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, sanctioning those decisions of the 
understanding in favour of which the head and the heart unite 
their suffrages. 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 Science , 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.f 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. 
