They knew that they could make the morality they required instinctive. If they could not have done this the whole business would have been with them, as it proved with so many other people, a more or less well-meant, but still only a melancholy _fiasco_. They did, however, thoroughly succeed in their great attempt, and this is what we have now to look into. First we must get hold of the fact that morality is instinctive. The moral sentiments are instincts engendered in our suitably prepared physical and mental organization by the circumstances and conditions of the life of the community; this is the spontaneous self-acting cause; and then, secondarily,—this, however, has ultimately the same source and origination—by the deliberate and purposed arrangements established by governing mind, that is, by laws and religion, the formal embodiments of that mind. They are instincts precisely in the sense in which we apply the word to certain physio-psychal phenomena of the lower animals. They are formed among mankind in the same way, with, as we have just said, the additional cause of the foreseen and intended action of those regulations, which are suggested by the working of human societies, and which are devised, and designedly introduced, by an exercise of the reasoning faculties. They are transmitted in the same way, act in the same way, and are modified, extinguished, and reversed in the same way. Whatever, for instance, may be predicated of the maternal instinct in a hen may be predicated of the maternal sentiment in the human mother, and vice versâ, due allowance having been made for modifying conditions, for there are other instincts in the human mother, (for instance, that of shame at the dread of the discovery of a lapse from virtue,) which may enable her to overpower and extinguish the maternal sentiment—a state to which the hen, through the absence of other counteracting instincts, and from defects of reason, can never be brought. This is true of all the moral sentiments from the bottom to the top of the scale. The necessities of human life, and chiefly the working of human society, have originated every one of them. This accounts for every phenomenon belonging to them that men have observed and commented on, and endeavoured to explain; as, for instance, for their endless diversity, and yet for their substantial identity; for their universality; for their apparent foundation in utility; for their apparent origination in the will of the Creator; for their apparent innateness; and for their apparent non-innateness. They are diverse, they are identical, they are universal, they are founded on utility, they originate in the will of the Creator, they are innate, they are non-innate, in the sense in which instincts generated by the necessities of human life, and the working of human societies (everywhere endlessly modified by times and circumstances, yet substantially the same), must possess every one of these qualities. A volume might be