’The note in question greatly startled me by implicitly classing me with Anti-utilitarians.  I have never regarded myself as an Anti-utilitarian.  My dissent from the doctrine of Utility as commonly understood, concerns not the object to be reached by men, but the method of reaching it.  While I admit that happiness is the ultimate end to be contemplated, I do not admit that it should be the proximate end.  The Expediency-Philosophy having concluded that happiness is a thing to be achieved, assumes that Morality has no other business than empirically to generalize the results of conduct, and to supply for the guidance of conduct nothing more than its empirical generalizations.

But the view for which I contend is, that Morality properly so called—­the science of right conduct—­has for its object to determine how and why certain modes of conduct are detrimental, and certain other modes beneficial.  These good and bad results cannot be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution of things; and I conceive it to be the business of Moral Science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness.  Having done this, its deductions are to be recognized as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery.

’Perhaps an analogy will most clearly show my meaning.  During its early stages, planetary Astronomy consisted of nothing more than accumulated observations respecting the positions and motions of the sun and planets; from which accumulated observations it came by and by to be empirically predicted, with an approach to truth, that certain of the heavenly bodies would have certain positions at certain times.  But the modern science of planetary Astronomy consists of deductions from the law of gravitation—­deductions showing why the celestial bodies necessarily occupy certain places at certain times.  Now, the kind of relation which thus exists between ancient and modern Astronomy, is analogous to the kind of relation which, I conceive, exists between the Expediency-Morality, and Moral Science properly so-called.  And the objection which I have to the current Utilitarianism, is, that it recognizes no more developed form of morality—­does not see that it has reached but the initial stage of Moral Science.

’To make my position fully understood, it seems needful to add that, corresponding to the fundamental propositions of a developed Moral Science, there have been, and still are, developing in the race, certain fundamental moral intuitions; and that, though these moral intuitions are the results of accumulated experiences of Utility, gradually organized and inherited, they have come to be quite independent of conscious experience.  Just in the same way that I believe the intuition of space, possessed by any living individual, to have