Ethics

ETHICS

1. Definition and general account of the subject. —It is not easy to define in a single phrase the subject commonly called Ethics in such a manner as to meet with general acceptance; as its boundaries and relations to cognate subjects are variously conceived by writers of different schools, and rather indefinitely by mankind in general. Nor does the derivation of the term help us much. Ethics (ηθLκa) originally meant that which relates to ^0oς (“character ”); the treatise of Aristotle’s, however, to which the term was first applied, is not concerned with character considered simply as character, but with its good and bad qualities. Indeed, the antithesis of “good” and “bad,”in some form, is involved in all ethical affirmation; and its presence constitutes a fundamental distinction between the science or study of ethics and any department of physical inquiry. Physics is concerned with what is, has been, or will be; ethics with what is “good.” or what “ought to be,” and its opposite. We must add, however, that the good that ethics investigates is “good for man,” to distinguish it from universal or absolute good, which is the subject-matter of theology or ontology; and again, if we are to separate ethics from politics, we must introduce a further qualification, and define the former as the study of the Good or Wellbeing of men considered as individuals. Neither of these distinctions, however, should be taken to imply a complete division of subjects; and neither, it may be added, was reached at once and without effort in the development of ethical reflection. In Platonism we find Ethics and Ontology indissolubly blended; and, indeed, in almost every philosophical system in which the universe is contemplated as having an ultimate end or Good, the good of human beings is conceived as somehow closely related to this Universal Good. So again the connexion between Ethics and Politics is naturally very intimate. We only know the individual man as a member of some society; what we call his virtues are chiefly exhibited in his dealings with his fellows, and his most prominent pleasures are derived from intercourse with them; thus it is a paradox to maintain that man’s highest good is independent of his social relations, or of the constitution and condition of the community of which he forms a part. So, again, it w ould be generally admitted that a statesman ought to aim at promoting the wellbeing of his follow citizens considered as individuals; and if so, the investigation of the particulars of such wellbeing must be an integral part of politics. Still it is manifest that the good of an individual man can be separated as an object of study from the good of his community; so that the ethical point of view has to be distinguished from the political, however large a field the two studies may have in common,

When, however, we thus isolate in thought the individual man from his polity, the close connexion of Ethics with Psychology becomes manifest. It is plain that the chief good of man cannot consist in anything external and material, such as wealth; nor even in mere bodily health and wellbeing, which experience shows to be compatible with extreme badness and wretchedness. And though it is . perhaps true that goodness is commonly attributed to men from a consideration of the external effects of their conduct; still it is generally held that a certain state of the agent s mind, a certain quality of disposition, motive, intention, or purpose, is essential to the perfect moral goodness of an action. Thus all (or almost all) ethical schools would agree that the main object of their investigation must belong to the psychical side of human life; whether they hold that ultimate good is to be found in psychical existence regarded as merely sentient and emotional, identifying it with some species of desirable feeling or pleasure, or the genus or sum of such feelings, or whether they rather maintain that wellbeing of the mind must lie solely or chiefly in the quality of its activity. And when we attempt to work out either view into a clear and complete system, we are led inevitably to further psychological study, in order to examine different kinds and degrees of pleasure and pain, determine the nature and mutual relations of the different virtues or good qualities of character, and their opposites. So again, in discussing the fundamental question as to what is ultimately good or desirable, moralists are led to observe carefully what men actually do desire and aim at, and thus to analyse fully the process of voluntary action, as well as the emotional states that precede and prompt to it. In fact it will appear that all important ethical notions are also psychological; except the fundamental antithesis of “good” and “bad,” or “right” and “wrong,” with which psychology is not primarily concerned, any more than physics.

The two antitheses just mentioned are frequently regarded as identical. And in fact it does not matter for ordinary purposes whether we speak of “right” or “good” conduct, “wrong” or “bad” motives. The common notion of what is Good for a human being—even if we restrict it to what is“ultimately” good, or “good in itself” and not merely as a means to some further end—includes more than the common notion of what is Right for him, or his Duty. No doubt it is commonly believed that it will be ultimately best for a man to do his duty, and that this will promote his real Interest or Happiness; but it does not follow that the notions of duty and interest are to be identified, or even that the connexion between the tλvo may be scientifically demonstrated. The connexion is often regarded rather as a matter of faith; indeed many would hold that it is not undesirable that it should be somewhat obscure, in order that duty may be done as duty, and not from a mere calculation of self-love. Thus we arrive at another conception of ethics, in which it is viewed as concerned primarily with the principles of duty or the moral code, and only secondarily—or perhaps not at all—with the relation of duty to the agent’s private happiness. On this view the study connects itself with theology, if the rules of duty are regarded as a code of divine legislation; and apart from this reference it has a close affinity to rational or abstract jurisprudence. We might distinguish this as the modern view of ethics in contrast with the former, which was that of ancient Greek philosophy generally,—the transition between the two being due chiefly to the influence of Christianity, but partly also to that of Roman jurisprudence It is true that the thought of “the gods’ unwritten and unfaltering law” was not by any means absent from the moral reflection of Greece: still, the idea of Law was not taken as the ultimate and fundamental notion in any of the ancient ethical systems. These all proceed on the assumption that man, as a reasonable being, must seek his own highest good in this earthly life, and «therefore that any laws he has to obey must be demonstrated to be means to the attainment of this good, or particulars in which it is realized. On this point the change produced by Christianity is even more striking, if we consider its more general effects rather than its influence on the minds that were most completely penetrated by its religious spirit.

The true Christian saint lived even on earth, no less than the pagan philosopher, a life which he regarded as intrinsically preferable to all other modes of earthly existence; and, like the Platonic philosopher, a life of which practical virtue was not so much the essence as the outward expression. Still even for the saint this earthly life afforded but an imperfect foretaste of the bliss for which he hoped; and in the view of more ordinary Christians, the ultimate good of man vanished from the scrutiny of mere ethical speculation into the indefinite brightness of a future life of happiness, supernaturally bestowed by God as a reward for obedience to his laws. Or rather, perhaps, by the mass of Christians, the moral code was more commonly regarded, in still closer analogy to human legislation, as supported by penal sanctions; since in all ages of Christianity the fear of the pains of hell has probably been a more powerful motive to draw men from vice than the hope of the pleasures of heaven. On either view the ultimate weal or ill of human beings became something that might be imagined and rhetorically described, but not definitely known or scientifically investigated; and thus the subject-matter of ethics defined itself afresh as Moral Law, a body of rules absolutely prescribed, and supplying a complete guidance for human conduct, though not claiming to contain an exhaustive statement of human good.

Within the Christian church, through the early and middle ages of its history, it naturally fell to theologians to expound, and to priests to administer this code of divine legislation. But when a more philosophical treatment of ethics was introduced by the schoolmen, the combination in the code of two elements, one distinctively Christian, and the other cognizable by natural reason and binding on all men apart from revelation, began to be clearly seen; and an adequate theory of this second element seemed to be supplied by the development of theoretical jurisprudence that followed on the revival, in the 12th century, of the study of Roman law. In the later treatment of legal principles in Rome, the notion of a law of nature had become prominent; and this notion was naturally aud easily adapted to represent the element in morality that was independent of revelation. It is true that the natural law of the philosophical jurists did not concern itself primarily with duties, but rather with rights, and so with the relative and negative duties that are involved in the notion of rights; hence it could not properly be identified with more than a portion of the moral code. This portion, however, is of such fundamental importance that the difference we have noticed has been frequently overlooked, and Morality not distinguished from Natural Law, except by the further control that the former claims over the inner springs of voluntary action.

It is chiefly in connexion with this jural view of morality that the inquiry into the origin of the moral faculty has occupied a prominent place in the modern treatment of Ethics. So long as the “moral facιdty” is regarded merely as the faculty of knowing our true good, together with its main causes or conditions, it hardly seems important to inquire how this faculty originated, any more than it is for a geometer to investigate the origin of the spatial faculty. But when conscience is conceived as a legislator and governor within the breast, claiming absolute authority over all other impulses, it is natural that the legitimacy of its claim should be investigated; and it is not hard to understand how this legitimacy is thought to depend on the “originality” of the faculty—that is, on its being a part of the plan or type according to which human nature was originally constructed. Hence investigations into the moral condition of children and savages and even animals, and more or less conjectural theories of the soul’s growth aud development, have been commonly regarded as necessary appendages or introductions to modern ethical discussion.

