ictory is equally certain to bring pleasure and
satisfaction. We arrive, then, at the conclusion that it is the moral
sanction which is the distinctive guide of conduct, and to which we must
look, in the last resort, to enforce right action, while the other
sanctions are mainly valuable in so far as they reinforce the moral
sanction or correct its aberrations. A man must, ultimately, be the
judge of his own conduct, and, as he acts or does not act according to
his own best judgment, so he will subsequently feel satisfaction or
remorse; but these facts afford no reason why he should not take pains
to inform his judgment by all the means which physical knowledge, law,
society, and religion place at his disposal.

CHAPTER III.

ANALYSIS AND FORMATION OF THE MORAL
SENTIMENT. ITS EDUCATION AND IMPROVEMENT.

Before proceeding to our third question, namely, how the moral
sentiment, which is the source of the moral sanction, has been formed,
and how it may be further educated and improved, it is desirable to
discriminate carefully between the intellectual and the emotional
elements in an act of approbation or disapprobation. We sometimes speak
of moral judgment, sometimes of moral feeling. These expressions ought
not to be regarded as the symbols of rival theories on the nature of the
act of moral approbation, as has sometimes been the case, but as
designating distinct parts of the process, or, to put the same statement
rather differently, separate elements in the analysis. Hume, whose
treatment of this subject is peculiarly lucid, as compared with that of
most writers on ethics, after reviewing the reasons assigned by those
authors respectively who resolve the act of approbation into an act of
judgment or an act of feeling, adds[1]: 'These arguments on each side
(and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that I am apt to
suspect they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and
satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral
determinations and conclusions. The final sentence; it is probable,
which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praiseworthy
or blameable; that which stamps on them the mark of honour or infamy,
approbation or censure; that which renders morality an active principle,
and constitutes virtue our happiness and vice our misery: it is
probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense
or feeling, which nature has made universal in