y use the expression,
of moral principles--the intensity and absoluteness with which they are
laid down ages before the world has approximated to the ideal thus
asserted."

Sir John Lubbock, in his work on Primitive Man before referred to, abandons
Mr. Spencer's explanation of the genesis of morals while referring to Mr.
Hutton's criticisms on the subject. Sir John proposes to substitute
"deference to authority" instead of "sense of interest" as the origin of
our conception of "duty," saying that what has been found to be beneficial
has been traditionally inculcated on the young, and thus has become to be
dissociated from "interest" in the mind, though the inculcation itself
originally sprung from that source. This, however, when analysed, turns out
to be a distinction without a difference. It is nothing but utilitarianism,
pure and simple, after all. For it can never be intended that authority is
obeyed because of an intuition that it _should be deferred to_, for that
would be to admit the very principle of absolute morality which Sir John
combats. It must be meant, then, that authority is obeyed through fear of
the consequences of disobedience, or through pleasure felt in obeying the
authority which commands. In the latter case we have "pleasure" as the end
and no rudiment of the conception "duty." In the former we have fear of
punishment, which appeals directly to the sense of "utility to the
individual," and no amount of such a sense will produce the least germ of
"ought" which is a conception different _in kind_, and in which the notion
of "punishment" has no place. Thus, Sir John Lubbock's explanation only
concerns a _mode_ in which the sense of "duty" may be stimulated or
appealed to, and makes no approximation to an explanation of its origin.

Could the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer, of Mr. Mill, or of Mr. Darwin on
this subject be maintained, or should they come to be generally accepted,
the consequences would be disastrous indeed! Were it really the case that
virtue was a _mere kind of "retrieving,"_ then certainly we should {205}
have to view with apprehension the spread of intellectual cultivation,
which would lead the human "retrievers" to regard from a new point of view
their fetching and carrying. We should be logically compelled to acquiesce
in the vociferations of some continental utilitarians, who would banish
altogether the senseless words "duty" and "merit;" and then, one important
influence which