[6] The logical analysis may be carried further, as by Mr. A. J. Balfour:--'To assume a special faculty which is to announce ultimate moral laws can add nothing to their validity, nor will it do so the more if we suppose its authority supported by such sanctions as remorse or self-approval. Conscience regarded in this way is not ethically to be distinguished from any external authority, as, for instance, the Deity, or the laws of the land' (_A Defence of Philosophic Doubt_, 1879, p. 345). [7] The same might be said of Mrs. Browning's minatory picture of the moment's passage ''Twixt the dying atheist's negative, And God's face waiting after all'-- round the corner with a flail, belike. Religion cannot be more dishonoured than by the moral ideals of some of its champions. Sec. 4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE But we have now clearly imported into the rationalist philosophy a principle or factor which ostensibly rivals or primes reason. The rationalist avows a moral bias--an attitude towards his fellows, a moral 'taste,' let us say--which partly determines his reasoned judgment. He has a conception of goodness in virtue of which he finds 'revelation' frequently repellent and the popular 'God' a chimera; even as the believer finds them satisfactory because they are in part conformable to his moral and speculative bias, and he has been brought up to pretermit judgment beyond those limits. This bias appears to be partly congenital, partly acquired; though most men are agreed that many who reveal a given bias would have presented another had they been differently trained. Certain forms of congenital bias, that is to say, yield more or less easily to others, specially fostered or exercised. Whatever be the respective force of the generative factors, the fact of bias remains; and there is no escape from the conclusion that it operates in regard to 'intellectual' as well as to 'moral' judgments--to judgments, that is, of causal interpretation or non-moral discrimination as well as to judgments upon human action.