Ecclesiastical morality in the "Dark Ages."

Under the influence of Ambrose and Augustine, the four cardinal virtues

furnished a basis on which the systematic ethical theories of subsequent

theologians were built. With them the triad of Christian graces, Faith,

Hope and Love, and the seven gifts of the Spirit (Isaiah xi. 2) were

often combined. In antithesis to this list, an enumeration of the

"deadly sins" obtained currency. These were at first commonly reckoned

as eight; but a preference for mystical numbers characteristic of

medieval theologians finally reduced them to seven. The statement of

them is variously given,--Pride, Avarice, Anger, Gluttony, Unchastity,

are found in all the lists; the remaining two (or three) are variously

selected from among Envy, Vainglory, and the rather singular sins

Gloominess (_tristitia_) and Languid Indifference (_acidia_ or _acedia_,

from Gr. [Greek: _akedia_]). These latter notions show plainly, what

indeed might be inferred from a study of the list as a whole, that it

represents the moral experience of the monastic life, which for some

centuries was more and more unquestioningly regarded as in a peculiar

sense "religious." It should be observed that the (also Augustinian)

distinction between "deadly" and "venial" sins had a technical reference

to the quasi-jural administration of ecclesiastical discipline, which

grew gradually more organized as the spiritual power of the church

established itself amid the ruins of the Western empire, and slowly

developed into the theocracy that almost dominated Europe during the

latter part of the middle ages. "Deadly" sins were those for which

formal ecclesiastical penance was held to be necessary, in order to save

the sinner from eternal damnation; for "venial" sins he might obtain

forgiveness, through prayer, almsgiving, and the observance of the

regular fasts. We find that "penitential books" for the use of the

confessional, founded partly on traditional practice and partly on the

express decrees of synods, come into general use in the 7th century. At

first they are little more than mere inventories of sins, with their

appropriate ecclesiastical punishments; gradually cases of conscience

come to be discussed and decided, and the basis is laid for that system

of casuistry which reached its full development in the 14th and 15th

centuries. This ecclesiastical jurisprudence, and indeed the general

relation of the church to the ruder races with which it had to deal

during this period, necessarily tended to encourage a somewhat external

view of morality. But a powerful counterpoise to this tendency was

continually maintained by the fervid inwardness of Augustine,

transmitted through Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Alcuin,

Hrabanus Maurus, and other writers of the philosophically barren period

between the destruction of the Western empire and the rise of

Scholasticism.

Medieval moral philosophy.

Scholastic ethics, like scholastic philosophy, attained its completest

result in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. But before giving a brief

account of the ethical part of his system, it will be well to notice the

salient points in the long and active discussion that led up to it. In

the pantheistic system of Erigena (q.v.) (_circa_ 810-877) the chief

philosophic element is supplied by the influence of Plato and Plotinus,

transmitted through an unknown author of the 5th century, who assumed

the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Accordingly the ethical side of

this doctrine has the same negative and ascetic character that we have

observed in Neoplatonism. God is the only real Being; evil is

essentially unreal and incognizable; the true aim of man's life is to

return to perfect union with God out of the degraded material existence

into which he has fallen. This doctrine found little acceptance among

Erigena's contemporaries, and was certainly unorthodox enough to justify

the condemnation which it subsequently received from Honorius III.; but

its influence, together with that of the Pseudo-Dionysius, had a

considerable share in developing the more emotional orthodox mysticism

of the 12th and 13th centuries; and Neoplatonism (or Platonism received

through a Neoplatonic tradition) remained a distinct element in medieval

thought, though obscured in the period of mature scholasticism by the

predominant influence of Aristotle. Passing on to Anselm (1033-1109), we

observe that the Augustinian doctrine of original sin and man's absolute

need of unmerited grace is retained in his theory of salvation; he also

follows Augustine in defining freedom as the "power not to sin"; though

in saying that Adam fell "spontaneously" and "by his free choice,"

though not "through its freedom," he has implicitly made the distinction

that Peter the Lombard afterwards expressly draws between the freedom

that is opposed to necessity and freedom from the slavery to sin. Anselm

further softens the statement of Augustinian predestinationism by

explaining that the freedom to will is not strictly lost even by fallen

man; it is inherent in a rational nature, though since Adam's sin it

only exists potentially in humanity, except where it is made actual by

grace.

In a more real sense Abelard (1079-1142) tries to establish the

connexion between man's ill desert and his free consent. He asserts that

the inherited propensity to evil is not strictly a sin, which is only

committed when the conscious self yields to vicious inclination. With a

similar stress on the self-conscious side of moral action, he argues

that rightness of conduct depends solely on the intention, at one time

pushing this doctrine to the paradoxical assertion that all outward acts

as such are indifferent.[21] In the same spirit, under the reviving

influence of ancient philosophy (with which, however, he was imperfectly

acquainted and the relation of which to Christianity he extravagantly

misunderstood), he argues that the old Greek moralists, as inculcating a

disinterested love of good--and so implicitly love of God as the highest

good--were really nearer to Christianity than Judaic legalism was. Nay,

further, he required that the Christian "love to God" should be regarded

as pure only if purged from the self-regarding desire of the happiness

which God gives. The general tendency of Abelard's thought was

suspiciously regarded by contemporary orthodoxy;[22] and the

over-subtlety of the last-mentioned distinction provoked vehement

replies from orthodox mystics of the age. Thus, Hugo of St Victor

(1077-1141) argues that all love is necessarily so far "interested" that

it involves a desire for union with the beloved; and since eternal

happiness consists in this union, it cannot truly be desired apart from

God; while Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) more elaborately

distinguishes four stages by which the soul is gradually led from (1)

merely self-regarding desire for God's aid in distress, to (2) love him

for his loving-kindness to it, then also (3) for his absolute goodness,

until (4) in rare moments this love for himself alone becomes the sole

all-absorbing affection. This controversy Peter the Lombard endeavoured

to compose by the scholastic art of taking distinctions, of which he was

a master. In his treatise, _Libri sententiarum_, mainly based on

Augustinian doctrine, we find a distinct softening of the antithesis

between nature and grace and an anticipation of the union of

Aristotelian and Christian thought, which was initiated by Albert the

Great and completed by Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas.

The moral philosophy of Aquinas is Aristotelianism with a Neoplatonic

tinge, interpreted and supplemented by a view of Christian dogma derived

chiefly from Augustine. All action or movement of all things irrational

as well as rational is directed towards some end or good,--that is,

really and ultimately towards God himself, the ground and first cause of

all being, and unmoved principle of all movement. This universal though

unconscious striving after God, since he is essentially intelligible,

exhibits itself in its highest form in rational beings as a desire for

knowledge of him; such knowledge, however, is beyond all ordinary

exercise of reason, and may be only partially revealed to man here

below. Thus the _summum bonum_ for man is objectively God, subjectively

the happiness to be derived from loving vision of his perfections;

although there is a lower kind of happiness to be realized here below

in a normal human existence of virtue and friendship, with mind and body

sound and whole and properly trained for the needs of life. The higher

happiness is given to man by free grace of God; but it is given to those

only whose heart is right, and as a reward of virtuous actions. Passing

to consider what actions are virtuous, we first observe generally that

the morality of an act is in part, but only in part, determined by its

particular motive; it partly depends on its external object and

circumstances, which render it either objectively in harmony with the

"order of reason" or the reverse. In the classification of particular

virtues and vices we can distinguish very clearly the elements supplied

by the different teachings which Aquinas has imbibed. He follows

Aristotle closely in dividing the "natural" virtues into intellectual

and moral, giving his preference to the former class, and the

intellectual again into speculative and practical; in distinguishing

within the speculative class the "intellect" that is conversant with

principles, the "science" that deduces conclusions, and the "wisdom" to

which belongs the whole process of knowing the sublimest objects of

knowledge; and in treating practical wisdom as inseparably connected

with moral virtues, and therefore in a sense moral. His distinction

among moral virtues of the justice that renders others their due from

the virtues that control the appetites and passions of the agent

himself, represents his interpretation of the _Nicomachean Ethics_;

while his account of these latter virtues is a simple transcript of

Aristotle's, just as his division of the non-rational element of the

soul into "concupiscible" and "irascible" is the old Platonic one. In

arranging his list, however, he defers to the established doctrine of

the four cardinal virtues (derived from Plato and the Stoics through

Cicero); accordingly, the Aristotelian ten have to stand under the

higher genera of (1) the prudence which gives reasoned rules of conduct,

(2) the temperance which restrains misleading desire, and (3) the

fortitude that resists misleading fear of dangers or toils. But before

these virtues are ranked the three "theologic" virtues, faith, love and

hope, supernaturally "instilled" by God, and directly relating to him as

their object. By faith we obtain that part of our knowledge of God which

is beyond the range of mere natural wisdom or philosophy; naturally

(e.g.), we can know God's existence, but not his trinity in unity,

though philosophy is useful to defend this and other revealed verities;

and it is essential for the soul's welfare that all articles of the

Christian creed, however little they can be known by natural reason,

should be apprehended through faith; the Christian who rejects a single

article loses hold altogether of faith and of God. Faith is the

substantial basis of all Christian morality, but without love--the

essential form of all the Christian virtues--it is "formless"

(_informis_). Christian love is conceived (after Augustine) as primarily

love to God (beyond the natural yearning of the creature after its

ultimate good), which expands into love towards all God's creatures as

created by him, and so ultimately includes even self-love. But creatures

are only to be loved in their purity as created by God; all that is bad

in them must be an object of hatred till it is destroyed. In the

classification of sins the Christian element predominates; still we find

the Aristotelian vices of excess and defect, along with the modern

divisions into "sins against God, neighbour and self," "mortal and

venial sins," and so forth.

