legislation. All action is for the sake of some end, and rules of
action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character
and colour from the end to which they are subservient. When we engage in
a pursuit, a clear and precise conception of what we are pursuing would
seem to be the first thing we need, instead of the last we are to look
forward to. A test of right and wrong must be the means, one would
think, of ascertaining what is right or wrong, and not a consequence of
having already ascertained it.

The difficulty is not avoided by having recourse to the popular theory
of a natural faculty, a sense or instinct, informing us of right and
wrong. For--besides that the existence of such a moral instinct is
itself one of the matters in dispute--those believers in it who have any
pretensions to philosophy, have been obliged to abandon the idea that it
discerns what is right or wrong in the particular case in hand, as our
other senses discern the sight or sound actually present. Our moral
faculty, according to all those of its interpreters who are entitled to
the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of
moral judgments; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive
faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doctrines of morality,
not for perception of it in the concrete. The intuitive, no less than
what may be termed the inductive, school of ethics, insists on the
necessity of general laws. They both agree that the morality of an
individual action is not a question of direct perception, but of the
application of a law to an individual case. They recognise also, to a
great extent, the same moral laws; but differ as to their evidence, and
the source from which they derive their authority. According to the one
opinion, the principles of morals are evident _à priori_, requiring
nothing to command assent, except that the meaning of the terms be
understood. According to the other doctrine, right and wrong, as well as