science being compared with the
various appetites, affections, and passions in men, the former is
manifestly supreme and chief, without regard to strength.... From its
very nature it manifestly claims superiority over all others, so that
you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking
in judgment, direction, superintendency. To preside and govern, from
the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it
strength as it has right, it would govern the world.'

It was a noble philosophy, well fitted to strengthen and elevate the
character, and it has supported many amid the dissolution of positive
beliefs. Utilitarian theories of morals move very smoothly as long as
their only task is to define the course which it is in the interests
of society that each man should pursue. They are less successful in
furnishing any firm and adequate reason why a man should pursue that
course when individual interests and individual passion are opposed to
it. It is the merit of the schools of Kant and of Butler, that they
raise the idea of duty above all the calculations of self-interest,
and make it the supreme and guiding principle of life.

Among living men, the strongest intellectual influence at that time in
Dublin was, I think, Whately, our archbishop, an original and powerful
thinker who has scarcely obtained a place in the literary and
intellectual history of his time commensurate with the wide and deep
influence he undoubtedly exercised. For this there are many reasons.
Unlike the High Church leaders who flourished with him at Oxford in
the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he never identified
himself with any organised party or school of thought, and he thus
deprived himself of many echoes and of much support. It was, indeed,
one of his first principles that there is no more fatal obstacle to
the discovery of truth than the deflecting influence of party and
system, and that the jealous maintenance of an independent judgment is
the first element of intellectual honesty. Few considerable writers
have appealed less to common passions or wide sympathies; and the only
passion--if it can be called so--that appears strongly in his
writings, is the love of truth for its own sake, which is the rarest
and highest of all. He was accustomed to speculate much upon that
strange power of intellectual magnetism which enables some men to draw
others to their views apart from any process of definite reasonin