From the notion of sin--treated in its jural aspect--Aquinas passes

naturally to the discussion of Law. The exposition of this conception

presents to a great extent the same matter that was dealt with by the

exposition of moral virtues, but in a different form; the prominence of

which may perhaps be attributed to the growing influence of Roman

jurisprudence, which attained in the 12th century so rapid and brilliant

a revival in Italy. This side of Thomas's system is specially important,

since it is just this blending of theological conceptions with the

abstract theory of the later Roman law that gave the starting-point for

independent ethical thought in the modern world. Under the general idea

of law, defined as an "ordinance of reason for the common good,

promulgated by him who has charge of the community," Thomas

distinguishes (1) the eternal law or regulative reason of God which

embraces all his creatures, rational and irrational; (2) "natural law,"

being that part of the eternal law that relates to rational creatures as

such; (3) human law, which properly consists of more particular

deductions from natural law particularized and adapted to the varying

circumstances of actual communities; (4) divine law specially revealed

to man. As regards natural law, he teaches that God has implanted in the

human mind a knowledge of its immutable general principles; and not only

knowledge, but a disposition, to which he applies the peculiar

scholastic name _synderesis_,[23] that unerringly prompts to the

realization of these principles in conduct, and protests against their

violation. All acts of natural virtue are implicitly included within the

scope of this law of nature; but in the application of its principles to

particular cases--to which the term "conscience" should be

restricted--man's judgment is liable to err, the light of nature being

obscured and perverted by bad education and custom. Human law is

required, not merely to determine the details for which natural law

gives no intuitive guidance, but also to supply the force necessary for

practically securing, among imperfect men, the observance of the most

necessary rules of mutual behaviour. The rules of this law must be

either deductions from principles of natural law, or determinations of

particulars which it leaves indeterminate; a rule contrary to nature

could not be valid as law at all. Human law, however, can deal with

outward conduct alone, and natural law, as we have seen, is liable to be

vague and obscure in particular applications. Neither natural nor human

law, moreover, takes into account that supernatural happiness which is

man's highest end. Hence they need to be supplemented by a special

revelation of divine law. This revelation is distinguished into the law

of the old covenant and the law of the gospel; the latter of these is

productive as well as imperative since it carries with it the divine

grace that makes its fulfilment possible. We have, however, to

distinguish in the case of the gospel between (1) absolute commands and

(2) "counsels," which latter recommend, without positively ordering the

monastic life of poverty, celibacy and obedience as the best method of

effectively turning the will from earthly to heavenly things.

Duns Scotus.

William of Occam.

But how far is man able to attain either natural or Christian

perfection? This is the part of Thomas's system in which the cohesion of

the different elements seems weakest. He is scarcely aware that his

Aristotelianized Christianity inevitably combines two different

difficulties in dealing with this question: first, the old pagan

difficulty of reconciling the proposition that will is a rational desire

always directed towards apparent good, with the freedom of choice

between good and evil that the jural view of morality seems to require;

and, secondly, the Christian difficulty of harmonizing this latter

notion with the absolute dependence on divine grace which the religious

consciousness affirms. The latter difficulty Thomas, like many of his

predecessors, avoids by supposing a "co-operation" of free-will and

grace, but the former he does not fully meet. It is against this part of

his doctrines that the most important criticism, in ethics, of his rival

Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) was directed. He urged that will could not be

really free if it were bound to reason, as Thomas (after Aristotle)

conceives it; a really free choice must be perfectly indeterminate

between reason and unreason. Scotus consistently maintained that the

divine will is similarly independent of reason, and that the divine

ordering of the world is to be conceived as absolutely arbitrary. On

this point he was followed by the acute intellect of William of Occam

(d. c. 1347). This doctrine is obviously hostile to all reasoned

morality; and in fact, notwithstanding the dialectical ability of Scotus

and Occam, the work of Thomas remained indubitably the crowning result

of the great constructive effort of medieval philosophy. The effort was,

indeed, foredoomed to failure, since it attempted the impossible task of

framing a coherent system out of the heterogeneous data furnished by

Scripture, the fathers, the church and Aristotle--equally unquestioned,

if not equally venerated, authorities. Whatever philosophic quality is

to be found in the work of Thomas belongs to it in spite of, not in

consequence of, its method. Still, its influence has been great and

long-enduring,--in the Catholic Church primarily, but indirectly among

Protestants, especially in England, since the famous first book of

Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ is to a great extent taken from the

_Summa theologiae_.

Medieval mysticism.

Partly in conscious antagonism to the schoolmen, yet with close affinity

to the central ethico-theological doctrine which they read out of or

into Aristotle, the mystical manner of thought continued to maintain

itself in the church. Philosophically it rested upon Neoplatonism, but

its development in strict connexion with Christian orthodoxy begins in

the 12th century with Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugo of St Victor. It

blended the Christian element of love with the ecstatic vision of

Plotinus, sometimes giving the former a decided predominance. In its

more moderate form, keeping wholly within the limits of ecclesiastical

orthodoxy, this mysticism is represented by Bonaventura and Gerson;

while it appears more independent and daringly constructive in the

German Eckhart, advancing in some of his followers to open breach with

the church, and even to practical immorality.

Casuistry.

The Jesuits.

In the brief account above given of the general ethical view of Thomas

Aquinas no mention has been made of the detailed discussion of

particular duties included in the _Summa theologiae_; in which, for the

most part, an excellent combination of moral elevation with sobriety of

judgment is shown, though on certain points the scholastic pedantry of

definition and distinction is unfavourable to due delicacy of treatment.

As the properly philosophic interest of scholasticism faded in the 14th

and 15th centuries, the quasi-legal treatment of morality came again

into prominence, borrowing a good deal of matter from Thomas and other

schoolmen. One result of this was a marked development and

systematization of casuistry. The best known _Summae casuum

conscientiae_, compiled for the conduct of auricular confession, belong

to the 14th and 15th centuries. The oldest, the _Astesana_, from Asti in

Piedmont, is arranged as a kind of text-book of morality on a scholastic

basis; later manuals are merely lists of questions and answers. It was

inevitable that, in proportion as this casuistry assumed the character

of a systematic penal jurisprudence, its precise determination of the

limits between the prohibited and the allowable, with all doubtful

points closely scrutinized and illustrated by fictitious cases, would

have a tendency to weaken the moral sensibilities of ordinary minds; the

greater the industry spent in deducing conclusions from the diverse

authorities, the greater necessarily became the number of points on

which doctors disagreed; and the central authority that might have

repressed serious divergences was wanting in the period of moral

weakness[24] that the church went through after the death of Boniface

VIII. A plain man perplexed by such disagreements might naturally hold

that any opinion maintained by a pious and orthodox writer must be a

safe one to follow; and thus weak consciences were subtly tempted to

seek the support of authority for some desired relaxation of a moral

rule. It does not, however, appear that this danger assumed formidable

proportions until after the Reformation; when, in the struggle made by

the Catholic church to recover its hold on the world, the principle of

authority was, as it were, forced into keen, balanced and prolonged

conflict with that of reliance on private judgment. To the Jesuits, the

foremost champions in this struggle, it seemed indispensable that the

confessional should be made attractive; for this purpose

ecclesiastico-moral law must be somehow "accommodated" to worldly needs;

and the theory of "Probabilism" supplied a plausible method for

effecting this accommodation. The theory proceeded thus: A layman could

not be expected to examine minutely into a point on which the learned

differed; therefore he could not fairly be blamed for following any

opinion that rested on the authority of even a single doctor; therefore

his confessor must be authorized to hold him guiltless if any such

"probable" opinion could be produced in his favour; nay, it was his duty

to suggest such an opinion, even though opposed to his own, if it would

relieve the conscience under his charge from a depressing burden. The

results to which this Probabilism, applied with an earnest desire to

avoid dangerous rigour, led in the 17th century were revealed to the

world in the immortal _Lettres provinciales_ of Pascal.

The Reformation. Transition to modern ethical philosophy.

