304 NATURE AND MAN. 



machines ? One of the most admirable sayings of Fred. W. 

 Robertson has always seemed to me to be his reply to the 

 remonstrance addressed to him by one of his churchwardens, as 

 to the displeasing effect of the outspokenness of his preaching 

 upon some of the principal supporters of his church. " I don't 

 " care," he said ; meaning, of course, " I must preach as my own 

 "sense of duty prompts me." — "You know what 'don't care' 

 " came to? " said the remonstrator. — " Yes, sir," replied Robertson, 

 " it came to Calvary." That the sympathetic thrill which every 

 true Christian disciple must feel when he realizes the full force of 

 these pregnant words, is the illusion of an unenlightened nature, 

 which the revelations of science will dispel by proving their utterer 

 to have been an automaton whose choice between duty and self- 

 interest was determined solely by " circumstances," may be the 

 conclusion of the unimpassioned closet-philosopher; but the ex- 

 perience of all who, like Robertson, make the sublimest of all acts 

 of self-sacrifice the rule and guide of their own lives, recognizes in 

 such sacrifice a moral power far transcending in probative value 

 any logical deduction of the intellect. 



3. I find the embodiment of that moral consciousness in all 

 language and literature ; for whatever may be the judgment of 

 ethical philosophers as to the nature and source of the fundamental 

 distinction between right and wrong, and whatever may be the 

 direction given to that notion by the No/aos by which the judgment 

 of each individual is shaped as to what is right and what is wrong, 

 the sense in which these terms are universally accepted is 

 based on the idea of a ^-^//-determining capability to do the right 

 and to ai'oid the wrong.* This seems to me perfectly clear, when 



* It is not a little instructive to find the moral intuitions of men like 

 Professor Clifford rising up to assert themselves against their philosophy. In 

 his lecture on "Right and Wrong" (^Fortnightly Review, December, 1875), 

 it is distinctly affirmed not only that there is a moral sense or conscience, 

 which is "the whole aggregate of our feelings about right or wrong, regarded 

 " as tending to make us do the right actions and avoid the wrong ones," but, 

 that there are feelings of moral approval and disapproval which imply " choice ; " 

 that " a particular motive is made to prevail by the fixing the attention upon 

 " that class of remembered things which calls up the motive," and that in so 

 far as this act of directing the attention is voluntary, "I am responsible because 

 "I made the choice ;" and that "within certain limits I am responsible for 

 " what I am now, because within certain limits I have made myself." In all 



