With these preliminary explanations, let us go on to consider the true aims and methods of moral education.  After a few pages devoted to the settlement of general principles, during the perusal of which we bespeak the reader’s patience, we shall aim by illustrations to make clear the right methods of parental behaviour in the hourly occurring difficulties of family government.

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When a child falls, or runs its head against the table, it suffers a pain, the remembrance of which tends to make it more careful; and by repetition of such experiences, it is eventually disciplined into proper guidance of its movements.  If it lays hold of the fire-bars, thrusts its hand into a candle-flame, or spills boiling water on any part of its skin, the resulting burn or scald is a lesson not easily forgotten.  So deep an impression is produced by one or two events of this kind, that no persuasion will afterwards induce it thus to disregard the laws of its constitution.

Now in these cases, Nature illustrates to us in the simplest way, the true theory and practice of moral discipline—­a theory and practice which, however much they may seem to the superficial like those commonly received, we shall find on examination to differ from them very widely.

Observe, first, that in bodily injuries and their penalties we have misconduct and its consequences reduced to their simplest forms.  Though, according to their popular acceptations, right and wrong are words scarcely applicable to actions that have none but direct bodily effects; yet whoever considers the matter will see that such actions must be as much classifiable under these heads as any other actions.  From whatever assumption they start, all theories of morality agree that conduct whose total results, immediate and remote, are beneficial, is good conduct; while conduct whose total results, immediate and remote, are injurious, is bad conduct.  The ultimate standards by which all men judge of behaviour, are the resulting happiness or misery.  We consider drunkenness wrong because of the physical degeneracy and accompanying moral evils entailed on the drunkard and his dependents.  Did theft give pleasure both to taker and loser, we should not find it in our catalogue of sins.  Were it conceivable that kind actions multiplied human sufferings, we should condemn them—­should not consider them kind.  It needs but to read the first newspaper-leader, or listen to any conversation on social affairs, to see that acts of parliament, political movements, philanthropic agitations, in common with the doings of individuals are judged by their anticipated results in augmenting the pleasures or pains of men.  And if on analysing all secondary superinduced ideas, we find these to be our final tests of right and wrong, we cannot refuse to class bodily conduct as right or wrong according to the beneficial or detrimental results produced.