cking us for such breaches, and so the
internal obligation and establishment of the rule be preserved.

8. Conscience no Proof of any innate Moral Rule.

To which I answer, that I doubt not but, without being written on their
hearts, many men may, by the same way that they come to the knowledge of
other things, come to assent to several moral rules, and be convinced
of their obligation. Others also may come to be of the same mind,
from their education, company, and customs of their country; which
persuasion, however got, will serve to set conscience on work; which is
nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude
or gravity of our own actions; and if conscience be a proof of innate
principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some men with the
same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid.

9. Instances of Enormities practised without Remorse.

But I cannot see how any men should ever transgress those moral rules,
with confidence and serenity, were they innate, and stamped upon
their minds. View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what
observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience
for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports
of men set at liberty from punishment and censure. Have there not been
whole nations, and those of the most civilized people, amongst whom the
exposing their children, and leaving them in the fields to perish by
want or wild beasts has been the practice; as little condemned or
scrupled as the begetting them? Do they not still, in some countries,
put them into the same graves with their mothers, if they die in
childbirth; or despatch them, if a pretended astrologer declares them to
have unhappy stars? And are there not places where, at a certain age,
they kill or expose their parents, without any remorse at all? In a part
of Asia, the sick, when their case comes to be thought desperate, are
carried out and laid on the earth before they are dead; and left there,
exposed to wind and weather, to perish without assistance or pity. It
is familiar among the Mingrelians, a people professing Christianity, to
bury their children alive without scruple. There are places where they
eat their own children. The Caribbees were wont to geld their children,
on purpose to fat and eat them. And Garcilasso de la Vega tells us of a
people in Peru which were wont to fat and eat the children they got on
their female cap