In tracing the development of casuistry we have been carried beyond the

great crisis through which Western Christianity passed in the 16th

century. The Reformation which Luther initiated may be viewed on several

sides, even if we consider only its ethical principles and effects. It

maintained the simplicity of Apostolic Christianity against the

elaborate system of a corrupt hierarchy, the teaching of Scripture alone

against the commentaries of the fathers and the traditions of the

church, the right of private judgment against the dictation of

ecclesiastical authority, the individual responsibility of every human

soul before God in opposition to the papal control over purgatorial

punishments, which had led to the revolting degradation of venal

indulgences. Reviving the original antithesis between Christianity and

Jewish legalism, it maintained the inwardness of faith to be the sole

way to eternal life, in contrast to the outwardness of works; returning

to Augustine, and expressing his spirit in a new formula, to resist the

Neo-Pelagianism that had gradually developed itself within the apparent

Augustinianism of the church, it maintained the total corruption of

human nature, as contrasted with that "congruity" by which, according to

the schoolmen, divine grace was to be earned; renewing the fervent

humility of St Paul, it enforced the universal and absolute

imperativeness of all Christian duties, and the inevitable unworthiness

of all Christian obedience, in opposition to the theory that "condign"

merit might be gained by "supererogatory" conformity to evangelical

"counsels." It will be seen that these changes, however profoundly

important, were, ethically considered, either negative or quite general,

relating to the tone and attitude of mind in which all duty should be

done. As regards all positive matter of duty and virtue, and most of the

prohibitive code for ordinary men, the tradition of Christian teaching

was carried on substantially unchanged by the Reformed churches. Even

the old method of casuistry was maintained[25] during the 16th and 17th

centuries; though Scriptural texts, interpreted and supplemented by the

light of natural reason, now furnished the sole principles on which

cases of conscience were decided.

Humanism.

In the 17th century, however, the interest of this quasi-legal treatment

of morality gradually faded; and the ethical studies of educated minds

were occupied with the attempt, renewed after so many centuries, to find

an independent philosophical basis for the moral code. The renewal of

this attempt was only indirectly due to the Reformation; it is rather to

be connected with the more extreme reaction from the medieval religion

which was partly caused by, partly expressed in, that enthusiastic study

of the remains of old pagan culture that spread from Italy over Europe

in the 15th and 16th centuries. To this "humanism" the Reformation

seemed at first more hostile than the Roman hierarchy; indeed, the

extent to which this latter had allowed itself to become paganized by

the Renaissance was one of the points that especially roused the

Reformers' indignation. Not the less important is the indirect stimulus

given by the Reformation towards the development of a moral philosophy

independent alike of Catholic and Protestant assumptions. Scholasticism,

while reviving philosophy as a handmaid to theology, had metamorphosed

its method into one resembling that of its mistress; thus shackling the

renascent intellectual activity which it stimulated by the double

bondage to Aristotle and to the church. When the Reformation shook the

traditional authority in one department, the blow was necessarily felt

in the other. Not twenty years after Luther's defiance of the pope, the

startling thesis "that all that Aristotle taught was false" was

prosperously maintained by the youthful Ramus before the university of

Paris; and almost contemporaneously the group of remarkable thinkers in

Italy who heralded the dawn of modern physical science--Cardanus,

Telesio, Patrizzi, Campanella, Bruno--began to propound their

Aristotelian theories of the constitution of the physical universe. It

was to be foreseen that a similar assertion of independence would make

itself heard in ethics also; and, indeed, amid the clash of dogmatic

convictions, and the variations of private judgment, it was natural to

seek for an ethical method that might claim universal acceptance from

all sects.

Grotius.

C. _Modern Ethics._--The need of such independent principles was most

strongly felt in the region of man's civil and political relations,

especially the mutual relations of communities. Accordingly we find that

modern ethical controversy began in a discussion of the law of nature.

Albericus Gentilis (1557-1611) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) were the

first to give a systematic account. Natural law, according to Grotius

and other writers of the age, is that part of divine law which follows

from the essential nature of man, who is distinguished from animals by

his "appetite" for tranquil association with his fellows, and his

tendency to act on general principles. It is therefore as unalterable,

even by God himself, as the truths of mathematics, although its effect

may be overruled in any particular case by an express command of God;

hence it is cognizable _a priori_, from the abstract consideration of

human nature, though its existence may be known _a posteriori_ also from

its universal acceptance in human societies. The conception, as we have

seen, was taken from the later Roman jurists; by them, however, the law

of nature was conceived as something that underlay existing law, and was

to be looked for through it, though it might ultimately supersede it,

and in the meanwhile represented an ideal standard, by which

improvements in legislation were to be guided. Still the language of the

jurists in some passages (cf. _Inst. of Justinian_, ii. 1, 2) clearly

implied a period of human history in which men were governed by natural

law alone, prior to the institution of civil society. Posidonius had

identified this period with the mythical "golden age"; and such ideas

easily coalesced with the narrative in Genesis. Thus there had become

current the conception of a "state of nature" in which individuals or

single families lived side by side--under none other than those

"natural" laws which prohibited mutual injury and interference in the

free use of the goods of the earth common to all, and upheld parental

authority, fidelity of wives, and the observance of compacts freely

made. This conception Grotius took, and gave it additional force and

solidity by using the principles of this natural law for the

determination of international rights and duties, it being obvious that

independent nations, in their corporate capacities, were still in that

"state of nature" in their mutual relations. It was not, of course,

assumed that these laws were universally obeyed; indeed, one point with

which Grotius is especially concerned is the natural right of private

war, arising out of the violation of more primary rights. Still a

general observance was involved in the idea of a natural law as a

"dictate of right reason indicating the agreement or disagreement of an

act with man's rational and social nature"; and we may observe that it

was especially necessary to assume such a general observance in the case

of contracts, since it was by an "express or tacit pact" that the right

of property (as distinct from the mere right to non-interference during

use) was held by him to have been instituted. A similar "fundamental

pact" had long been generally regarded as the normal origin of

legitimate sovereignty.

The ideas above expressed were not peculiar to Grotius; in particular

the doctrine of the "fundamental pact" as the jural basis of government

had long been maintained, especially in England, where the constitution

historically established readily suggested such a compact. At the same

time the rapid and remarkable success of Grotius's treatise (_De jure

belli et pacis_) brought his view of Natural Right into prominence, and

suggested such questions as--"What is man's ultimate reason for obeying

these laws? Wherein exactly does this their agreement with his rational

and social nature consist? How far, and in what sense, is his nature

really social?"

Hobbes.

It was the answer which Hobbes (1588-1679) gave to these fundamental

questions that supplied the starting-point for independent ethical

philosophy in England. The nature of this answer was determined by the

psychological views to which Hobbes had been led, possibly to some

extent under the influence of Bacon,[26] partly perhaps through

association with his younger contemporary Gassendi, who, in two

treatises, published between the appearance of Hobbes's _De cive_ (1642)

and that of the _Leviathan_ (1651), endeavoured to revive interest in

Epicurus. Hobbes's psychology is in the first place materialistic; he

holds, that is, that in any of the psycho-physical phenomena of human

nature the reality is a material process of which the mental feeling is

a mere "appearance." Accordingly he regards pleasure as essentially

motion "helping vital action," and pain as motion "hindering" it. There

is no logical connexion between this theory and the doctrine that

appetite of desire has always pleasure (or the absence of pain) for its

object; but a materialist, framing a system of psychology, will

naturally direct his attention to the impulses arising out of bodily

wants, whose obvious end is the preservation of the agent's organism;

and this, together with a philosophic wish to simplify, may lead him to

the conclusion that all human impulses are similarly self-regarding.

This, at any rate, is Hobbes's cardinal doctrine in moral psychology,

that each man's appetites or desires are naturally directed either to

the preservation of his life, or to that heightening of it which he

feels as pleasure.[27] Hobbes does not distinguish instinctive from

deliberate pleasure-seeking; and he confidently resolves the most

apparently unselfish emotions into phases of self-regard. Pity he finds

to be grief for the calamity of others, arising from imagination of the

like calamity befalling oneself; what we admire with seeming

disinterestedness as beautiful (_pulchrum_) is really "pleasure in

promise"; when men are not immediately seeking present pleasure, they

desire power as a means to future pleasure, and thus have a derivative

delight in the exercise of power that prompts to what we call benevolent

action. Since, then, all the voluntary actions of men tend to their own

preservation or pleasure, it cannot be reasonable to aim at anything

else; in fact, nature rather than reason fixes this as the end of human

action; it is reason's function to show the means. Hence if we ask why

it is reasonable for any individual to observe the rules of social

behaviour that are commonly called moral, the answer is obvious that

this is only indirectly reasonable, as a means to his own preservation

or pleasure. It is not, however, in this, which is only the old Cyrenaic

or Epicurean answer, that the distinctive point of Hobbism lies. It is

rather in the doctrine that even this indirect reasonableness of the

most fundamental moral rules is entirely conditional on their general

observance, which cannot be secured apart from government. For example,

it is not reasonable for me to perform my share of a contract, unless I

have reason for believing that the other party will perform his; and

this I cannot have, except in a society in which he will be punished for

non-performance. Thus the ordinary rules of social behaviour are only

hypothetically obligatory; they are actualized by the establishment of a

"common power" that may "use the strength and means of all" to enforce

on all the observance of rules tending to the common benefit. On the

other hand Hobbes yields to no one in maintaining the paramount

importance of moral regulations. The precepts of good faith, equity,

requital of benefits, forgiveness of wrong so far as security allows,

the prohibition of contumely, pride, arrogance,--which may all be summed

up in the formula, "Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have

done to thyself" (i.e. the negative of the "golden rule")--he still

calls "immutable and eternal laws of nature"--meaning that, though a man

is not unconditionally bound to realize them, he is, as a reasonable

being, bound to desire that they should be realized. The pre-social

state of man, in his view, is also pre-moral; but it is therefore

utterly miserable. It is a state in which every one has a right to

everything that may conduce to his preservation;[28] but it is therefore

also a state of war--a state so wretched that it is the first dictate of

rational self-love to emerge from it into social peace and order. Hence

Hobbes's ideal constitution naturally comes to be an unquestioned and

unlimited--though not necessarily monarchical--despotism. Whatever the

government declares to be just or unjust must be accepted as such, since

to dispute its dictates would be the first step towards anarchy, the one

paramount peril outweighing all particular defects in legislation and

administration. It is perhaps easy to understand how, in the crisis of

1640, when the ethico-political system of Hobbes first took written

shape, a peace-loving philosopher should regard the claims of individual

conscience as essentially anarchical, and dangerous to social

well-being; but however strong might be men's yearning for order, a view

of social duty, in which the only fixed positions were selfishness

everywhere and unlimited power somewhere, could not but appear

offensively paradoxical.

There was, however, in his theory an originality, a force, an apparent

coherence which rendered it undeniably impressive; in fact, we find that

for two generations the efforts to construct morality on a philosophical

basis take more or less the form of answers to Hobbes. From an ethical

point of view Hobbism divides itself naturally into two parts, which by

Hobbes's peculiar political doctrines are combined into a coherent

whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected. Its theoretical

basis is the principle of egoism; while, for practically determining the

particulars of duty it makes morality entirely dependent on positive law

and institution. It thus affirmed the relativity of good and evil in a

double sense; good and evil, for any individual citizen, may from one

point of view be defined as the objects respectively of his desire and

his aversion; from another, they may be said to be determined for him by

his sovereign. It is this latter aspect of the system which is primarily

attacked by the first generation of writers that replied to Hobbes. This

attack, or rather the counter-exposition of orthodox doctrine, is

conducted on different methods by the Cambridge moralists and by

Cumberland respectively. Cumberland is content with the legal view of

morality, but endeavours to establish the validity of the laws of nature

by taxing them on the single supreme principle of rational regard for

the "common good of all," and showing them, as so based, to be

adequately supported by the divine sanction. The Cambridge school,

regarding morality primarily as a body of truth rather than a code of

rules, insist on its absolute character and intuitive certainty.

The Cambridge moralists, Cudworth.

Cudworth was the most distinguished of the little group of thinkers at

Cambridge in the 17th century, commonly known as the Cambridge

Platonists (q.v.). In his treatise on _Eternal and Immutable Morality_

his main aim is to maintain the "essential and eternal distinctions of

good and evil" as independent of mere will, whether human or divine.

These distinctions, he insists, have an objective reality, cognizable by

reason no less than the relations of space or number; and he endeavours

to refute Hobbism--which he treats as a "novantique philosophy," a mere

revival of the relativism of Protagoras--chiefly by the following

_argumentum ad hominem_. He argues that Hobbes's atomic materialism

involves the conception of an objective physical world, the object not

of passive sense that varies from man to man, but of the active

intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore, he urges, an

inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in

morals, and an objective world of right and wrong, which the mind by its

normal activity clearly apprehends as such.

More.

Cudworth, in the work above mentioned, gives no systematic exposition of

the ethical principles which he holds to be thus intuitively

apprehended. But we may supply this deficiency from the _Enchiridion

Ethicum_ of Henry More, another thinker of the same school. More gives a

list of 23 _Noemata Moralia_, the truth of which will, he says, be

immediately manifest. Some of these admit of a purely egoistic

application, and appear to be so understood by the author--as (e.g.)

that goods differ in quality as well as in duration, and that the

superior good or the lesser evil is always to be preferred; that absence

of a given amount of good is preferable to the presence of equivalent

evil; that future good or evil is to be regarded as much as present, if

equally certain, and nearly as much if very probable. Objections, both

general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of

formulating man's natural pursuit of self-interest; but the serious

controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism related not to such

principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a

(real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows. Such are the evangelical

principle of "doing as you would be done by"; the principle of justice,

or "giving every man his own, and letting him enjoy it without

interference"; and especially what More states as the abstract formula

of benevolence, that "if it be good that one man should be supplied with

the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that

it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on." The

question, however, still remains, what motive any individual has to

conform to these social principles when they conflict with his natural

desires. To this Cudworth gives no explicit reply, and the answer of

More is hardly clear. On the one hand he maintains that these principles

express an absolute good, which is to be called intellectual because its

essence and truth are apprehended by the intellect. We might infer from

this that the intellect, so judging, is itself the proper and complete

determinant of the will, and that man, as a rational being, ought to aim

at the realization of absolute good for its own sake. In spite, however,

of possible inferences from his definition of virtue, this does not seem

to be really More's view. He explains that though absolute good is

discerned by the intellect, the "sweetness and flavour" of it is

apprehended, not by the intellect proper, but by what he calls a

"boniform faculty"; and it is in this sweetness and flavour that the

motive to virtuous conduct lies; ethics is the "art of living well and

happily," and true happiness lies in "the pleasure which the soul

derives from the sense of virtue." In short, More's Platonism appears to

be really as hedonistic as Hobbism; only the feeling to which it appeals

as ultimate motive is of a kind that only a mind of exceptional moral

refinement can habitually feel with the decisive intensity required.

Cumberland.

It is to be observed that though More lays down the abstract principle

of regarding one's neighbour's good as much as one's own with the full

breadth with which Christianity inculcates it, yet when he afterwards

comes to classify virtues he is too much under the influence of

Platonic-Aristotelian thought to give a distinct place to benevolence,

except under the old form of liberality. In this respect his system

presents a striking contrast to Cumberland's, whose treatise _De Legibus

Naturae_ (1672), though written like More's in Latin, is yet in its

ethical matter thoroughly modern. Cumberland is a thinker both original

and comprehensive, and, in spite of defects in style and clearness, he

is noteworthy as having been the first to lay down that "regard for the

common good of all" is the supreme rule of morality or law of nature. So

far he may be fairly called the precursor of later utilitarianism. His

fundamental principle and supreme "Law of Nature" is thus stated: "The

greatest possible benevolence of every rational agent towards all the

rest constitutes the happiest state of each and all, so far as depends

on their own power, and is necessarily required for their happiness;

accordingly Common Good will be the Supreme Good." It is, however,

important to notice that in his "good" is included not merely happiness

but "perfection"; and he does not even define perfection so as to

exclude from it the notion of absolute moral perfection and save his

theory from an obvious logical circle. A notion so vague could not

possibly be used with any precision for determining the subordinate

rules of morality; but in fact Cumberland does not attempt this; his

supreme principle is designed not to rectify, but merely to support and

systematize, common morality. This principle, as was said, is conceived

as strictly a law, and therefore referred to a lawgiver, God, and

provided with a sanction in its effects on the agent's happiness. That

the divine will is expressed by it, Cumberland, "not being so fortunate

as to possess innate ideas," tries to prove by a long inductive

examination of the evidences of man's essential sociality exhibited in

his physical and mental constitution. His account of the sanction,

again, is sufficiently comprehensive, including both the internal and

the external rewards of virtue and punishments of vice; and he, like

later utilitarians, explains moral obligation to lie in the force

exercised on the will by these sanctions; but as to the precise manner

in which individual is implicated with universal good, and the operation

of either or both in determining volition, his view is indistinct if not

actually inconsistent.

Locke.

The clearness which we seek in vain from Cumberland is found to the

fullest extent in Locke, whose _Essay on the Human Understanding_ (1690)

was already planned when Cumberland's treatise appeared. Yet Locke's

ethical opinions have been widely misunderstood; since from a confusion

between "innate ideas" and "intuitions," which has been common in recent

ethical discussion, it has been supposed that the founder of English

empiricism must necessarily have been hostile to "intuitional" ethics.

The truth is that, while Locke agrees entirely with Hobbes as to the

egoistic basis of rational conduct, and the interpretation of "good" and

"evil" as "pleasure" and "pain," or that which is productive of pleasure

and pain, he yet agrees entirely with Hobbes's opponents in holding

ethical rules to be actually obligatory independently of political

society, and capable of being scientifically constructed on principles

intuitively known,--though he does not regard these principles as

implanted in the mind at birth. The aggregate of such rules he conceives

as the law of God, carefully distinguishing it, not only from civil law,

but from the law of opinion or reputation, the varying moral standard by

which men actually distribute praise and blame; as being divine it is

necessarily sanctioned by adequate rewards and punishments. He does not,

indeed, speak of the scientific construction of this code as having been

actually effected, but he affirms its possibility in language remarkably

strong and decisive. "The idea," he says, "of a Supreme Being, infinite

in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and upon whom

we depend, and the idea of ourselves, as understanding rational beings,

being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and

pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action, as

might place morality among the sciences capable of demonstration;

wherein, I doubt not, but from self-evident propositions, by necessary

consequences as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measure of

right and wrong might be made out." As Locke cannot consistently mean by

God's "goodness" anything but the disposition to give pleasure, it might

be inferred that the ultimate standard of right rules of action ought to

be the common happiness of the beings affected by the action; but Locke

does not explicitly adopt this standard. The only instances which he

gives of intuitive moral truths are the purely formal propositions, "No

government allows absolute liberty," and "Where there is no property

there is no injustice,"--neither of which has any evident connexion with

the general happiness. As regards his conception of the Law of Nature,

he takes it in the main immediately from Grotius and Pufendorf, more

remotely from the Stoics and the Roman jurists.

Clarke.

We might give, as a fair illustration of Locke's general conception of

ethics, a system which is frequently represented as diametrically

opposed to Lockism; namely, that expounded in Clarke's Boyle lectures on

the _Being and Attributes of God_ (1704). It is true that Locke is not

particularly concerned with the ethico-theological proposition which

Clarke is most anxious to maintain,--that the fundamental rules of

morality are independent of arbitrary will, whether divine or human. But

in his general view of ethical principles as being, like mathematical

principles,[29] essentially truths of relation, Clarke is quite in

accordance with Locke; while of the four fundamental rules that he

expounds, Piety towards God, Equity, Benevolence and Sobriety (which

includes self-preservation), the first is obtained, just as Locke

suggests, by "comparing the idea" of man with the idea of an infinitely

good and wise being on whom he depends; and the second and third are

axioms self-evident on the consideration of the equality or similarity

of human individuals as such. The principle of equity--that "whatever I

judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the

same I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should

do for him," is merely a formal statement of the golden rule of the

gospel. We may observe that, in stating the principle of benevolence,

"since the greater good is always most fit and reasonable to be done,

every rational creature ought to do all the good it can to its

fellow-creatures," Clarke avowedly follows Cumberland, from whom he

quotes the further sentence that "universal love and benevolence is as

plainly the most direct, certain and effectual means to this good as the

flowing of a point is to produce a line." The quotation may remind us

that the analogy between ethics and mathematics ought to be traced

further back than Locke; in fact, it results from the influence

exercised by Cartesianism over English thought generally, in the latter

half of the 17th century. It must be allowed that Clarke is misled by

the analogy to use general ethical terms ("fitness," "agreement" of

things, &c.), which overlook the essential distinction between what is

and what ought to be; and even in one or two expressions to overleap

this distinction extravagantly, as (e.g.) in saying that the man who

"wilfully acts contrary to justice wills things to be what they are not

and cannot be." What he really means is less paradoxically stated in the

general proposition that "originally and in reality it is natural and

(morally speaking) necessary that the will should be determined in every

action by the reason of the thing and the right of the case, as it is

natural and (absolutely speaking) necessary that the understanding

should submit to a demonstrated truth." But though it is an essential

point in Clarke's view that what is right is to be done as such, apart

from any consideration of pleasure or pain, it is to be inferred that he

is not prepared to apply this doctrine in its unqualified form to such a

creature as man, who is partly under the influence of irrational

impulses. At least when he comes to argue the need of future rewards and

punishments we find that his claim on behalf of morality is startlingly

reduced. He now only contends that "virtue deserves to be chosen for its

own sake, and vice to be avoided, though a man was sure for his own

particular neither to gain nor lose anything by the practice of either."

He fully admits that the question is altered when vice is attended by

pleasure and profit to the vicious man, virtue by loss and calamity; and

even that it is "not truly reasonable that men by adhering to virtue

should part with their lives, if thereby they deprived themselves of

all possibility of receiving any advantage from their adherence."

Thus, on the whole, the impressive earnestness with which Clarke

enforces the doctrine of rational morality only rendered more manifest

the difficulty of establishing ethics on an independent philosophical

basis; so long at least as the psychological egoism of Hobbes is not

definitely assailed and overthrown. Until this is done, the utmost

demonstration of the abstract reasonableness of social duty only leaves

us with an irreconcilable antagonism between the view of abstract reason

and the self-love which is allowed to be the root of man's appetitive

nature. Let us grant that there is as much intellectual absurdity in

acting unjustly as in denying that two and two make four; still, if a

man has to choose between absurdity and unhappiness, he will naturally

prefer the former; and Clarke, as we have already seen, is not really

prepared to maintain that such preference is irrational.[30]

Shaftesbury.

It remains to try another psychological basis for ethical construction;

instead of presenting the principle of social duty as abstract reason,

liable to conflict to any extent with natural self-love, we may try to

exhibit the naturalness of man's social affections, and demonstrate a

normal harmony between these and his self-regarding impulses. This is

the line of thought which Shaftesbury (1671-1713) may be said to have

initiated. This theory had already been advanced by Cumberland and

others, but Shaftesbury was the first to make it the cardinal point in

his system; no one had yet definitely transferred the centre of ethical

interest from the Reason, conceived as apprehending either abstract

moral distinctions or laws of divine legislation, for the emotional

impulses that prompt to social duty; no one had undertaken to

distinguish clearly, by analysis of experience, the disinterested and

self-regarding elements of our appetitive nature, or to prove

inductively their perfect harmony. In his _Inquiry concerning Virtue and

Merit_ he begins by attacking the egoism of Hobbes, which, as we have

seen, was not necessarily excluded by the doctrine of rational

intuitions of duty. This interpretation, he says, would be true only if

we considered man as a wholly unrelated individual. Such a being we

might doubtless call "good," if his impulses were adapted to the

attainment of his own felicity. But man we must and do consider in

relation to a larger system of which he forms a part, and so we call him

"good" only when his impulses and dispositions are so balanced as to

tend towards the good of this whole. And again we do not attribute

goodness to him merely because his outward acts have beneficial results.

When we speak of a man as good, we mean that his dispositions or

affections are such as tend of themselves to promote the good or

happiness of human society. Hobbes's moral man, who, if let loose from

governmental constraint, would straightway spread ruin among his

fellows, is not what we commonly agree to call good. Moral goodness,

then, in a "sensible creature" implies primarily disinterested

affections, whose direct object is the good of others; but Shaftesbury

does not mean (as he has been misunderstood to mean) that only such

benevolent social impulses are good, and that these are always good. On

the contrary, he is careful to point out, first, that immoderate social

affections defeat themselves, miss their proper end, and are therefore

bad; secondly, that as an individual's good is part of the good of the

whole, "self-affections" existing in a duly limited degree are morally

good. Goodness, in short, consists in due combination, in just

proportion, of both sorts of "affections," tendency to promote general

good being taken as the criterion of the right degrees and proportions.

This being established, the main aim of Shaftesbury's argument is to

prove that the same balance of private and social affections, which

tends naturally to public good, is also conducive to the happiness of

the individual in whom it exists. Taking the different impulses in

detail, he first shows how the individual's happiness is promoted by

developing his social affections, mental pleasures being superior to

bodily, and the pleasures of benevolence the richest of all. In

discussing this he distinguishes, with well-applied subtlety, between

the pleasurableness of the benevolent emotions themselves, the

sympathetic enjoyment of the happiness of others, and the pleasure

arising from a consciousness of their love and esteem. He then exhibits

the unhappiness that results from any excess of the self-regarding

impulses, bodily appetite, desire of wealth, emulation, resentment, even

love of life itself; and ends by dwelling on the intrinsic painfulness

of all malevolence.[31]

One more special impulse remains to be noticed. We have seen that

goodness of character consists in a certain harmony of self-regarding

and social affections. But virtue, in Shaftesbury's view, is something

more; it implies a recognition of moral goodness and immediate

preference of it for its own sake. This immediate pleasure that we take

in goodness (and displeasure in its opposite) is due to a susceptibility

which he calls the "reflex" or "moral" sense, and compares with our

susceptibility to beauty and deformity in external things; it furnishes

both an additional direct impulse to good conduct, and an additional

gratification to be taken into account in the reckoning which proves the

coincidence of virtue and happiness. This doctrine of the moral sense is

sometimes represented as Shaftesbury's cardinal tenet; but though

characteristic and important, it is not really necessary to his main

argument; it is the crown rather than the keystone of his ethical

structure.

Mandeville.

The appearance of Shaftesbury's _Characteristics_ (1713) marks a

turning-point in the history of English ethical thought. With the

generation of moralists that followed, the consideration of abstract

rational principles falls into the background, and its place is taken by

introspective study of the human mind, observation of the actual play of

its various impulses and sentiments. This empirical psychology had not

indeed been neglected by previous writers. More, among others, had

imitated Descartes in a discussion of the passions, and Locke's essay

had given a still stronger impulse in the same direction; still,

Shaftesbury is the first moralist who distinctly takes psychological

experience as the basis of ethics. His suggestions were developed by

Hutcheson into one of the most elaborate systems of moral philosophy

which we possess; through Hutcheson, if not directly, they influenced

Hume's speculations, and are thus connected with later utilitarianism.

Moreover, the substance of Shaftesbury's main argument was adopted by

Butler, though it could not pass the scrutiny of that powerful and

cautious intellect without receiving important modifications and

additions. On the other hand, the ethical optimism of Shaftesbury,

rather broadly impressive than exactly reasoned, and connected as it was

with a natural theology that implied the Christian scheme to be

superfluous, challenged attack equally from orthodox divines and from

cynical freethinkers. Of these latter Mandeville, the author of _The

Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits_ (1723), was a

conspicuous if not a typical specimen. He can hardly be called a

"moralist"; and though it is impossible to deny him a considerable share

of philosophic penetration, his anti-moral paradoxes have not even

apparent coherence. He is convinced that virtue (where it is more than a

mere pretence) is purely artificial; but not quite certain whether it is

a useless trammel of appetites and passions that are advantageous to

society, or a device creditable to the politicians who introduced it by

playing upon the "pride and vanity" of the "silly creature man." The

view, however, to which he gave audacious expression, that moral

regulation is something alien to the natural man, and imposed on him

from without, seems to have been very current in the polite society of

his time, as we learn both from Berkeley's _Alciphron_ and from Butler's

more famous sermons.

Butler.

The view of "human nature" against which Butler preached was not exactly

Mandeville's, nor was it properly to be called Hobbist, although Butler

fairly treats it as having a philosophical basis in Hobbes's psychology.

It was, so to say, Hobbism turned inside out,--rendered licentious and

anarchical instead of constructive. Hobbes had said "the natural state

of man is non-moral, unregulated; moral rules are means to the end of

peace, which is a means to the end of self-preservation." On this view

morality, though dependent for its actuality on the social compact which

establishes government, is actually binding on man as a reasonable

being. But the quasi-theistic assumption that what is natural must be

reasonable remained in the minds of Hobbes's most docile readers, and in

combination with his thesis that egoism is natural, tended to produce

results which were dangerous to social well-being. To meet this view

Butler does not content himself, as is sometimes carelessly supposed,

with insisting on the natural claim to authority of the conscience which

his opponent repudiated as artificial; he adds a subtle and effective

argument _ad hominem_. He first follows Shaftesbury in exhibiting the

social affections as no less natural than the appetites and desires

which tend directly to self-preservation; then reviving the Stoic view

of the _prima naturae_, the first objects of natural appetites, he

argues that pleasure is not the primary aim even of the impulses which

Shaftesbury allowed to be "self-affections"; but rather a result which

follows upon their attaining their natural ends. We have, in fact, to

distinguish self-love, the "general desire that every man hath of his

own happiness" or pleasure, from the particular affections, passions,

and appetites directed towards objects other than pleasure, in the

satisfaction of which pleasure consists. The latter are "necessarily

presupposed" as distinct impulses in "the very idea of an interested

pursuit"; since, if there were no such pre-existing desires, there would

be no pleasure for self-love to aim at. Thus the object of hunger is not

the pleasure of eating but food; hunger is therefore, strictly speaking,

no more "interested" than benevolence; granting that the pleasures of

the table are an important element in the happiness at which self-love

aims, the same at least may be said for the pleasures of love and

sympathy. Further, so far from bodily appetites (or other particular

desires) being forms of self-love, there is no one of them which under

certain circumstances may not come into conflict with it. Indeed, it is

common for men to sacrifice to passion what they know to be their true

interests; at the same time we do not consider such conduct "natural" in

man as a rational being; we rather regard it as natural for him to

govern his transient impulses. Thus the notion of natural unregulated

egoism turns out to be a psychological chimera. Indeed, we may say that

an egoist must be doubly self-regulative, since rational self-love ought

to restrain not only other impulses, but itself also; for as happiness

is made up of feelings that result from the satisfaction of impulses

other than self-love, any over-development of the latter, enfeebling

these other impulses, must proportionally diminish the happiness at

which self-love aims. If, then, it be admitted that human impulses are

naturally under government, the natural claim of conscience or the moral

faculty to be the supreme governor will hardly be denied.

But has not self-love also, by Butler's own account, a similar

authority, which may come into conflict with that of conscience? Butler

fully admits this, and, in fact, grounds on it an important criticism of

Shaftesbury. We have seen that in the latter's system the "moral sense"

is not absolutely required, or at least is necessary only as a

substitute for enlightened self-regard; since if the harmony between

prudence and virtue, self-regarding and social impulses, is complete,

mere self-interest will prompt a duly enlightened mind to maintain

precisely that "balance" of affections in which goodness consists. But

to Butler's more cautious mind the completeness of this harmony did not

seem sufficiently demonstrable to be taken as a basis of moral teaching;

he has at least to contemplate the possibility of a man being convinced

of the opposite; and he argues that unless we regard conscience as

essentially authoritative--which is not implied in the term "moral

sense"--such a man is really bound to be vicious; "since interest, one's

own happiness, is a manifest obligation." Still on this view, even if

the authority of conscience be asserted, we seem reduced to an ultimate

dualism of our rational nature. Butler's ordered polity of impulses

turns out to be a polity with two independent governments. Butler does

not deny this, so far as mere claim to authority is concerned;[32] but

he maintains that, the dictates of conscience being clear and certain,

while the calculations of self-interest lead to merely probable

conclusions, it can never be practically reasonable to disobey the

former, even apart from any proof which religion may furnish of the

absolute coincidence of the two in a future life.

Wollaston.

This dualism of governing principles, conscience and self-love, in

Butler's system, and perhaps, too, his revival of the Platonic

conception of human nature as an ordered and governed community of

impulses, is perhaps most nearly anticipated in Wollaston's _Religion of

Nature Delineated_ (1722). Here, for the first time, we find "moral

good" and "natural good" or "happiness" treated separately as two

essentially distinct objects of rational pursuit and investigation; the

harmony between them being regarded as matter of religious faith, not

moral knowledge. Wollaston's theory of moral evil as consisting in the

practical contradiction of a true proposition, closely resembles the

most paradoxical part of Clarke's doctrine, and was not likely to

approve itself to the strong common sense of Butler; but his statement

of happiness or pleasure as a "justly desirable" end at which every

rational being "ought" to aim corresponds exactly to Butler's conception

of self-love as a naturally governing impulse; while the "moral

arithmetic" with which he compares pleasures and pains, and endeavours

to make the notion of happiness quantitatively precise, is an

anticipation of Benthamism.

Hutcheson.

There is another side of Shaftesbury's harmony which Butler was

ultimately led to oppose in a more decided manner,--the opposition,

namely, between conscience or the moral sense and the social affections.

In the _Sermons_, indeed (1729), Butler seems to treat conscience and

calm benevolence as permanently allied though distinct principles, but

in the _Dissertation on Virtue_, appended to the _Analogy_ (1739), he

maintains that the conduct dictated by conscience will often differ

widely from that to which mere regard for the production of happiness

would prompt. We may take this latter treatise as representing the first

in the development of English ethics, at which what were afterwards

called "utilitarian" and "intuitional" morality were first formally

opposed; in earlier systems the antithesis is quite latent, as we have

incidentally noticed in the case of Cumberland and Clarke. The argument

in Butler's dissertation was probably directed chiefly against

Hutcheson, who in his _Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty

and Virtue_ had definitely identified virtue with benevolence. The

identification is slightly qualified in Hutcheson's posthumously

published _System of Moral Philosophy_ (1755), in which the general view

of Shaftesbury is more fully developed, with several new psychological

distinctions, including Butler's separation of "calm" benevolence--as

well as, after Butler, "calm self-love"--from the "turbulent" passions,

selfish or social. Hutcheson follows Butler again in laying stress on

the regulating and controlling function of the moral sense; but he still

regards "kind affections" as the principal objects of moral

approbation--the "calm" and "extensive" affections being preferred to

the turbulent and narrow--together with the desire and love of moral

excellence which is ranked with universal benevolence, the two being

equally worthy and necessarily harmonious. Only in a secondary sense is

approval due to certain "abilities and dispositions immediately

connected with virtuous affections," as candour, veracity, fortitude,

sense of honour; while in a lower grade still are placed sciences and

arts, along with even bodily skills and gifts; indeed, the approbation

we give to these is not strictly moral, but is referred to the "sense of

decency or dignity," which (as well as the sense of honour) is to be

distinguished from the moral sense. Calm self-love Hutcheson regards as

morally indifferent; though he enters into a careful analysis of the

elements of happiness,[33] in order to show that a true regard for

private interest always coincides with the moral sense and with

benevolence. While thus maintaining Shaftesbury's "harmony" between

public and private good, Hutcheson is still more careful to establish

the strict disinterestedness of benevolent affections. Shaftesbury had

conclusively shown that these were not in the vulgar sense selfish; but

the very stress which he lays on the pleasure inseparable from their

exercise suggests a subtle egoistic theory which he does not expressly

exclude, since it may be said that this "intrinsic reward" constitutes

the real motive of the benevolent man. To this Hutcheson replies that no

doubt the exquisite delight of the emotion of love is a motive to

sustain and develop it; but this pleasure cannot be directly obtained,

any more than other pleasures, by merely desiring it; it can be sought

only by the indirect method of cultivating and indulging the

disinterested desire for others' good, which is thus obviously distinct

from the desire for the pleasure of benevolence. He points to the fact

that the imminence of death often intensifies instead of diminishing a

man's desire for the welfare of those he loves, as a crucial experiment

proving the disinterestedness of love; adding, as confirmatory evidence,

that the sympathy and admiration commonly felt for self-sacrifice

depends on the belief that it is something different from refined

self-seeking.

