He would impose two new moral restraints.  He considers that every parent should be bound to provide a suitable education for his own children.  Farther, for any one to bring into the world human beings without the means of supporting them, or, in an over-peopled country, to produce children in such number as to depress the reward of labour by competition, he regards as serious offences.

SAMUEL BAILEY.

Mr. Samuel Bailey devotes the last four in his Third Series of ’Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind,’ to the subject of the Moral Sentiments, or the feelings inspired in us by human conduct.  He first sets down five facts in the human constitution, in which moral phenomena originate—­

1.  Man is susceptible of pleasure and pain of various kinds and degrees.

2.  He likes and dislikes respectively the causes of them.

3.  He desires to reciprocate pleasure and pain received, when intentionally given by other sentient beings.

4.  He himself expects such reciprocation from his fellows, coveting it in the one case, and shunning it in the other.

5.  He feels, under certain circumstances, more or less sympathy with the pleasures and pains given to others, accompanied by a proportionate desire that those affections should be reciprocated to the givers.

These rudimentary affections, states and operations of consciousness [he is careful to note that, besides feelings, intellectual conditions and processes are involved in them] are found more or less developed in all, or nearly all the human race.  In support of the limitation now made, he adduces what are given as authentic accounts of savages devoid of all gratitude and fellow-feeling; and then goes on to trace the nature and development of moral sentiment from the rudimentary powers and susceptibilities mentioned, in those that do possess them.  In doing so, he follows the convenient mode of speech that takes actions for the objects that excite the susceptibilities, although, in reality, the objects are no other than human beings acting in particular ways.

The feelings he supposes to be modified in manner or degree, according as actions are (1) done by ourselves to others, or (2) done to others by others, or (3) done to others by ourselves; i.e., according as we ourselves are the subjects, the spectators, or doers of them.

First, then, he considers our feelings in regard to actions done to us by others, and the more carefully, because these lie at the foundation of the rest.  When a fellow-creature intentionally contributes to our pleasure, we feel the pleasure; we feel a liking to the person intentionally conferring it, and we feel an inclination to give him pleasure in return.  The two last feelings—­liking and inclination to reciprocate, constitute the simplest form of moral approbation; in the contrary case, dislike and resentment give the rudimentary form of moral disapprobation.