44 Moral Responsibility. 



duty, — and above all, in a hypothetical future ; still too 

 much distracts the attention of men from their present 

 practical physical requirements, leads them to depreciate and 

 neglect their advantages ; and opposes, though with daily 

 decreasing power, the irresistible progress of that scientific 

 knowledge, in which alone the prosperity, happiness, and 

 true virtue of the human race, are to be sought and found. 



But throughout this hasty sketch of the genesis of the 

 idea of moral responsibility and obligation, there is nothing 

 to indicate the existence, or to demand the importation of any 

 more mysterious principle than physical advantage and con- 

 ventional convenience ; the cause and explanation of current 

 theories being, that in the matured social system, the causes 

 of mental phenomena are much more complex, iD direct, and 

 therefore obscure ; and at the same time the inchoate senti- 

 ment becomes more refined and defined, than in a very 

 primitive condition of society. This seems to have led men 

 insensibly to regard all indirect consequences of an act, 

 as if inhering in the act itself; and it is called moral or 

 immoral, when its general tendency only can be discerned 

 as it were by habit ; its physical consequences becoming too 

 complicated and numerous to be easily traced. A moral 

 man is of course one who customarily does moral acts, or 

 such as are calculated to produce generally good effects ; an 

 immoral man is one who habitually commits acts of an evil 

 tendency, according to the moral standard of the society in 

 which each lives. It is corroborative of this view, that 

 morality is as variable as the conditions of climate and of 

 civilisation. Hospitality is incomplete in Lapland and else- 

 where, without the concession of conjugal privileges in 

 favour of a guest. In Ladak, etc., it is moral for a woman 

 to have several brothers for her husbands in one house ; and 

 in Fiji and Melanesia, it is a moral duty to bury parents 

 alive. All these customs are practised under a moral obliga- 

 tion. Among our own ancestors within three centuries, it 

 was meritorious to burn one's neighbour alive if of a 

 different religious opinion. A pious bishop thanked God 

 that he had been enabled to burn alive after torturing seven 

 hundred in a single year, and he died in the odour of sanc- 

 tity. None of us, probably, would envy him his state of 

 mind ; still it must not be overlooked that that would be 

 one of virtuous self-complacency, and the reverse of that of 

 any man who should do so in our times. When his 

 piety was most fervent, his acts were what we deem most 



