I am at a loss to guess how _this_ step further can be supposed to be hostile to the disinterestedness of virtue. It is easy to see how the opposite theory of the origin of conscience, as exhibited in Mr. Darwin’s _Descent of Man_,--whereby the authority of the human intuition, “Thou shalt do no murder,” is traced to the same origin as the bees’ intuition of the duty of killing their brothers, the drones (namely, the hereditary transmission of ideas found conducive to the welfare of the tribe),--should dethrone Conscience from her assumed supremacy, and place her among the crowd of other hereditary notions, neither more nor less deserving of honor. And, on the other hand, the attribution of our moral ideas, directly or indirectly, to the teaching of a Being immeasurably above us,--a theory which represents conscience as a ray shot downward from a sun, instead of a marsh-fire illumined under special conditions of social existence, and liable to blaze up, die down, or flit hither and thither as they may determine,--must inevitably elevate and sanctify the laws of morals to our apprehension. In truth, it is obvious that, had the first hypothesis (of the hereditary transmission of useful ideas) been heard of in the days of our ancestors, the “mystic extension” (as Mr. Mill calls it) of utility into morality could never have been accomplished, and repentance and remorse would have been unknown experiences. But all this refers to the practical _authority_ of moral laws. It is with the _disinterestedness_ of the man who obeys them that we are at present concerned; and this disinterestedness is not, that I perceive, influenced one way or the other by the theory he may hold of how he comes by his knowledge of them.