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Moral sense   /mˈɔrəl sɛns/   Listen
Moral sense

noun
1.
Motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions.  Synonyms: conscience, scruples, sense of right and wrong.






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"Moral sense" Quotes from Famous Books



... questions which absorb the mind, the practical answerings of which engross the life of men. The schemes are too often those of fraud, and outrage upon the sacred obligations of being; the sacrifice, loss of the highest moral sense, the destruction of the purest susceptibilities of nature, the neglect of internal life and development, the utter and sad perversion of the true purposes of existence. Money is valued beyond its worth—it has gained ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy would soon prevail. I cannot (as Dr. Brandes appears to do) discover any startling merit in outraging the moral sense of the community in which one lives; and though I may admit that a man who was capable of doing this was a great poet, I cannot concede that the fact of his being a great poet justified the outrage. Nor am I sure that Dr. Brandes means to ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... the Jews in Roumania, their exclusion from the public service and the learned professions, the limitations of their civil rights, and the imposition upon them of exceptional taxes, involving as they do wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples, are not so directly in point for my present purpose as the public acts which attack the inherent right of man as a bread winner in the ways of agriculture and trade. The Jews are prohibited from owning land, ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf

... punishments, from the Ducking Stool to the Stocks, proceeded upon the appeal to the moral sense of the community, and up to the middle, or probably nearer to the end of last century, the summary punishment of offenders took place, both in village and town, in the most public manner possible. Near the Old Prison ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... I was armed only with a long-sword, and so according to the laws and ethics of battle everywhere upon Barsoom should only have been met with a similar or lesser weapon, seemed to have no effect upon the moral sense of my enemy, for he whipped out his revolver ere I scarce had touched the floor by his side, but an uppercut from my long-sword sent it flying from his grasp before ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... who seest the dang'rous strife In which some demon bids me plunge my life, To the Aonian fount direct my feet, Say where the Nine thy lonely musings meet? Where warbles to thy ear the sacred throng, Thy moral sense, thy dignity of song? Tell, for you can, by what unerring art You wake to finer feelings every heart; In each bright page some truth important give, And bid to future ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... noble hopes in many directions, hopes which inspired me to believe in his truth and goodness, aside from his capabilities for achieving greatness. His eagle sight, which read through other men's shams and pretences; his moral sense, which bade him shun even the appearance of evil, not only permitted, but urged him, seemingly, into this marriage with Flossy, by which he effectually cut himself off from his dearest aspirations. One by one I have seen him relinquish them, holding to them lovingly to ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... it means may make a great difference to the accused on trial. If the defendant thinks that God has directed him to kill a wicked man, he may know that such an act will not only be contrary to law, but also in opposition to the moral sense of the community as a whole, and yet he may believe that it is his conscientious duty to take life. In the case of Hadfield, who deliberately fired at George III in order to be hung, the defendant believed himself to be the Lord Jesus Christ, and that only by so doing ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... race, and justly, if the epithet be understood in its physiological rather than its moral sense. This irritability, which responds to the slightest stimulus, leads to much of the misdirection of talent we have been considering. The greatness of an author consists in having a mind extremely irritable, and at the same time ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... restoration of the credit of the General Government of the Union and that of many of the States. Happy would it be for the indebted States if they were freed from their liabilities, many of which were incautiously contracted. Although the Government of the Union is neither in a legal nor a moral sense bound for the debts of the States, and it would be a violation of our compact of union to assume them, yet we can not but feel a deep interest in seeing all the States meet their public liabilities and pay off their just debts at the earliest practicable ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... whole discussion of duty rests on these probabilities. But where do the laws of mind and experience oppose the terrific tendencies of Abolitionism that have been portrayed? Are not the minds of men thrown into a ferment, and excited by those passions which blind the reason, and warp the moral sense? Is not the South in a state of high exasperation against Abolitionists? Does she not regard them as enemies, as reckless madmen, as impertinent intermeddlers? Will the increase of their numbers tend to allay this exasperation? Will the appearance ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher

... in the moral sense which enables man to distinguish right from wrong, the conscience, which forbids and reproves the unbridled indulgence of the animal appetites, that we observe the grand distinction between man and the brute. There is nothing in the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... looking with a pale face on the assembled circle as Martin closed the door, 'the young man has this night beheld a refinement of social manner, and an easy magnificence of social decoration, to which he is a stranger in his own country. Let us hope it may awake a moral sense within him.' ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... in a diabolical squint. Something of the same kind would, we fear, be the effect on a large number of persons of well-meant expositions of the English civil-service reform and its admirable results. Nor will any appeals to the moral sense excite an indignation at the workings of our present system sufficiently deep and general to demand its overthrow. Civil-service reform had a far easier task in England than it has here, and forces at its back which are here actively or inertly opposed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... which have existed for more than three years in the island of Cuba, so near our own borders, have shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States, have been a disgrace to Christian civilization,—culminating, as they have, in the destruction of a United States battle-ship, with two hundred and sixty of its officers and crew, while on a ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... a falsehood so flagrant that I commended the rule of truth-speaking to her moral sense, and asked how she reconciled the sin with her ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... every scientific discipline must pass through a theological and metaphysical stage before it assumed the character of a positive science seems to be true as far as sociology is concerned. Machiavelli shocked the moral sense of his time, if not the moralists of all time, when he proposed to accept human nature as it is as a basis for political science. Herbert Spencer insisted upon the futility of expecting "golden conduct from leaden instincts." To ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... five feet four inches in height, round, ruddy, mellow and jocund. A complete absence or suppression of moral sense, together with health as perfect as an animal's, had rendered him insensible to all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He had never shed a tear save in excessive laughter, and sorrow had never yet struck a dart through the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... not, indeed, been intoxicated beyond moral sense, their reeling footsteps must have been palsied by the horrors of their situation. The air was cold and misty. The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass, which sprang up around the feet and ankles. Fallen ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... springs of personal character and development. On the whole, it seems unwise to attempt to divide the poor into the "worthy" and "unworthy" poor, as has often been done, for no one can say who is the worthy and who is the unworthy in a moral sense. The only sense in which these words may be used scientifically in charitable work is to mean ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... for example, or by the force of sympathy, it is possible that benevolence may become pleasing and malevolence displeasing, even when our own interest is not involved (ii. 436). Nay, there is a kind of moral sense natural to man, which consists in a certain preception of the harmony between sin and punishment, and which therefore does not properly spring from self-love. This moral sense may even go so far ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... C.L.'s moral sense presents her compliments to Doctor Manning, is very thankful for his medical advice, but is happy to add that her ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... philosopher broke in now and then with "Now that I like,"—"So the Great Spirit has taught me;" but when the missionary came to the regions where faith surpasses the power of the intellect and the moral sense, the Indian would not follow him, and rejected his teaching. It was curious that he particularly denied the idea of a devil, declaring that there was no such being, according to the ancient Indians. Now, the incantations of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... to extol or depreciate, or to commend or deplore any of the phenomena which the word is used to characterise. The term is used in a technical sense as describing a comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value—in an aesthetic or moral sense—and so awarding and defining the relative degrees of complacency with which they may legitimately be contemplated by themselves and by others. An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... direct sphere of conscience, which shine by their own light. Such is that fundamental truth of theology thus announced by the apostle John: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5); where light and darkness are both taken in a moral sense, as the context shows; and thus by the apostle James: "God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (Jas. 1:13); and thus, ages before, by Moses: "He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... any one born of a free Christian mother" could, notwithstanding, be a slave, and be obliged to remain such, passed their comprehension.[222] It was impossible for them to explain it." And, although "they were treated just like Christians," the moral sense of the people could not excuse such a flagrant ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... day I saw that something was troubling the tutor from New England. It was the Moral Sense of the Puritan at work, I supposed, and, that night, when I came in with a new supply of "billies" and gave one to each of my brothers, the tutor looked up over his ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... little affected. He pitied her because of her perverted moral sense, which sought an honorable marriage from a wild, immoral impulse. He pitied her because she was what she was—a wanton who was determined by scheme and wile to gain her ends. And he shrewdly suspected ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... heard much of the superior moral sense of woman. It is superior in spots but not as a whole.... Here is an imaginary case which will show how undeveloped in some respects woman's moral sense still is: Suppose a train was coming with a children's picnic on board—three hundred ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... with either hand to the grovelling Australian and the erect orang outang. Brutes are nerved as we are, and uncivilized man possesses instincts like them: all we can with any show of reason deny them is moral sense, and in our arbitrary refusal of this, and our summary disposal of what we are pleased to term instinct, we take credit to ourselves for exclusive participation in that immaterial essence which is called Soul. But is it, in candour, true that brutes have no moral sense? ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... then by appointed inspectors, that neither health nor morals remained for factory-workers, and that hopeless deterioration would result unless government interfered at once. Hideous epidemic diseases, an extinction of any small natural endowment of moral sense, and a daily life far below that of the brutes, had showed themselves as industries and the attendant competition developed; and the story in all its horror may be read in English Bluebooks and the record of government inspectors, and made accessible in the works of Giffen, Toynbee, Engels, ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... will revert ancestrally to a lower plane of thought. "It thus happens that the minds of persons of high religious culture by ancestral descent, and the intermarriage of religious families, so strangely end in the production of children totally devoid of moral sense and religious sentiment—moral imbeciles in short."[245-1] From such considerations of the necessity of physical vigor to elevated thought, Descartes predicted that if the human race ever attain perfection it will be chiefly ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... on the slate, "Would you like her?" and she through her tears said, "You know that would never do." But it did do. We left Duchie that very night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan's for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... LETTER BETA}) That the Fathers not only conceived grace to be necessary for the cure of weakness induced by sin (gratia sanans) in a merely moral sense, but thought it to be metaphysically necessary for the communication of physical strength (gratia elevans), is evidenced by such oft-recurring similes as these: Grace is as necessary for salvation as the eye is to see, or as wings are ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle

... pointed out, it is only the religious view of man that builds up civilization. A great community is the record of man's supernaturalism, his uniqueness. It is built on the "higher-than-self" principle which is involved in the moral sense itself. And this higher-than-self is not just a collective naturalism, a social consciousness, as Durkheim and Overstreet and Miss Harrison would say. The simplest introspective act will prove that. For a man cannot ignore ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... it in a moral sense," replied Mrs. Meredith. "However, we will not answer till we have had a chance to discuss it ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... stormy session of the Indian National Congress at Calcutta in December, 1906, which endorsed the Bengalee boycott movement, he lent the weight of his authority to a policy that was difficult to reconcile with constitutional methods of opposition, his reason and his moral sense have always revolted against the reactionary appeals to religious prejudice and racial hatred by which men like Tilak have sought to stimulate a perverted form of Indian patriotism. Highly educated both as a Western and an ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... head of the Moral Sense. It is a large question. Let us finish with what we are about now, before we take ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... does not appear to me that I am confessing that I should have been debarred by "selfish interests" from making candid inquiry, or that I should have been biassed by "sordid motives." I hope that even such a fragment of moral sense as may remain in an ecclesiastical "infidel" might have got me through the difficulty; but it would be unworthy to deny, or disguise, the fact that a very serious difficulty must have been created for me by the nature of my tenure. And let it be observed ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... direct or by indirect suggestion. (3) Hypnosis was characterised by physical as well as by psychical changes. (4) The simultaneous appearance of several phenomena was recognised, and much importance was attached to the intelligent action of a secondary consciousness. (5) Volition was unimpaired, moral sense increased, and suggested crime impossible. (6) Rapport was a purely artificial condition created by suggestion. (7) The importance of direct verbal suggestion was fully recognised, as also the mental influence ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... of art and all the vices of humanity. Each has its offence. Protestantism is made responsible for the extremes of individualism;[146] and Judaism, for the absurdities of its customs and the weakness of its moral sense.[147] I do not know which of the two is the more soundly belaboured; the second has the privilege of being so, not only in writing, but in pictures.[148] The worst of it is, these antipathies are apt to spoil the fairness of M. d'Indy's artistic judgment. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... knowing how deep Herzog had led him in the mire. His moral sense had disappeared, but he had a vague instinct of the danger he had incurred. The financier's last words came to his mind: "Confess all to your wife; she can get you out of this difficulty!" He understood the meaning ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... of life. The 'Summa Theologica' of St. Thomas Aquinas not only treated with incomparable logic the vexed questions of scholastic philosophy, but brought all the resources of a noble and well-trained intelligence and of a fine moral sense to the study and determination of the order and government of the universe, and of the nature ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... hope seems to be absurdity, and joy a sin against our fellows, as a feast would be in a house next door to where was a funeral. I do not wonder at settled sorrow falling upon men of vivid imagination, keen moral sense, and ordinary sensitiveness, when they brood long on the world as it is. But I do wonder at the superficial optimism which goes on with its little prophecies about human progress, and its rose-coloured pictures of human life, and sees nothing to strike it dumb for ever in men's writhing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... felicity, as all the world is aware, has never been troubled, and the example thus given to their subjects is one of the surest foundations of their influence and authority in Germany. The secret of this felicity, affection apart, is to be sought for in the strong moral sense of the Emperor regarding what he owes to himself and his people, but no less perhaps in the exemplary character of the Empress. As a girl at Primkenau she was a sort of Lady Bountiful to the aged and sick on the estate, and led there the simple life of the German country ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... thing is to see that the | | brain is healthy; not poisoned and diseased. For an unhealthy organ | | can not perform healthy functions. You might as well try to improve | | the sense of smell with the nose stuffed full of snuff, as to try to | | improve the moral sense while it is poisoned with the essence of | | snuff. Try to change a man's heart that is palpitating with poison and | | lusting for more! If you wish to be a successful soul doctor, you must | | commence at the seat of all moral diseases; a poisoned and disordered ...
— Vanity, All Is Vanity - A Lecture on Tobacco and its effects • Anonymous

