of something self-existing, which could not vary in any circumstances, nor be less powerful at any moment, than at any other moment. Virtue, however, it is evident, is nothing in itself, but is only a general name for certain actions, which excite, when contemplated by us, certain emotions. It is a felt relation to certain emotions, and nothing more, with no other universality, therefore, than that of the minds, in which, on the contemplation of the same actions, the same emotions arise. We speak always of what our mind is formed to admire or hate,-not of what it might have been formed to estimate differently; and the supposed immutability, therefore, has regard only to the existing constitution. of things under that Divine Being, who has formed our social nature as it is, and who, in thus forming it, may be considered as marking his own approbation of that virtue which we love, and his own disapprobation of that vice, which he has rendered it impossible for us not to view with indignation or disgust.

Such is the moderate sense of the absolute immutability of virtue, for which alone we can contend; a sense in which virtue itself is supposed to become known to us as an object of our thought only, in consequence of certain emotions which it excites, and with which it is coextensive and commensurable; but, even in this moderate sense, it was necessary to make some limitations of the uniformity of sentiment supposed; since it is abundantly evident, that the same actions,-that is to say, the same agents, in the same circumstances, willing and producing the same effects,-are not regarded by all mankind with feelings precisely the same, nor even with feelings precisely the same by the same individual in every moment of his life.

The first limitation which I made relates to the moments, in which the mind is completely occupied and absorbed in other feelings, when, for example, it is under the temporary influence of extreme passion, which incapacitates the mind for perceiving moral distinctions, as it incapacitates it for perceiving distinctions of every sort. Virtue, though lost to our perception for a moment, however, is immediately perceived again with distinct vision as before, as soon as the agitation subsides:-It is like the image of the sky on the bosom of a lake, which vanishes, indeed, while the waters are ruffled, but which reappears more and more distinctly, as

every little wave sinks gradually to rest,―till the returning calm shews again in all its purity the image of that Heaven, which has never ceased to shine on it.

The influence of passion, then, powerful as it unquestionably is in obstructing those peculiar emotions in which our moral discernment consists, is limited to the short period during which the passion rages. We are then as little capable of perceiving moral differences, as we should be, in the same circumstances, of distinguishing the universal truths of geometry; and in both cases, from the same law of the mind,—that general law, by which one very vivid feeling of any sort lessens in proportion the vividness of any other feeling that may coexist with it, or, in other cases, prevents the rise of feelings that are not accordant with the prevailing emotion, by inducing, in more ready suggestion, the feelings that are accordant with it.

The next limitation which we made is of more consequence, as being far more extensive, and operating, therefore, in some degree, in almost all the moral estimates which we form. This second limitation relates to cases in which the result of actions is complicated by a mixture of good and evil, and in which we may fix upon the good, when others fix on the evil, and may infer the intention in the agent of producing this good, which is a part of the mixed result, while others may conceive him to have had in view the partial evil. The same actions, therefore, may be approved and disapproved in different ages and countries, from the greater importance attached to the good or to the evil of such compound results, in relation to the general circumstances of society, or the influence, perhaps, of political errors, as to the consequences of advantage or injury to society of these particular actions; and, in the same age, and the same country, different individuals may regard the same action with very different moral feelings, from the higher attention paid to certain partial-results of it, and the different presumptions thence formed as to the benevolent or injurious intentions of the agent. All this, it is evident, might take place without the slightest mutability of the principle of moral sentiments; because, though the action which is estimated may seem to be the same in the cases in which it is approved and condemned, it is truly a different action which is so approved and condemned; a different action in the only sense in which an action

has any meaning, as signifying the agent himself having certain views, and willing, in consequence, certain effects of supposed benefit or injury.

A third limitation, often co-operating with the former, relates to the influence of habit and association in general, whether as extending to particular actions the emotions that have been gradually connected with the whole class of actions under which they have been arranged, or as modifying the sentiments of individuals by circumstances peculiar to the individuals themselves. It is pleasing to love those who are around us; it is pleasing, above all, to love our immediate friends, and those domestic relations to whom we owe our being, or to whose society, in the first friendships which we were capable of forming, before our heart had ventured from the little world of home into the great world without, we owed the happiness of many years, of which we have forgotten every thing but that they were delightful. It is not merely pleasing to love these first friends; we feel that it is a duty to love them; that is to say, we feel that, unless in circumstances of extraordinary profligacy on their part, if we were not to love them, we should look upon ourselves with moral disapprobation. The feeling of this very duty mingles in our estimates of the conduct of those whom we love; and it is in this way that association in such cases operates;-not by rendering vice in itself less an object of disapprobation than before, but by blending with our disapprobation of the action that love of the agent, which is, as it were, an opposite duty. It is the good which is mixed with the bad that we love, not the bad which is mixed with the good; and the primary and paramount love of the good, and hatred of the bad remain, though we may seem, in certain cases, to love the one less or more, or to hate the other less or more, in consequence of the vivid images which association affords to heighten or reduce the force of the opposite sentiment,-when the actions of which we approve or disapprove have a resemblance to the actions of those who have loved or made us happy,-whose love, therefore, and the consequent happiness produced by them, arise, perhaps, to our mind at the very moment at which the similar action is contemplated by us.

