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--Shakespeare, 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.
Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have great
respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could
no further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet
one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin
did not.