in identifying the antecedents, associates, and reinforcements of the feeling with the feeling itself. If we avoid only this fallacy, we may accept as substantially true all that the empiricist has said of the gradual emergence of the sense of obligation in consciousness, as well as of the circumstances by which its nascency was conditioned. The three essential phases of the empirical theory are as follows:—First, associations are formed between our actions and the pleasant or painful consequences they bring us, thus predisposing us to the performance of pleasure-giving actions. Secondly, this natural incentive is moulded by the external authorities—domestic, political, religious, and social—which govern youthful, and to a large extent adult, life through the administration of rewards and punishments; or, in other words, the sense of obligation is the answer which our susceptibility to pleasures and pains makes to the enforcements of government or other external authority. Lastly, the sense of obligation thus developed is enlightened and purified by the discovery, which every reflecting adult may make for himself, that the injunctions of superiors and the enactments of laws have for their end the well-being of man and, in virtue of this, have a right to obedience independent of the power by which they are enforced. That the theory thus summarized is based on actual facts, our own experience will convince us. And this process of moralisation is a racial as well as an individual one. Nevertheless, it can only be by a confusion of thought that the Empiricist deems himself to have explained that ultimate fact of obligation on which the Intuitionist and the Transcendentalist justly lay such stress. For, in the third stage of the process described above, it appears as an unanalyzable feeling of submission to an end or ideal recognized as good. And this perfected sense of obligation is so far from being a mere development from the earlier consciousness of fear of penalties inflicted by external authorities that they seem to have nothing whatever in common, save their muscular expression. No doubt the feeling of an unconditional obligation is unknown to the child; it cannot awaken to life till the soil has been prepared by suitable disci-
