Thus, even those who hold that our moral judgments are merely judgments about feelings must admit that, at some point in the history of the human race, men, or their ancestors, began not merely to have feelings but to judge that they had them: and this alone means an enormous change. If such a change as this must have occurred at some time or other, without our being able to say precisely when or why, what reason is there, why another change, which is scarcely greater, should not also have occurred, either before or after it? a change consisting in the fact that men for the first time become conscious of another predicate, which might attach to actions, beside the mere fact that certain feelings were felt towards them, and began to judge of this other predicate that it did or did not belong to certain actions? It is certain that, if men have been developed from non-human ancestors at all, there must have been many occasions on which they became possessed for the first time of some new idea. And why should not the ideas, which we convey by the words “right” and “wrong,” be among the number, even if
