often associated
with them, can no more be heard without rousing a dim consciousness of
these delights, than the voice of an old friend unexpectedly coming into
the house can be heard without suddenly raising a wave of that feeling
that has resulted from the pleasures of past companionship. If we are to
understand the genesis of emotions, either in the individual or in the
race, we must take account of this all-important process. Mr. Hutton,
however, apparently overlooking it, and not having reminded himself, by
referring to the _Principles of Psychology_, that I insist upon it,
represents my hypothesis to be that a certain sentiment results from the
consolidation of intellectual conclusions! He speaks of me as believing
that "what seems to us now the 'necessary' intuitions and _a priori_
assumptions of human nature, are likely to prove, when scientifically
analysed, nothing but a similar conglomeration of our ancestors' _best
observations and most useful empirical rules_." He supposes me to think
that men having, in past times, come to _see_ that truthfulness was
useful, "the habit of approving truth-speaking and fidelity to
engagements, which was first based on this ground of utility, became so
rooted, that the utilitarian ground of it was forgotten, and _we_ find
ourselves springing to the belief in truth-speaking and fidelity to
engagements from an inherited tendency." Similarly throughout, Mr.
Hutton has so used the word "utility," and so interpreted it on my
behalf, as to make me appear to mean that moral sentiment is formed out
of _conscious generalizations_ respecting what is beneficial and what
detrimental. Were such my hypothesis, his criticisms would be very much
to the point; but as such is not my hypothesis, they fall to the ground.
The experiences of utility I refer to are those which become registered,
not as distinctly recognized connexions between certain kinds of acts
and certain kinds of remote results, but those which become registered
in the shape of associations between groups of feelings that have often
recurred together, though the relation between them has not been
consciously generalized--associations the origin of which may be as
little perceived as is the origin of the pleasure given by the sounds of
a rookery; but which, nevertheless, have arisen in the course of daily
converse with things, and serve as incentives or deterrents.

In the paragraph which Mr. Hutton has extracted from my letter