’This prime question of moral philosophy, as I have called it, is no easy one to answer, for it is no easy matter to effect the discrimination out of which the answer must proceed.  It is a question, perhaps, to which no complete, but only an approximate, answer can be returned.  One common mistake is to ascribe more to the natural man than properly belongs to him, to ascribe to him attributes and endowments which belong only to the social and artificial man.  Some writers—­Hutcheson, for example, and he is followed by many others—­are of opinion that man naturally has a conscience or moral sense which discriminates between right and wrong, just as he has naturally a sense of taste, which distinguishes between sweet and bitter, and a sense of sight, which discriminates between red and blue, or a sentient organism, which distinguishes between pleasure and pain.  That man has by nature, and from the first, the possibility of attaining to a conscience is not to be denied.  That lie has within him by birthright something out of which conscience is developed, I firmly believe; and what this is I shall endeavour by-and-by to show when I come to speak of Sokrates and his philosophy as opposed to the doctrines of the Sophists.  But that the man is furnished by nature with a conscience ready-made, just as he is furnished with a ready-made sensational apparatus, this is a doctrine in which I have no faith, and which I regard as altogether erroneous.  It arises out of the disposition to attribute more to the natural man than properly belongs to him.  The other error into which inquirers are apt to fall in making a discrimination between what man is by nature, and what he is by convention, is the opposite of the one just mentioned.  They sometimes attribute to the natural man less than properly belongs to him.  And this, I think, was the error into which the Sophists were betrayed.  They fall into it inadvertently, and not with any design of embracing or promulgating erroneous opinions.’

2.  With reference to SYMPATHY, he differs from Adam Smith’s view, that it is a native and original affection of the heart, like hunger and thirst.  Mere feeling, he contends, can never take a man out of self.  It is thought that overleaps this boundary; not the feeling of sensation, but the thought of one’s self and one’s sensations, gives the ground and the condition of sympathy.  Sympathy has self-consciousness for its foundation.  Very young children have little sympathy, because in them the idea of self is but feebly developed.

3.  In his chapter on the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, he discusses at length the summum bonum, or Happiness, and, by implication, the Ethical end, or Standard.  He considers that men have to keep in view two ends; the one the maintenance of their own nature, as rational and thinking beings; the other their happiness or pleasure.  He will not allow that we are to do right at all hazards, irrespective of utility; yet he considers that there is something defective in the scheme that sets aside virtue as the good, and enthrones happiness in its place.  He sums up as follows:—­