happiness principle or with Kant's law of duty. Yet to avoid
misconception, what appears to be the truth about the origin of our moral
ideas may be shortly summed up as follows:--To each of us individually our
moral ideas come first of all in childhood through the medium of education,
from parents and teachers, assisted by the unconscious influence of
language; they are impressed upon a mind which at first is like a waxen
tablet, adapted to receive them; but they soon become fixed or set, and in
after life are strengthened, or perhaps weakened by the force of public
opinion. They may be corrected and enlarged by experience, they may be
reasoned about, they may be brought home to us by the circumstances of our
lives, they may be intensified by imagination, by reflection, by a course
of action likely to confirm them. Under the influence of religious feeling
or by an effort of thought, any one beginning with the ordinary rules of
morality may create out of them for himself ideals of holiness and virtue.
They slumber in the minds of most men, yet in all of us there remains some
tincture of affection, some desire of good, some sense of truth, some fear
of the law. Of some such state or process each individual is conscious in
himself, and if he compares his own experience with that of others he will
find the witness of their consciences to coincide with that of his own.
All of us have entered into an inheritance which we have the power of
appropriating and making use of. No great effort of mind is required on
our part; we learn morals, as we learn to talk, instinctively, from
conversing with others, in an enlightened age, in a civilized country, in a
good home. A well-educated child of ten years old already knows the
essentials of morals: 'Thou shalt not steal,' 'thou shalt speak the
truth,' 'thou shalt love thy parents,' 'thou shalt fear God.' What more
does he want?

But whence comes this common inheritance or stock of moral ideas? Their
beginning, like all other beginnings of human things, is obscure, and is