ment of duty in AEnone:

And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of
human nature been built up. The power which has moulded us thus far
has worked with stern tools upon a very rigid stuff. What it has done
cannot be so readily undone; and it has endowed us with moral
constitutions which take pleasure in the noble, the beautiful, and the
true, just as surely as it has endowed us with sentient organisms,
which find aloes bitter and sugar sweet. That power did not work with
delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are removed. Facts,
rather than dogmas, have been its ministers--hunger and thirst, heat
and cold, pleasure and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame,
pride, love, hate, terror, awe--such were the forces whose interaction
and adjustment throughout an immeasurable past wove the triplex web of
man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the
forces that will be effectual to the end.

You may retort that even on my own showing 'the power which makes for
righteousness' has dealt in delusions; for it cannot be denied that
the beliefs of religion, including the dogmas of theology and the
freedom of the will, have had some effect in moulding the moral world.
Granted; but I do not think that this goes to the root of the matter.
Are you quite sure that those beliefs and dogmas are primary, and not
derived?--that they are not the products, instead of being the
creators, of man's moral nature? I think it is in one of the
Latter-Day Pamphlets that Carlyle corrects a reasoner, who deduced the
nobility of man from a belief in heaven, by telling him that he puts
the cart before the horse, the real truth being that the belief in
heaven is derived from the nobility of man. The bird's instinct to
weave its nest is referred to by Emerson as typical of the force which
built cathedrals, temples, and pyramids:

Knowest thou what wove yon woodbird's nest
Of leaves and feathers from her breast,
Or how the fish outbuilt its shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Such and so grew these holy piles
While love and terror laid the tiles;
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone;
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky
As on its friends with kindred e