ent; and, if so, we are precluded from resolving
or analyzing it into simpler modes of feeling, willing, or thinking.

We have many feelings that urge us to act and abstain from acting; but
the prompting of conscience has something peculiar to itself, which
has been expressed by the terms rightness, authority, supremacy. Other
motives,--hunger, curiosity, benevolence, and so on,--have might, this
has right.

So, the Intellect has many occasions for putting forth its aptitudes
of discriminating, identifying, remembering; but the operation of
discerning right and wrong is supposed to be a unique employment of
those functions.

5. In reply to these arguments, and in support of the view that the
Moral Faculty is complex and derived, the following considerations are
urged:--

First, The Immediateness of a judgment, is no proof of its being
innate; long practice or familiarity has the same effect.

In proportion as we are habituated to any subject, or any class of
operations, our decisions are rapid and independent of deliberation.
An expert geometer sees at a glance whether a demonstration is
correct. In extempore speech, a person has to perform every moment a
series of judgments as to the suitability of words to meaning, to
grammar, to taste, to effect upon an audience. An old soldier knows in
an instant, without thought or deliberation, whether a position is
sufficiently guarded. There is no greater rapidity in the judgments of
right and wrong, than in these acquired professional judgments.

Moreover, the decisions of conscience are quick only in the simpler
cases. It happens not unfrequently that difficult and protracted
deliberations are necessary to a moral judgment.

6. Secondly, The alleged similarity of men's moral judgments in all
countries and times holds only to a limited degree.

The very great differences among different nations, as to what
constitutes right and wrong, are too numerous, striking, and serious,
not to have been often brought forward in Ethical controversy. Robbery
and murder are legalized in whole nations. Macaulay's picture of the
Highland Chief of former days is not singular in the experience of
mankind.

'His own vassals, indeed, were few in number, but he came of the best
blood of the Highlands. He kept up a close connexion with his more
powerful kinsmen; nor did they like him the less because he was a
robber; for he never robbed them; and that robbery, merely as robbery,
was a wic