So again, it is through the jural conception of ethics that the controversy on free will chiefly becomes important. Λ man does not naturally inquire whether he is “free” or not to seek his own good, provided only he knows what it is, and that it is attainable by voluntary action. But when his conduct is compared with a code to the violation of which punishments are attached, the question whether he really could obey the rule by which he is judged is obvious and inevitable, since if he could not, it seems contrary to our sense of justice to punish him.

To sum up, the subject of Ethics, most comprehensively understood, includes (1) an investigation of the constituents and conditions of the Good or Wellbeing of men considered individually, which chiefly takes the form of an examination into the general nature and particular species of (a) Virtue or (b) Pleasure, and the chief means of realizing these ends; (2) an investigation of the principles and most important details of Duty or the Moral. Law (so far as this is distinguished from Virtue); (3) some inquiry into the nature and origin of the Faculty by which duty is recognized; (4) some examination of the question of human Free Will. It is connected with Ontology or Theology, in so far as a Universal Good is recognized, inclusive of Human Good, or analogous to it; with Theology again, so far as morality is regarded as a Code of Divine appointment. It is connected with Politics, so far as the wellbeing of any individual man is bound up with the wellbeing of his society; and again with Jurisprudence (or Politics), so far as morality is identified with Natural Law. Finally, almost every branch of Ethical discussiou belongs at least in part to Psychology; and the inquiries into the origin of the moral faculty and the freedom of the Will are purely psychological.

We will now proceed to trace briefly the course of ethical speculation from its origin in Europe to the present day; confining our attention, during the latter part of this period, to such modes of thought as have been developed in England, or have exercised an important influence there.

II. Greek and Greco-Roman Ethics. —The ethical speculation of Greece, and therefore of Europe, has not, any more than other elements of European civilization, an abrupt and absolute commencement. The naïve and fragmentary utterances of sage precepts for conduct, in which nascent moral reflection everywhere first manifests itself, supply a noteworthy element of Greek literature in the “gnomic” poetry of the 7th and 6th centuries before Christ; their importance in the development of Greek civilization is strikingly characterized by the traditional enumeration of the “seven sages” of the 6th century; and their influence on ethical thought is sufficiently shown in the references that Plato and even Aristotle make to the definitions and maxims of poets and sages. But from such utterances as these to moral philosophy there was still a long step; for though Thales (circ. 640-560 B.C.), one of the seven, was also the first physical philosopher of Greece, we have no ground for supposing that his practical wisdom had anything of a philosophical character. There seems to have been more connexion between moral teaching and metaphysical speculation in the case of Pythagoras (cire. 580-500 b.c.), who is conspicuous among pre-Socratic philosophers as the _ founder not merely of a school, but rather of a sect or order, bound by a common rule of life. Certainly the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, that the essence of justice (conceived as equal retribution) was a square number, indicates a serious attempt to extend to the region of conduct that mathematical view of the universe which was the fundamental characteristic of Pythagoreanism; and the same may be said of their classification of good with unity, limit, straightness, light, &c., and of evil with the opposite qualities. Still, on the whole, the moral precepts of Pythagoras appear to have been announced much more in a dogmatic, or even prophetic, than in a philosophic manner; and, whether sound or arbitrary, to have been accepted by his disciples with a decidedly unphilosophic reverence for the “ipse dixit ’ ' of the master. Hence, whatever influence the Pythagorean blending of ethical and mathematical notions may have had on Plato, and, through him, on later thought, we cannot regard the school as having really forestalled the Socratic inquiry after a completely reasoned theory of conduct. The ethical element in the “dark” philosophizing of Heraclitus (circ. 530-470 b.c.) shows more profundity of view but still less approximation to a system; in spite of the partial anticipation of Stoicism which we find in his conceptions of a law of the universe, to which the wise man will carefully conform, and a divine harmony, in the recognition of which he will find his truest satisfaction. It is only when we come to Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates, the last of the series of original thinkers whom we distinguish as pre-Socratic, that we find anything which we can call an ethical system. The fragments that remain of the moral treatises of Democritus are sufficient, perhaps, to convince us that the turn of Greek philosophy in the direction of conduct, which was actually due to Socrates, would have taken place without him, though in a less decided manner; but when we compare the Democritean ethics with the post-Socratic system to which it has most affinity, Epicureanism, we find that it exhibits a very rudimentary apprehension of the formal conditions which moral teaching must fulfil before it can lay claim to be treated as scientific.

The fact is that a moral system could not satisfactorily be constructed until attention had been strongly directed to the vagueness and inconsistency of the common moral opinions of mankind; until this was done, the moral counsels of the philosopher, however supreme his contempt for the common herd, inevitably shared these defects. For this purpose was needed the concentration of a philosophic intellect of the first order on the problems of practice. In Socrates, for the first time, we find the required combination of a genuine ardour for knowledge, and a paramount interest in conduct. The pre-Socratic thinkers, from Thales downwards, were all primarily devoted to ontological research; but by the middle of the 5th century b.c. the clash and conflict of their dogmatic systems had led some of the keenest minds to doubt the possibility of penetrating the secret of the universe. This doubt found expression in the reasoned scepticism of Gorgias, and produced the famous doctrine of Protagoras, that the human apprehension is the only standard of what is and what is not. A similar view of the natural limits of the human intellect repelled the philosophic ardour of Socrates from physico-metapbysi-cal inquiries. In his case, moreover, such a view found support in a naive piety that indisposed him to search into things of which the gods seemed to have reserved the knowledge to themselves. The regulation of human action, on the other hand (except on occasions of special difficulty, for which omens and oracles might be vouchsafed), they had left to human reason; on this accordingly Socrates concentrated his efforts.

The demand for an art of conduct was not, however, original in Socrates, though his conception of the requisite knowledge was so in the highest degree. The thought of the most independent thinker is conditioned by that of his age; and we cannot disconnect the work of Socrates from the professional instruction in conduct which is so striking a phenomenon of this period of Greek civilization. The origination of this kind of teaching seems to have been due to the genius of Protagoras; whom we may suppose to have been turned, like Socrates, to the study of human affairs in consequence of his negative attitude towards current ontological speculation. This instruction, conveyed in well-thronged lectures, does not seem to have been based on any philosophical system, and was in fact of too popular a quality to be of much philosophical importance. It seems to have combined somewhat loosely the art of getting on in the world with the art of managing public affairs, and to have mingled encomiastic expositions of different virtues with prudential justifications of virtue, as a means of obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain. But however commonplace the teaching of the “sophists” may have been, the general fact of the appearance of this new profession to meet a new social need is sufficiently remarkable. How came it that after so many centuries, in which Greeks had used their moral notions with the confidence of perfect knowledge, and attributed to any cause rather thau ignorance the extensive failure of men to realize virtue, they should suddenly become persuaded that good conduct was something that could be learnt from lectures'? It must be borne in mind that in the Greek conception of virtue the moral view of life was not separated from the prudential; the aptτη which the sophists professed to communicate was not strictly virtue, as distinguished from other skills and gifts that sustain and enrich life. Thus while in this age, as in more modern times, most men would suppose that they had sufficient knowledge of justice and temperance, they would not be equally confident that they possessed the art of making the best of life generally. We must remember, too, the importance of the civic or public side of life, to a free-born leisured Greek in the small town communities of this age. The art of conduct as professed and taught to him would mean to a great extent the art of public life; indeed, Plato’s Protagoras defines his function to be that of teaching “civic excellence” in distinction from other skills (as that of flute-playing), which might also be included under the notion of οpeτη. It is more natural that a plain man should think scientific training necessary in dealing with affairs of state than in his own private concerns.

Still this emergence of an art of conduct with professional teachers cannot thoroughly be understood, unless it is viewed as a crowning result of a general tendency at this stage of Greek civilization to substitute technical skill for traditional procedure and empirically developed faculty. In the age of the sophists we find, wherever we turn, the same eager pursuit of knowledge, and the same eager effort to apply it directly to practice. The method of earthmeasurement was rapidly becoming a science; the astronomy of Meton was introducing precision into the computation of time; Hippodamus was revolutionizing architecture by building towns with straight broad streets; old-fashioned soldiers were grumbling at the new pedantries of “tactics” and “hoplitics;” the art of music had recently received a great technical development; and a still greater change had been effected in that training of the body which constituted the other half of ordinary Greek education. If bodily vigour was no longer to be left to nature and spontaneous exercise, but was to be attained by the systematic observance of rules laid down by professional trainers, it was natural to think that the same might be the case with mental excellences. The art of rhetoric, again, which was developed in Sicily in the second half of the fifth century, is a specially striking example of the general tendency we are here considering; and it is important to observe that the profession of rhetorician was commonly blended with that of sophist. Indeed throughout the age of Socrates sophists and philosophers were commonly regarded, by those who refused to recognize their higher claims, as teaching an “art of words” It is easy to see how this came about; when the demand of an art of conduct made itself felt, it was natural that the rhetoricians, skilled as they were in handling the accepted notions and principles of practice, should come forward to furnish the supply. Noris there any reason to regard them as conscious charlatans for so doing, any more than the professional journalist of our own day, whose position as a political instructor of mankind is commonly earned rather by a knack of merely writing than by any special depth of political wisdom. As Plato's Protagoras says, the sophists in professing to teach virtue only claimed to do somewhat better than others what all men are continually doing; and similarly we may say that, when tried by the touchstone of Socrates, they only exhibited somewhat more conspicuously than others the deficiencies which the great questioner found everywhere.

The charge that Socrates brought against the sophists and his fellow-men generally may be viewed in two aspects. On one side it looks quite artless and simple; on the other it is seen to herald a revolution in scientific method, and to contain the germ of a metaphysical system. Simply stated, the charge was that they talked about justice, temperance, law, <fcc., and yet could not tell what these things were; the accounts of them which they gave when pressed were, as Socrates forced them to admit, inconsistent with their own judgments on particular’ instances of justice, legality, &c. This “ignorance” of the real meaning of their terms was not, indeed, the only lack of knowledge that Socrates discovered in his contemporaries, but it was the chief, and it was in the exposure of this that , the philosophic importance of his work lay. For the famous “dialectic,” by which he brought this ignorance home to his interlocutors, at once exhibited the scientific need of exact definitions of general notions, and suggested that these definitions were tobe attained by a careful comparison of particulars. Thus, we can understand how, in Aristotle’s view, the main service of Socrates to philosophy consisted in “introducing induction and definitions.” This description, however, is both too technical and too positive to represent the naive and negative character of the Socratic dialectic. For that the results of these resistless arguments were mainly negative is plain from those (earlier) Platonic di ιlogues in which the impression of the real Socrates is to be found least modified. The pre-eminent “wisdom” which the Delphic oracle attributed to him was held by himself to consist in a unique consciousness of ignorance. And yet it is equally plain, even from Plato, that there was a most important positive element in the teaching of Socrates; had it been otherwise, the attempt of Xenophon to represent his discourses as directly edifying, and the veneration felt for him by the most dogmatic among subsequent schools of philosophy, would be quite inexplicable.

The union of these two elements in the work of Socrates has caused historians no little perplexity; and certainly we cannot quite save the philosopher’s consistency, unless we regard some of the doctrines attributed to him by Xenophon as merely tentative and provisional. Still the positions of Socrates that are most important in the history of ethical thought are not only easy to harmonize with his conviction of ignorance, but even render it easier to understand his unwearied cross-examination of common opinion. For the radical and most impressive article of his creed was constituted by his exalted estimate of this knowledge that was so hard to find, his conviction that ignorance of the good and evil in human life was the source of all practical error. If his habitual inquiries were met by the reply,

“We do know what justice and holiness are though we cannot say,” he would rejoin, “Whence, then, these perpetual disputes about what is just and holy ?” True knowledge, he urged, would settle these quarrels, ’and produce uniformity in men’s moral judgments and conduct. To us, no doubt, it seems an extravagant paradox to treat men’s ignorance of justice as the sole cause of unjust acts; and to the Greek mind also the view was paradoxical; but if we would understand the position, not of Socrates only, but of ancient ethical philosophy generally, we must try to realize that this paradox was also a nearly unanswerable deduction from a pair of truisms. That “every one wishes for his own good, and would get it it he could,” an arguer would hardly venture to question; and he would equally shrink from denying that justice and virtue generally were goods, and of all goods the finest. How then could he refuse to admit that “those who knew how to do just and righteous acts would prefer nothing else, while those who did not know could not do them if they would,” which would land him at once in the conclusion of S0crate3 that “all virtues were summed up in wisdom or knowledge of Good '' Observe that we are not to understand this “knowledge of good” as if it were knowledge of duty as distinct from interest. The force of the above argument depends upon a blending of duty and interest in the single notion of good. This blending Socrates did not, of course, invent—he found it in the common thought of his age; but it was the primary moral function of his dialectic to educe and exhibit it, to drive it home and trace its practical consequences. A resolute assertion of the coincidence of different elements of good, as commonly recognized, forms the kernel of the positive moral teaching that Xenophon attributes to him. He could give no account that satisfied him of good in the abstract; when pressed for one he evaded the questioners by saying that “he knew no good that was not good for something in particular but that good is con sistent with itself, that the beautiful is also profitable, the virtuoue also pleasant, he was always ready to prove in concrete cases. If he prized the wisdom that is virtue, the “good of the soul,” above all other goods, if in his unreserved devotion to the task of producing it in himself and others he endured the hardest penury, he steadily maintained that such life was richer in enjoyment than a life of luxury; if he faced death rather than violate the laws of his country, he was prepared with a complete proof that it was probably his interest to die.

This many-sidedness in his view of good is strikingly illustrated by the curious blending of elevated and vulgar sentiment which his utterances about friendship show. If goodness of soul is the “finest of goods,” a good friend must be the most valuable of external possessions; no effort is too great to keep or win such. Still, the good of friend ship must be shown in its utility; a friend who can be of no service is valueless; and this “service” Socrates on occasion interpreted in the most homely and practical sense. Still, the highest of services that friend can render to friend is moral improvement.

To sum up, then, we may describe the relation of Socrates to the common sense of his age as that of perpetual particular scepticism, combined with permanent general faith. He is always attacking common opinion, and showing it, from its inconsistencies, not to be knowledge; but the premises of his arguments are always taken from common opinion, and the knowledge which he seeks is something that will harmonize, not overthrow it This knowledge is not merely knowledge of Good, though that is the chief and crown of it; he is continually inquiring for definitions of all the notions that enter into practical reasonings, whether for the regulation of public or private conduct, and is unwearied in studying the rationale of even the most subordinate acts of life. In fact, he required of all men, whatever their special business might be, that they should know what they were doing and why,—should act on some clear and consistent theory; the requirement was startling to many, but to all philosophic souls it was not the less irresistible, because it was usually indirect The necessity, indeed, for firmness of purpose as well as clearness of insight he did not expressly recognize, but this quality was all the more conspicuously manifested in his life. Indeed, it was the very perfection in which he possessed this virtue that led him to the paradox of ignoring it. Of him3elf at least it waβ true, that whatever he believed to be “fair and good” he must necessarily do; when another acted apparently against knowledge, the easiest explanation seemed to him to be that true knowledge was not really there.

These, then, seem the historically important characteristics of the great founder of moral philosophy, if we take (as we must) his teaching and character together :—(1) an ardent inquiry for knowledge nowhere to be found, but which, if found, would perfect human conduct; (2) a demand meanwhile that men should act as far as possible on some consistent theory; (3) a provisional adhesion to the commonly received view of good, in all its incoherent complexity, and a perpetual readiness to maintain the unity of its different elements, and demonstrate the superiority of virtue by applying the commonest standard of self interest; (4) personal firmness, as apparently easy as it was actually invincible, in carrying out such practical convictions as he had attained. It is only when we keep all these points in view that we can understand how from the spring of Socratic conversation flowed the branching rivers of Greek ethical thought

Four distinct philosophical schools trace their immediate origin to the circle that gathered round Socrates—the Megarian, the Platonic, the Cynic, and the Cyrenaic. The impress of the master is manifest on all, in spite of f he wide differences that divided them; and they all agree in holding the most important possession of man to be wisdom or knowledge, and the most important knowledge to be knowledge of Good. Here, however, the agreement ends. The more philosophic part of the circle, forming a group in which Euclides of Megara seems at first to have taken the lead, regarded this Good as the object of a still unfulfilled quest; and setting out afresh in search of it, with a profound sense of its mystery, were led to identify it with the hidden secret of the universe, and thus to pass from ethics to metaphysics. Others again, whose demand for knowledge was more easily satisfied, and who were more impressed with the positive and practical side of the master’s teaching, made the quest a much simpler affair; in fact, they took the Good as already known, and held philosophy to consist in the steady application of this knowledge to conduct. Among these were Antisthenes the Cynic and Aristippus of Cyrene. It is by their unreserved recognition of the duty of living consistently by theory, their sense of the new value given to life through this rationalization, and their effort to maintain the easy, calm, unwavering firmness of the Socratic temper, that we recognize both Antisthenes and Aristippus a3 “Socratic men,” in spite of the completeness with which they divided their master’s positive doctrine into systems diametrically opposed. Of their contrasted principles we may perhaps say that, while Aristippus took the most obvious logical step for reducing the teaching of Socrates to clear dogmatic unity, Antisthenes certainly drew the most natural inference from the Socratic life.

Aristippus argued that, if all that is beautiful or admirable in conduct has this quality as being useful, i.e. i productive of some further good; if virtuous action is essentially action done with insight, or rational apprehension of the act as a means to this good; then surely this good can be but pleasure, which all living things with unperverted impulses seek, while they shun its opposite, pain. He further found a metaphysical basis for this conclusion in the doctrine to which the relativism of Protagoras led him, that we can know nothing of things without us except their impressions on ourselves. An immediate inference from this is the “smooth motion” of sense which we call pleasure, from whatever source it came, as the only cognizable good; no kind of pleasure being in itself better than any other, though some kinds were to be rejected for their painful consequences. Bodily pleasures and pains Aristippus held to be the keenest; though he does not seem to have maintained this on any materialistic theory, as he admitted the existence of purely mental pleasures, such as joy in the prosperity of our fatherland. He fully recognized that his good was transient, and only capable of being realized in successive parts; giving even exaggerated emphasis to the rule of seeking the pleasure of the moment, and not troubling oneself about a dubious future. It was in the calm, resolute, skilful culling of such pleasures as circumstances afforded from moment to moment, undisturbed by passion, prejudices, or superstition, that he conceived the quality of wisdom to be exhibited; and tradition represents him as realizing this ideal to an impressive degree. Among the prejudices from which the wise man was free he included all regard to customary morality beyond what was due to the actual penalties attached to its violation; though he held, with Socrates, that these penalties actually render conformity reasonable.

Far otherwise was the Socratic spirit understood by Antisthenes and the Cynics. They equally held that no speculative research was needed for the discovery and definition of Good and Virtue; but they maintained that the Socratic wisdom, on the exercise of which man’s wellbeing depended, was exhibited, not in the skilful pursuit, but in the rational disregard of pleasure,—in the clear apprehension of the intrinsic worthlessness of this and most other objects of men’s common aims. Antisthenes, indeed, did not overlook the need of supplementing merely intellectual insight by “Socratic force of soul;” but it seemed to him that, by insight and invincible self-mastery combined, an absolute spiritual independence might be attained which left nothing wanting for perfect wellbeing. What, indeed, could be wanting to the free rational soul, when imaginary needs, illusory desires, and idle prejudices were all discarded. For as for poverty, painful toil, disrepute, and such evils as men dread most, these, he argued, were positively useful as means of progress in spiritual freedom and virtue. The eccentricities with which his disciple Diogenes flaunted and revelled in this freedom have made him one of the most familiar figures of ancient social history, and one which in its very extravagance gives a vivid impression of that element in the Socratic pattern which it involuntarily caricatures. Vainly, however, do we seek a definite positive import for the Cynic notion of wisdom or moral insight, besides the mere negation of irrational desires and prejudices. We saw that Socrates, while not claiming to have found the abstract theory of Good or Wise conduct, practically understood it to consist in the faithful performance of customary duties, maintaining always that his own happiness was therewith bound up. The Cynics more boldly discarded both pleasure and mere custom as alike irrational; but in so doing they left the freed reason with no definite aim but its own freedom. It is absurd, as Plato urged, to say that knowledge is the good, and then when asked “knowledge of what?” to have nothing positive to reply but “of the good ,” but the Cynics do not seem to have made any serious effort to escape from this absurdity.

The ultimate views of these two one-sided Socraticisms we shall have to notice presently when we come to the post Aristotelian schools. We must now proceed to the more complicated task of tracing the fuller development of the Socratic germ to its Platonic blossom and Aristotelian fruit. We can see that the influence of more than one of the earlier metaphysical schools combined with that of Socrates to produce the famous idealism which subsequent genera tions have learnt from Plato’s dialogues; but the precise extent and manner in which each element co-operated is difficult even to conjecture Here, however, we may con sider Plato’s views merely in their relation to the teaching of Socrates, since to the latter is certainly due the ethical aspect of idealism with which we are at present concerned.

The ethics of Plato cannot properly be treated as a finished result, but rather as a continual movement from the position of Socrates towards the more complete and articulate system ot Aristotle; except that there is a mystical element at the core of Plato's teaching which finds no counterpaιt in Aristotle, and in fact disappears from Greek philosophy soon after Plato's death until it finds a partial revival and fantastic development in Neo Pythagoreamsm and Neo Platonism, The first stage at which we can distinguish Plato’s ethical view from that of Socrates is presented in the Protagoras, where he makes a serious, though clearly tenta tιve, effort to define the object of that knowledge which he regards, with his master, as the essence of all virtue. This science, he here maintains, is really mensuration of pleasures and pains, by which the wise man avoids those mistaken under-estimates of the value of future feelings in comparison with present which we commonly call “yielding to fear or desire.” This thorough going hedonism has somewhat per plexed Plato’s readers; but (as was said in speaking of the similar view of the Cyrenaics), when a disciple sought to make clear and definite the essentially Socratic doctrine that the different common notions of good,—the beauti ful, the pleasant, and the useful,—were to be somehow identified and interpreted by each other, hedonism presented itself as the most obvious conclusion. By Plato, however, this conclusion could only have been held before he had accomplished the movement of thought by which he carried the Socratic method beyond the range of human conduct, and developed it into a metaphysical system.

This movement may be briefly expressed thus. “If we know,” said Socrates, “what justice is, we can give an account or definition of it;” true knowledge—to put it more technically—must be knowledge of the general fact, common to all the individual cases to which we apply our general notion. But why should we restrict this notion within the range of human conduct? The same relation of general notions to particular examples extends through the whole physical universe; we can only think and talk of it by means of such notions, lt must be equally true every where that true or scientific knowledge is general know ledge, relating, not to individuals primarily, but to the general facts or qualities which individuals exemplify; in fact, our notion of an individual, when examined, is found to be an aggregate of such general qualities. But, again, the object of true knowledge must be what really exists: hence the most real reality, the essence of the universe, must lie in these general facts, and not in the individuals that exemplify them.

So far the steps are plain enough , but we do not yet see how this logical Realism (as it was afterwards called) comes to have the essentially ethical character that especially interests us in Platonism. For though Plato’s philosophy is now concerned with the whole universe of being, the ultimate object of his philosophic contemplation is still “the good,” now conceived as the ultimate ground of all being and knowledge. That is, the essence of the universe is identified with its end,—the “formal” with the “final” cause of things, to use the later Aristotelian phraseology How comes this about?

Perhaps we may best explain this by recurring to the original application of the Socratic method to human affairs. S ..ce all rational activity is for some end, the different arts or functions into which human industry is divided are naturally defined by a statement of their ends or uses; and similarly, in giving an account of the different artists and functionaries, we necessarily state their end, “what they are good for” It is only so far as they realize this end that they are what we call them. A painter who cannot paint is, as we say, “no painter;” or, to take a favourite Socratic illustration, a ruler is essentially one who realizes the wellbeing of the ruled; if he fails to do this, he is not, properly speaking, a ruler at all. And in a society well-ordered on Socratic principles, every human being would be put to some use; the essence of his life would consist in doing what he was good for. But again it is easy to extend this view throughout the whole region of organized life; an eye that does not attain its end by seeing is with out the essence of an eye. In short, we may say of all organs and instruments that they are what we think them in proportion as they fulfil their function and attain their end · if, then, we conceive the whole universe organically, as a complex arrangement of means to ends, we shall understand bow Plato might hold that all things really were, or (as we say) “realized their idea,” in proportion as they accomplished the special end or good for which they were adapted. Even Socrates, in spite of his aversion to physics, was led by pious reflection to expound a teleological view of the physical world, as subservient in all its parts to divine ends , and in the metaphysical turn which Plato gave to this view, he was probably anticipated by Euclides of Megara, who held that the one real being is “that which we call by many names, Good, Wisdom, Reason, or God;” to which Plato, raising to a loftier significance the Socratic identification of the beautiful with the useful, added the further name of absolute Beauty.

