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inadmissible. It docs not satisfactorily meet the question, Whence arises the sense of obligation which is the salient feature of the right? It strives to make answer by affirming that the feeling of duty is conventionally imposed by the community in satisfaction of its own sentiments, and in view of what is advantageous to itself. The obligation of ethical action is thus referred to education, to social and civil institutions, in their own behalf laying the pressure of duty on their subjects. Says Bain, "Authority or punishment is the commencement of the state of mind recognized under the various names Conscience, the Moral Sense, the Sentiment of Obligation. The major part of every community adopt certain rules of conduct necessary for the common preservation, or ministering to the common well-being.

.... Every one, not of himself disposed to follow the rules prescribed by the community, is subjected to some infliction of pain to supply the absence of other motives: the infliction increasing in severity until obedience is attained. It is the familiarity with this regime of compulsion, and of suffering, constantly increasing until resistance is overborne, that plants in the infant and youthful mind the first germ of the sense of obligation." The Emotions and the Will, p. 481. His definition of Conscience is, "An ideal resemblance of public authority, growing up in the individual mind, and working to the same end."

The community grounds the law of action partly on utility, and partly on the transient sentiments which possess it, and so, with a variety of sanctions, trains the child to obedience. " A certain dread and awful impression is thus connected with forbidden actions, which is the conscience in its earliest germ or manifestation.''

This theory derives a force which does not belong to it from the very fact that social law, appealing, as it often does, to our moral nature, acquires thereby a prescriptive