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would involve the assertion, that pleasure, as pleasure, is felt in human experience to be obligatory. This would farther include the statement, the stronger the pleasure the greater the sense of duty; and, as our own enjoyments are more distinctly conceived than those of others, that these are pre-eminently enforced in practical morals; and farther, as present gratification yields more intense feeling than anticipated indulgence, that the pleasures of the hour are especially watched over by conscience. Each and all of these conclusions are in exact contradiction of the facts. If there is anything in reference to which we feel ourselves left to our own unrestrained choices, it is our pleasures. The moral nature has not laid upon it the superfluous task of enforcing these; but rather that of restraining them. By playing cunningly between the two, public sentiment on the one hand, and utility on the other, some embarrassments may be evaded by the theorist; yet neither nor both can be successfully made the source of the sense of duty. "When we are brought face to face with any, the wisest statement of the utilitarian law, as for instance that we are to seek the greatest good of the greatest number, how is that statement to gain any authority with us? Evidently by our rational penetration into its inmost quality. Enforced in any other way on us it loses power to bless us. Its intrinsic fitness does not save it, if we do not see that fitness. Enforced obedience is slavery for all the parties involved in it. Insight is the only refuge of manhood. Ultimate, honorable guidance must come to us through our own powers.

While these failures of explanation rob utilitarianism of all claims to acceptance, is there not in it a yet deeper difficulty in supposing that a simple notion, like that of obligation, can be other than primitive and independent of the action of society? "What would be thought of a philosophy