Scarcely could the contrast of the new and the old schools of thought be more vividly displayed than in these brief quotations. There are some, indeed, who have even gone farther, and maintained that the pursuit of happiness and that of virtue are not only independent, but even incompatible aims; because, writes Dr. Despine, a French psychologist of repute,――“Happiness is the satisfaction of desire, while virtue consists in doing good, not to satisfy the desire of doing it, but out of a sense of duty, and in opposition to desire.” This statement, however, overlooks the existence of a moral sense and the normal pleasure derived from its gratification. Morality and the moral sense are not to be confounded. All men have a love for the beautiful, but nowise agree as to what is beautiful; and there is just as wide and just as impassable a gulf between the various conceptions of morals, although, in all, the moral sense is present. Morality is nothing more than the conformity of the individual to the type of the society in which he lives. It is the recognition of the debt which he owes it for securing him the privileges of safety, liberty, and education, as I have explained in the last chapter. Not his own moral sense, but the society in which he is, lays down the terms on which that debt is to be paid; and while he feels on the one side entitled to these rights, he acknowledges, on the other, his liability for his social duties in exchange for them. There is, therefore, no such thing as a universal or even a general code of morality, nor can there be. There is no act which may not sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. I have heard of a French writer, who composed a work entitled “The Seven Cardinal Sins,” showing how under certain circumstances every one of them could be committed by a perfectly virtuous person. I have never read his book, but I delight in his doctrine. Take the Decalogue itself, written, as we are told, by the very finger of Divinity, and there is not a command in it that both Christian and Jew do not break most virtuously whenever occasion calls. “Thou shalt not kill;” and all nations spend more annually in preparations for killing by land and sea than they do in a generation for institutions of learning. “Thou shalt not rob;” and Abraham Lincoln with one glorious stroke of his pen robbed the citizens of the United States of a hundred million dollars’ worth of valuable slaves. Truth-telling? The observation of Socrates in the Symposium still holds good,――“In speaking of holy things or persons, there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you should tell the truth about them;” witness the discussions that come up from time to time on the characters of “the Fathers of the Republic” or the books of the Bible.