4 The Ethics of Opuvnion. : 265 
hope, fairly revived for general consideration. The positions 
which I have endeavoured to establish are these: That men’s 
opinions and actions are involuntary, and must therefore be 
blameless ; that we learn from experience that rewards and 
punishments, but for acts solely, are necessary, natural, bene- 
ficial, and just; at the same time that praise and blame 
are essentially unnatural, unjust, and pernicious. Thatblame 
is not only factitious and fallacious in principle, but also 
entirely mischievous in its effect; defeating the ostensible 
object of its invention by rendering punishment nugatory to — 
a far greater extent than that to which it supplants it. That 
blame is merely antipathy and hate, under a surreptitious 
aspect and an evasive name. That were praise and blame 
abolished, reward and punishment would be immeasurably 
more efficacious, 1f only consistently administered. That 
man’s moral responsibility, traced home, resolves itself into 
the fact that he is subject to the necessary consequences, 
good or bad, of his own acts. To such consequences, and to 
such consequences only, man is really and properly responsi- 
ble. He is naturally responsible to natural consequences for 
observing or violating the laws which experience prescribes as 
necessary to preserve his life, health, and general well-being; 
and morally responsible to social consequences for violating or 
conforming to those imposed by the society in which he 
lives. Ignorance does not exempt from natural penalties, 
and rightly too. For otherwise experience of them could 
never be acquired, and utter ignorance would remain the con- 
stant condition of human nature; whereas by its invaria- 
bility only, does experience become reliable as a rule of 
conduct. Society is, undoubtedly, to a certain extent unable 
to exact its penalties with infallible regularity ; and unfortu- 
nately, but with a diftidence which seems not altogether inex- 
cusable, it wavers and falters in the infliction of many of 
those which it should execute. Thus it deviates, and with 
most pernicious results, much further from the perfect rule 
afforded by nature, than its comparatively imperfect consti- 
tution really renders unavoidable; and I urge, that in fine, 
the main object of society should be to follow implicitly the 
example of nature, by making its rewards and punishments 
as certain and as consistent as hers. 
If these principles be,as I think, as novel, as I feel them tobe 
both consistent and important, some fresh light may be consi- 
dered to have been thrown upon the subject, and possibly 
some service done to humanity. It has, so far as I am aware, 
T 