Let us conceive, then, that Plato has taken this vast stride of thought, and identified the ultimate notions of ethics and ontology We have now to see what attitude this will lead him to adopt towards the practical inquiries from which he started. What will now be his view of wisdom, virtue, pleasure, and their relation to human wellbeing?

The answer to this question is inevitably somewhat complicated. In the first place we have to observe that philosophy has now passed definitely from the marketplace into the study or lecture-room. The quest of Socrates was for the true art of conduct for an ordinary member of the human society, a man living a practical life among his fellows. But if the objects of abstract thought constitute the real world, of which this world of individual things is but a shadow, it is plain that the highest, most real life must lie in the former region and not in the latter. We thus reach the paradox that Plato enforced in more than one of his most impressive dialogues, that the true art of living is really an “art of dying” as far as possible to mere sense, in order more fully to exist in intimate union with absolute goodness and beauty. On the other hand, iu so far as this philosophic abstraction from ordinary human interests can never be complete, since the philosopher must still live and act in the concrete sensible world, the Socratic identification of wisdom and virtue is fully maintained by Plato. Only he who apprehends good in the abstract can imitate it in such transient and imperfect good as admits of being realized in human life, and it is impossible, having this knowledge, that he should not act on it, whether in private or public affairs. Thus, in the true philosopher, we shall necessarily find the practically good man, he who being “likest of men to the gods is best loved by them;” and also the perfect statesman, if only the conditions of his society allow him a sphere for exercising his statesmanship.

When we come to examine the characteristics of this practical goodness, we find that they correspond to the fundamental conceptions in Plato’s view of the universe. We have seen that he conceives the world of being as—(1) essentially ideal and knowable; (2) organized and fitted for realization of good. Accordingly the soul of man, in its good or normal condition, must be (1) wise or knowing, (2) ordered, regulated, and harmonized. The' question then arises, “Wherein does this order or harmony precisely consist?” In explaining how Plato was led to answer this question, it will be well to notice that, while faithfully maintaining the Socratic doctrine that the highest virtue wa3 inseparable from knowledge of the good, he had come, as his conception of this knowledge deepened and expanded, to recognize an inferior kind of virtue, possessed by men who were not philosophers. It is plain that if the good that is to be known is the ultimate ground of the whole of things, so that the knowledge of it includes all other knowledge, it is only attainable by a select and carefully trained few, and we can hardly restrict all virtue to these alone. What account, then, was to be given of ordinary “civic” bravery, temperance, and justice? It seemed clear that men who did their duty, resisting the seductions of fear and desire, must have right opinions, if not knowledge, as to the good and evil in human life; but whence comes this right “opinion?” Partly, Plato said, it comes by nature and “divine allotment,” but for its adequate development “custom and practice” are required. Hence the paramount importance of education and discipline for civic virtue; and even for future philosophers such moral culture, in which physical and aesthetic training must co-operate, is an indispensable prerequisite; no merely intellectual preparation will suffice. What, then, is the precise effect of this culture if it does not merely develop the intellect? A distinct step in psychological analysis was taken when Plato recognized that itseffect was to produce the “harmony” above mentioned among different parts of the soul, by subordinating the impulsive elements to reason. These impulsive elements he further distinguished as appetitive and combative, founding on this triple division of the soul a systematic view of the four kinds of goodness chiefly recognized by the common moral consciousness of Greece, and in later times known as the cardinal virtues. Of these the two most fundamental were (as has been already indicated) wisdom—in its highest form philosophy—and that harmonious regulation of psychical impulses and activities which Plato gives as the essence of δικαtocrυTy. This term in ordinary use had a wider meaning than our “justice,” and might without much straining denote uprightness in social relations generally. Still its import is essentially social; and we can only explain Plato’s use of it by reference to the analogy which his analysis of the soul led him to draw between the individual man and the community. For in this latter also he regarded the regulative and combative elements as naturally distinct from the common herd, who are concerned with merely material interests; so that social and individual wellbeing would depend on the same harmonious action of diverse elements, which in its social application is more naturally termed δικαιοσνη;. We see that these two fundamental virtues are mutually involved. Wisdom will necessarily maintain orderly activity, and this latter consists in regulation by wisdom, while the two more special virtues of courage and temperance (σωφpoσ√vτ∕) are only different sides or aspects of this wisely regulated action of the complex soul. We may observe that this fourfold division of virtue was generally accepted in ethical discussion after Plato; though the notions were somewhat differently defined by different thinkers, and the peculiar Platonic interpretation of justice for the most part abandoned.

Such, then, are the forms in which essential good seemed to manifest itself in human life; it remains to ask whether the statement of these gives a complete account of human wellbeing, or whether pleasure is also to be included. On this point Plato’s view seems to have gone through several oscillations. After apparently maintaining (Protagoras) that pleasure is the good, he passes first to the opposite extreme, and denies it (Phaido, Gorgias) to be a good at all. Not only is it, as concrete and transient, obviously not the real essential good that the philosopher seeks; it is found further that the feelings most prominently recognized as pleasures are bound up with pain, as good can never be with evil; since they are the mere satisfaction of painful wants and cease with the removal of these; in so far, then, as common sense rightly recognizes some pleasures as good, it can only be from their tendency to produce some further good. This view, however, was too violent a divergence from Socratism for Plato to remain in it. That pleasure is not the real absolute good, was no ground for not including it in the good of concrete human life; and after all it was only coarse and vulgar pleasures that were indissolubly linked to the pains of want. Accordingly, in the Republic he has no objection to try the question of the intrinsic superiority of philosophic or virtuous life by the standard of pleasure; arguing that the philosophic (or good) man alone enjoys real pleasure, while the sensualist spends his life in oscillating between painful want and the merely neutral state of painlessness, which he mistakes for positive pleasure. In the Philebus, however, though a more careful psychological analysis leads him to soften down the exaggerations of this attack on sensual pleasure, the antithesis, of knowledge and pleasure is again sharpened, and a desire to depreciate even good pleasures is more strongly shown; still even here pleasure is recognized as a constituent of that philosophic life which is the highest human good, while in the Laws, where the subject is more popularly treated, it is admitted that we cannot convince man that the just life is the best unless we can also prove it to be the pleasantest.

When a student passes from Plato to Aristotle, he is so forcibly impressed by the contrast between the habits of mind of the two authors and their manners of literary expression, that it is easy to understand how their systems have come to be popularly conceived as diametrically opposed to each other; and the uncompromising polemic which Aristotle, both in his ethical and his metaphysical treatises, directs against Plato and the Platonists, has tended strongly to confirm this view. Yet a closer inspection shows us that when a later president of the Academy (Antiochus of Ascalon) repudiated the scepticism which for two hundred years had been accepted as the traditional Platonic doctrine, he had good grounds for claiming Plato and Aristotle as coincident authorities for the ethical position which he took up. The truth is that, though Aristotle’s divergence from Plato is very conspicuous when we consider either his general conception of the subject of ethics, or the scientific working out of his system of virtues, still his agreement with his master is almost complete as regards the main outline of his theory of human good; the difference between the two practically vanishes when we view them in relation to the later controversy between Stoics and Epicureans. Even on the cardinal point on which Aristotle entered into direct controversy with Plato, the definite disagreement between the two is less than at first appears; the objections of the disciple hit that part of the master’s system that was rather imagined than thought; the positive result of Platonic speculation only gains in distinctness by the application of Aristotelian analysis.

