s to the
general happiness is the essence, or even only the criterion, of good,
must necessarily believe that it is also that which God approves. The
whole force therefore of external reward and punishment, whether
physical or moral, and whether proceeding from God or from our fellow
men, together with all that the capacities of human nature admit, of
disinterested devotion to either, become available to enforce the
utilitarian morality, in proportion as that morality is recognized; and
the more powerfully, the more the appliances of education and general
cultivation are bent to the purpose.

So far as to external sanctions. The internal sanction of duty, whatever
our standard of duty may be, is one and the same--a feeling in our own
mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation of duty,
which in properly cultivated moral natures rises, in the more serious
cases, into shrinking from it as an impossibility. This feeling, when
disinterested, and connecting itself with the pure idea of duty, and
not with some particular form of it, or with any of the merely accessory
circumstances, is the essence of Conscience; though in that complex
phenomenon as it actually exists, the simple fact is in general all
encrusted over with collateral associations, derived from sympathy, from
love, and still more from fear; from all the forms of religious feeling;
from the recollections of childhood and of all our past life; from
self-esteem, desire of the esteem of others, and occasionally even
self-abasement. This extreme complication is, I apprehend, the origin of
the sort of mystical character which, by a tendency of the human mind of
which there are many other examples, is apt to be attributed to the idea
of moral obligation, and which leads people to believe that the idea
cannot possibly attach itself to any other objects than those which, by
a supposed mysterious law, are found in our present experience to excite
it. Its binding force, however, consists in the existence of a mass of
feeling which must be broken through in order to do what violates our
standard of right, and which, if we do nevertheless violate that
standard, will probably have to be encountered afterwards in the form of
remorse. Whatever theory we have of the nature or origin of conscience,
this is what essentially constitutes it.

The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external motives
apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see