ves with other than purely moral
considerations), not only that they admit of being more intense than any
other pleasures and pains, but that, whenever there is any conflict
between the moral sanction and any other sanction, it is to the moral
sanction that they attach themselves. Thus, if a man has incurred
physical suffering, or braved the penalties of the law or the ill word
of society, in pursuance of a course of conduct which he deemed to be
right, he looks back upon his actions with satisfaction, and the more
important the actions, and the clearer his convictions of right and the
stronger the inducements to act otherwise, the more intense will his
satisfaction be. But no such satisfaction is felt, when a man has
sacrificed his convictions of right to avoid physical pain, or to escape
the penalties of the law, or to conciliate the goodwill of society; the
feeling, on the other hand, will be that of dissatisfaction with
himself, varying, according to circumstances, from regret to remorse.
And, if no similar remark has to be made with reference to the religious
sanction, it is because, in all the higher forms of religion, the
religious sanction is conceived of as applying to exactly the same
actions as the moral sanction. What a man himself deems right, that he
conceives God to approve of, and what he conceives God as disapproving
of, that he deems wrong. But in a religion in which God was not regarded
as holy, just, and true, or in which there was a plurality of gods, some
good and some evil, I conceive that a man would look back with
satisfaction, and not with dissatisfaction, on those acts in which he
had followed his own sense of right rather than the supposed will of the
Deity, just as, when there is a conflict between the two, he now
congratulates himself on having submitted to the claims of conscience
rather than to those of the law.

The justification, then, of that claim to superiority, which is asserted
by the moral sanction, consists, I conceive, in two circumstances:
first, that the pleasures and pains, the feelings of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, by means
of which it works, are, in the normally constituted mind, far more
intense and durable than any other pleasures and pains; secondly, that,
whenever this sanction comes into conflict with any other sanction, its
defeat is sure, on a careful retrospect of our acts, to bring regret or
remorse, whereas its v