pleasure and pain, good and evil, beauty and deformity, the ideas of them could never be excited in us, any more than the ideas of colour in persons born blind." "The sensible horror at vice, and affectionate attachment to virtue, may be impaired, the conscience seared, the nature of particular practices mistaken, the sense of shame weakened, the judgment darkened, the voice of reason stifled, and self-deception practiced, to the most lamentable and fatal degree. Yet the grand lines and primary principles of morality are so deeply wrought into our hearts and one with our minds, that they will be for ever legible. The general approbation of certain virtues, and dislike of their contraries, must always remain, and cannot be erased but with the destruction of all reason and intellectual perception. The most depraved never sink so low, as to lose all moral discernment, all ideas of right and wrong, justice and injustice, honour and dishonour. This appears from the judg ments they pass on the actions of others, and the resentment they discover, when they are themselves the objects of ill treatment. Whatever peace they enjoy proceeds in a great measure from a studied neglect of reflexion, and from their having learnt to disguise their vices under the appearance of some virtuous or innocent qualities."*

It is observed by Dr. Hutcheson, that "it is strange, Reason is universally allowed to men, notwithstanding all the stupid ridiculous opinions received in

* Review of the principal questions in morals. chap. 7.

many places; and yet absurd practices, founded on those very opinions, shall seem an argument against any moral sense, although the bad conduct is not owing to any irregularity in the moral sense, but to a wrong judgment or opinion."-" Our sense of virtue generally leads us exactly enough according to our opinions; and therefore the absurd practices which prevail in the world, are much better arguments that men have no reason, than that they have no moral sense of beauty in actions."

Thus, putting the aged, the deformed and weak, and children, to death, are vindicated by divers plausible reasons, arising from unsound opinions, as well as the worship of idolatrous nations and thus we find that the basest actions are dressed in some tolerable mask. What others call Avarice, appears to the agent a prudent care of a family or friends; fraud, artful conduct; Malice and Revenge, a just sense of honour, and a vindication of our right in possessions or fame.

Fire and sword and desolation among enemies a just thorough defence of our country; persecution, a zeal for the Truth, and for the eternal happiness of men, which heretics oppose. In all these instances men generally act from a Sense of virtue upon false opinions."*

Dr. Thomas Brown, in speaking of the limitations to which a moral principle is liable, makes some judicious remarks. His reasonings come very near to those of Dr. Price, and amount to this;-that

* Inquiry concerning moral Good and Evil, sect. 4.

though all the particulars of duty and rectitude were in themselves plain and easy to be determined; the influence of other causes might have been expected a priori to have this modifying effect upon a moral principle, if, without considering any of the objections urged, we had only reflected on the analogous phenomena of other principles of the mind, that are allowed to be essential to it, and that are yet capable of similar modifications.

"The first limitation," he observes, "relates to the influence of extreme passion, which incapacitates the mind for perceiving moral distinctions, as it does for perceiving distinctions of every sort-virtue, though lost to our perceptions for a moment, however, is immediately perceived again, with distinct vision as before, as soon as the agitation subsides :→→ it is like the image of the sky in the bosom of a lake, which vanishes indeed, while the waters are ruffled, but which reappears more and more distinctly as every little wave sinks gradually to rest,-till the returning calm shows again in all its purity the image of that Heaven which has never ceased to shine on it." "Moral Truths are to the impassioned mind as little universal as the truths in geometry."

Another limitation relates to the influence of habit and association. "It is pleasing," he says, "to love those who are around us; above all, those domestic relations to whom we owe our being, or to whose society we owed the happiness of many years of which we have forgotten every thing, but that they

were delightful. It is not merely pleasing to love these first friends; we feel that it is a duty to love them; that, unless in circumstances of extraordinary profligacy on their part, if we were not to love them, we should look upon ourselves with moral disappro bation. The feeling of this very duty mingles in our estimates of the conduct of those whom we love; and it is in this way that Association in such cases operates;-not by rendering vice in itself less an object of disapprobation, than before, but by blending with our disapprobation of the action that love of the Agent, which is, as it were an opposite duty. It is the good that is mixed with the bad, that we love, not the bad, which is mixed with the good."*

Hooker observes, "We see a general agreement in the secret opinion of men, that every man ought to embrace the Religion which is true, and to shun, as hurtful, whatsoever dissenteth from it, but that most, which doth farthest dissent. The Generalitie of which persuasion argueth, that God hath imprinted it by nature. The errors of the most seduced this way have been mixed with some truths."

"And whereas (speaking of the Romans) we read so many of them so much commended, some for their mild and merciful disposition, some for their virtuous severitie, some for their integritie of life, all these were the fruits of true and infallible principles delivered unto us in the word of God, as the axiomes of our Religion, which being imprinted by the God of nature

* Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind.

in their hearts also, and taking better root in some than in most others, grew, though not from, yet with and amidst the heaps of manifold repugnant errors, which errors of corrupt religion had also their suitable effects in the lives of the self-same parties."

66 Seeing that mens' desire is in general to hold no religion but the true; and that whatsoever good effects doe grow out of their religion who embrace, instead of the true, a false, the roots thereof are certain sparkes of the light of truth intermingled with the darknesse of error; because no religion can wholly and only consist of untruths; we have reason to think that all true virtues are to honour Religion as their parent, and all well ordered common-weales to love her as their chiefest stay."*

"If conscience," says Rousseau, “speaks to every heart, why then are there so few that listen to it. Ah! it is because it speaks to us the language of nature, which every thing causes us to forget. Conscience is timid, it loves retirement and peace; it is alarmed by the noise of the world; the prejudices from which they represent it to take its origin, are its most cruel enemies; it flies away or is silent before them; their noise drowns its gentle voice, and hinders it from being heard; fanaticism dares to counterfeit it, and to meditate crimes in its name. It leaves us at last in consequence of being neglected; it no longer speaks to us, no longer answers; and, after such continued contempt for it, it costs as much to

* See Ecclesiastical Politic. Book Fifth,