You desire that the murderer may be arrested and delivered up to justice, you desire that he may be punished; when he has been arrested, delivered up to justice, and punished, you are satisfied. What does that mean? Is it a capricious movement of the imagination and heart? No. Calm or indignant, at the moment of the crime or a long time after, without any spirit of personal vengeance, since you are not the least interested in this affair, you none the less declare that the murderer ought to be punished. If, instead of receiving a punishment, the culpable man makes his crime a stepping-stone to fortune, you still declare that, far from deserving prosperity, he deserves to suffer in reparation of his fault; you protest against lot, and appeal to a superior justice. This judgment philosophers have called the judgment of merit and demerit. I suppose, in the mind of man, the idea of a supreme law that attaches happiness to virtue, unhappiness to crime. Omit the idea of this law, and the judgment of merit and demerit is without foundation. Omit this judgment, and indignation against prosperous crime and the neglect of virtue is an unintelligible, even an impossible sentiment, and never, at the sight of crime, would you think of demanding the chastisement of a criminal. All the parts of the moral phenomenon are connected together; all are equally certain parts,--destroy one, and you completely overturn the whole phenomenon. The most common observation bears witness to all these facts, and the least subtle logic easily discovers their connection. It is necessary to renounce even sentiment, or it must be avowed that sentiment covers a judgment, the judgment of the essential distinction between good and evil, that this distinction involves an obligation, that this obligation is applied to an intelligent and free agent; in fine, it must be observed that the distinction between merit and demerit, that corresponds to the distinction between good and evil, contains the principle of the natural harmony between virtue and happiness. What have we done thus far? We have done as the physicist or chemist does, who submits a composite body to analysis and reduces it to its simple elements. The only difference here is that the phenomenon to which our analysis is applied is in us, instead of being out of us. Besides, the processes employed are exactly the same; there is in them neither system nor hypothesis; there are only experience and the most immediate induction. In order to render experience more certain, we may vary it. Instead of examining what takes place in us when we are spectators of bad or good actions in another, let us interrogate our own consciousness when we are doing well or ill. In this case, the different elements of the moral phenomenon are still more striking, and their order appears more distinctly.