kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of
security, to every one's feelings the most vital of all interests.
Nearly all other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed
by another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone,
or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly
do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the
whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since
nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to
us, if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever
was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of
all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had, unless the
machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our
notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow creatures to join
in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers
feelings round it so much more intense than those concerned in any of
the more common cases of utility, that the difference in degree (as is
often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. The
claim assumes that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity,
and incommensurability with all other considerations, which constitute
the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of
ordinary expediency and inexpediency. The feelings concerned are so
powerful, and we count so positively on finding a responsive feeling in
others (all being alike interested), that _ought_ and _should_ grow into
_must_, and recognized indispensability becomes a moral necessity,
analogous to physical, and often not inferior to it in binding force.

If the preceding analysis, or something resembling it, be not the
correct account of the notion of justice; if justice be totally
independent of utility, and be a standard _per se_, which the mind can
recognize by simple introspection of itself; it is hard to understand