men could not raise within us such affections, or make us careful about anything beyond external deportment.  Nor could rewards from God, or the wish for self-approbation, create such affections, although, on the supposition of their existence, these may well help to foster them.  It is benevolent dispositions that we morally approve; but dispositions are not to be raised by will.  Moreover, they are often found where there has been least thought of cultivating them; and, sometimes, in the form of parental affection, gratitude, &c., they are followed so little for the sake of honour and reward, that though their absence is condemned, they are themselves hardly accounted virtuous at all.  He then rebuts the idea that generous affections are selfish, because by sympathy we make the pleasures and pains of others our own.  Sympathy is a real fact, but has regard only to the distress or suffering beheld or imagined in others, whereas generous affection is varied toward different characters.  Sympathy can never explain the immediate ardour of our good-will towards the morally excellent character, or the eagerness of a dying man for the prosperity of his children and friends.  Having thus accepted the existence of purely disinterested affections, and divided them as before into calm and turbulent, he puts the question, Whether is the selfish or benevolent principle to yield in case of opposition?  And although it appears that, as a fact, the universal happiness is preferred to the individual in the order of the world by the Deity, this is nothing, unless by some determination of the soul we are made to comply with the Divine intentions.  If by the desire of reward, it is selfishness still; if by the desire, following upon the sight, of moral excellence, then there must necessarily exist as its object some determination of the will involving supreme moral excellence, otherwise there will be no way of deciding between particular affections.  This leads on to the consideration of the Moral Faculty.

But, in the beginning of Chapter IV., he first rejects one by one these various accounts of the reason of our approbation of moral conduct:—­pleasure by sympathy; pleasure through the moral sense; notion of advantage to the agent, or to the approver, and this direct or imagined; tendency to procure honour; conformity to law, to truth, fitness, congruity, &c.; also education, association, &c.  He then asserts a natural and immediate determination in man to approve certain affections and actions consequent on them; or a natural sense of immediate excellence in them, not referred to any other quality perceivable by our other senses, or by reasoning.  It is a sense not dependent on bodily organs, but a settled determination of the soul.  It is a sense, in like manner as, with every one of our powers—­voice, designing, motion, reasoning, there is bound up a taste, sense, or relish, discerning and recommending their proper exercise; but superior to all these, because the power