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154 as Theistic threats and promises. Here Mill makes a distinct advance in the work of construction. The moral sentiment has arisen, he maintains, partly through artificial and partly through natural causes. The artificial influence, the "education of conscience under government or authority," tends to yield to the "dissolving force of analysis." The natural causes of the altruistic moral sense are the "social feelings of mankind," which are a complex blending of (1) sympathy with the pleasures and pains of others, and (2) the habit of consulting the welfare of others from a consciousness of mutual need and implication of interests. On the latter point Mill evidently touches the sociological argument which later scholars elaborated. This feeling of unity with one's fellows engenders a "natural want" in any "properly-cultivated moral nature" to be in harmony with others, though he admits that some are devoid of it and ethically hopeless. In the course of time, the objects which were originally desired only as means to an end come, through the laws of association, to be directly pleasant and desirable; hence his apparently Stoical maxim, that virtue must be loved as a thing desirable in itself. He contends, also, that the acquired tendency to virtuous conduct may grow so strong as to persist even when there is not only no pleasure to be gained by it, but quite the reverse. Thus, Utilitarian morality is as capable of producing moral heroes as any other ethical system, and Mill's celebrated assertion, that he would go to hell rather than pay a mendacious compliment to the Deity, is much more in harmony with his teaching than Dr. Mivart or Mr. Mallock imagines. Dr. Bain's view of the origin of the moral sentiment is, broadly, similar to Mr. Mill's.

The chief argument against the Associational theory of moral feeling was based on the early age at which that feeling is manifested by children. This objection was met and answered by the next form which hedonism took—the evolutionary theory, which has now generally superseded the Associational. Not that there is a conflict between the consecutive schools of "naturalistic" ethics. It is a development parallel to that of Biblical criticism. Each new school supersedes its predecessor only in the sense that it introduces new elements, and is thus enabled to meet the old difficulties more effectively. The great crux of the