134 THE REV. H. J. CLARKE ON THE 
looked upon with abhorrence.’* But what does all this 
prove? Not that there are no stable principles on which a 
Science of Rectitude may be established, but that such 
principles need for their discovery, and with a view to their 
specific applications, more reliable criteria than aré to be 
found in men’s creeds and their notions respecting the ground 
of social order and social relations—that the science in ques- 
tion, if there be such a science, comprehends more truths 
than are necessarily perceived in the way of simple intuition, 
that the acquisition of it presupposes the culture of that 
faculty of moral discrimination from the exercise of which 
have sprung the terms ight and wrong, and that it is acquired 
conformably to the character, and pr oportionably to the 
degree, of the culture which the faculty receives. 
It is an undeniable fact that some people have a better eye 
for perspective than others, and sume a better ear for music. 
There is doubtless many a person who, when he looks at a 
picture in which some of the lines supposed to recede from 
the spectator in the same direction do not converge towards 
precisely the same point, fails to detect the error, and to 
whom, if he were making a drawing of his own, it would 
never occur even to choose a point of sight and regulate with 
due regard to its position the course of every Ime. But who 
would infer from non-agreement in critical remarks, thus 
easily accounted for, or from a similarly explicable absencé 
of universally known and accepted rules, that there can be 
no Science of Perspective? Relatively to diversity in the 
appreciation of musical sounds, a question of like import may 
be asked. There are persons whose feelings never vibrate 
in response to elaborate harmonies. There are ears more 
easily attracted by a husky pothouse rendering of any of the 
dullest and heaviest of street airs, and by the feeblest of 
stridulous instrumental performances, than they would be by 
the faultless execution of some wonderful masterpiece of a 
composer of world-wide fame. Indeed, to not a few has 
been denied the power of so discriminating definite relations 
in degrees of pitch as to be just capable of distinguishing 
clearly one tune from another; and to such people music can 
be little more than a succession of rhythmical variations in 
certain kinds of sonorous noise. Yet, notwithstanding all 
the gradations and varieties of shortcoming which may be 
assumed to exist, 1f perfect sensibility of ear be taken as the 
standard, and in spite of the consequent diversities of taste 
Mental and Moral Science, by A. Bain, “ Ethics,” Part 1, ch. iii, § 6, 
