Let me explain myself. I do not think there is any precept too high to be accepted by the mass of mankind: nay, I think that the higher, nobler, more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response it will draw forth from the heart of humanity. But this is the _moral_ excellence of the precept, the loftiness of the purity, the nobleness of the generosity, the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to present, as the proper motive of daily virtue, an idea requiring a trained _intellect_ to take it in and a vivid _imagination_ to realize it. Every argument for virtue, for sobriety, veracity, and so on, drawn from considerations of future consequences, labors under this irremediable defect: _that it appeals least to those whom it is most necessary to influence_. When we go further, and place our fulcrum of moral leverage in the period after the death of the man to whom we appeal, and candidly tell him that he will neither enjoy the sight of any good he may have effected, nor suffer from the spectacle of the results of his wrong-doing, we have reached (as it seems to me) the _ne plus ultra_ of impracticability. Woe to human virtue when its advocates are driven to attach primary importance to such an argument, and dream it can be made “the centre of a religion”! To sum up this subject. To a man of high calibre and gifts, the consideration of “posthumous activities” may act as a spur to doing great actions, but scarcely as a motive to regulate his daily life and temper. He will, perhaps, under its influence reform the prisons of Europe, and at the same time break his wife’s heart; write a great epic poem, and treat his daughters like slaves; paint splendid pictures, and remain a selfish and sordid miser; fight heroically his country’s battles, and lead a life of persistent adultery; be at once a disinterested statesman in a corrupt age, and an habitual drunkard. As to the mass of mankind, who are endowed neither with any superior gifts to employ, nor vivid imagination to realize the results of their actions hereafter, an appeal to them to act virtuously in consideration of their posthumous activities would draw forth some such reply as this: “Our conduct can, at most, leave after our deaths only very small results on a very few people whom we shall never know. We find it hard enough to make sacrifices for those whom we do know and love, and whose happiness or misery we actually witness. It is asking too much of us that, for remote, contingent, and evanescent benefits to our survivors, we should undergo any pain or labor, or renounce any of the pleasures which in our poor short lives (so soon to end forever in darkness) may fall within our grasp.”