ked and disgraceful act, had never entered into the mind of
any Celtic chief.'

Various answers have been given by the advocates of innate morality to
these serious discrepancies.

(1) It is maintained that savage or uncultivated nations are not a
fair criterion of mankind generally: that as men become more
civilized, they approximate to unity of moral sentiment; and what
civilized men agree in, is alone to be taken as the judgment of the
race.

Now, this argument would have great weight, in any discussion as to
what is good, useful, expedient, or what is in accordance with the
cultivated reason or intelligence of mankind; because civilization
consists in the exercise of men's intellectual faculties to improve
their condition. But in a controversy as to what is given us by
nature,--what we possess independently of intelligent search and
experience,--the appeal to civilization does not apply. What civilized
men agree upon among themselves, as opposed to savages, is likely to
be the reverse of a natural instinct; in other words, something
suggested by reason and experience.

In the next place, counting only civilized races, that is, including
the chief European, American, and Asiatic peoples of the present day,
and the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world, we still find
disparities on what are deemed by us fundamental points of moral right
and wrong. Polygamy is regarded as right in Turkey, India, and China,
and as wrong in England. Marriages that we pronounce incestuous were
legitimate in ancient times. The views entertained by Plato and
Aristotle as to the intercourse of the sexes are now looked upon with
abhorrence.

(2) It has been replied that, although men differ greatly in what they
consider right and wrong, they all agree in possessing _some notion_
of right and wrong. No people are entirely devoid of moral judgments.

But this is to surrender the only position of any real importance. The
simple and underived character of the moral faculty is maintained
because of the superior authority attached to what is natural, as
opposed to what is merely conventional. But if nothing be natural but
the mere fact of right and wrong, while all the details, which alone
have any value, are settled by convention and custom, we are as much
at sea on one system as on the other.

(3) It is fully admitted, being, indeed, impossible to deny, that
education must concur with natural impulses in making up the moral
sentiment.