Approbation and reprobation, divine and human, come to be associated in thought with the sympathetic and unsympathetic actions respectively. The commands of a creed, the legal penalties, and the code of social conduct, mutually enforce them; and every child, as it grows up, daily has impressed on it, by the words and faces and voices of those around, the authority of these highest principles." The altruistic sentiments develop, and altruistic action becomes habitual, "until at length these altruistic sentiments begin to call in question the authority of those ego-altruistic sentiments which once ruled unchallenged." And Spencer sums up his objections to the interpretation of his theory of the development of the moral sentiment as follows: "What I have said will make it clear that two fundamental errors have been made in the interpretation put upon it. Both Utility and Experience have been construed in senses much too narrow. "Utility, convenient a word as it is from its comprehensiveness, has very inconvenient and misleading implications. It vividly suggests uses and means and proximate ends, but very faintly suggests the pleasures, positive or negative, which are the ultimate ends, and which, in the ethical meaning of the word, are alone considered; and, further, it implies conscious recognition of means and ends--implies the deliberate taking of some course to gain a perceived benefit. Experience, too, in its ordinary acceptation, connotes definite perceptions of causes and consequences, as standing in observed relations, and is not taken to include the connections found in consciousness between states that occur together, when the relation between them, causal or other, is not perceived. It is in their widest senses, however, that I habitually use these words, as will be manifest to every one who reads the 'Principles of Psychology.'" In his essay on Prison Ethics (1860), Spencer says: "The antagonistic schools of morals, like many other antagonistic schools, are both right and both wrong. The _a priori_ school has its truth; the _a posteriori_ school has its truth; and for the proper guidance of conduct there should be due recognition of both. On the one hand, it is asserted that there is an absolute standard of rectitude; and respecting certain classes of actions, it is rightly asserted. From the fundamental laws of life and the conditions of social existence are deducible certain imperative limitations to individual action--limitations which are essential to a perfect life, individual and social; or, in other words, essential to the greatest possible happiness. And these limitations, following inevitably as they do from undeniable first principles, deep as the nature of life itself, constitute what we may distinguish as absolute morality.