ABSTRACT
The doctrine is taught by all the people religious teachers; it is assumed by every writer on morality: they may therefore safely consider it as an admitted truth. Greatest Happiness and Morality, are the face and obverse of the same fact: what is written on the one surface is beyond our interpretation: what is written on the other the people may read easily enough. Without any alternative, beings who are to realize the Divine Idea must be thus constituted. The realization of the Divine Idea being reduced to the fulfilment of certain conditions, it becomes the office of a scientific morality, to make a detailed statement of the mode in which life must be regulated so as to conform to them. Individual or private morality, as distinguished from social or public morality, is not to be entered upon in the following pages.
