because it is in itself essentially painful and disturbing. This
conception of virtue and vice as states of health or sickness, the one
being in itself a good, and the other in itself an evil, was a
fundamental proposition in the ethics of Plato. It was admitted, but
only to a subsidiary place, by the Stoics, and has passed more or less
into all the succeeding systems. It is especially favourable to large
and elevating conceptions of self-culture, for it leads men to dwell
much less upon isolated acts of virtue or vice than upon the habitual
condition of mind from which they spring.

It is possible, in the third place, to argue in favour of virtue by
offering as a motive that sense of pleasure which follows the deliberate
performance of a virtuous act. This emotion is a distinct and isolated
gratification following a distinct action, and may therefore be easily
separated from that habitual placidity of temper which results from the
extinction of vicious and perturbing impulses. It is this theory which
is implied in the common exhortations to enjoy "the luxury of doing
good," and though especially strong in acts of benevolence, in which
case sympathy with the happiness created intensifies the feeling, this
pleasure attends every kind of virtue.

These three motives of action have all this common characteristic, that
they point as their ultimate end to the happiness of the agent. The
first seeks that happiness in external circumstances; the second and
third in psychological conditions. There is, however, a fourth kind of
motive which may be urged, and which is the peculiar characteristic of
the intuitive school of moralists and the stumbling-block of its
opponents. It is asserted that we are so constituted that the notion of
duty furnishes in itself a natural motive of action of the highest
order, and wholly distinct from all the refinements and modifications of