by false philosophy or the practice of mental analysis, or infected by the
corruption of society or by some moral disorder in the individual, are
constantly assuming a more natural and necessary character. The habit of
the mind, the opinion of the world, familiarizes them to us; and they take
more and more the form of immediate intuition. The moral sense comes last
and not first in the order of their development, and is the instinct which
we have inherited or acquired, not the nobler effort of reflection which
created them and which keeps them alive. We do not stop to reason about
common honesty. Whenever we are not blinded by self-deceit, as for example
in judging the actions of others, we have no hesitation in determining what
is right and wrong. The principles of morality, when not at variance with
some desire or worldly interest of our own, or with the opinion of the
public, are hardly perceived by us; but in the conflict of reason and
passion they assert their authority and are not overcome without remorse.

Such is a brief outline of the history of our moral ideas. We have to
distinguish, first of all, the manner in which they have grown up in the
world from the manner in which they have been communicated to each of us.
We may represent them to ourselves as flowing out of the boundless ocean of
language and thought in little rills, which convey them to the heart and
brain of each individual. But neither must we confound the theories or
aspects of morality with the origin of our moral ideas. These are not the
roots or 'origines' of morals, but the latest efforts of reflection, the
lights in which the whole moral world has been regarded by different
thinkers and successive generations of men. If we ask: Which of these
many theories is the true one? we may answer: All of them--moral sense,
innate ideas, a priori, a posteriori notions, the philosophy of experience,
the philosophy of intuition--all of them have added something to our
conception of Ethics; no one of them is the whole truth. But to decide how
far our ideas of morality are derived from one source or another; to