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catalogue as discriminating and exhaustive as you please, be represented by the letters A, B, C, D, E. Let each one choose between them as he, under the guidance of his own tastes and capabilities, is able, in kind, degree, duration, difficulty of attainment; and thus mark out for himself the path of prudence. He can not now go farther, and add to the motives urging any one proposed line of conduct a peculiar blessedness which is to crown it as right above all others. This is to establish again in our constitution a moral law, to restore to it intrinsic obligation, and thus secure the unspeakable satisfaction of obedience. All that our quiet, careful reasoner, overlooking the various sources of pleasure, and choosing between them, is entitled to, is, if he select wisely, the satisfaction of sagacity. He is always right when he is prudent, and the rewards of right sink to those of prudence. The self-congratulation of shrewdness, takes the place of the blessedness of a law implicitly obeyed, clung to in darkness and in light. No peculiar happiness can follow obedience to right, till we have recognized it as an antecedent, supreme, self-enforced law. As long as it remains a line of conduct resting for support on its pleasurable results, it must look to these exclusively, adding nothing to them save the satisfaction of sagacity. The right must come before the satisfaction which springs from obeying it.

Herein is revealed a difficulty which more or less embarrasses every presentation of the utilitarian theory. We grant, that what is right is always ultimately in a broad sense useful, but the moral nature, itself an independent means of gratification, a pre-eminent source of good, is often the necessary condition of its being so. The martyr sets this one pleasure over against all other pleasures, and wisely; yet he never would have done this, if he had started with the idea that the right action is only the sagacious