Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/346

 in us a moral sense, and lead us to the love and approbation of virtue, and to the fear, hatred, and abhorrence of vice. This moral sense therefore carries its own authority with it, inasmuch as it is the sum total of all the rest, and the ultimate result from them; and employs the force and authority of the whole nature of man against any particular part of it, that rebels against the determinations and commands of the conscience or moral judgment.

It appears also, that the moral sense carries us perpetually to the pure love of God, as our highest and ultimate perfection, our end, centre, and only resting-place, to which yet we can never attain.

When the moral sense is advanced to considerable perfection, a person may be made to love and hate, merely because he ought; i.e. the pleasures of moral beauty and rectitude, and the pains of moral deformity and unfitness, may be transferred, and made to coalesce, almost instantaneously.

Scrupulosity may be considered as a degeneration of the moral sense, resembling that by which the fear of God passes into superstition; for it arises, like this, from a consciousness of guilt, explicit or implicit, from bodily indisposition, and from an erroneous method of reasoning. It has also a most intimate connexion with superstition (just as moral rectitude has with the true love and fear of God:) and, like superstition, it is, in many cases, observed to work its own cure by rectifying what is amiss; and so by degrees removing both the explicit and implicit consciousness of guilt. It seems also, that in this imperfect state men seldom arrive at any great degree of correctness in their actions without some previous scrupulosity, by which they may be led to estimate the nature and consequences of affections and actions with care, impartiality, and exactness.

The moral sense or judgment here spoken of is sometimes considered as an instinct, sometimes as determinations of the mind, grounded on the eternal reasons and relations of things. Those who maintain either of these opinions may, perhaps, explain them so as to be consistent with the foregoing analysis of the moral sense from association. But if by instinct be meant a disposition communicated to the brain, and in consequence of this, to the mind, or to the mind alone, so as to be quite independent of association; and by a moral instinct, such a disposition producing in us moral judgments concerning affections and actions; it will be necessary, in order to support the opinion of a moral instinct, to produce instances, where moral judgments arise in us, independently of prior associations determining thereto.

In like manner, if by founding the morality of actions, and our judgment concerning this morality, on the eternal reasons and relations of things, be meant, that the reasons drawn from the relations of things, by which the morality or immorality of certain actions is commonly proved, and which, with the relations,