The idea that the right is the social as opposed to the sensual is, it seems to me, a sound one, if we mean by it that the mentally higher, more personal or imaginative impulses have on the whole far more weight in conscience than the more sensual. The immediate reason for this seems to be that the mind of one who shares the higher life is so thronged with vivid personal or social sentiments, that the merely sensual cannot be the rational except where it is allied with these, or at any rate not opposed to them. It is for the psychologist to explain the mental processes involved, but apparently the social interests prevail in conscience over the sensual because they are the major force; that is, they are, on the whole, so much more numerous, vivid, and persistent, that they determine the general system of thought, of which conscience is the fullest expression. We may, perhaps, represent the matter nearly enough for our purpose by comparing the higher and lower kinds of thought to the human race and the inferior animals. The former is so much more powerful, on the whole, though not always so individually, that it determines, in all settled countries, the general organization of life, erecting cities and railroads, clearing forests, and the like, to suit itself, and with only incidental regard to other animals. The latter are preserved within the system only in so far as they are useful, or at any rate not very troublesome, to mankind. So all sensual impulses are judged by their relation to a system of thought dominated by social sentiment. The pleasures of eating, harmless in themselves, begin to be judged wrong so soon as they are indulged in such a way as to blunt the higher faculties, or to violate justice, decency, or the like. A shipwrecked man, it is felt, should rather perish of hunger than kill and eat another man, because the latter action violates the whole system of social thought. And in like manner it is held that a soldier, or indeed any man, should prefer honor and duty to life itself. The working of personal influence upon our judgments of right is not different in kind from its working upon other judgments: it simply introduces vivid impulses, which affect the moral synthesis something in the way that picking up a weight will change one’s centre of gravity and force him to alter his footing.