all act of
sacrifice on our own part was by no means efficacious in promoting the
'greater good' of the recipient, and still less of society at large. A
life of vagrancy or indolence may easily be made more attractive than
one of honest industry, and well-meant efforts to anticipate all the
wants and misfortunes of the poor may often have the effect of making
them careless of the future and of destroying all elements of
independence and providence in their character. Another instance of the
contrast between the immediate and remote, or apparent and real, results
of acts of intended beneficence is to be found in the prodigality with
which well-to-do persons often distribute gratuities amongst servants.
These gratuities have the immediate effect of giving gratification to
the recipients and securing better service to the donors, but they have
often the remote and more permanent effect of rendering the recipients
servile and corrupt, and (as in the case of railway porters) of
depriving poorer or less prodigal persons of services to which they are
equally entitled.

In adducing these illustrations, I must not be understood to be
advocating or defending a selfish employment of superfluous wealth, but
to be shewing the evils which may result from an unenlightened
benevolence, and the importance of ascertaining that the 'greater good
of others,' to which we sacrifice our own interests or enjoyments, is a
real, and not merely an apparent good, and, moreover, that our conduct,
if it became general, would promote the welfare of the community at
large, and not merely particular sections of it to the injury of the
rest.

To sum up the results of this chapter, we may repeat that we must
distinguish carefully between the intellectual act of moral judgment, or
the judgment we pass on matters of conduct, and the emotional act of
moral feeling, or the feeling which supervenes upon that judgment, and
that, so far as we can give a precise definition of the latter, it is an
indirect or reflex form of one or other of the sympathetic, resentful,
or self-regarding feelings, occurring when, on consideration, we realise
that, in matters involving a conflict of motives and of sufficient
importance to arrest our attention and stimulate our reflexion, one or
other of these feelings has been gratified or thwarted: moreover, that
we praise, in the case of others, and approve, in our own case, all
those actions of the above kind, in which a man sub