... effect, to recall King James, or to deluge their country in blood, and again to bring their religion, laws, and liberties into the peril they had just escaped, it was an act of NECESSITY, in the strictest moral sense in which ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... instincts, but also largely intelligent social habits, have here been developed[30]. Similarly, in the case of mankind, we can understand the still more extraordinary development of these things—culminating in the moral sense. I have heard a sermon, preached at one of the meetings of the British Association, entirely devoted to arguing that the moral sense could not have been evolved by natural selection, seeing that the altruism ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... future father-in-law out of the creature's clutches. In return Nana abused her old Mimi in a charming fashion. He was a renegade who had devoured his fortune in the company of vile women; he had no moral sense. True, he did not let them pay him money, but he profited by that of others and only repaid them at rare intervals with a bouquet or a dinner. And when the count seemed inclined to find excuses for these failings she bluntly informed him that Daguenet had enjoyed her favors, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... is a great pleasure to the story-teller, because of their responsiveness, their readiness to enjoy. But besides the enjoyment of the children there is something far higher to work for—the development of the moral sense. The virtues of obedience, kindness, courage and unselfishness are set forth over and over again in the fairy tale. The story East o' the sun and west o' the moon, is nothing but a beautiful lesson in obedience, The king of the golden river in unselfishness, Diamonds and ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... his successor, Ercole. Lucretia, however, was the daughter of a Pope, the child of a priest, and this, in the eyes of the Este, constituted her disgrace. Neither her father's licentiousness nor Caesar's crimes could have greatly affected the moral sense of the court of Ferrara, but not one of the princely houses of that age was so depraved that it was indifferent to the reputation of a woman destined to become one ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... gives the most interesting testimony, in his "Malay Archipelago," to the existence of a very distinct, and in some instances highly developed moral sense in the natives with whom he came in contact. In one case,[211] a Papuan who had been paid in advance for bird-skins and who had not been able to fulfil his contract before Mr. Wallace was on{198} the point of starting, "came running down after us holding up a bird, and saying with ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... its authoritative character. The only way by which Christ now acts upon persons is by the force of his example and ideas, just as Moses, Mohammed, and Socrates now influence men. Religious faith is not necessarily faith in Christ. He was not free from sin in a moral sense; he had a natural sinfulness by ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... the jibaro professes Catholicism with a large admixture of fetichism. His moral sense is ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... leather-clad Fox? Can that be thy son, in the battlers mid din, Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin, With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring Impressed on his hard moral sense ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... doubtless, would have been the easy thing to do. There is indeed no reason why women like Mercedes Okraska, women with the world at their feet, should trouble to think of the young men they may chance to meet, whose exacting moral sense they don't satisfy. I am glad you see that," said Mrs. Forrester, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... While one denounces the impudent atheists who find fault with the myths of the Iliad, ignorant of its allegorical meaning, another resolves all its heroes into the elements; and still another, hoping to reconcile to the improved moral sense of the times the indecencies and wickednesses of the gods, imputes them all to demons; an idea which found much favour at first, but became singularly fatal to polytheism ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... are cold, tremulous, and useless. There is a very disagreeable feeling in the back of his neck, and a spinning sensation about the brain. A queer rumbling seizes his ears. He has heard that "conscience makes cowards of us all." What mortal sin has he committed? His moral sense answers back, "None. You are only that poor creature, a bashful youth." And he bravely calls on all his nerves, muscles, and brains to help him through this ordeal. He sees the pitying eyes of the woman to whom he is talking ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... combined in one ideal conception, much as with Plato. Matter in itself is ugly. The order of the world, wherein all beauty really resides, is a spiritual principle, all motion and life being the product of spirit. The principle of beauty is perceived not with the outer sense, but with an internal or moral sense which apprehends the good as well. This perception yields the only true delight, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... sustained concentration of effort on the furtherance of material interests, and his scorn of ethical restraints render him a formidable competitor in pacific pursuits and a dangerous enemy in war. His moral sense is not so much dulled by experience as warped by education. It may be likened to a clock which has not stopped but shows the wrong hour. He has been taught that there are times and circumstances when religious and ethical standards ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... then!—not only your noble desires, remember! Every good impulse, yes—but also every nasty little wish, every vicious thought, everything you'd ever desired, good or bad! The dream-beasts are marvelous salesmen, but they lack the moral sense!" ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

