But before passing to these subjects, he devotes Chapter V. to the confirmation of the doctrine of the Moral Sense, and first from the Sense of Honour.  This, the grateful sensation when we are morally approved and praised, with the reverse when we are censured, he argues in his usual manner, involves no thought of private interest.  However the facts may stand, it is always under the impression of actions being moral or immoral, that the sense of honour works.  In defence of the doctrine of a moral sense, against the argument from the varying morality of different nations, he says it would only prove the sense not uniform, as the palate is not uniform in all men.  But the moral sense is really more uniform.  For, in every nation, it is the benevolent actions and affections that are approved, and wherever there is an error of fact, it is the reason, not the moral sense, that is at fault.  There are no cases of nations where moral approval is restricted to the pursuit of private interest.  The chief causes of variety of moral approbation are three:  (1) Different notions of happiness and the means of promoting it, whereby much that is peculiar in national customs, &c., is explained, without reflecting upon the moral sense. (2) The larger or more confined field on which men consider the tendencies of their actions—­sect, party, country, &c. (3) Different opinions about the divine commands, which are allowed to over-ride the moral sense.  The moral sense does not imply innate complex ideas of the several actions and their tendencies, which must be discovered by observation and reasoning; it is concerned only about inward affections and dispositions, of which the effects may be very various.  In closing this part of his subject, he considers that all that is needed for the formation of morals, has been given, because from the moral faculty and benevolent affection all the special laws of nature can be deduced.  But because the moral faculty and benevolence have difficulty in making way against the selfish principles so early rooted in man, it is needful to strengthen these foundations of morality by the consideration of the nature of the highest happiness.

With Chapter VI. accordingly he enters on the discussion of Happiness, forming the second half of his first book.  The supreme happiness of any being is the full enjoyment of all the gratifications its nature desires or is capable of; but, in case of their being inconsistent, the constant gratification of the higher, intenser, and more durable pleasures is to be preferred.

In Chapter VII., he therefore directly compares the various kinds of enjoyment and misery, in order to know what of the first must be surrendered, and what of the second endured, in aiming at highest attainable happiness.  Pleasures the same in kind are preferable, according as they are more intense and enduring; of a different kind, as they are more enduring and dignified, a fact decided at once by our immediate sense of dignity