It remains to consider how, from the doctrine that affection is the

proper object of approbation, we are to deduce moral rules or "natural

laws" prescribing or prohibiting outward acts. It is obvious that all

actions conducive to the general good will deserve our highest

approbation if done from disinterested benevolence; but how if they are

not so done? In answering this question, Hutcheson avails himself of the

scholastic distinction between "material" and "formal" goodness. "An

action," he says, "is _materially_ good when in fact it tends to the

interest of the system, so far as we can judge of its tendency, or to

the good of some part consistent with that of the system, whatever were

the affections of the agent. An action is _formally_ good when it flowed

from good affection in a just proportion." On the pivot of this

distinction Hutcheson turns round from the point of view of Shaftesbury

to that of later utilitarianism. As regards "material" goodness of

actions, he adopts explicitly and unreservedly the formula afterwards

taken as fundamental by Bentham; holding that "that action is best which

procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers, and the worst

which in a like manner occasions misery." Accordingly his treatment of

external rights and duties, though decidedly inferior in methodical

clearness and precision, does not differ in principle from that of Paley

or Bentham, except that he lays greater stress on the immediate

conduciveness of actions to the happiness of individuals, and more often

refers in a merely supplementary or restrictive way to their tendencies

in respect of general happiness. It may be noticed, too, that he still

accepts the "social compact" as the natural mode of constituting

government, and regards the obligations of subjects to civil obedience

as normally dependent on a tacit contract; though he is careful to state

that consent is not absolutely necessary to the just establishment of

beneficent government, nor the source of irrevocable obligation to a

pernicious one.

Hume.

An important step further in political utilitarianism was taken by Hume

in his _Treatise on Human Nature_ (1739). Hume concedes that a compact

is the natural means of peacefully instituting a new government, and may

therefore be properly regarded as the ground of allegiance to it at the

outset; but he urges that, when once it is firmly established the duty

of obeying it rests on precisely the same combination of private and

general interests as the duty of keeping promises; it is therefore

absurd to base the former on the latter. Justice, veracity, fidelity to

compacts and to governments, are all co-ordinate; they are all

"artificial" virtues, due to civilization, and not belonging to man in

his "ruder and more natural" condition; our approbation of all alike is

founded on our perception of their useful consequences. It is this last

position that constitutes the fundamental difference between Hutcheson's

ethical doctrine and Hume's.[34] The former, while accepting utility as

the criterion of "material goodness," had adhered to Shaftesbury's view

that dispositions, not results of action, were the proper object of

moral approval; at the same time, while giving to benevolence the first

place in his account of personal merit, he had shrunk from the paradox

of treating it as the sole virtue, and had added a rather undefined and

unexplained train of qualities,--veracity, fortitude, activity,

industry, sagacity,--immediately approved in various degrees by the

"moral sense" or the "sense of dignity." This naturally suggested to a

mind like Hume's, anxious to apply the experimental method to

psychology, the problem of reducing these different elements of personal

merit--or rather our approval of them--to some common principle. The old

theory that referred this approval entirely to self-love, is, he holds,

easy to disprove by "crucial experiments" on the play of our moral

sentiments; rejecting this, he finds the required explanation in the

sympathetic pleasure that attends our perception of the conduciveness of

virtue to the interests of human beings other than ourselves. He

endeavours to establish this inductively by a survey of the qualities,

commonly praised as virtues, which he finds to be always either useful

or immediately agreeable, either (1) to the virtuous agent himself or

(2) to others. In class (2) he includes, besides the Benevolence of

Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the useful virtues, Justice, Veracity and

Fidelity to compacts; as well as such immediately agreeable qualities as

politeness, wit, modesty and even cleanliness. The most original part of

his discussion, however, is concerned with qualities immediately useful

to their possessor. The most cynical man of the world, he says, with

whatever "sullen incredulity" he may repudiate virtue as a hollow

pretence, cannot really refuse his approbation to "discretion, caution,

enterprise, industry, frugality, economy, good sense, prudence,

discernment"; nor again, to "temperance, sobriety, patience,

perseverance, considerateness, secrecy, order, insinuation, address,

presence of mind, quickness of conception, facility of expression." It

is evident that the merit of these qualities in our eyes is chiefly due

to our perception of their tendency to serve the person possessed of

them; so that the cynic in praising them is really exhibiting the

unselfish sympathy of which he doubts the existence. Hume admits the

difficulty that arises, especially in the case of the "artificial"

virtues, such as justice, &c., from the undeniable fact that we praise

them and blame their opposites without consciously reflecting on useful

or pernicious consequences; but considers that this may be explained as

an effect of "education and acquired habits."[35]

So far the moral faculty has been considered as contemplative rather

than active; and this, indeed, is the point of view from which Hume

mainly regards it. If we ask what actual motive we have for virtuous

conduct, Hume's answer is not quite clear. On the one hand, he speaks of

moral approbation as derived from "humanity and benevolence," while

expressly recognizing, after Butler, that there is a strictly

disinterested element in our benevolent impulses (as also in hunger,

thirst, love of fame and other passions). On the other hand, he does not

seem to think that moral sentiment or "taste" can "become a motive to

action," except as it "gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes

happiness or misery." It is difficult to make these views quite

consistent; but at any rate Hume emphatically maintains that "_reason_

is no motive to action," except so far as it "directs the impulse

received from appetite or inclination"; and recognizes--in his later

treatise at least--no "obligation" to virtue, except that of the agent's

interest or happiness. He attempts, however, to show, in a summary way,

that all the duties which his moral theory recommends are also "the true

interest of the individual,"--taking into account the importance to his

happiness of "peaceful reflection on one's own conduct."

Adam Smith.

But even if we consider the moral consciousness merely as a particular

kind of pleasurable emotion, there is an obvious question suggested by

Hume's theory, to which he gives no adequate answer. If the essence of

"moral taste" is sympathy with the pleasure of others, why is not this

specific feeling excited by other things beside virtue that tend to

cause such pleasure? On this point Hume contents himself with the vague

remark that "there are a numerous set of passions and sentiments, of

which thinking rational beings are by the original constitution of

nature the only proper objects." The truth is, that Hume's notion of

moral approbation was very loose, as is sufficiently shown by the list

of "useful and agreeable" qualities which he considers worthy of

approbation.[36] It is therefore hardly surprising that his theory

should leave the specific quality of the moral sentiments a fact still

needing to be explained. An original and ingenious solution of this

problem was offered by his contemporary Adam Smith, in his _Theory of

Moral Sentiments_ (1759). Without denying the actuality or importance of

that sympathetic pleasure in the perceived or inferred effects of

virtues and vices he yet holds that the essential part of common moral

sentiment is constituted rather by a more direct sympathy with the

impulses that prompt to action or expression. The spontaneous play of

this sympathy he treats as an original and inexplicable fact of human

nature, but he considers that its action is powerfully sustained by the

pleasure that each man finds in the accord of his feelings with

another's. By means of this primary element, compounded in various ways,

Adam Smith explains all the phenomena of the moral consciousness. He

takes first the semi-moral notion of "propriety" or "decorum," and

endeavours to show inductively that our application of this notion to

the social behaviour of another is determined by our degree of sympathy

with the feeling expressed in such behaviour. Thus the prescriptions of

good taste in the expression of feeling may be summed up in the

principle, "reduce or raise the expression to that with which spectators

will sympathize." When the effort to restrain feeling is exhibited in a

degree which surprises as well as pleases, it excites admiration as a

virtue or excellence; such excellences Adam Smith quaintly calls the

"awful and respectable," contrasting them with the "amiable virtues"

which consist in the opposite effort to sympathize, when exhibited in a

remarkable degree. From the sentiments of propriety and admiration we

proceed to the sense of merit and demerit. Here a more complex

phenomenon presents itself for analysis; we have to distinguish in the

sense of merit--(1) a direct sympathy with the sentiments of the agent,

and (2) an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of those who receive the

benefit of his actions. In the case of demerit there is a direct

antipathy to the feelings of the misdoer, but the chief sentiment

excited is sympathy with those injured by the misdeed. The object of

this sympathetic resentment, impelling us to punish, is what we call

injustice; and thus the remarkable stringency of the obligation to act

justly is explained since the recognition of any action as unjust

involves the admission that it may be forcibly obstructed or punished.

Moral judgments, then, are expressions of the complex normal sympathy of

an impartial spectator with the active impulses that prompt to and

result from actions. In the case of our own conduct what we call

conscience is really sympathy with the feelings of an imaginary

impartial spectator.

