the doctrine that all endowments are national property, which the government may and ought to control; but not, as I should once have done, condemning endowments in themselves, and proposing that they should be taken to pay off the national debt.

whose existence requires us to deny that the palpable evil that we find really is evil. The religion of humanity would draw our attention to real evil in the world, and urge us to work to overcome it.

A significant remaining question is whether there is a constraint placed on morality by the logic of that emotion: whether, in other words, there are certain actions which, because of the nature of the emotion of blame, cannot be regarded as morally wrong (Jacobson 2008).

And in the absence of reasons to doubt our universal tendency to desire happiness, we are warranted in taking happiness to be desirable.

Induction could have been self-undermining—its success as a form of reasoning about the world, established on its own terms, is not trivial.