cordance with his view of the nature
of those obligations. Under its theological aspect, morality is
obedience to the will of God; and the ground for such obedience is
two-fold; either we ought to obey God because He will punish us if we
disobey Him, which is an argument based on the utility of obedience; or
our obedience ought to flow from our love towards God, which is an
argument based on pure feeling and for which no reason can be given.
For, if any man should say that he takes no pleasure in the
contemplation of the ideal of perfect holiness, or, in other words, that
he does not love God, the attempt to argue him into acquiring that
pleasure would be as hopeless as the endeavour to persuade Peter Bell of
the "witchery of the soft blue sky."

In whichever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling,
not on reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects
of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the
love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral
law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon
instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less "innate" and
"necessary" than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got to
understand the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathematics are
no less necessary and binding on the great mass of mankind. Some there
are who cannot feel the difference between the _Sonata Appassionata_,
and _Cherry Ripe_; or between a gravestone-cutter's cherub and the
Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged.
While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy are incapable of a
sense of duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations
of morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely
the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the
anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body
would ignore abnormal specimens.

And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom
the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to
spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new
possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have
been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of
moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained;
though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, whi