The other moral emotions named, viz.: satisfaction in duty done and remorse or compunction for wrong, bring us to the same conclusion. These feelings are _sui generis_. They are distinctively characteristic, and are never called forth but in connection with the moral intuitions. These peculiar satisfactions or compunctions never appear upon perception of a truth of mathematics or a fact in chemistry or a gem of art. Such knowledge evokes no sense of duty and is followed by no feeling of remorse or rush of compunction, flooding the soul with self-condemnation. A sense of loss, in failing to gain a possible advantage, is incapable of being confounded with the feeling of having done wrong. Some of the highest elevations of ethical satisfaction are felt when men have maintained their fidelity to the right in face of the most enormous losses and of the most desolating sufferings. The deepest remorse the human soul ever knows may spring up in view of ways and acts which have given men all the things they have coveted and judged to be the most useful and enjoyable. There must surely be a special power whose peculiar discernments call the sensibilities into such unique and peculiar forms of feeling.
=4.= This conclusion is not weakened, as has sometimes been supposed, by the diversity and seeming conflict of moral judgments among men. This diversity seems, in the view of many persons, inconsistent with the supposition of a conscience, in the sense given. The fact of such diversity is freely conceded. The progress of history shows many changes in moral judgments. An advance is clearly traceable, in which once accepted rules of conduct have been superseded by different requirements. Things approved in one land and tribe are condemned in another. Pascal has said that conscience is one thing north of the Pyrenees and another south. In every community what some look upon as right others declare wrong. Infanticide, which under our civilization is punished as murder, on the banks of the Ganges has been esteemed a high religious duty. Polygamy, which our government is trying to wipe out as an immorality and foul blot, is held by the Mormons as a sacred right. Slavery is still regarded by some as right though condemned by the convictions of the nation as morally indefensible. Most startling diversities and contrasts are continually appearing. Hence it has often been said that our moral judgments rest, in fact, on no original and permanent principles discerned by a distinct and universal faculty of the soul, but are a purely adventitious and accidental product, shaped in ideas that come of circumstances, education or the shifting spirit of the age.[13] The law of morality is reduced to the dictates of expediency or to sentiment and caprice born of our changeful desires. This virtually denies both the validity of the ethical behests and the reality of an ethical faculty provided for perception of rectitude and duty. But the difficulty from this diversity and apparent contradiction loses its force when carefully considered. It disappears when we recall the following indubitable facts: