those who believe the most strenuously in their transcendental origin.
Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty,
if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it; capable,
like them, in a certain small degree, of springing up spontaneously; and
susceptible of being brought by cultivation to a high degree of
development. Unhappily it is also susceptible, by a sufficient use of
the external sanctions and of the force of early impressions, of being
cultivated in almost any direction: so that there is hardly anything so
absurd or so mischievous that it may not, by means of these influences,
be made to act on the human mind with all the authority of conscience.
To doubt that the same potency might be given by the same means to the
principle of utility, even if it had no foundation in human nature,
would be flying in the face of all experience.

But moral associations which are wholly of artificial creation, when
intellectual culture goes on, yield by degrees to the dissolving force
of analysis: and if the feeling of duty, when associated with utility,
would appear equally arbitrary; if there were no leading department of
our nature, no powerful class of sentiments, with which that association
would harmonize, which would make us feel it congenial, and incline us
not only to foster it in others (for which we have abundant interested
motives), but also to cherish it in ourselves; if there were not, in
short, a natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality, it might
well happen that this association also, even after it had been implanted
by education, might be analysed away.

But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is
which, when once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical
standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This
firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to