The Transcendental doctrine has been exposed to most deadly assault on the ethical side. The theory of moral intuition, which held that "every man is, according to the cautious statement of James Walker, born with a moral faculty, or the elements of a moral faculty, which, on being developed, creates in him the idea of a right and a wrong in human conduct; which summons him before the tribunal of his own soul for judgment on the rectitude of his purposes; which grows up into an habitual sense of personal responsibility, and thus prepares him, as his views are enlarged, to comprehend the moral government of God, and to feel his own responsibility to God as a moral governor,"--has fallen into general disrepute; and in its place a persuasion is abroad, that, in the language of Grote, "the universal and essential tendencies of the moral sense, admit of being most satisfactorily deduced from other elementary principles of our nature." It is now a widely accepted belief among conservative thinkers, that "conscience" is not a faculty, or an element, existing here in germ, there in maturity; but is the result of social experience. Moderate Transcendentalists conceded the necessity of _educating_ conscience, which still implied the existence of a conscience or moral sense to be educated. It is now contended that conscience itself is a product of education, a deposit left in the crucible of experiment, a habit formed by the usage of mankind. The justification of this view has gone so far, that it seems likely to become the recognized account of this matter; but in course of substantiating this doctrine, a new foundation for ethical feeling and judgment is laid, which is as immovable as the transcendental "facts of consciousness." The moral sentiments are represented as resting on the entire past of the race, on reefs of fact built up by the lives of millions of men, from the bottom of the deep of humanity. The finest moral sensibility caps the peak of the world's effort at self-adjustment, as the white, unsullied snow rests on the summit of the Jungfrau. The intuition is referred to in another genesis, but it is equally clear and equally certain. The difference of origin creates no difference of character. Moral distinctions are precisely the same for idealists and sensationalists. Here at least, the transcendentalist and his adversary can dwell in amity together. IX. THE SEER.