for courage, for veracity, as well as for digestion,
for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice
and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar; every
complex fact grows out of the simple facts with which
it is affiliated and on which it depends. We
must therefore try to ascertain what simple facts
underlie moral qualities the same as we ascertain those
that underlie physical qualities, and, for example,
let us take the first fact that comes to hand, a religious
system of music, that of a Protestant church.
A certain inward cause has inclined the minds of worshipers
toward these grave, monotonous melodies, a cause much
greater than its effect; that is to say, a general
conception of the veritable outward forms of worship
which man owes to God; it is this general conception
which has shaped the architecture of the temple, cast
out statues, dispensed with paintings, effaced ornaments,
shortened ceremonies, confined the members of a congregation
to high pews which cut off the view, and governed
the thousand details of decoration, posture, and all
other externals. This conception itself again
proceeds from a more general cause, an idea off human
conduct in general, inward and outward, prayers, actions,
dispositions of every sort that man is bound to maintain
toward the Deity; it is this which has enthroned the
doctrine of grace, lessened the importance of the clergy,
transformed the sacraments, suppressed observances,
and changed the religion of discipline into one of
morality. This conception, in its turn, depends
on a third one, still more general, that of moral perfection
as this is found in a perfect God, the impeccable
judge, the stern overseer, who regards every soul
as sinful, meriting punishment, incapable of virtue
or of salvation, except through a stricken conscience
which He provokes and the renewal of the heart which
He brings about. Here is the master conception,
consisting of duty erected into the absolute sovereign
of human life, and which prostrates all other ideals
at the feet of the moral ideal. Here we reach
what is deepest in man; for, to explain this conception,
we must consider the race he belongs to, say the German,
the Northman, the formation and character of his intellect,
his ways in general of thinking and feeling, that tardiness
and frigidity of sensation which keeps him from rashly
and easily falling tinder the empire of sensual enjoyments,
that bluntness of taste, that irregularity and those
outbursts of conception which arrest in him the birth
of refined and harmonious forms and methods; that
disdain of appearances, that yearning for truth, that
attachment to abstract, bare ideas which develop conscience
in him at the expense of everything else. Here
the search comes to an end. We have reached a
certain primitive disposition, a particular trait belonging
to sensations of all kinds, to every conception peculiar
to an age or to a race, to characteristics inseparable
from every idea and feeling that stir in the human