t a really moral age should first have invented
and then bowed down before them; how plain it is (when once explained)
that they are antiquities, like an English court-suit, or a
STONE-sacrificial knife, for no one would use such things as implements
of ceremony, except those who had inherited them from a past age, when
there was nothing better.

Nor is there anything inconsistent with our present moral theories of
whatever kind in so thinking about our ancestors. The intuitive theory
of morality, which would be that naturally most opposed to it, has
lately taken a new development. It is not now maintained that all men
have the same amount of conscience. Indeed, only a most shallow
disputant who did not understand even the plainest facts of human
nature could ever have maintained it; if men differ in anything they
differ in the fineness and the delicacy of their moral intuitions,
however we may suppose those feelings to have been acquired. We need
not go as far as savages to learn that lesson; we need only talk to the
English poor or to our own servants, and we shall be taught it very
completely. The lower classes in civilised countries, like all classes
in uncivilised countries, are clearly wanting in the nicer part of
those feelings which, taken together, we call the SENSE of morality.
All this an intuitionist who knows his case will now admit, but he will
add that, though the amount of the moral sense may and does differ in
different persons, yet that as far as it goes it is alike in all. He
likens it to the intuition of number, in which some savages are so
defective that they cannot really and easily count more than three. Yet
as far as three his intuitions are the same as those of civilised
people. Unquestionably if there are intuitions at all, the primary
truths of number are such. There is a felt necessity in them if in
anything, and it would be pedantry to say that any proposition of
morals was MORE certain than that five and five make ten. The truths of
arithmetic, intuitive or not, certainly cannot be acquired
independently of experience nor can those of morals be so either.
Unquestionably they were aroused in life and by experience, though
after that comes the difficult and ancient controversy whether anything
peculiar to them and not to be found in the other facts of life is
superadded to them independently of experience out of the vigour of the
mind itself. No intuitionist, therefore, fears to speak of the