that supreme or exclusive
place which their authors would have assigned to them.

We may preface the criticism with a few preliminary remarks:--

Mr. Mill, Mr. Austin, and others, in their eagerness to maintain the
doctrine of utility, are fond of repeating that we are in a lamentable
state of uncertainty about morals. While other branches of knowledge
have made extraordinary progress, in moral philosophy we are supposed by
them to be no better than children, and with few exceptions--that is to
say, Bentham and his followers--to be no further advanced than men were
in the age of Socrates and Plato, who, in their turn, are deemed to be
as backward in ethics as they necessarily were in physics. But this,
though often asserted, is recanted almost in a breath by the same
writers who speak thus depreciatingly of our modern ethical philosophy.
For they are the first to acknowledge that we have not now to begin
classifying actions under the head of utility; they would not deny that
about the general conceptions of morals there is a practical agreement.
There is no more doubt that falsehood is wrong than that a stone falls
to the ground, although the first does not admit of the same ocular
proof as the second. There is no greater uncertainty about the duty
of obedience to parents and to the law of the land than about the
properties of triangles. Unless we are looking for a new moral world
which has no marrying and giving in marriage, there is no greater
disagreement in theory about the right relations of the sexes than about
the composition of water. These and a few other simple principles, as
they have endless applications in practice, so also may be developed in
theory into counsels of perfection.

To what then is to be attributed this opinion which has been often
entertained about the uncertainty of morals? Chiefly to this,--that
philosophers have not always distinguished the theoretical and the
casuistical uncertainty of morals from the practical certainty. There
is an uncertainty about details,--whether, for example, under given
circumstances such and such a moral principle is to be enforced, or
whether in some cases there may not be a conflict of duties: these are
the exceptions to the ordinary rules of morality, important, indeed, but
not extending to the one thousandth or one ten-thousandth part of human
actions. This is the domain of casuistry. Secondly, the aspects under
which the most general principles of morals m