[158] The view that moral judgments relate primarily or most properly to motives will be more fully discussed in chap. xii. of this Book. [159] I use these alternative terms in order to avoid the Free Will Controversy. [160] Many religious persons would probably say that the motive of obedience or love to God was the highest. But those who take this view would generally say that obedience and love are due to God as a Moral Being, possessing the attributes of Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, and not otherwise: and if so, these religious motives would seem to be substantially identical with regard for duty and love of virtue, though modified and complicated by the addition of emotions belonging to relations between persons. [161] Locke’s _Essay_, II. c. 28, §§ 5, 6. [162] _Ibid._ IV. c. 3, § 18. [163] I do not myself usually employ the antithesis of Form and Matter in philosophical exposition, as it appears to me open to the charge of obscurity and ambiguity. In the present case we may interpret “formal rightness” as denoting at once a _universal_ and _essential_, and a _subjective_ or _internal_ condition of the rightness of actions. [164] It is not, I conceive, commonly held to be indispensable, in order to constitute an act completely right, that a belief that it is right should be actually present in the agent’s mind: it might be completely right, although the agent never actually raised the question of its rightness or wrongness. See p. 225. [165] The decision would, I think, usually be reached by weighing bad consequences to the agent’s character against bad consequences of a different kind. In extreme cases the latter consideration would certainly prevail in the view of common sense. Thus we should generally approve a statesman who crushed a dangerous rebellion by working on the fear or cupidity of a leading rebel who was rebelling on conscientious grounds. Cf. _post_, Book iv. chap. iii. § 3. [166] The antithesis of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ cannot be applied to the condition of right conduct considered in this paragraph: for this formal condition is at once subjective and objective; being, as I argue, involved in our common notion of right conduct, it is, therefore, necessarily judged by us to be of really universal application: and, though it does not secure complete objective rightness, it is an important protection against objective wrongness. [167] Cf. Book i. chap. iii. § 3.