 Prichard originally thought that conscience, or a sense of obligation, was a distinct species of motive from desire. ‘A sense of obligation does sometimes move us to act’ (15). In this he was a precursor of the direction that intuitionistic moral philosophy would take 60 years later. By 1928, however, he had abandoned this dualist view, writing ‘Again, if we face the purely general question ‘Can we really do anything whatever unless in some respect or other we desire to do it?’ we have to answer “No”’ (38; see also 129). On this new understanding a sense of obligation was not a motive at all, since it involved no desire; to get motivation, one needs in addition a desire to do the right. This ‘externalist’ position, also adopted by Ross, opened the door to complaints that on the intuitionist picture moral cognition was the recognition of facts that lacked any intrinsic connection to action; it should be possible to come to know that it is wrong to kill the innocent without thinking of that as at all relevant to one’s choice of action. And those complaints eventually became the strongest argument for non-cognitivism in meta-ethics.