These three limitations, then, we must make ;-limitations, the necessity of which it would have been natural for us to antici

pate, though no objections had been urged to the original differences of actions as objects of moral sentiment. But, making these limitations, to some one or other of which the apparent anomalies may, I conceive, be referred,-do we not still leave unimpaired the great fundamental distinctions of morality itself, the moral approbation of the producer of unmixed good as good, the moral disapprobation of him who produces unmixed evil for the sake of evil? Where moral good and evil mix, the emotions may, indeed, be different; but they are different, not because the production of evil is loved as the mere production of evil, and the production of good hated as the mere production of good; it is only because the evil is tolerated for the good which is loved, and the good, perhaps, in other cases, forgotten or unremarked, in the abhorrence of the evil which accompanies it. When some country is found, in which the intentional producer of pure unmixed misery is preferred, on that very account, to the intentional producer of as much good as an individual is capable of producing,-some country, in which it is reckoned more meritorious to hate than to love a benefactor, merely for being a benefactor, and to love rather than to hate the betrayer of his friend, merely for being the betrayer of his friend,-then may the distinctions of morality be said to be as mutable, perhaps, as any other of the caprices of the most capricious fancy. But the denier of moral distinctions knows well, that it is impossible for him to prove the original indifference of actions in this way. He knows, that the intentional producer of evil, as pure evil, is always hated, the intentional producer of good, as pure good, always loved; and he flatters himself, that he has succeeded in proving, by an easier way, that we are naturally indifferent to what the prejudiced term moral good and evil, merely by proving, that we love the good so very much, as to forget, in the contemplation of it, some accompanying evil; and hate the evil so very much, as to forget in the contemplation of it, some accompanying good."

One of our most popular moralists begins his inquiry into the truth of the natural distinctions of morality, by quoting from Valerius Maximus, an anecdote of most atrocious profligacy,—which, he supposes, related to a savage, who had been "cut off in his infancy from all intercourse with his species, and consequently, under no possible influence of example, authority, education, sympathy,

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or habit; and whose feelings, therefore, in hearing such a relation, if it were possible for us to ascertain what the feelings of such a mind would be, he would consider as decisive of the question." I quote the story as he has translated it..

"The father of Caius Toranius had been proscribed by the Triumvirate. Caius Toranius, coming over to the interests of that party, discovered to the officers who were in pursuit of his father's life, the place where he had concealed himself, and gave them a description by which they might distinguish his person. The old man, more anxious for the safety and fortunes of his son, than about the little that might remain of his own life, began immediately to inquire of the officers who seized him, whether his son was well,-whether he had done his duty to the satisfaction of his generals. That son,' replied one of the officers, that son, so dear to thy affections, betrayed thee to us. By his information thou art apprehended and diest.' The officer, with this, struck a poniard to the old man's heart; and the unhappy parent fell, not so much affected by his fate, as by the means to which he owed it."-Auctore cædis quam ipsa cædi miserior.*.

It is necessary, for the very supposition which is made, that the savage should understand, not merely what is meant by the simple relations of son and father, and all the consequences of the treachery of the son, but that he should know also the additional interest which the paternal and filial relation, in the whole intercourse of good offices from infancy to manhood, receives from this continued intercource. The author of our mere being is not all which a father, in such circumstances, is, he is far better known and loved by us as the author of our happiness in childhood and youth, and the venerable friend of our maturer years. If the savage, knowing this relation in its fullest extent, could yet feel no different emotions of moral regard and dislike, for the son and for the father, it would be easier to suppose, that a life of total privation of society had dulled his natural susceptibilities of emotion, than that he was originally void of these. But what reason is there to imagine, that, with this knowledge, he would not have the emotions which are felt by every human being to whom this story is related? It is easy to assert, that knowing every re

Paley's Moral Philosophy