To conclude: moral emotion is a very complex state. Those sentimentalists in the last century, or in this, who have maintained the hypothesis of a “moral sense,” have erroneously considered it as a special sense with an innate faculty of discriminating good and evil. It is not a simple act, but the sum of a set of tendencies. Let us eliminate the intellectual elements, and enumerate its emotional constituents only: (1) as basis, sympathy—_i.e._, a community of nature and disposition; (2) the altruistic or benevolent tendency manifesting itself under different forms (attraction of like to like, maternal or paternal affection, etc.), at first weak, but gaining more expansion by the restriction of the egoistic feelings; (3) the sense of justice with its obligatory character—whose origin we have just traced; (4) the desire of approbation or of divine or human rewards, and the fear of disapprobation and punishments. As in the case of all complex feelings, its composition must vary with the predominance of one or other of its constituent elements; in one case it is obligation (the Stoics), in another charity, in many the fear of public opinion or of the law, of God or of the devil. It is impossible that it should be constant and identical in all men. IV. The pathology of the moral sense cannot detain us long, its detailed study belonging to the department of criminal anthropology. Numerous works have been published on this subject within the last half-century; there would be no advantage in presenting a bald abstract of these. Lombroso’s view of the “born criminal,” with his physiological, psychical, and social characteristics, has been violently attacked, and sustained serious damage. Several successive theories have attempted to explain the existence of this moral anomaly: atavism, according to which the born criminal is a survival, a return to primitive man, who is assumed to have been violent and unsociable; infantilism, which has recourse, not to heredity, but to arrested development, and alleges that the perversion which is permanent in the criminal is normal, but transient, in the child; the pathological view which connects the criminal type with epilepsy, considered as the prototype of violent and destructive impulses; the sociological view (the most recent), which attributes a preponderant function to social conditions, and maintains that the criminal is “a microbe inseparable from his environment.”[184] We need not enter into a detailed examination of these hypotheses, which have given rise to much passionate debate: one question alone concerns our subject, that of moral insensibility—a condition described, long before the days of criminal anthropology, under the names of _moral insanity_ (Prichard, 1835), _folie morale_, impulsive insanity, instinctive monomania, etc., and which will serve to show once more the independence and the preponderance of feeling in the moral life.[185] ----- Footnote 184: