Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/515

Rh explanations, is substantially correct. Man's morality is rooted in his innermost nature. It grows necessarily out of his very reason, but it is certainly moulded into what it is by the form and pressure bf the society in which he lives, and by the force of the circumstances which surround him. These alter considerably his primitive nature, and engraft new shoots on the original stock of his being. Example, education, traditional usages, prescriptive customs, the approbation and disapprobation of our fellow-men, all these are foreign agencies, and they exert such a potent influence on each of us, and so shape and modify our original dispositions, as to render it in the highest degree difficult to determine accurately what are the native or primary, and what the acquired or secondary elements in our moral constitution. And we learn nothing from being told that our conscience or sense of duty, our sentiments in regard to right and wrong, our obligation to pursue one course of conduct and to avoid another course, are ultimate principles which admit of no further analysis or explanation. Even if this were true, it would teach us nothing. But it is not true. It is not true that conscience operates like an instinct; it is not true that we distinguish instinctively between the right and the wrong, as we do between the pleasurable and the painful; it is not true that our social feelings arise, as our selfish ones do, without the intervention of any antecedent principle. Above all, the advocates of an innate morality have failed to note the very