§ 8.

That there exists in us a mental mechanism by which the essential pre-requisite to greatest happiness is recognised and Edition: current; Page: [102] enforced, seems therefore abundantly manifest. We find the general principles of our structure to imply some such provision. In that Moral Sense, of whose existence we elsewhere saw the probability, we have an agent apparently answering to the requirement; and in this first condition to greatest happiness, we discover the axiom which the Moral Sense was to respond to. That man does possess a feeling which responds to this axiom, is evidenced by the more or less complete expression spontaneously given to it in political dogmas, in laws, and in the sayings of daily life: further proof of its existence being found in the fact, that those who nominally repudiate the belief it gives utterance to, themselves profess that belief in a disguised and incorrect form. By an analogy drawn from the impulse to accumulate, we are shown that an impulse to maintain liberty of action, is most likely essential to the completeness of the human constitution. How this impulse to maintain liberty of action can generate regard for the liberty of action of others, is explicable by an extension of Adam Smith’s doctrine of Sympathy; and that our sentiment of justice is really due to a sympathetic excitement of such impulse, numerous facts conspire to prove. Lastly, we find that the convictions originated in us after the manner here supposed, correspond with the results of abstract reasoning, not only as to the possession by each of a right to exercise his faculties, and as to a consequent limit of that right, but as to the peculiar sacredness of that right and this limit.

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