That degree of unselfishness once attained, further improvement would be checked by the mutual opposition of diverging moral tendencies and spontaneous variations in all directions.
Added to which, we have the principle of reversion and atavism, tending powerfully to restore and reproduce that more degraded anterior condition whence the later and better state painfully emerged.
Very few, however, dispute the complete distinctness, here and now, of the ideas of "duty" and "interest" whatever may have been the origin of those ideas.

No one pretends that ingratitude may, in any past abyss of time, have been a virtue, or that it may be such now in Arcturus or the Pleiades.
Indeed, a certain eminent writer of the utilitarian school of ethics has amusingly and very instructively shown how radically distinct even in his own mind are the two ideas which he nevertheless endeavours to identify.
Mr.John Stuart Mill, in his examination of "Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," says,[208] if "I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what the principles of his government, except that 'the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving' does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may.

But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the {194} names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not.

Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him.
I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go." This is unquestionably an admirable sentiment on the part of Mr.Mill (with which every absolute moralist will agree), but it contains a complete refutation of his own position, and is a capital instance[209] of the vigorous life of moral intuition in one who professes to have eliminated any fundamental distinction between the "right" and the "expedient." For if an action is morally good, and to be done, merely in proportion to the amount of pleasure it secures, and morally bad and to be avoided as tending to misery, and if it could be _proved_ that by calling God good--whether He is so or not, in our sense of the term,--we could secure a maximum of pleasure, and by refusing to do so we should incur endless torment, clearly, on utilitarian principles, the flattery would be good.
Mr.Mill, of course, must also mean that, in the matter in question, all men would do well to act with him.

Therefore, he must mean that it would be well for all to accept (on the hypothesis above given) infinite and final misery for all as the result of the pursuit of happiness as the only end.
It must be recollected that in consenting to worship this unholy God, Mr.
Mill is not asked to do harm to his neighbour, so that his refusal reposes simply on his perception of the immorality of the requisition.