moral judgments; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive
faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doctrines of morality,
not for perception of it in the concrete. The intuitive, no less than
what may be termed the inductive, school of ethics, insists on the
necessity of general laws. They both agree that the morality of an
individual action is not a question of direct perception, but of the
application of a law to an individual case. They recognise also, to a
great extent, the same moral laws; but differ as to their evidence, and
the source from which they derive their authority. According to the one
opinion, the principles of morals are evident _a priori_, requiring
nothing to command assent, except that the meaning of the terms be
understood. According to the other doctrine, right and wrong, as well as
truth and falsehood, are questions of observation and experience. But
both hold equally that morality must be deduced from principles; and the
intuitive school affirm as strongly as the inductive, that there is a
science of morals. Yet they seldom attempt to make out a list of the _a
priori_ principles which are to serve as the premises of the science;
still more rarely do they make any effort to reduce those various
principles to one first principle, or common ground of obligation. They
either assume the ordinary precepts of morals as of _a priori_
authority, or they lay down as the common groundwork of those maxims,
some generality much less obviously authoritative than the maxims
themselves, and which has never succeeded in gaining popular acceptance.
Yet to support their pretensions there ought either to be some one
fundamental principle or law, at the root of all morality, or if there
be several, there should be a determinate order of precedence among
them; and the one principle, or the rule for deciding between the
various principles when they conflict, ought to be self-evident.

To inquire how far the bad effects of this deficiency have been
mitigated in practice, or to what extent the moral beliefs of mankind
have been vitiated or made uncertain by the absence of any distinct
recognition of an ultimate standard, would imply a complete survey and
criticism of past and present ethical doctrine. It would, however, be
easy to show that whatever steadiness or consistency these moral beliefs
have attained, has been mainly due to the tacit influence of a standard
not recognised. Although the non-exist