196 



It has not yet ceased to be true that thought on this point is 

 made to take more than its proper place, to the exclusion of 

 feeling. Dugald Stewart said_, " If health and leisure allow 

 me to put in writing some speculations which have long been 

 familiar to my own thoughts, I shall endeavour to place the 

 defects of our common logical systems in a still stronger light, 

 by considering them in their application to the fundamental 

 doctrines of ethics ; and more particularly, by examining how 

 far, in researches of this sort, our moral feelings are entitled 

 to consideration ; checking, on the one hand, our speculative 

 reasonings when they lead to conclusions at which our nature 

 revolts; and, on the other, sanctioniug those decisions of the 

 understanding in favour of which the head and the heart unite 

 their sufirages. According to the prevailing maxims of modern 

 philosophy, so little regard is paid to feeling and sentiment 

 in matters of reasoning, that, instead of being understood to 

 sanction and confirm the intellectual judgments with which 

 they accord, they are very generally supposed to cast a shade 

 of suspicion on every conclusion with which they blend the 

 slightest tincture of sentiment or enthusiasm.-'^* These are 

 wise words, and they go with all the force of their wisdom to 

 show how high a place must be given in such discussions as 

 that now in hand to the moral feeling, or sensation, as distin- 

 guished from judgments in moral things. If any proposi- 

 tion sounds harshly on the moral ear — glares badly on the 

 moral eye — smells offensively in the moral nostril — or rasps 

 painfully on the moral touch, — it must receive more than 

 average scrutiny from the moral reason. 



I may give an illustration of what I mean. Mr. Tyndall, in 

 his Fragments of Sciencej institutes a comparison between 

 the building of the pyramids of Egypt and the formation of a 

 crystal of common salt. The former he represents rightly as 

 the result of the action of men on the stones of which the 

 pyramids are composed ; but the latter as that of the self- 

 action of the molecules which constitute the crystal. He 

 speaks of the forces with which these molecules attract 

 and repel each other, and so on, with his account of their 

 wonderful work.t He says, While thus the blocks of Egypt 

 were laid down by a power external to themselves, these mole- 

 cular blocks of salt are self-posited, being fixed in their places 

 by the forces with which they act on each other .■'^ Mr. Tyndall 

 says, in the same volume, " Where the aim is to elevate the 

 mind, to quicken the moral sense, to kindle the fire of religion 



* Philosophical Essays, ed. 1816, p. 62. 



t Fragments of Science, ed. 1871 pp. 114, 115. 