Adam Smith gives authority to his moral system by saying that "moral

principles are justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity"; but this

he never proves. So Hume insists emphatically on the "reality of moral

obligation"; but is found to mean no more by this than the real

existence of the likes and dislikes that human beings feel for each

other's qualities. The fact is that amid the analysis of feelings

aroused by the sentimentalism of Shaftesbury's school, the fundamental

questions "What is right?" and "Why?" had been allowed to drop into the

background, and the consequent danger to morality was manifest. The

binding force of moral rules becomes evanescent if we admit, with

Hutcheson, that the "sense" of them may properly vary from man to man as

the palate does; and it seems only another way of putting Hume's

doctrine, that reason is not concerned with the ends of action, to say

that the mere existence of a moral sentiment is in itself no reason for

obeying it. A reaction, in one form or another, against the tendency to

dissolve ethics into psychology was inevitable; since mankind generally

could not be so far absorbed by the interest of psychological hypothesis

as to forget their need of establishing practical principles. It was

obvious, too, that this reaction might take place in either of the two

lines of thought, which, having been peacefully allied in Clarke and

Cumberland, had become distinctly opposed to each other in Butler and

Hutcheson. It might either fall back on the moral principles commonly

accepted, and, affirming their objective validity, endeavour to exhibit

them as a coherent and complete set of ultimate ethical truths; or it

might take the utility or conduciveness to pleasure, to which Hume had

referred for the origin of most sentiments, as an ultimate end and

standard by which these sentiments might be judged and corrected. The

former is the line adopted with substantial agreement by Price, Reid,

Stewart and other members of the still existing Intuitional school; the

latter method, with considerably more divergence of view and treatment,

was employed independently and almost simultaneously by Paley and

Bentham in both ethics and politics, and is at the present time widely

maintained under the name of Utilitarianism.

Price.

Price's _Review of the Chief Questions and Difficulties of Morals_ was

published in 1757, two years before Adam Smith's treatise. In regarding

moral ideas as derived from the "intuition of truth or immediate

discernment of the nature of things by the understanding," Price revives

the general view of Cudworth and Clarke; but with several specific

differences. Firstly, his conception of "right" and "wrong" as "single

ideas" incapable of definition or analysis--the notions "right," "fit,"

"ought," "duty," "obligation," being coincident or identical--at least

avoids the confusions into which Clarke and Wollaston had been led by

pressing the analogy between ethical and physical truth. Secondly, the

emotional element of the moral consciousness, on which attention had

been concentrated by Shaftesbury and his followers, though distinctly

recognized as accompanying the intellectual intuition, is carefully

subordinated to it. While right and wrong, in Price's view, are "real

objective qualities" of actions, moral "beauty and deformity" are

subjective ideas; representing feelings which are partly the necessary

effects of the perceptions of right and wrong in rational beings as

such, partly due to an "implanted sense" or varying emotional

susceptibility. Thus, both reason and sense of instinct co-operate in

the impulse to virtuous conduct, though the rational element is primary

and paramount. Price further follows Butler in distinguishing the

perception of merit and demerit in agents as another accompaniment of

the perception of right and wrong in actions; the former being, however,

only a peculiar species of the latter, since, to perceive merit in any

one is to perceive that it is right to reward him. It is to be observed

that both Price and Reid are careful to state that the merit of the

agent depends entirely on the intention or "formal rightness" of his

act; a man is not blameworthy for unintended evil, though he may of

course be blamed for any wilful neglect (cf. Arist., _Eth. Nic_., iii.

1), which has caused him to be ignorant of his real duty. When we turn

to the subject matter of virtue, we find that Price, in comparison with

More or Clarke is decidedly laxer in accepting and stating his ethical

first principles; chiefly owing to the new antithesis to the view of

Shaftesbury and Hutcheson by which his controversial position is

complicated. What Price is specially concerned to show is the existence

of ultimate principles _beside_ the principle of universal benevolence.

Not that he repudiates the obligation either of rational benevolence or

self-love; on the contrary, he takes more pains than Butler to

demonstrate the reasonableness of either principle. "There is not

anything," he says, "of which we have more undeniably an intuitive

perception, than that it is 'right to pursue and promote happiness,'

whether for ourselves or for others." Finally, Price, writing after the

demonstration by Shaftesbury and Butler of the actuality of

disinterested impulses in human nature, is bolder and clearer than

Cudworth or Clarke in insisting that right actions are to be chosen

because they are right by virtuous agents as such, even going so far as

to lay down that an act loses its moral worth in proportion as it is

done from natural inclination.

Reid.

On this latter point Reid, in his _Essays on the Active Powers of the

Human Mind_ (1788), states a conclusion more in harmony with common

sense, only maintaining that "no act can be morally good in which regard

for what is right has not _some_ influence." This is partly due to the

fact that Reid builds more distinctly than Price on the foundation laid

by Butler; especially in his acceptance of that duality of governing

principles which we have noticed as a cardinal point in the latter's

doctrine. Reid considers "regard for one's good on the whole" (Butler's

self-love) and "sense of duty" (Butler's conscience) as two essentially

distinct and co-ordinate rational principles, though naturally often

comprehended under the one term, Reason. The rationality of the former

principle he takes pains to explain and establish; in opposition to

Hume's doctrine that it is no part of the function of reason to

determine the ends which we ought to pursue, or the preference due to

one end over another. He urges that the notion of "good[37] on the

whole" is one which only a reasoning being can form, involving as it

does abstraction from the objects of all particular desires, and

comparison of past and future with present feelings; and maintains that

it is a contradiction to suppose a rational being to have the notion of

its Good on the Whole without a desire for it, and that such a desire

must naturally regulate all particular appetites and passions. It cannot

reasonably be subordinated even to the moral faculty; in fact, a man who

doubts the coincidence of the two--which on religious grounds we must

believe to be complete in a morally governed world--is reduced to the

"miserable dilemma whether it is better to be a fool or a knave." As

regards the moral faculty itself, Reid's statement coincides in the main

with Price's; it is both intellectual and active, not merely perceiving

the "rightness" or "moral obligation" of actions (which Reid conceives

as a simple unanalysable relation between act and agent), but also

impelling the will to the performance of what is seen to be right. Both

thinkers hold that this perception of right and wrong in actions is

accompanied by a perception of merit and demerit in agents, and also by

a specific emotion; but whereas Price conceives this emotion chiefly as

pleasure or pain, analogous to that produced in the mind by physical

beauty or deformity, Reid regards it chiefly as benevolent affection,

esteem and sympathy (or their opposites), for the virtuous (or vicious)

agent. This "pleasurable good-will," when the moral judgment relates to

a man's own actions, becomes "the testimony of a good conscience--the

purest and most valuable of all human enjoyments." Reid is careful to

observe that this moral faculty is not "innate" except in germ; it

stands in need of "education, training, exercise (for which society is

indispensable), and habit," in order to the attainment of moral truth.

He does not with Price object to its being called the "moral sense,"

provided we understand by this a source not merely of feelings or

notions, but of "ultimate truths." Here he omits to notice the important

question whether the premises of moral reasoning are universal or

individual judgments; as to which the use of the term "sense" seems

rather to suggest the second alternative. Indeed, he seems himself quite

undecided on this question; since, though he generally represents

ethical method as deductive, he also speaks of the "original judgment

that this action is right and that wrong."

The truth is that the construction of a scientific method of ethics is a

matter of little practical moment to Reid. Thus, though he offers a list

of first principles, by deduction from which these common opinions may

be confirmed, he does not present it with any claim to completeness.

Besides maxims relating to virtue in general,--such as (1) that there is

a right and wrong in conduct, but (2) only in voluntary conduct, and

that we ought (3) to take pains to learn our duty, and (4) fortify

ourselves against temptations to deviate from it--Reid states five

fundamental axioms. The first of these is merely the principle of

rational self-love, "that we ought to prefer a greater to a lesser good,

though more distinct, and a less evil to a greater,"--the mention of

which seems rather inconsistent with Reid's distinct separation of the

"moral faculty" from "self-love." The third is merely the general rule

of benevolence stated in the somewhat vague Stoical formula, that "no

one is born for himself only." The fourth, again, is the merely formal

principle that "right and wrong must be the same to all in all

circumstances," which belongs equally to all systems of objective

morality; while the fifth prescribes the religious duty of "veneration

or submission to God." Thus, the only principle which ever appears to

offer definite guidance as to social duty is the second, "that so far as

the intention of nature appears in the constitution of man, we ought to

act according to that intention," the vagueness[38] of which is obvious.

(For Reid's views on moral freedom see A. Bain, _Mental Science_, pp.

422, seq.)

Dugald Stewart.

A similar incompleteness in the statement of moral principles is found

if we turn to Reid's disciple, Dugald Stewart, whose _Philosophy of the

Active and Moral Powers of Man_ (1828) contains the general view of

Butler and Reid, and to some extent that of Price,--expounded with more

fulness and precision, but without important original additions or

modifications. Stewart lays stress on the obligation of justice as

distinct from benevolence; but his definition of justice represents it

as essentially impartiality,--a virtue which (as was just now said of

Reid's fourth principle) must equally find a place in the utilitarian or

any other system that lays down universally applicable rules of

morality. Afterwards, however, Stewart distinguishes "integrity or

honesty" as a branch of justice concerned with the rights of other men,

which form the subject of "natural jurisprudence." In this department he

lays down the moral axiom "that the labourer is entitled to the fruit of

his own labour" as the principle on which complete rights of property

are founded; maintaining that occupancy alone would only confer a

transient right of possession during use. The only other principles

which he discusses are veracity and fidelity to promises, gratitude

being treated as a natural instinct prompting to a particular kind of

just actions.