We are driven to scepticism, then, if we first declare that scientific knowledge depends upon metaphysical theory; and then that all metaphysical theory is moonshine. I do not accept the first principle; and I hold that the danger to morals from metaphysical difficulties is pretty much the same as the danger that the stars will leave their courses if we adopt a wrong theory of an astronomy. We fancy that when we are explaining facts, we are, somehow, creating them; as the meteorologist in _Rasselas_ observed the clouds till he came to think that he caused the rain. The facts upon which morality depends are the facts that men have certain emotions; that mothers love their children; that there are such things as pity, and sympathy, and public spirit; and that there are social instincts upon the growth of which depends the vitality of the race. We may, of course, ask how more precisely these emotions act, and what functions they discharge. We may make historical and psychological and metaphysical inquiries; and we may end, if ever we reach such a consummation, by establishing what we may call a science of ethics. But the facts do not depend upon the explanation. The illusion of their dependence is easily produced. You make your theory of morality, and then you define morality as a belief in the object required by your theory. It follows, of course, that morality will disappear with the belief--or else that your theory is wrong. Morality, said some people, is a belief in future rewards and punishments. If that belief disappears, morality--that is, their morality--must disappear too. But that morality--taken as the actual sentiment which they have erroneously defined--should disappear also, no more follows than it follows that heat will disappear when we discover that there is no such thing as the old imaginary substance of heat. The doctrine is now more generally urged in a different form. Theology, it is said, is essential to morality. Such bold assertions may be best met by a dogmatic assertion of the inverse case. Theology, as I hold, is not the source of the moral instincts, but, under certain conditions, derives its real power from them. Theology, in the first place, is a word including not only heterogeneous but contradictory meanings,--Baal and Jehovah, the Mumbo-jumbo of the negro and Spinoza's "ens absolute infinitum". To the enormous majority of the human race, the more metaphysical conception is hopelessly unintelligible. When a savage expresses his crude sense of duties to the tribe under the form of belief in an ancestral ghost, is the morality made by the belief, or the belief generated by the incipient moral emotion? Does he believe in God or really in a man like himself, and respected precisely because he is like himself? Is not the truth tacitly acknowledged by the more philosophical religions? Their adherents admit that the God of philosophy is too abstract a Being to