KOSMICOS. The idea of a divine command, as the source of morality, is not necessary to the explanation of the mode in which the social or the self-regarding virtues were gradually developed. In the progress from barbarism to civilization, what is called the moral sense has been slowly developed as an increasing perception of what is beneficial, and this has become an inherited faculty. We thus have a sure scientific basis for the moral intuitions which we do not individually stay to analyze when we are called upon to determine the morality or the immorality of certain actions. The supposed divine command is something that is aside from the process by which the idea of morality or immorality became developed. SOPHEREUS. And is this also Mr. Spencer's philosophy of the moral sense? KOSMICOS. Let me read you what Spencer says: "I believe that the experience of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, has been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain _faculties_ of moral intuition--certain _emotions_ responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no _apparent_ basis in the _individual_ experiences of utility."[123] I have emphasized certain words in this passage in order to make its meaning distinct. Mr. Spencer's theory is that we have certain _faculties_ of moral intuition, which have become such by transmission and accumulation; that the original ideas of right and wrong sprang from perceptions of utility; and that when to the individual the question of a good or a bad action in others or himself is now presented, he feels an _emotion_ which responds to right or wrong conduct, and feels it in the _faculty_ which he has inherited from ancestors, without referring it to his _individual_ experience of the utility or inutility of certain conduct.