long enough, I should like, with the assistance of the "Methods of Ethics," to analyze the ideas involved in this passage. I can merely suggest the following questions:--If acquired capacities are equally natural with those not acquired, what is the use of introducing a distinction without a difference? If moral feelings can spring up spontaneously, even in the smallest degree, and then be developed by "natural outgrowths," how do any of our feelings differ from natural ones? What does Mill mean, at the top of the next page, by speaking of "moral associations which are wholly of artificial creation?" Are these also not the less natural because they are of artificial creation? If not, we should like to know how to draw the line between _acquired_ and _artificial_ capacities. How, again, are we to interpret the use of the word _natural_, on p. 50, where, speaking of the deeply-rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being, he says-- "This feeling in most individuals is much inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is often wanting altogether. But to those who have it, it possesses all the characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition of education," &c. Here a natural feeling is contrasted to the product of education, although we were before told that acquired capacities, like speaking, building, cultivating, were none the less natural. But I must candidly confess that when Mill introduces the words _nature_ and _natural_, I am completely baffled. I give it up. I can no longer find any logical marks to assist me in tracking out his course of thought. The word _nature_ may be Mill's key to a profound philosophy; but I rather think it is the key to many of his fallacies. I often amuse myself by trying to imagine what Bentham would have said of Benthamism expounded by Mill. Especially would it be interesting to hear Bentham on Mill's use of the word "natural." No passage in which Bentham analyzes the meaning of "nature," or "natural," occurs to me, but the following is his treatment of the word "unnatural," as employed in Ethics:-- "Unnatural, when it means anything, means unfrequent: and there it means something; although nothing to the present purpose. But here it means no such thing: for the frequency of such acts is perhaps the great complaint. It therefore means nothing; nothing, I mean, which there is in the act itself. All it can serve to express is, the disposition of the person who is talking of it: the disposition he is in to be angry at the thoughts of it."[84] Would that the grand old man, as he still sits benignly pondering in his own proper bones and clothes, in the upper regions of a well-known institution, could be got to deliver himself in like style about feelings which are _not the less natural because they are acquired_.