... if ever, appeals to our highest moral sense. The highest chords he strikes are those of reason and self-love. Through all the fables runs the thought that man's morality springs wholly from self-love, and that if that self-love is directed and restrained by reason, happiness must follow. Now, so far as I can ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... which explains all legislative variations, and furnishes a key for all problems. Now, is there so much as a shadow of method in M. Toullier, M. Troplong, and this swarm of insipid commentators, almost as devoid of reason and moral sense as the code itself? Do you give the name of method to an alphabetical, chronological, analogical, or merely nominal classification of subjects? Do you give the name of method to these lists of paragraphs gathered under an arbitrary ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still—with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... pains of the world too much for him; he takes alcohol to bring on forgetfulness; he forgets, and he pays for his pleasure by losing alike the desire and capacity for work. The man of the slums fares exactly like the gentleman: both sacrifice their moral sense, both become idle; the bad in both is ripened into rankness, and makes itself villainously manifest at all seasons; the good is atrophied, and finally dies. Goodness may take an unconscionable time a-dying, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... pliancy of mind, this lack of conviction, this absolute want of moral sense, which ought to have given the Count such great advantages in his conflict with the world, were, in reality, the main source of his weakness. Fortune had made a soldier of the man, and he filled the part as he ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... property. When private property ceases to be the fulcrum around which the relations between the sexes turn, any attempt at coercion, moral or material, in these relations must necessarily become repugnant to the moral sense of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... first place, Mary was not her governess long enough to actually change her nature, or to influence her for life; and, in the second place, she was not allowed to have her own way with her pupils. Had she been free she would have been more apt to encourage a spirit of piety, and inculcate a fine moral sense. For she was at that period in a deeply religious frame of mind, while she did all she could to counteract what she considered the deteriorating tendencies of the children's home training. As Kegan Paul says, "Her whole endeavor was to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... this point that Montague dropped out of the race, and took to studying from the outside the mechanism of this young poet's conversation. Strathcona flouted the idea of a moral sense; but in reality he was quite dependent upon it—his recipe for making epigrams was to take what other people's moral sense made them respect, and identify it with something which their moral sense made them abhor. Thus, for instance, the tale which he told about one of ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... excited by Iago, the patriotism of Brutus artfully exploited by Cassius, he yields to the repeated solicitation and does a deed in every way repugnant to his normal character. Nothing seems so blinding in its effect on the moral sense as passion. It obscures all sense of humour, proportion, congruity; the murder of the man or woman who stands in the way of its full enjoyment becomes an act of inverted justice to the perpetrators; they reconcile themselves to it by the most perverse reasoning until they come to ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... distinctly the finest, the most characteristic, and the most convincing of Mr. Du Maurier's novels, though it is easy to see why it did not enjoy such a "boom" as its successor. In "Peter Ibbetson" our moral sense does not feel outraged by the fact of the sympathy we have to extend to a man-slayer; we are made to feel that a man may kill his fellow in a moment of ungovernable and not unrighteous wrath without losing his fundamental goodness. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... of the sex-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts—none of the best—that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish minds. But we soon return to saner moments; our moral sense resumes its normal sway, and sex-plays and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... never-ending wonder to Fred Sanders how it was he could have been so wicked a lad, and how it was that his moral sense could have been so totally eclipsed for years. The gentle, winning words of Inez Hawthorne had first aroused his conscience, until finally it would not allow him to rest until he had made his peace ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis

... the blame wholly upon blind fathers and mothers, though indeed they were culpable. And in consideration of the subject, Lane excluded all except the better class of Middleville. It was no difficult task to understand lack of moral sense in children who were poor and unfortunate, who had to work, and get what pleasures they had in the streets. But how about the best families, where there were luxurious homes, books, education, amusement, kindness, love—all the supposed stimuli needed for the proper ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... contemplating the Passion of Christ, a satisfaction deeper than that of any emotion; a satisfaction not to the heart, still less to the brain, but to that far deeper and diviner faculty within us all—our moral sense; that God-given instinct which makes us discern and sympathise with all that is ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... sacrilege and the murder of a master by a slave, which were punished with death. It is a natural inference that, as the royal treasury was enriched by these imposts, the sovereign would hardly attempt to check the annual harvest of iniquity by which his revenue was increased. Still, although the moral sense is shocked by a system which makes the ruler's interest identical with the wickedness of his people, and holds out a comparative immunity in evil-doing for the rich, it was better that crime should be punished ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... us. The majority do not go about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always disappointed by the results of their own operation. Hence "the State," instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much less of all those things. Furthermore, it often turns out in practice that "the State" is not even the known and accredited servants of the State, but, as has been well said, is only some obscure clerk, hidden in the recesses of a Government ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... quite unnatural. We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in some vague ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... postmaster announces that out of 100,000 letters a year, exactly so and so many come unaddressed, we think nothing of the matter—but when Quetelet counts so and so many criminals to every 100,000 people our moral sense is aroused since it is painful to think that *we are not criminals simply because somebody else has drawn the black spot.'' But really there is as little regrettable in this fact as in the observation ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... flag shall still wave over them. Large numbers of persons are now leaving the north-east of Scotland for Canada, and these are among the most valuable of the emigrants who seek her shores. They carry with them the high moral sense, the integrity, and the loyalty which characterise them at home; and in many cases more than this—the religious principle, and the "godliness which has promise of the life which now is, and of that ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... Christ, the badge or difference of the people of God, the exercise and impression of obedience, and other divine uses and fruits thereof, that some of the most learned Rabbins have travailed profitably and profoundly to observe, some of them a natural, some of them a moral sense, or reduction of many of the ceremonies and ordinances. As in the law of the leprosy, where it is said, "If the whiteness have overspread the flesh, the patient may pass abroad for clean; but if there be any whole flesh remaining, he is to ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... were numerous instances where conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under the Oriental system, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... "Scotchman," as the natives of that part of Africa call a two-shilling piece,[*] and pocketed it before he answered. The fact that the giver had murdered all his near relations did not make the gift less desirable in his eyes. Hottentot moral sense is not ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... between them, and Agostino could not find it in his heart at once to separate from him. Tempest-tossed and homeless, burning with a sense of wrong, alienated from the faith of his fathers through his intellect and moral sense, yet clinging to it with his memory and imagination, he found in the tender devotional fervor of the artist monk a reconciling and healing power. He shared, too, in no small degree, the feelings which now possessed the breast of his companion for the great reformer whose purpose seemed to meditate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... of a weakening of the moral sense in the chief of a state, to enfeeble that moral sense at the same time, and by an inevitable contagion, amongst his rivals and adversaries. In presence of the continental blockade, and of the resolution which the Emperor Napoleon ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... in the garrison at that time. Had there been, such a step would hardly have been ventured. Far away in the wilderness, shut out from the salutary influences of religious and social cultivation, what wonder that the moral sense sometimes becomes blinded, and that the choice is made, "Evil, be ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie

... intent to deceive is there, he lies. Professional ethics are no different from the ethics of the Decalogue; they are specific applications of the rules of conduct which have governed enlightened and honorable men in all ages and in all walks of life. It is only when the moral sense is blunted or temptation presents itself in some new and unrecognized form that it is difficult to draw the line between right and wrong. I am aware that a delicate sense of honor often comes between a man and his opportunities of profit, and that a fine sensitiveness ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... these considerations that should surprise us, or even shock our moral sense. For what they have indicated is an increase of money profits in rough proportion to the price-level, so that the aggregate profits will represent about as much real income as before.[1] The conclusion therefore amounts ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... prose that Charles Lamb thought 'capital' has no small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to me quite certain. There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... word "Poesy" used as the generic or class term, including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture, as its species. The reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each other; and of both to religion, and the moral sense. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... my book on the 'Descent of Man,' etc., and its publication is delayed only by the Index: when published, I will send you a copy, but I do not know that you will care about it. Parts, as on the moral sense, will, I dare say, aggravate you, and if I hear from you, I shall probably receive a few stabs from your polished ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... justice. He must be a democrat, a believer in and an advocate of the equal rights of men. A slavery-loving, slavery-upholding lecturer would be just as much of an anomaly as a slavery-loving and slavery-singing poet. The taint so vitiates the whole aesthetic nature, so poisons the moral sense, so palsies the finer powers, so destroys all true sympathy with universal humanity, that the composition of an acceptable lecture becomes impossible to the man who bears it. The popular lecture, as it has been described in this article, has never existed at the South, and could not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... all that its effects can contain, was seen to be inadmissible in logic and contradicted by everyday experience; while the argument from the supposed freedom of the will and the existence of the moral sense was negatived both deductively by the theory of evolution, and inductively by the doctrine of utilitarianism.' The theory of the freedom of the will is indeed at this stage of thought utterly untenable[7]; the evidence is overwhelming that the moral sense is the result of a purely natural ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... is not such reflex influence of the divine thought and character such as man and angels may attain, but identity of essence constituting him not God-like alone, but God. Others may be children of God in a moral sense; but by this right of elemental nature, none but He; He is herein, the only Son; so little separate, so close to the inner divine life which He expresses, that He is in the bosom of the Father. This language denotes two natures ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans

... who speculated upon its appearance,—rude as they were in a moral sense,—were not so intellectually stupid as to mistake for a star that speck of yellowish hue, struggling to reveal itself against the almost kindred ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... insane, Tom; but from the time that she supposed that her son had been gibbeted, there was something like insanity about her: the blow had oppressed her brain—it had stupefied her, and blunted her moral sense of right and wrong. She told me, after you had communicated to her that her son was in the hospital, and had died penitent, that she felt as if a heavy weight had been taken off her mind; that she had been rid of an oppression which had ever borne down her faculties—a sort of ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... affected by every life which touches ours. Influence is like an atmosphere exhaled by each separate personality. Some men seem neutral and colorless, with no atmosphere to speak of. Some have a bad atmosphere, like the rank poisonous odor of noxious weeds, breeding malaria. If our moral sense were only keen and true, we would instinctively know them, as some children do, and dread their company. Others have a good atmosphere; we can breathe there in safety, and have a joyful sense of security. With some of these it is a ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black

... nature. The hawk eats the sparrow; the fox devours the young rabbit; the cat leaps from under a bush and kills the mother robin while the young are left to starve in the nest. There is neither right nor wrong among the brutes because they have no moral sense. They do not kill for revenge nor torture for the love of cruelty, as Comrade Bannerman would in praying that the train be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts can feel no pity, no ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... has been disputed on the ground of Art. We are told by Mr. Sharp, though in somewhat different words, that the poet, qua poet, cannot deliver a 'message' such as directly addresses itself to the intellectual or moral sense; since his special appeal to us lies not through the substance, but through the form, or presentment, of what he has had to say; since, therefore (by implication), in claiming for it an intellectual—as distinct from an aesthetic—character, we ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... possibilities. But, for one thing, moral concepts are in themselves a powerful force, often hard to distinguish in their effect from material ones; and, for another, these material possibilities unfold material facts, secrets of Nature, that go to enrich the treasury of science, and quicken the moral sense. Of such material facts are the discoveries in embryology and kindred branches. They reveal the grave fact, previously reckoned with in the matter of the breeding of domestic animals, that the act of impregnation is an act of inoculation. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... moral sense of humanity his door of escape from the fatal relativity of pure reason with its confounding antinomies. Huxley found in the moral sense of humanity a mysterious, unrelated phenomenon that refused to fall into line ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... weakness is founded upon truth, for a child is of course unfit to guide himself. Without noticing mere bodily helplessness, a child knows scarcely what is good and what is evil; his desires for the highest good are not yet in existence; his moral sense altogether is exceedingly weak, and would yield readily to the first temptation. And, because those higher feelings, which are the great check to selfishness, have not yet arisen within him, the selfish instinct, connected apparently with all animal life, is exceedingly predominant in him. ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... with impunity. But, then, we must not defend the death penalty as such, but rather deplore and do our utmost to change our political conditions, which make it still unwise to abolish a form of punishment so barbarous and so repugnant to the moral sense. ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler

... on hypnotized subjects that scientists first learned of the suggestibility of the subconscious mind. In hypnosis a person can be made to believe almost anything and to do almost anything compatible with the safety and the moral sense of the individual. The instinct of self-preservation will not allow the most deeply hypnotized person to do anything dangerous to himself; and the moral complexes, laid in the subconscious, never permit a person to perform in earnest ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... the vineyard of the Word with thorns for me, and places snares in its pathways. These may be delusions of an evil spirit; but ere I so harshly question the seeming angel of light—my reason, I mean, and moral sense in conjunction with my clearest knowledge—I must inquire on what authority this doctrine rests. And what other authority dares a truly catholic Christian admit as coercive in the final decision, but the declarations of the Book itself—though I should not, without struggles, and a trembling reluctance, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... manner. How can we interpret this conduct of the dog, better than by supposing that he was aware he had done amiss, and that the evil doing preyed on him till he had made restitution? Was not this a kind of moral sense? ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... lest this should be one of the consequences of my going, and described some of the scourging caricatures of his day with an intense appreciation of their awfulness as engines of the moral sense of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... innocent, but he was created in union with God, a union which conferred on him many supernatural gifts, gifts, that is, which were not a part of his nature, but were in the way of an addition to his nature. "By created nature man is endowed with moral sense, and is thus made responsible for righteousness; but he is unequal to its fulfilment. The all-righteous Creator could be trusted to complete His work. He endowed primitive man with superadded gifts of grace, especially the supernatural ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... as he has sometimes shown its coexistence with physical energy and intellectual superiority,—much as he may teach us to admire the villain for some of his attributes, he never confounds the limits of right and wrong. He produces no obliquity in our moral sense, nor seduces us to lend our sympathy against the dictates of our better reason. Neither in his graver, nor in his gayer scenes, is there aught which can corrupt. He invests profligacy with no attractive colours, nor lends a false and imposing greatness to atrocious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various

