This discussion brings out the positive truth for which Bentham and Mill stand: _viz._, that _the moral quality of any impulse or active tendency can be told only by observing the sort of consequences to which it leads in actual practice_. As against those who insist that there are certain feelings in human nature so sacred that they do not need to be measured or tested by noting the consequences which flow from them, so sacred that they justify an act _no matter what its results_, the utilitarians are right. It is true, as Bentham says, that if motives are good or bad it is on account of their effects. Hence we must be constantly considering the effects of our various half-impulsive, half-blind, half-conscious, half-unconscious motives, in order to find out what sort of things they are--whether to be approved and encouraged, or disapproved and checked. =Practical Importance of Defining Springs to Action by Results.=--This truth is of practical as well as of theoretical significance. Many have been taught that certain emotions are inherently so good that they are absolutely the justification of certain acts, so that the individual is absolved from any attention whatsoever to results. Instance "charity," or "benevolence." The belief is engrained that the emotion of pity, of desire to relieve the sufferings of others, is intrinsically noble and elevating. Hence it has required much discussion and teaching to bring home, even partially, the evils of indiscriminate giving. The fact is that pity, sympathy, apart from forecast of specific results to be reached by acting upon it, is a mere psychological reaction, as much so as is shrinking from suffering, or as is a tendency to run away from danger; in this blind form it is devoid of any moral quality whatsoever. Hence to teach that the feeling is good in itself is to make its mere discharge an end in itself. This is to overlook the evil consequences in the way of fraud, laziness, inefficiency, parasitism produced in others, and of sentimentality, pride, self-complacency produced in the self. There is no doubt that the effect of some types of moral training is to induce the belief that an individual may develop goodness of character simply by cultivating and keeping uppermost in his consciousness certain types of feelings, irrespective of the objective results of the acts they lead to--one of the most dangerous forms of hypocrisy and of weakened moral fiber. The insistence of utilitarianism that we must become aware of the moral quality of our impulses and states of mind on the basis of the results they effect, and must control them--no matter how "good" they feel--by their results, is a fundamental truth of morals.