[A letter to Mr. N.P.  Clayton also discusses the basis of morality.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 5, 1892.

Dear Sir,

I well remember the interview to which you refer, and I should have replied to your letter sooner, but during the last few weeks I have been very busy.

Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules of conduct which contribute to the welfare of society, and by implication, of the individuals who compose it.

The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man.  The rules of conduct by which this end is to be attained are discoverable—­like the other so-called laws of Nature—­by observation and experiment, and only in that way.

Some thousands of years of such experience have led to the generalisations, that stealing and murder, for example, are inconsistent with the ends of society.  There is no more doubt that they are so than that unsupported stones tend to fall.  The man who steals or murders, breaks his implied contract with society, and forfeits all protection.  He becomes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature.  Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved most convenient for dealing with him.

All this would be true if men had no “moral sense” at all, just as there are rules of perspective which must be strictly observed by a draughtsman, and are quite independent of his having any artistic sense.

The moral sense is a very complex affair—­dependent in part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid of it—­just as some children draw, or are enchanted by music while mere infants, while others do not know “Cherry Ripe” from “Rule Britannia,” nor can represent the form of the simplest thing to the end of their lives.

Now for this last sort of people there is no reason why they should discharge any moral duty, except from fear of punishment in all its grades, from mere disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of society is to see that they live under wholesome fear of such punishment short, sharp, and decisive.

For the people with a keen innate sense of moral beauty there is no need of any other motive.  What they want is knowledge of the things they may do and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to be attained.  Good people so often forget this that some of them occasionally require hanging almost as much as the bad.

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak?  I can only reply by putting another question—­Why do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong—­Shakespere, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less endowed multitude away?  But they do, and always will.  People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes on about them.