except those who had inherited them from a past age, when there was
nothing better.

Nor is there anything inconsistent with our present moral theories
of whatever kind in so thinking about our ancestors. The intuitive
theory of morality, which would be that naturally most opposed to
it, has lately taken a new development. It is not now maintained
that all men have the same amount of conscience. Indeed, only a most
shallow disputant who did not understand even the plainest facts of
human nature could ever have maintained it; if men differ in
anything they differ in the fineness and the delicacy of their moral
intuitions, however we may suppose those feelings to have been
acquired. We need not go as far as savages to learn that lesson; we
need only talk to the English poor or to our own servants, and we
shall be taught it very completely. The lower classes in civilised
countries, like all classes in uncivilised countries, are clearly
wanting in the nicer part of those feelings which, taken together,
we call the SENSE of morality. All this an intuitionist who knows
his case will now admit, but he will add that, though the amount of
the moral sense may and does differ in different persons, yet that
as far as it goes it is alike in all. He likens it to the intuition
of number, in which some savages are so defective that they cannot
really and easily count more than three. Yet as far as three his
intuitions are the same as those of civilised people. Unquestionably
if there are intuitions at all, the primary truths of number are
such. There is a felt necessity in them if in anything, and it would
be pedantry to say that any proposition of morals was MORE certain
than that five and five make ten. The truths of arithmetic,
intuitive or not, certainly cannot be acquired independently of
experience nor can those of morals be so either. Unquestionably they