actions, and such as these, which make human life what it is, and
are the fountains of all the good and evil with which its entire
surface is so widely and impartially overspread; and though they are
called minute, they are called so in compliance with the blindness
of those who cannot estimate their importance. It is in the due
appreciating the general effects of their peculiarities, and in
cultivating the habit of acquiring decisive knowledge respecting
the tendencies arising out of them in particular cases, that the
most important part of moral science consists. The deepest abyss
of these vast and multitudinous caverns, it is necessary that we
should visit.

This is the difference between social and individual man. Not that
this distinction is to be considered definite, or characteristic
of one human being as compared with another; it denotes rather two
classes of agency, common in a degree to every human being. None
is exempt, indeed, from that species of influence which affects, as
it were, the surface of his being, and gives the specific outline
to his conduct. Almost all that is ostensible submits to that
legislature created by the general representation of the past
feelings of mankind--imperfect as it is from a variety of causes,
as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits.
Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power.
The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape
it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and
his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured
from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on
examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages
from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted
otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions,