of virtue and the disapproval of vice may cease to be expressed in sufficiently plain and emphatic terms.  But, on the other hand, with the extension of experience and the ever-improving discipline of the intellectual faculties, the moral judgment, we may already presume (for the confirmation of this presumption I must refer to the next chapter), will always be growing in accuracy, receiving further applications, and becoming a more and more adequate representative of facts.  The analysis, therefore, of the moral act, with which we have been mainly engaged in the foregoing chapter, besides being essential to the determination of any theoretical problem of ethics, has a most important practical bearing from the indication which it affords of the direction in which moral progress is, in the future, most likely to be found.

It must never be forgotten, however, that men may know what is right and do what is wrong, and, hence, the due stimulation of the moral emotions, so that they may respond to the improved moral judgments, is at once an indispensable branch of moral education and an indispensable condition of moral progress.  But this is the function, not so much of the scientific moralist, as of the parent, the instructor of youth, the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, the journalist, the artist, and, above all, of the religious teacher.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MORAL TEST AND ITS JUSTIFICATION.

The moral feeling, as we have seen, follows immediately and necessarily on the moral judgment.  But what considerations guide the moral judgment?  Our moral judgments, as we have also seen, are the result of a logical process of reference to a class or of association with similars.  This particular action is like certain other actions, or belongs to a class of actions, which we habitually regard as right or wrong, and, consequently, as soon as the reference or association is made, the moral feeling supervenes.  Now, in this process, there are two possible sources of error.  In the first place, the act of reference or association may be faulty, and the action may not really belong to the class to which we refer or really be like the other actions with which we associate it.  This fault is one of classification, and can only be remedied, as all other faulty acts of classification, by learning to discriminate between the essential and the non-essential marks of similarity, and insisting on the presence of the essential marks.  In criminal cases, this is one of the functions of the jury, and, unless they exercise great care, they may easily be mistaken as to whether an alleged act of fraud, theft, assault, &c., was really an act of that kind.  But, even if the action be referred to its right head, there remains the second question whether we are really justified in regarding the class of actions itself as right or wrong.  Failure to prosecute for or punish heresy or witchcraft was at one time regarded