The mental objects or presentations which are distinguished from one another by the difference of their characteristic qualities, and which we therefore call colours, or sounds, or movements, are accompanied by varying degrees of pleasurable or painful feeling; and it is possible to hold that the moral sense is a name for such feelings following in the train of those complexes of presentations to which we give the name of actions, or of those other recurring complexes we call affections. This, practically, was the position with which Hutcheson started in the 'Inquiry.' Benevolence pleased us and selfishness pained us; just as the taste of sugar was pleasant, and that of wormwood disagreeable. Perhaps Hutcheson departed from this theory, because he saw that if conduct was made a matter of taste, there would be no sufficient reason for condemning selfishness any more than an unusual taste. He therefore relinquished, or seems to have relinquished, the view of the moral sense as a feeling of pleasure or pain; and under the influence, no doubt, of Butler, spoke of it as a judgment of approbation or disapprobation. But he fell back on his original theory by making this judgment depend on "a taste or relish," which only lends itself to interpretation as a peculiar feeling of pleasure. [Sidenote: (β) The objects of the moral sense: first said to be actions;] [Sidenote: afterwards to be affections;] The reflex nature of the moral sense is brought out more distinctly in the 'System' than in the 'Inquiry.' In his earlier work, Hutcheson had spoken of it as directly related to _actions_. But it was more consistent with his maturer thought to regard it as having to do with mental powers or "affections" in the first instance, and with actions only indirectly or mediately. "The object of this sense," he says,[96] "is not any external motion or action, but the inward affections or dispositions;" and this is made by him to account for the discrepancy which the deliverances of the moral sense show in regard to actions. It "seems ever to approve and condemn uniformly the same immediate objects, the same affections and dispositions; though we reason very differently about the actions which evidence certain dispositions or their contraries." This distinction is applied with unlimited confidence in its efficacy. By means of it he would explain the most fundamental differences in the moral code of men and nations. Thus people unacquainted with the industrial improvements which give the character of permanence to property, may "see no harm in depriving men of their artificial acquisitions and stores beyond their present use,"--that is to say, "no evil may appear in theft."[97]