An eager wish for marriage has led many a man to exaggerate the powers of a limited income, and a fit of dyspepsia has given an unreasonably gloomy aspect to more than one balance-sheet.
Considering that moral intuitions have to do with _insensible_ matters, they cannot be expected to be more clear than the perception of physical facts.

And if the latter perceptions may be influenced by volition, desire, or health, our moral views may also be expected to be so influenced, and this in a higher degree because they so often run counter to our desires.

A bottle or two of wine may make a sensible object appear double; what wonder, then, if our moral perceptions are sometimes warped and distorted by such powerful agencies as an evil education or an habitual absence of self-restraint.

In neither case does occasional distortion invalidate the accuracy of normal and habitual perception.
The distinctness here and now of the ideas of "right" and "useful" is however, as before said, fully conceded by Mr.Herbert Spencer, although he contends that these conceptions are one in root and origin.
His utilitarian Genesis of Morals, however, has been recently combated{202} by Mr.Richard Holt Hutton in a paper which appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_.[216] This writer aptly objects an _argumentum ad hominem_, applying to morals the same argument that has been applied in this work to our sense of musical harmony, and by Mr.Wallace to the vocal organs of man.
Mr.Herbert Spencer's notions on the subject are thus expressed by himself: "To make my position fully understood, it seems needful to add that, corresponding to the fundamental propositions of a developed moral science, there have been, and still are developing in the race certain fundamental moral intuitions; and that, though these moral intuitions are the result of accumulated experiences of utility gradually organized and inherited, they have come to be quite independent of conscious experience.

Just in the same way that I believe the intuition of space possessed by any living individual to have arisen from organized and consolidated experiences of all antecedent individuals, who bequeathed to him their slowly developed nervous organizations; just as I believe that this intuition, requiring only to be made definite and complete by personal experiences, has practically become a form of thought quite independent of experience;--so do I believe that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications which, by continued transmissions and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, active emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.