Note 48 — Chapter III · THE TRANSITION TO UTILITARIANISM.

Cf. Bain, The Emotions and the Will, p. 287. Professor Bain says (Emotions, p. 276 n.), "we ought to have a written code of public morality, or of the duties imposed by society, over and above what parliament imposes, and this should not be a loosely written moral treatise, but a strict enumeration of what society requires under pain of punishment by excommunication or otherwise,—the genuine offences that are not passed over." This would certainly be very desirable, were it not from the nature of the case impracticable. Popular judgment as to a man's conduct,—what society imposes,—is one of the things most difficult to predict: it is under the influence of most heterogeneous causes, personal, industrial, religious, political, &c. I do not think, for instance, that any one could safely undertake to describe exactly the kind of actions which will infallibly call forth the censure of British public opinion, or that of the smaller and intersecting groups into which society is divided.