gence. 



64 HABIT AND INTELLIGENCE. [CH. XXXII. 



But how have we acquired the idea of holiness ? how 

 have we learned that some pleasures, quite irrespectively of 

 their intensity, are higher than others, and worthier to be 

 sought — that the pleasure of hearing music, for instance, is 

 higher than that of eating and drinking ; the pleasures of 

 the affections higher than those of music ; and the pleasure 

 yielded by the approbation of a good conscience higher 

 than all the rest ? And how have we learned to conceive 

 of aims of duty so high, that not even the highest pleasure, 

 present or future, ought to be weighed against them ? 

 The sense I believe this moral sense, or sense of holiness,^ is in- 

 is a case^^^ capable of being referred to any principle belonging to 

 of intelli- either matter, life, or sensation, and can only be explained 

 as a case, not of vital but of spiritual intelligence. 



I have only glanced at this most important subject. It 

 would be impossible to do it justice without introducing 

 arguments drawn from another world than that external 

 world which we know of the senses ; and to do so would 

 be to enter on a totally new class of subjects. It is not 

 from indifference to them, but rather from the sense of 

 their transcendent importance, that I at present pass them 

 by with this allusion, and restrict myself in this work to 

 the sciences of matter and life. 



1 Mr. MiU, in his work on Utilitarianism, maintains, with the whole of 

 the philosophical school which he so ably represents, that the moral sense 

 is what I have called a secondary feeling, and produced by association with 

 the pleasures and pains of sensation. He is, however, obliged to admit — 

 or rather, I ought to say, he places in the front of his theory — that besides 

 differing in quantity (which, I suppose, means intensity multiplied into 

 duration), pleasures differ from each other as higher and lower ; a little of 

 a higher pleasure being worth as much as a great deal of a lower one. Of 

 course I agree with this ; but I think it destroys the whole of the theory. 

 I think it introduces an ethical element into the subject without saying 

 whence it is derived, and thereby virtually confesses that it is underived. 



