Mora I Responsibi liiy. 41 



which such benefits shall be mutually given and received ; 

 that their sympathy and antipathy extend beyond them- 

 selves and those things in which the investment of their 

 own labour has created a personal interest ; and they come 

 to regard aggression or depredation committed against their 

 social body, or against any individual, or right, or law, or 

 custom of it, as an indirect or moral injury to them- 

 selves. An individual, in calling upon his neighbours to 

 resist or prevent an aggression upon himself or any of them, 

 from within or from without their social body, naturally 

 represents the offender as a proper object of antipathy and 

 hate, and claims protection and united action against him, 

 from their sympathy and sense of mutual interest. 



Here then, I believe, was the origin of the idea of indi- 

 rect, or moral obligation ; and the first germ in connection 

 with it of that sentiment which subsequently developed into 

 the system of praise and blame, merit and demerit, which I 

 propose to trace a little further. The idea of moral respon- 

 sibility, I think, belongs to, and must have originated in, a 

 different and ruder form of civil society — that of the 

 paternal government, chieftainship, or monarchy ; which is 

 the development of the principle of authority, and perfectly 

 adapted to the government of children. The mutual depend- 

 ence and reliance generated by the operation of the demo- 

 cratic principle, experience teaches us are far more appropriate 

 and favourable to the equal conditions, the capacities, the 

 activit}", and the prosperity of adults, national as well as 

 individual. 



That this view is correct — that the notion of merit and 

 demerit, desert for praise and blame — is compounded of, 

 first, the feeling of the right to property, acquired from the 

 consciousness of having expended labour for it ; secondly, 

 the sense of mutual advantage and reciprocal dependence, 

 ensuing from combination, first casual and temporary, after- 

 wards permanent, and resulting at last in social security and 

 collective power ; thirdly the sympathy and antipathy 

 which, by the force of habit, men readily learn to transfer 

 beyond the immediate to the most indirect perceptible causes 

 of pleasure and pain ; and lastly, the gradual exaltation of 

 the whole into a transcendental region of sentiment in pro- 

 portion to the development of what is called the aesthetic 

 faculty. This account of the concrete idea is strikingly 

 corroborated by the fact that in the history of the world, the 

 developement of the moral sentiment originated almost 



