1st, The moral sentiments, in their mature state, are a class of feelings with no other objects than the dispositions to voluntary actions, and the actions flowing from these dispositions.  We approve some dispositions and actions, and disapprove others; we desire to cultivate them, and we aim at them for something in themselves.  This position receives light from the doctrine above quoted as to the supreme happiness of virtuous dispositions.  His second position is that Conscience is an acquired principle; which he repeats and unfolds in subsequent places.

He finds fault with Hume for ascribing Virtue to qualities of the Understanding, and considers that this is to confound admiration with moral approbation.  Hume’s general Ethical doctrine, that Utility is a uniform ground of moral distinction, he says can never be impugned until some example be produced of a virtue generally pernicious, or a vice generally beneficial.  But as to the theory of moral approbation, or the nature of the Faculty, he considers that Hume’s doctrine of Benevolence (or, still better, Sympathy) does not account for our approbation of temperance and fortitude, nor for the supremacy of the Moral Faculty over all other motives.

He objects to the theory of Adam Smith, that no allowance is made in it for the transfer of our feelings, and the disappearing of the original reference from the view.  Granting that our approbation began in sympathy, as Smith says, certain it is, that the adult man approves actions and dispositions as right, while he is distinctly aware that no process of sympathy intervenes between the approval and its object.  He repeats, against Smith, the criticism on Hume, that the sympathies have no imperative character of supremacy.  He further remarks that the reference, in our actions, to the point of view of the spectator, is rather an expedient for preserving our impartiality than a fundamental principle of Ethics.  It nearly coincides with the Christian precept of doing unto others as we would they should do unto us,—­an admirable practical maxim, but, as Leibnitz has said truly, intended only as a correction of self-partiality.  Lastly, he objects to Smith, that his system renders all morality relative to the pleasure of our coinciding in feeling with others, which is merely to decide on the Faculty, without considering the Standard.  Smith shrinks from Utility as a standard, or ascribes its power over our feelings to our sense of the adaptation of means to ends.

He commends Smith for grounding Benevolence on Sympathy, whereas Butler, Hutcheson, and Hume had grounded Sympathy on Benevolence.

It is in reviewing Hartley, whose distinction it was to open up the wide capabilities of the principle of Association, that Mackintosh develops at greatest length his theory of the derived nature of Conscience.