g a more natural and necessary
character. The habit of the mind, the opinion of the world, familiarizes
them to us; and they take more and more the form of immediate intuition.
The moral sense comes last and not first in the order of their
development, and is the instinct which we have inherited or acquired,
not the nobler effort of reflection which created them and which keeps
them alive. We do not stop to reason about common honesty. Whenever we
are not blinded by self-deceit, as for example in judging the actions
of others, we have no hesitation in determining what is right and wrong.
The principles of morality, when not at variance with some desire or
worldly interest of our own, or with the opinion of the public, are
hardly perceived by us; but in the conflict of reason and passion they
assert their authority and are not overcome without remorse.

Such is a brief outline of the history of our moral ideas. We have to
distinguish, first of all, the manner in which they have grown up in the
world from the manner in which they have been communicated to each of
us. We may represent them to ourselves as flowing out of the boundless
ocean of language and thought in little rills, which convey them to the
heart and brain of each individual. But neither must we confound the
theories or aspects of morality with the origin of our moral ideas.
These are not the roots or 'origines' of morals, but the latest efforts
of reflection, the lights in which the whole moral world has been
regarded by different thinkers and successive generations of men. If we
ask: Which of these many theories is the true one? we may answer: All
of them--moral sense, innate ideas, a priori, a posteriori notions, the
philosophy of experience, the philosophy of intuition--all of them have
added something to our conception of Ethics; no one of them is the whole
truth. But to decide how far our ideas of morality are derived from
one source or another; to determine what history, what philosophy has
contributed to them; to distinguish the original, simple elements from
the manifold and complex applications of them, would be a long enquiry
too far removed from the question which we are now pursuing.

Bearing in mind the distinction which we have been seeking to establish
between our earliest and our most mature ideas of morality, we may now
proceed to state the theory of Utility, not exactly in the words, but
in the spirit of one of its ablest and most moderate