed 

 on it, by the words and faces and voices of those around, 



