or regret. It may be said that, though, in these cases, the legal and
the social sanctions are confessedly excluded, the sanction which really
operates is the religious sanction, in either its higher or its lower
form. But it can hardly be denied that, even where there is no belief in
God, or, at least, no vivid sense of His presence nor any effective
expectation of His intervention, the same feelings are experienced.
These feelings, then, appear to be distinct in character from any of the
others which we have so far considered, and they constitute what may
appropriately be called the moral sanction, in the strict sense of the
term. It is one of the faults of Bentham's system that he confounds this
sanction with the social sanction, speaking indifferently of the moral
_or_ popular (that is to say, social) sanction; but let any one examine
carefully for himself the feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction
with which he looks back upon past acts of his own life, and ask himself
whether he can discover in those feelings any reference to the praise or
blame of other persons, actual or possible. There will, if I mistake
not, be many of them in which he can discover no such reference, but in
which the feeling is simply that of satisfaction with himself for having
done what he ought to have done, or dissatisfaction with himself for
having done that which he ought not to have done. Whether these feelings
admit of analysis and explanation is another question, and one with
which I shall deal presently, but of their reality and distinctness no
competent and impartial person, on careful self-examination, can well
doubt. The answer, then, to our first question, I conceive to be that
the moral sanction, properly so called, is distinguished from all other
sanctions of conduct in that it has no regard to the prospect of
physical pleasure or pain, or to the hope of reward or fear of
punishment, or to the estimation in which we shall be held by any other
being than ourselves, but that it has regard simply and solely to the
internal feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with which, on