and would thus disregard the real affirmation as it stands in the moral judgment of mankind. Such a claim, it has been well said, no theorist of the present day would pretend to maintain outside of his closet.[9] Not in any race or people has the ethical sense allowed that essentially and at bottom all acts are equally right. This is the very point of the great phenomenon presented. Whatever may be the final explanation of it, somehow or other the reason, sentiment and practical sense of mankind insist on a real difference, and look upon all denial of the distinction as a manifest and intolerable absurdity. The universal recognition of this distinction, revealed in every man's consciousness, involved in the organic relations of society, testified to everywhere in the pages of history, embodied essentially in the religious nature and sentiments of mankind, woven into general literature, found to-day unmistakably in the thinking, laws and customs of all races and tribes, and acknowledged in the philosophical view of humanity wherever man is studied, irreducible as a fact by any account of its genesis or explanation of its significance, presents the occasion and primary materials of ethical science. The great phenomenon calls for investigation. We want to know the reasons for it and the import of it. CHAPTER III. FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS--THE EXISTENCE OF CONSCIENCE. ==The Moral Faculty.== The great fact of moral distinctions, found to be universal in human thought and life, must be traced back to the particular power of the mind which discerns and feels these distinctions. Back of the phenomenon must be recognized the psychical capacity and action out of which the discriminations arise. The moral faculty answers to and in part accounts for the moral fact. In modern general literature it is usually called the conscience. Ethical science properly accepts the designation. It is sometimes called the moral consciousness, or the moral sense. It expresses a power of the personal _ego_ or self to make the moral discrimination and discern the obligation to rectitude. Without such power, as an adequate capacity for the ideas, it is plain that the ethical judgments could not arise. The very idea of obligation, the ethical "ought," would be wanting. The whole realm of what this science considers would be a blank. In the moral faculty or conscience itself, as the immediate source of the ethical distinctions and laws of duty, we are furnished with additional material for this study.