... more careful elucidation. From the earliest period of reflection the question how we came to have moral ideas has been a disputed one. At first it was thought that there existed in man a distinct innate faculty or moral sense which was capable of deciding categorically man's duty without reference to history or condition. But in modern times the theory of evolution has discredited the inviolable character of conscience, and sought rather to determine ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... which for good or ill is a turning point in her history. Her duty and her responsibility are equally as great as her opportunity. Shall we rise to its full potentiality, both in a material and in a moral sense? ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn

... of Argyll, was a man of wide knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high moral sense was amply shown in his adhesion to the side of the American Union in the struggle against disunion and slavery, despite the overwhelming majority against him in the high aristocracy to which he belonged. As an ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... is delicately and truthfully worded—"not considering"; he does not say, not being aware of; but though it was a matter known to him, his moral sense was not watchful, as it were, about it. We must be careful not to press the admissions of a generous mind too far, or to exaggerate the importance of the suggestion of Las Casas. It would be quite erroneous to look upon this suggestion as being ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various

... only thing that excites me.... I have a chronic insanity with regard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far up into the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine." I should be glad if I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell of Ole Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her aesthetic, but her aesthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal. Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixt two"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... not yet come across them, was astonished to find in the girl an absence of all faith: he marveled at her tenacious hold on life, without pleasure or purpose, and most of all he admired her sturdy moral sense that had no need of prop or support. Till then he had only seen the French people through naturalistic novels, and the theories of the mannikins of contemporary literature, who, reacting from the art of the century of pastoral scenes and the Revolution, loved to present natural man as a vicious ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... explosive. Time after time I have seen him committed to prison, until he became a hopeless prison habitue. My experience has also shown me that physical deprivations are equally likely to lead to sharpened wits and perverted moral sense as to explosive and cruel violence. Probably this is natural, for nature provides some compensation ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... win by connivance at fraud create a pressure which is more than the virtue of many can withstand, and there can be no doubt that the open disregard of constitutional obligations avowed by some of the highest and most influential men in the country has greatly weakened the moral sense of those who serve in subordinate places. The expenses of the United States, including interest on the public debt, are more than six times as much as they were seven years ago. To collect and disburse this vast amount requires ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson

... that the fact of my being a Batrachian had no bearing on my moral rights, and ought not to have upon my social and legal rights. The capacity which I had for understanding the moral law and for feeling injustice gave me a claim to justice. Whoever has the moral sense to claim rights is by that very endowment vested with rights. "The true brotherhood between us rational animals," said this party, "is founded in our rationality and in our sentiments of justice and piety, and not in our animal nature. But this Batrachian, although ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... Christian religion. My heart rebelled against it. I would not accept it. I became an infidel. A man can not accept an interpretation of God that does not appeal to the best that is in him. No man can accept a doctrine that darkens his moral sense, or that confuses the distinction between right and wrong. I would not accept the old interpretation because my soul rose in revolt against it. I shall never forget how, one evening in his study, a minister, who had outgrown the old ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... power of bringing us to the state of harmony, and in so far it is beautiful. And vice versa, works of art which leave us in a state of moral rebellion are unbeautiful, not because they are immoral, but because they are disturbing to the moral sense. Literature which ignores the fundamental moral principle of the freedom of the will, like the works of Flaubert, Maupassant, much of Zola, Loti, and Thomas Hardy, fails of beauty, inasmuch as it fails of the perfect reposeful harmony of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... of kind or degree in the moral sense of the two races? In the prevailing view of authoritative students morality is emotional and not intellectual in its origin, and the warrant of right doing is attributed not to some hypothetical objective standard, but to the whisperings of an inner conscience, ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen

... when, instead of setting forth heroical deeds, it teaches the audience new possibilities of crime, and new excuses for those crimes; when, instead of purifying the affections by pity and terror, it confounds the moral sense by exciting pity and terror merely for the sake of excitement, careless whether they be well or ill directed: then it is of the devil, and the sooner it returns to its father the better for mankind. When, again, comedy, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... people's needs," and no legal code has yet succeeded in drawing a line between fair and unfair trade. In India and Japan merchants are an inferior class; and loss of self-respect reacts unfavourably on the moral sense. Ingratitude is a vice attributed to Bengalis by people who have done little or nothing to elicit the corresponding virtue. As a matter of fact their memory is extremely retentive of favours. They will overlook any shortcomings in a ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... it, the very people who press you hardest, professing to see "no harm," will feel they have lost something if you make them think the King's Country is just like their own. Whatever has happened to your moral sense, they know that the theatre is no place for a true-hearted servant of the Lord Jesus, if the Master is all he is represented to be. If they met you there unawares, it would be with a thrill not of ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner

... and lived amidst a blaze of genius never since equalled; he is the greatest representative of human reason in the direction of spirituality unaided by revelation; "but the errors in the dialogues reach to absurdity in reason and to sayings shocking to the moral sense." ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... more advanced vegetative stage of the preceding species—though it looks quite different, being white and spiny. This, too, must only be touched with very clean hands, in the moral sense, it would seem, as much as in the physical, for only people who are well baptised are allowed to handle it. It is a good Christian and keeps a sharp eye on the people around it; and when it sees anyone doing some wrong, it gets very angry, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... The boy's delicate moral sense was shocked at so unexpected a remark. He was the son of a poor widow, who had taught him that to be just is the duty of man, and that "honesty is the best ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various

