l views may also be expected to be so influenced, and
this in a higher degree because they so often run counter to our desires. A
bottle or two of wine may make a sensible object appear double; what
wonder, then, if our moral perceptions are sometimes warped and distorted
by such powerful agencies as an evil education or an habitual absence of
self-restraint. In neither case does occasional distortion invalidate the
accuracy of normal and habitual perception.

The distinctness here and now of the ideas of "right" and "useful" is
however, as before said, fully conceded by Mr. Herbert Spencer, although he
contends that these conceptions are one in root and origin.

His utilitarian Genesis of Morals, however, has been recently combated{202}
by Mr. Richard Holt Hutton in a paper which appeared in _Macmillan's
Magazine_.[216]

This writer aptly objects an _argumentum ad hominem_, applying to morals
the same argument that has been applied in this work to our sense of
musical harmony, and by Mr. Wallace to the vocal organs of man.

Mr. Herbert Spencer's notions on the subject are thus expressed by himself:
"To make my position fully understood, it seems needful to add that,
corresponding to the fundamental propositions of a developed moral science,
there have been, and still are developing in the race certain fundamental
moral intuitions; and that, though these moral intuitions are the result of
accumulated experiences of utility gradually organized and inherited, they
have come to be quite independent of conscious experience. Just in the same
way that I believe the intuition of space possessed by any living
individual to have arisen from organized and consolidated experiences of
all antecedent individuals, who bequeathed to him their slowly developed
nervous organizations; just as I believe that this intuition, requiring
only to be made definite and complete by personal experiences, has
practically become a form of thought quite independent of experience;--so
do I believe that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated
through all past generations of the human race, have been producing
corresponding nervous modifications which, by continued transmissions and
accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition,
active emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no
apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility. I also hold that,
just as the space intuition responds to the