DEONTOLOGY. 281 
should be challenged to support it by adducing more con- 
clusive evidence than is to be found in an indeterminate 
ageregate of confirmatory testimonies and of seemingly 
accordant ethical phenomena. Everyone who perceives it 
to be indisputably true has discovered in himselfits only sure, 
its absolutely certain ground. In some such cases as I thus 
assume, a sentiment of reverence for a fellow man may cause 
in others, subjects or disciples, or profound admirers, the 
impression that obedience, partial or complete, is due to him. 
On this supposition there may be those whose sense of duty 
recognizes no authority superior to his will; butif, apart 
from, or in the absence of, reverence for the man himself, he is 
obeyed, and still from au imperative, that is a real, sense of 
duty, a higher will is, not indeed distinctly, or even con- 
sclously, recognized as a matter of course, but, it would seem, 
virtually acknowled ged. 
To confirm this “yet unproved assertion, and from it, 
proceeding to others more precise and definite, to arrive at 
the full truth to which it points, there needs some investiga- 
tion of phenomena that indicate in certain of the lower 
animals a psychic affection, which, perhaps, in common 
opinion simulates, but, as it appears to me, may properly be 
called, a sense of duty. No one at all observant of the 
habits of dogs can fail to have remarked how any of 
these creatures, if adequately inteligent and duly trained, 
invariably behave when detected in acts of disobedience 
to such authority as they have learned to recognize. The 
manifestation of fear may possibly in such a case be 
insignificant, or even nil; but if that be go, another kind of 
feeling becomes the more evident, betraying itself by various 
symptoms, which human observers, even children, taught by 
their sympathetic moral sense, instinctively interpret. The 
indications of a sense of shame are unmistakable. But a 
sense of shame implies a sense of duty; and in a dog the 
sense of duty is the sort of feeling under the impulse of 
which, after he has attached himself to an owner, he in eftect 
submits to hold the position of a bondservant, and, if trained 
in congruity with the possibilities of his nature , instinctively 
slides into the habit of subordinating in some measure his 
natural appetites to commands, which, in this assumed 
position, it is his nature to recognize as having for himself the 
might and urgency of a supreme auti iority. This sense of 
duty underlies the distinction he makes between his master’s 
right to be obeyed, and any claim a stranger may seem bent 
upon enforcing by an aggressive manifestation of formidable 