... both in Heart and intention, with great love of truth, and a high moral sense, although too much given to lecturing, and sometimes a little wanting in charity towards erring fellow-mortals. She had much of her father's understanding and prudence, but came, of course, far short of him in knowledge of mankind and in experience, although now, in her eighteenth year, she considered ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... record are therefore those of an English, and not an American "Parson"; but there is nothing in them which a parson of any church or denomination would feel inclined to repudiate, on the score either of their fineness of mental perception or healthiness of moral sense. The author tells us, that, in writing these essays, he has not been rapt away into heroic times and distant scenes, but has written of daily work and worry amid daily work and worry: and herein lies the charm of his discourses. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... of the Evolution theory himself, in his Descent of Man, has given us an account of morality which suggests a remark of the same kind. He seems to have come to the conclusion that what is called our moral sense is merely an indication of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... be opened," expresses the power of mentally apprehending things before unperceived and unknown; but, of course, both in an intellectual and moral sense. The position taken appeared reasonable, and had a semblance of truth, and exerted its ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... possibility of accepting the pardon of sin with too light a heart. To ask for pardon Without real shame is to treat sin lightly; and to treat sin lightly is to treat God lightly. Nothing more effectually deadens the moral sense than: the habit of asking pardon without a due sense of the evil of sin. We ask God to forgive us our debts, and we do so in so inconsiderate a spirit that we go straightway and contract heavier debts. The friend who repays the ten pounds we had lent him and asks for a new loan of twenty, does not ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods

... causes; and never did a day pass without his communing in spirit, and this, too, without the aid of forms or language, with the infinite source of all he saw, felt, and beheld. Thus constituted, in a moral sense, and of a steadiness that no danger could appall, or any crisis disturb, it is not surprising that the hunter felt a pleasure at looking on the scene he now beheld, that momentarily caused him to forget the object of his visit. This will more ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... moral character of an author appears in his general attitude toward truth and life. A strong moral sense appears in a firm adherence to right and an unblinded condemnation of wrong. A genial, charitable spirit is shown in a kindly disposition to overlook the weaknesses of men and to magnify their virtues. Life may be looked upon as something earnest, exalted, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... perceiving it, as we are sure to do unless we have the boundary constantly before our minds. The law talks about rights, and duties, and malice, and intent, and negligence, and so forth, and nothing is easier, or, I may say, more common in legal reasoning, than to take these words in their moral sense, at some state of the argument, and so to drop into fallacy. For instance, when we speak of the rights of man in a moral sense, we mean to mark the limits of interference with individual freedom which we think are prescribed by conscience, or by our ideal, however reached. Yet it is certain that ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

... utterly devoid of moral sense there remains an appreciation of rascality which, being conventional, is perfectly clear. Sotillo thought that Dr. Monygham, so different from all Europeans, was ready to sell his countrymen and Charles Gould, his employer, for some share of the San Tome silver. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... in politics, has any man final occasion to repent of forbearance. There may be a tempest of provocation towards the policy of rigour; that policy may justify itself to the moral sense of men; modes even of prudence may be won over to sanction it; and yet, after all the largest spirit of civil prudence, such as all of us would approve in any historical case removed from the passions of the times, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of God. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... that these fictions are not destitute of some foundation, like many other fables, which contain not only a hidden and moral sense, but which have also some relation to an event really historical: for instance, what is said of the Golden Fleece carried away by Jason; of the Wooden Horse, made use of to surprise the city of Troy; the Twelve Labors of Hercules; ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... obligations were to both the partners; and though Mr. Collingsby never took any notice of me, my duty to him was just as urgent as to the junior. The thought startled me. My soul revolted at the idea of any treachery to Mr. Whippleton, who had always been very kind to me. But on the other hand, my moral sense revolted at the thought of concealing his fraud. I was troubled ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic

... overt acts of vice, it palsies every virtue.'[250] The temptations to which the poor man is exposed, and the sense of injustice due to an ignorance of the true cause of misery, tend to 'sour the disposition, to harden the heart, and deaden the moral sense.' Unfortunately, the means which have been adopted to lessen the evil have tended to increase it. In the first place, there was the master-evil of the poor-laws. Malthus points out the demoralising effects of these laws in chapters full of admirable common sense, which he was unfortunately ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... many things that we have not hitherto questioned, and I for one believe that our safety in those questioning days, as well as our comprehension of matters that touch society to the quick, will depend upon the direct and authoritative participation of women in our counsels. We shall need their moral sense to preserve what is right and fine and worthy in our system of life as well as to discover just what it is that ought to be purified and reformed. Without their counselings we shall be only ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens

... were decently mindful of life's proprieties and moralities and they throve by legitimate sale of the most and best news and the best possible elucidation and discussion thereof. The father could bring the paper of his choice to his breakfast table with no fear that his own moral sense and self-respect might be outraged, or that the face of his wife might be crimsoned and the minds of his children befouled. But there came from out of the West new men and new forces, quick to see the larger opportunity ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various

... much greater bloodshed than that caused by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, scenes of destruction planned more directly and on a vaster scale by governments, and sometimes the same contrast between an advanced state of civilization and acts of barbarity; but no spectacle wounds moral sense and humanity to the same degree as this persecution carried on coldly and according to abstract ideas, without the excuse of struggle and danger, without the ardent fever of battle and revolution. The very virtues of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... cannot be suppressed or denied, perverted by chicane or bribery without incalculable damage to the whole political body. Irregular methods once indulged in for one purpose, and towards one class, so sap the moral sense that they come to be used for all purposes. The danger is ultimately as great to those who suppress or pervert as it is to the suppressed and corrupted. It is the demoralization of all sound political action and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Had the priest merely bidden him to look at the stream and see how beautiful it was, instead of tasting it, it would have been quite another matter. And this is precisely the difference between what appeals to our aesthetic and to our moral sense, between what is judged of by the taste ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... condoned too easily, and the line between vice and virtue drawn in accordance with certain distinctions which even Parson Adams could scarcely have approved. Vice, he seems to say, is altogether objectionable only when complicated by cruelty or hypocrisy. But if Fielding's moral sense is not very delicate, it is vigorous. He hates most heartily what he sees to be wrong, though his sight might easily be improved in delicacy of discrimination. The truth is simply that Fielding accepted that moral code which the better men of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... Prof. of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, where he exercised a great influence over his students, and also upon the Scottish system of philosophy. In his philosophical views he was to some extent a disciple of Shaftesbury. He introduced the term, "moral sense," which he defined as a power of perceiving moral attributes in action. His System of Moral Philosophy appeared posthumously ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... and Belle laughed merrily. 'Anyone who has courage to stroll through the Middle Ages with old Mr Hallam before sunrise, must have plenty of altitude in her composition. It is my belief she lives on Mount Shasta, in a moral sense, and I shouldn't be surprised to hear of her taking out a building permit at the North Pole, if she thought duty called her. But, Dick, how can you be such an atrocious sceptic as to doubt the possibility of one's living above the clouds when you ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black

