4.  Thirdly, Moral Sentiment is said to be radically different in its nature from any other fact or phenomenon of the mind.

The peculiar state of discriminating right and wrong, involving approbation and disapprobation, is considered to be entirely unlike any other mental element; and, if so, we are precluded from resolving or analyzing it into simpler modes of feeling, willing, or thinking.

We have many feelings that urge us to act and abstain from acting; but the prompting of conscience has something peculiar to itself, which has been expressed by the terms rightness, authority, supremacy.  Other motives,—­hunger, curiosity, benevolence, and so on,—­have might, this has right.

So, the Intellect has many occasions for putting forth its aptitudes of discriminating, identifying, remembering; but the operation of discerning right and wrong is supposed to be a unique employment of those functions.

5.  In reply to these arguments, and in support of the view that the Moral Faculty is complex and derived, the following considerations are urged:—­

First, The Immediateness of a judgment, is no proof of its being innate; long practice or familiarity has the same effect.

In proportion as we are habituated to any subject, or any class of operations, our decisions are rapid and independent of deliberation.  An expert geometer sees at a glance whether a demonstration is correct.  In extempore speech, a person has to perform every moment a series of judgments as to the suitability of words to meaning, to grammar, to taste, to effect upon an audience.  An old soldier knows in an instant, without thought or deliberation, whether a position is sufficiently guarded.  There is no greater rapidity in the judgments of right and wrong, than in these acquired professional judgments.

Moreover, the decisions of conscience are quick only in the simpler cases.  It happens not unfrequently that difficult and protracted deliberations are necessary to a moral judgment.

6.  Secondly, The alleged similarity of men’s moral judgments in all countries and times holds only to a limited degree.

The very great differences among different nations, as to what constitutes right and wrong, are too numerous, striking, and serious, not to have been often brought forward in Ethical controversy.  Robbery and murder are legalized in whole nations.  Macaulay’s picture of the Highland Chief of former days is not singular in the experience of mankind.

’His own vassals, indeed, were few in number, but he came of the best blood of the Highlands.  He kept up a close connexion with his more powerful kinsmen; nor did they like him the less because he was a robber; for he never robbed them; and that robbery, merely as robbery, was a wicked and disgraceful act, had never entered into the mind of any Celtic chief.’

Various answers have been given by the advocates of innate morality to these serious discrepancies.