every one has also a direct inclination to do so. But on this account the often anxious care which most men take for it has no intrinsic worth, and their maxim has no moral import. They preserve their life _as duty requires_, no doubt, but not _because duty requires_. On the other hand, if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life; if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it—not from inclination or fear, but from duty—then his maxim has a moral worth. “To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations” (pp. 17–19). I have given this extract at length that there may be fully understood the remarkable doctrine it embodies—a doctrine especially remarkable as exemplified in the last sentence. Let us now consider all that it means. Before doing this, however, I may remark that, space permitting, it might be shown clearly enough that the assumed distinction between _sense_ of duty and inclination is untenable. The very expression sense of duty implies that the mental state signified is a feeling; and if a feeling it must, like other feelings, be gratified by acts of one kind and offended by acts of an opposite kind. If we take the {211} name conscience, which is equivalent to sense of duty, we see the same thing. The common expressions “a tender conscience” “a seared conscience,” indicate the perception that conscience is a feeling—a feeling which has its satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and which _inclines_ a man to acts which yield the one and avoid the other—produces an _inclination_. The truth is that conscience, or the sense of duty, is an inclination of a complex kind as distinguished from inclinations of simpler kinds.