... at the same conclusion by analysing that unconditioned sense of duty which we call conscience. This moral sense cannot be a fixed code implanted in our consciousness, for then we could not explain either the variations of moral opinion, or the feeling of obligation (as distinguished from necessity) which impels us to obey it. It cannot be the ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... record recites. The female villain of the piece and her craven henchman were foiled by the sturdy but wily trustee and the doughty Carolina colonel who, in headlong, aristocratic championship of those threatened with oppression against the moral sense of the community, charged upon the scene and counseled slaughter if necessary in defense of negroes who were none of his. And in the end the magistrates and jurors, proving second Daniels come to judgment, endorsed the victory of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... is that I was entering into our nefarious undertaking with an involuntary zeal of which I was myself quite unconscious at the time. The romance and the peril of the whole proceeding held me spellbound and entranced. My moral sense and my sense of fear were stricken by a common paralysis. And there I stood, shining my light and holding my phial with a keener interest than I had ever brought to any honest avocation. And there knelt A. ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... and probably are, Chinamen who are as honourable, upright, and honest as the average Englishman, but my experience, such as it has been, is that they are not to be found aboard a junk. The Chinese seaman is, as a rule, drawn from the lowest stratum of his people, and among such men the moral sense, if not absolutely lacking, is very nearly so. They are barbarian, and all their instincts are primitive. Honour and honesty are words that have no meaning for them; they are, before all things else, intensely acquisitive, and if they want a thing they will take it if they can, and woe betide ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood

... regard for "tradition venerable through ancient report," and "doctrines hoary with years."[196] He aspired after supernatural light and guidance; he longed for some intercourse with, some communication from, the Deity. And whilst he found many things in the ancient legends which revolted his moral sense, and which his reason rejected, yet the sentiment and the lesson which pervades the whole of Grecian mythology, viz., that the gods are in ceaseless intercourse with the human race, and if men will do right the gods ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... comes that ineradicable conviction of the supremacy of righteousness, of the utter loveliness of the good, and utter hatefulness of the evil? I am not concerned with the steps of the process by which the moral sense may have developed. The majesty of goodness, before which I bow, really, sincerely, even when by my acts I give the lie to my own innermost convictions, that is no creation of my consciousness. Nor do I see good reason to believe that it has been an invention ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... so plain, both from our own moral sense, and the declarations of Scripture, still for many reasons it is necessary to insist upon it; chiefly, because, it being very hard to keep God's commandments, men would willingly persuade themselves, if they could, that strict obedience is not necessary ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... but genius was needed to preserve—perhaps to enhance—the animation of their recitals. If he understood his own age imperfectly, he depicted its outward appearance with incomparable skill; and though his moral sense was shallow, and his knowledge of character far from profound, he painted portraits which live in the imagination of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... yet a closed incident, but Mr. Wilson's policy has been vindicated in principle. For the first time since Mr. Roosevelt shocked the moral sense and aroused the political resentment of all the Latin-American states by the rape of Panama, faith in the integrity and friendship of the United States has been restored among the other nations of ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... mental malpractice tends to blast moral sense, health, and the human life. Instruct 452:1 him how to bar the door of his thought against this seeming power, - a task not difficult, when one under- 452:3 stands that evil has in reality no power. Incorrect reasoning leads to practical error. The wrong ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... were held by the Rev. Mr. Naude—a man who kept the courage and the moral sense of the burghers up to the mark with his meek Christian spirit. He also formed the debating club that was such a welcome recreation to us. We often thought that the enemy would be surprised if they could know of the debates ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo

... what a midshipman's life on shore often is, may easily conceive the description of scenes into which he introduced me. With the wariness of the serpent, however, he took care not too early to shock my moral sense, and therefore only gave me glimpses of the scenes to which I have alluded. We were at Naples for some months. As my father had begged the captain, whenever duty would permit, to give me every opportunity of seeing all that was to be seen in the places we visited, I constantly got leave ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston

... marrying Charles Kuhn, of Philadelphia, had come to Italy, and, like all good Americans and English, was hotly Italian. In July, 1859, she was at Thun in Switzerland, and there Henry Adams joined them. Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral. Mrs. Kuhn had a double superiority. She not only adored Italy, but she cordially disliked ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... observe, in his address at the opening of the session of 1851: “La situation du département cet égard est sans doute profondément triste. Le nombre des crimes n'a pas diminué sensiblement.” So low, however, is the moral sense in Corsica with regard to the sanctity of human life, that these atrocities excite no horror, and the sympathies of vast numbers of the population are with the bandits. They are the heroes of the popular tales and canzoni; one hears ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... characteristic of Pete that he did not regret anything that he had done, in a moral sense. He had made mistakes—and he would have to pay for them—but only once. He would not make these mistakes again. A man was a fool who deliberately rode his horse into ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... superseding morality and suppressing the individual, which within the short span of two generations has taken possession of Germany. In the latter case at least the incessant preaching and teaching of a theory which lowers the citizen's independence and individuality while it saps his moral sense seems to us a misdirection of educational effort. But in it education has at ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... answer, I do not scruple to write a few lines to say how faithful and full a resume you have given of my notions on the moral sense in the "Pall Mall," and to make a few extenuating or explanatory remarks. (242/1. "What is called the question of the moral sense is really two: how the moral faculty is acquired, and how it is ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone—that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded—it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the [Greek: ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... the word "foisonless," that it means "without strength or sap; dried up; withered." Scott, in Old Mortality, uses it in the moral sense, "unsubstantial." ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop



Words linked to "Moral sense" :   morality, sense of duty, ethical motive, sense of shame, wee small voice, morals, superego, voice of conscience, ethics, small voice



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