Plato, we saw, held that there is one supreme science or wisdom, of which the ultimate object is absolute good; in the knowledge of this, the knowledge of all particular goods,— that is, of all that we rationally desire to know,—is im plicitly contained; and also all practical virtue, as no one who truly knows what is good can fail to realize it. But in spite of the intense conviction with which he thus identified metaphysical speculation and practical wisdom, we find in his writings no serious attempt to deduce the particulars of human wellbeing from his knowledge of absolute good, still less to unfold from it the particular cognitions of the special arts and sciences. Indeed, we may say that the distinction which Aristotle explicitly draws between speculative science or wisdom, which is concerned with the eternal and immutable truths of being, and practical wisdom (on its political side statesmanship), which has for its object “human” or “practicable” good, is really indicated in Plato’s actual treatment of the subjects, although the express recognition of it is contrary to his principles. The discussion of good (e.g.) in his Philebus relates entirely to human good, and the respective claims of Thought and Pleasure to constitute this; he only refers in passing to the Divine Thought that is the good of the ordered world, as something clearly beyond the limits of the present discussion. So again, in his last great ethico-political treatise (the Laws) there is hardly a trace of his peculiar metaphysics; it is from the union of practical wisdom (τo <bpovciv)— not philosophy—with power that the realiza tion of the ideal state is now expected. On the other hand, the relation between human and divine good, as presented by Aristotle, is so close that we can hardly conceive Plato ⅛s having definitely thought it closer. The substantial good of the universe, in Aristotle’s view, is the pure activity of universal abstract thought, at once subject and object, which, itself changeless and eternal, is the final cause and first source of the whole process of change in the concrete world. And he holds, with Plato, that a similar activity of pure speculative intellect is the highest and best mode of human existence, and that in which the philosopher will seek to exist as far as possible; though he must, being a man, concern himself with the affairs of ordinary human life, in which region his highest good will be attained by realizing perfect moral excellence. No doubt Aristotle’s demonstration of the inappropriateness of attributing moral excellence to the Deity seems to contradict Plato’s doctrine that the just man as such is “likest the gods;” but here again the discrepancy is reduced when we remember that the essence of Plato’s justice (δικαιοσύνη) is harmonious activity. Nor, again, is Aristotle’s divergence from the Socratic principle that all “virtue is knowledge” substantially greater than Plato’s. Both accept the paradox in the qualified sense that no one can deliberately act contrary to what appears to him good, and that perfect virtue is inseparably bound up with perfect wisdom or moral insight. Both, however, see that this moral, insight is not to be imparted by mere teaching, but depends rather on careful training in good habits applied to minds of good natural dispositions; though the doctrine has no doubt a more definite and prominent place in Aristotle’s system. In the same way the latter draws more clearly, and develops more fully, the distinction between impulsive offences and the deliberate choice of evil for good which belongs to confirmed vice; which is, however, implied in Plato’s later recognition (in the Sophista) of “disorder v of the soul as a kind of badness essentially different from ignorance. The disciple, no doubt, takes a step in advance by stating definitely, as an essential characteristic of virtuous action, that it is chosen for its own sake, for the beauty of virtue alone; but herein he merely formulates the conviction that his master more persuasively inspires. Nor, finally, does Aristotle’s account of the ιelation of pleasure to human wellbeing differ materially from the outcome of Plato’s thought on this point, as the later dialogues present it to us; although he has to combat the extreme anti-hedonism to which the Platonic school under Speusippus had been led. Pleasure, in Aristotle’s view, is not the essence of wellbeing, but rather an inseparable accident of it; human wellbeing is essentially well doing, excellent activity of some kind, whether its aim and end be abstract truth or noble conduct; but all activities are attended and in a manner perfected by pleasure, which is better and more desirable in proportion to the excellence of the activity. He no doubt criticises Plato’s account of the nature of pleasure, arguing that we cannot properly conceive pleasure either as a “process” or as “replenishment ”—the last term, he truly says, denotes a material rather than a psychical fact; but this does not interfere with the general ethical agreement betw een the two; and the doctrine that vicious pleasures are uot true or real pleasures is so characteristically Platonic that we are almost surprised to find it in Aristotle.

In so far as there is any important difference between the Platonic and the Aristotelian views of human good, we may observe that the latter is substantially the more faithful development of the ethical teaching of Socrates, although it is presented in a far more technical and scholastic form, and involves a more distinct rejection of the fundamental Socratic paradox. The same result appears when we compare the methods of the three philosophers. Although the Socratic induction forms a striking feature of Plato’s dialogues, his ideal method of ethics is purely deductive; he only admits common sense as supplying provisional steps and starting points from which the mind is to ascend to knowledge of absolute good; by deduction from which, as he conceives, the lower notions of particular goods are to be truly apprehended. Aristotle, discarding the transcendentalism of Plato, naturally receded towards the original Socratic method of induction from and verification by common opinion. Indeed, the turns and windings of his exposition are best understood if we consider his literary manner as a kind of Socratic dialogue formalized and reduced to a monologue—transferred, we may say, from the marketplace to the lecture-room. He first leads us by an indue-tion to the fundamental notion of ultimate end or good for man. All men, in acting, aim at some result, either for its own sake or as a means to some further end; but obviously everything cannot be sought merely as a means; there must therefore be some ultimate end In fact men commonly recognize such an end, and agree to call it well being (ευδαι∕coι√α); but they take very different views of its nature. How, then, shall we find the true view Î Another genuinely Socratic induction leads us to this. We observe that men are classified and named according to their functions; all kinds of man, and indeed all organs of man, have their special functions, and are judged as functionaries and organs to be in good or bad condition according as they perform their functions well or ill. May we not then infer that man, as man, has his proper function, and that the wellbeing or “doing well” that all seek really lies in fulfilling well the proper function of man,—that is, in living well that life of the rational soul which we recog nize as man’s distinctive attribute?

Again, this Socratic deference to common opinion is not merely shown in the way by which Aristotle reaches his fundamental conception; it equally appears in his treatment of the conception itself. In the first place, though in Aristotle’s view the most perfect wellbeing consists in the exercise of man’s “dιvinest part,” pure speculative reason, he keeps far from the paradox of putting forward this and nothing else as human good; so far, indeed, that the greater part of his treatise is occupied with an exposition of the inferior good which is realized in practical life when the appetitive or impulsive (semi-rational) element of the soul operates under the due regulation of reason. Even when the notion of “good performance of function” was thus widened, and when it had further taken in the pleasure that is inseparably connected with such function ing, it did not yet correspond to the whole of what a Greek commonly understood as “humau wellbeing;” though, in order to make it fit better, Aristotle emphasizes more than we should have expected the necessity of worldly goods for the realization of such virtues as liberality, justice, &c There still remain other goods, such as beauty, good birth, welfare of posterity, &c., the presence oι absence of which influenced the common view of a man’s wellbeing, though they could not be shown to be even indirectly important to his “well-acting.” These Aristotle neither attempts to exclude from the philosophic conception of wellbeing nor to include in his formal definition of it. The deliberate locseuess which is thus given to his fundamental doctrine characterizes more or less his whole discussion of ethics. He plainly says that the subject does not admit of completely scientific treatment; his aim is to give not a perfectly definite theory of human good, but a practically adequate account of its most important constituents.

The most important characteristics, then, of wellbeing or good life for ordinary men are represented by the notions of the different moral excellences. In expounding these, Aristotle gives throughout the pure result of analytical observation of the common moral consciousness of his age. Ethical truth, in his view, is to be attained by induction from particular moral opinions, just as physical truth is to be obtained by induction from particular physical observa tions. On account of the conflict of opinion in ethics we cannot hope to obtain perfect clearness and certainty upon all questions; still reflection will lead us to discard some of the conflicting views and find a reconciliation for others, and will furnish, on the whole, a practically sufficient residuum of moral truth. In many respects this adhesion to common sense involves a sacrifice of both depth and completeness in Aristotle’s system. His virtues are not arranged on any clear philosophic plan; the list shows no serious attempt to consider human life exhaustively, and exhibit the standard of excellence appropriate to its different departments or aspects. He seems to have taken as a starting point Plato’s four cardinal virtues. The two comprehensive notions of Wisdom and Justice (δικαtoσυn∕) he treats separately. As regards both his analysis leads him to diverge considerably from Plato. As we saw, his distinction between practical and speculative Wisdom belongs to the deepest of his disagreements with his master; and in the case of δικαιoσυr77 again he distinguishes the wider use of the term to express Law-observance, which (he says) coincides with the social side of virtue generally, and its narrower use for the virtue that “aims at a kind of equality,” whether (I) in the distribution of wealth, honour, &c., or (2) in commercial exchange, or (3) in the reparation of wrong done. Then, in arranging the other special virtues, he begins with courage and temperance, which (after Plato) he considers as the excellences of the “irrational element” of the soul. Next follow two pairs of excellences, concerned respectively with wealth and honour :—(1) liberality and magnificence, of which the latter is exhibited in great.r matters of expenditure, and (2) laudable ambition and high mindedness similarly related to honour. Then comes gentleness—the virtue regulative of anger; and the list is concluded by the excellences of social intercourse, friendliness (as a mean between obsequiousness and surliness), truthfulness, and decorous wit.

The abundant store of just and close analytical observation contained in Aristotle’s account of these notions give it a permanent interest, even beyond its historical value as a delineation of the Greek ideal of “fair and good” life. But its looseness of arrangement and almost grotesque co-ordination of qualities widely differing in importance are obvious; and Aristotle’s restriction of the sphere of courage to dangers in war, and of that of temperance to certain bodily pleasures, as well as his non distinction of selfish and benevolent expenditure in describing liberality, illustrate the fragmentariness and superficiality of treatment to which mere analysis of the common u^age of ethical terms is always liable to lead. Nor is his famous general formula for virtue, that it is a mean or middle state, always to be found somewhere between the vices which stand to it in the relation of excess and defect, of much avail in rendering his treatment more systematic. It was important, no doubt, to express the need of limitation and regulation, of observing due measure and proportion, in order to attain good results in human life no less than in artistic products; but the observation of this need was no new thing in Greek literature; indeed, it had already led the Pythagoreans and Plato to find the ultimate essence of the ordered universe in number. But Aristotle’s purely quantitative statement of the relation of virtue and vice is misleading, even where it is not obviously inappropriate; and sometimes leads him to such eccentricities as that of making simple veracity a mean between boastfulness and mock-modesty. *

It ought to be said that Aristotle does not present the formula just discussed as supplying a criterion of good conduct in any particular case; he expressly leaves this to be determined by “correct reasoning, and the judgment of the practically wise man.” We cannot, however, find that he has furnished any substantial principles for its determination; indeed, he hardly seems to have formed a distinct general idea of the practical syllogism by which he conceives it to be effected. And, indeed, it would not have been easy for him to make this point plain, without bringing into prominence a profound discrepancy between his own view of rational action and the common opinion and practice of mankind. The kind of reasoning which his view of virtuous conduct requires is one in which the ultimate major premise states a distinctive characteristic of some virtue, and one or more minor premises show that such characteristic belongs to a certain mode of conduct under given circumstances; since it is essential to good conduct that it should contain its end in itself, and be chosen for its own sake. But he has not failed to observe that practical reasonings are not commonly of this kind, but are rather concerned with actions as means to ulterior ends; indeed, he lays stress on this as a characteristic of the “political” life, when he wishes to prove its inferiority to the life of pure speculation. Though common sense will admit that virtues are the best of goods, it still undoubtedly conceives practical wisdom as chiefly exercised in providing those inferior goods which Aristotle, after recognizing the need or use of them for the realization of human wellbeing, has dropped out of sight; and the result is that, in trying to make clear his conception of practical wisdom, we find ourselves fluctuating continually between the common notion, which he does not distinctly reject, and the notion required as the keystone of his ethical system.

On the whole, there is probably no treatise so masterly as Aristotle’s Ethics, and containing so much close and valid thought, that yet leaves on the reader’s mind so strong an impression of dispersive and incomplete work. It is only by dwelling on these defects that we can understand the small amount of influence that his system exercised during the five centuries after his death, in which the schools sprung from Socrates were still predominant in Graeco Roman culture; as compared with the effect which it has had, directly or indirectly, in shaping the thought of modern Europe. Partly, no doubt, the limited influence of the “Peripatetics" (as Aristotle’s disciples were called) is to be attributed to that exaltation of the purely speculative life which distinguished the Aristotelian ethics from other later systems, and which was too alien from the common moral consciousness to find much acceptance in an age in which the ethical alms of philosophy had again become paramount. Partly, again, the analytical distinctness of Aristotle’s manner brings into special prominence the difficulties that attend the Socratic effort, to reconcile the ideal aspirations of men, and the principles on which they agree to distribute mutual praise and blame, with the principles on which their practical reasonings are commonly conducted. The conflict between these two elements of Common Sense was too profound to be compromised; and the moral consciousness of mankind demanded a more trenchant partisanship than Aristotle’s.

Its demands were met by a school which separated the moral from the worldly view of life, with an absoluteness and definiteness that caught the imagination; which regarded practical goodness as the highest result and manifestation of its ideal of wisdom; and which bound the common notions of duty into an apparently complete and coherent system, by a formula that comprehended the whole of human life, and exhibited its relation to the ordered process of the universe. This school was always known as the “Stoic,” from the portico (στοά) in which its founder Zeno used to teach. The intellectual descent of its ethical doctrines is principally to be traced to Socrates through the Cynics, though an important element in them seems attributable to the school that inherited the “Academy” of Plato. Both Stoic and Cynic maintained, in its sharpest form, the fundamental tenet that the practical knowledge which is virtue, with the condition of soul that is inseparable from it, is alone to be accounted good. He who exercises this wisdom or knowledge has complete wellbeing; all else is indifferent to him. It is true that the Cynics were more concerned to emphasize the negative side of the sage’s wellbeing, its independence of bodily health and strength, beauty, pleasure, wealth, good birth, good fame; while the Stoics brought into more prominence its positive side, the magnanimous confidence, the tranquillity undisturbed by grief, the joy and good cheer of the spirit, which inseparably attended the possession of wisdom. This difference, however, did not amount to disagreement. The Stoics, in fact, sθem generally to have regarded the eccentricities of Cynicism as an emphatic manner of expressing the essential antithesis between philosophy and tbe world; a manner which, though not necessary or even normal, might yet be advantageously adopted by the sage under certain circumstances.

Wherein, then, does this knowledge or wisdom that makes tree and perfect consist Ί Both Cynics and Stoics agreed that the most important part of it, that which constituted the fundamental distinction between the wise and the unwise, was the knowledge that the sole good of man lay in this knowledge or wisdom itself. It must be understood that by wisdom they meant wisdom realized in act; indeed, they did not conceive the existence of wisdom as separable from such realization. We may observe, too, that the Stoics rejected the divergence which we have seen gradually taking place in Platonic-Aristotelian thought from the position of Socrates, “that no one aims at wlιat he knows to be bad."’ The stress that their psychology laid on the essential unity of the rational self that is the source of voluntary action, prevented them from accepting Plato’s analysis of the soul into a regulative element and elements needing regulation. They held that what we call passion, so far as it governs the voluntary action of a reasoning being, must always be erroneous judgment as to what is to be sought or shunned. From such passions or errors the truly wise man will be free. He will of course be conscious of tbe solicitations of physical appetite; but he will not be misled into supposing that its object is really a good; he cannot, therefore, hope for the attainment of this object or fear to miss it, a⅛ these states involve the conception of it as a good. Similarly, though he will be subject like other men to bodily pain, this will not cause him mental grief or disquiet, as his worst agonies will not disturb his clear conviction that it is really indifferent to his true reasonable self. And so of all other objects that commonly excite men’s hope, fear, joy, or grief, they cannot produce these states in the sage, because he cannot judge them tobe good or bad. That this impassive sage was a being not to be found among living men the later Stoics at least were fully aware. They faintly suggested that one or two moral heroes of old time might have realized the ideal, but they admitted that all other philosophers (even) were merely in a state of progress towards it. This admission did not in the least diminish the rigour of their demand for absolute loyalty to the exclusive claims of wisdom. The assurance of its own unique value that such wisdom involved they held to be an abiding possession for those who had attained it; and without this assurance no act could be truly wise or virtuous. Whatever was not of knowledge was of sin; and the distinction between right and wrong being absolute and not admitting of degrees, all sins were equally sinful; whoever broke the least commandment was guilty of the whole law. Similarly, in any one of the manifestations of wisdom, commonly distinguished as particular virtues, all wisdom was somehow involved; though whether these virtues were specifically distinct, or only the same knowledge in different relations, was a subtle question on which the Stoics do not seem to have been agreed.

