The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works
mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on
Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of
the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's _Sermons_,
and Kant's _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_ and
other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed
my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my
_Theory of Good and Evil_.
[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.
[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases:
but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in
effect feel that it is virtuous.' (_Treatise_, Part I, Section ii.,
ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good
and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the
view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain
cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is
just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and
that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.'
(_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 311.)
[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe
without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without
Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but
because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism,
for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all
events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such
non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity
or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal
God, but never without Metaphysic, _i.e._ a theory about the ultimate
nature of things.
[4] Tennyson's _Wages_.
[5] The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is 'Cum possit Deus omnia
efficere quae esae possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant,
omnipotens merito dicitur.' (_Summa Theol_., Pars I. Q. xxv. art. 8.)
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