The great majority of moral philosophers do not endorse the view of Kant and Fichte, that conscience is a piece of human nature, a sense inborn in man, an inner voice that is independent of, and unmoved by, external influences; on the contrary, they are convinced that conscience originates outside the individual, that, in his consciousness, it is the advocate retained by society, commissioned to plead the cause of the community before the reason of the individual even, nay, especially, when the interests of the community run counter to those of the individual. Bacon calls the presence in our consciousness of a defender of the interests of society our innate social affection, and treats it unreservedly as the source of Morality. Long before his time the Stoics had noted the existence of this social affection and called it [Greek: oikeiôsis]; Hugo Grotius, with the intellectual perspicuity peculiar to himself, says that "Right and Morality flow from the same source, and this source is a strong social instinct natural to man, it is solicitude for the community, a solicitude guided by Reason." The English philosophers are practically unanimous in ascribing both conscience and Morality in general to a social source. The welfare of the community, says Richard Cumberland, is the highest moral law; Hutcheson remarks that, in the struggle between egoism and universal benevolence, the decisive factor in favour of the latter is the accompanying feeling, the reflective emotion of approval. In modern parlance we call "universal benevolence," altruism, and the "reflective emotion of approval" is a paraphrase of conscience which contains an indication of its mode of action. For the idea that our action will meet with the approval of the community and the pleasurable emotion of satisfaction are in fact the reasons why we mostly submit to the dictates of conscience voicing the commands of the community. Only Hutcheson is too venturesome and goes too far, when he maintains unreservedly that the reflective emotion of approval in the struggle between egoism and universal benevolence is the decisive factor which turns the scales in favour of the latter. This is by no means always the case. When it does occur we call the action moral, but we characterize it as immoral when, in spite of the "reflective emotion of approval" "universal benevolence" is worsted by egoism.