Call then, to your mind, an instance of justice, and one of injustice: a case of virtue and a case of crime: an example of heroism and an example of weakness: does not each of these cases embody, the one class your idea of the _right in itself_, and the other your idea of the _wrong in itself_? But your conception of the cases in which your antecedent idea of the _right_ and the _wrong_ appears, and your antecedent idea of _that right_ and of _that wrong_, are very different ideas: that is, the case itself and your idea of the principle are distinct: the one a thing, the other an idea of something real. What, then, is your idea of the _right_, which is so distinct in your mind from the case in which it appears? Interrogate your reason and consciousness. Interrogate the reason and consciousness of all mankind. Take this example: “The father of _Caius Toranius_ had been proscribed by the triumvirate. _Caius Toranius_, coming over to the interest of that party, discovered to the officers who were in pursuit of his father the place where he concealed himself, and gave withal a description by which they might distinguish his person when they found him. The old man, more anxious for the safety and fortunes of his son than about the little that might remain of his own life, began immediately to inquire of the officers who seized him, whether his son were well, whether he had done his duty to the satisfaction of the generals. ‘That son,’ replied one of the officers, ‘so dear to thy affections, betrayed thee to us: by his information thou art apprehended, and diest.’ The officer, with this, struck a poniard to his heart, and the unhappy parent fell, not so much affected by his fate as by the means to which he owed it.”[3] Here is an example of the greatest filial impiety, and of the highest parental affection. The one fulfils our idea of _the right_, the other our idea of _the wrong_. Now, what is this idea of the right and the wrong in which all are supposed to agree? We would not ask, with the disciple of Paley, of Condillac, or of Helvetius, what the “wild boy, caught years ago in the woods of Hanover,” would have thought of this case; nor what the savage, without experience and without instruction, cut off in his infancy from all intercourse with his species, would think of it. No: “the savage state offers us humanity in swaddling-clothes, so to speak--the germ of humanity, but not humanity entire. The true man is the perfect man of his kind: true human nature is human nature arrived at its development.”[4] We utterly deny that, in order to arrive at the judgment of human nature, we need consult a savage in such circumstances, or indeed to consult a savage at all. And yet we say that even a savage of good mind, who has lived long enough in society to get the idea of the relation of parent and child--such as even savages have--would pronounce the conduct of the one to be right, and