Was, then, this rare and priceless knowledge something which it was possible for man to attain, or were human shortcomings really involuntary? There is an obvious danger to moral responsibility involved in the doctrine that vice is involuntary; which yet seems a natural inference from the Socratic identification of knowledge with virtue. Hence Aristotle had already been Jed to attempt a refutation of this doctrine; but his attempt had only shown the profound difficulty of attacking the paradox, so long as it was admitted that no one could of deliberate purpose act contrary to what seemed to him best. Now, Aristotle’s divergence from Socrates had not led him so far as to deny this; while for the Stoics who had receded to the original Socratic position, the difficulty was still more patent. In fact, a philosopher who maintains that virtue is essentially knowledge has to choose between alternative paradoxes: he must either allow vice to be involuntary, or affirm ignorance to be voluntary. The latter horn of the dilemma is at any rate the less dangerous to morality, and as such the Stoics chose it. But they were not yet at the end of their perplexities; for while they were thus driven on one line of thought to an extreme extension of the range of human volition, their view of the physical universe involved an equally thorough going determinism. How could the vicious man be responsible if his vice were strictly predetermined? The Stoics answered that the error which was the essence of vice was so far voluntary that it could be avoided if men chose to exercise their reason; no doubt it depended ou the innate force and firmness of a man’s soul whether his reason was thus effectually exercised; but moral responsibility was saved if the vicious act proceeded from the man himself and not from any external cause.

With all this we have got little way towards ascertaining the positive practical content of this wisdom. How are we to emerge from the barren circle of affirming (1) that wisdom is the sole good and unwisdom the sole evil, and (2) that wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil; and attain some method for determining the particulars of good conduct? Both Cynicism and Stoicism stood in need of such a method to complete their doctrine, since neither school was prepared to maintain that what the sage does is indifferent (no less than what befalls him), provided only he does it with a full conviction of its indifference. The Cynics, however, seem to have made no philosophical provision for this need; they were content to mean by virtue what any plain man meant by it, except in so far as their sense of independence led them to reject certain received precepts and prejudices. The Stoics, on the other hand, not only worked out a detailed system of duties—or, as they termed them, “things meet and fit” (καθήκοντα) for all occasions of life; they were further especially concerned to comprehend them under a general formula. They found this by bringing out the positive significance of the notion of Nature, which the Cynic had used chiefly in a negative way, as an antithesis to the “consentions” (νόμος), from which his knowledge had made him free. Even in this negative use of the notion, it is necessarily implied that whatever in man is “natural”—that is, prior to and uncorrupted by social customs and conventions, —must furnish valid guidance for conduct. But whence can this authority belong to the natural, unless nature, the ordered creation of which man is a part, be itself somehow reasonable, an expression or embodiment of divine law and wisdom? The conception of the world, as organized and filled by divine thought, was common, in some form, to all the philosophies that looked back to Socrates as their founder,—the Megarians, as we saw, even maintaining that this thought was the sole reality. This latter doctrine harmonized thoroughly with the Stoic view of human good; but being unable to conceive substance idealistically, they (with considerable aid from the earlier system of Heraclitus) supplied a materialistic side to their pantheism,—conceiving divine thought as an attribute of the purest and most primary of material substances, a subtle fiery aether. They held the physical world to have been developed out of Zeus, so conceived; to be, in fact, a modification of his eternal substance into which it would ultimately be consumed and re-absorbed; meanwhile it was throughout permeated with the fashioning force of his divine spirit, and perfectly ordered by his prescient law. This theological view of the physical universe had a double effect on the ethics of the Stoic. In the first place it gave to his cardinal conviction of the all-sufficiency of wisdom for human wellbeing a root of cosmical fact, and an atmosphere of religious and social emotion. The exercise of wisdom was now viewed as the pure life of that particle of divine substance which was in very truth the “god within him the reason whose supremacy he maintained was the reason of Zeus, and of all gods and reasonable men, no less than his own; its realization in any one individual was thus the common good of all rational beings as such; “the sage could not stretch out a finger rightly without thereby benefiting all other sages,”—nay, it might even be said that he was “as useful to Zeus as Zeus to him.” But again, the same conception served to harmonize the higher and the lower elements of human life. For even in the physical or non-rational man, as originally constituted, we may see clear indications of the divine design, which it belongs to his rational will to carry into conscious execution; indeed, in the first stage of human life, before reason is fully developed, uncorrupted natural impulse effects what is afterwards the work of reason. Thus the formula of “living according to nature,” in its application to man as the “rational animal,” may be understood both as directing that reason is to govern, and as indicating how that government is to be practically exercised. In man, as in every other animal, from the moment of birth natural impulse prompts to self-preservation, and to the maintenance of his physical frame in its original integrity , then, when reason has been developed and has recognized itself as its own sole good, these “primary ends of nature” and whatever promotes these still constitute the outward objects at which reason is to aim; there is a certain value (αξία) in them, in proportion to which they are “preferred” (προηγμένα) and their opposites “rejected” (άποπροηγμένα) ; indeed, it is only in the due and consistent exercise of such preference and rejection that wisdom can find its practical manifestation. In this way all or most of the things commonly judged to be “goods”—health, strength, wealth, fame, &c.,—are brought within the sphere of the sage’s choice, though his real good still is solely in the wisdom of the choice, and not in the thing chosen; just as an archer aims at a bull’s eye, his end being not the mark itself, but the manifestation of his skill in hitting it.

It is to be observed that the adoption of “conformity to nature,” as the general positive rule for outward conduct, originated in the Academic school, which, after Plato’s death, seems to have separated ethics from ontology as completely as Aristotle. We find “nature” used as a cardinal notion in ethics both by Speusippus, Plato’s immediate successor, and by Xenocrates, the contemporary of Aristotle. Indeed, their fundamental doctrine apparently differed from the Stoic’s only in calling “good” what the latter called “preferred,” and consistently affirming that virtue was sufficient by itself for happiness, but not for perfect happiness. A view nearly the same, but allowing more importance to outward circumstances, was maintained by the Peripatetics; on whom, when the energies of Plato’s school were absorbed in scepticism (250-100 b.c.), it chiefly devolved to maintain the more moderate claims of morality in contrast to the paradoxes of Stoicism. It is easy to understand how the one school thought it mere perversity to refuse the common names of “good” and “evil” to things “preferred” and “rejected,” and patent inconsistency to make wisdom manifest itself in choosing among objects that wisdom knew to be indifferent; while to the other it seemed the essence of philosophy to be thus independent of outward things while yet exercised upon them.

So far we have considered the “nature” of the individual man as apart from his social relations; but it is obvious that the sphere of virtue, as commonly conceived, lies chiefly in these, and this was fully recognized in the Stoic account of duties (καθήκοντα) ; indeed, their exposition of the “natural” basis of justice, the evidences in man’s mental and physical constitution that he was born not for himself but for mankind, is the most important part of their work in the region of practical morality. Here, however, we especially notice the double significance of “natural,” as applied to (1) what actually exists everywhere or for the most part, and (2) what would exist if the original plan of man’s life were fully carried out; and we find that the Stoics have not clearly harmonized the two elements of the notion. That man was “naturally” a social animal Aristotle had already taught; that all rational beings, in the unity of the reason that is common to all, form naturally one community with a common law was (as we saw) an immediate inference from the Stoic conception of the universe as a whole. That the members of this “city of Zeus” should observe their contracts, abstain from mutual narm, combine to protect each other from injury, were obvious points of natural law; while, again, it was clearly necessary to the preservation of human society that its members should form sexual unions, produce children, and bestow care on their rearing and training. But beyond this nature did not seem to go in determining the relations of the sexes; accordingly, we find that community of wives was a feature of Zeno’s ideal commonwealth, just as it was of Plato’s; and other Stoics are represented as maintaining, and illustrating with rather offensive paradoxes, the conventionality and relativity of the received code of sexual morality; while, again, the strict theory of the school recognized no government or laws as true or binding except those of the sage; he alone is the true ruler, the true king. So far, the Stoic “nature” seems in danger of being as revolutionary as Rousseau’s. Practically, however, this revolutionary aspect of the notion was kept for the most part in the background; the rational law of an ideal community was peacefully undistinguished from the positive ordinances and customs of actual society; and the “natural” ties that actually bound each manto family, kinsmen, fatherland, and to unwise humanity generally, supplied the outline on which the external manifestation of justice was delineated. It was a fundamental maxim that the sage was to take part in public life; and it does not appear that his political action was to be regulated by any other principles than those commonlv accepted in his com munity. Similarly, in the view taken by the Stoics of the duties of social decorum, and in their attitude to the popular religion, we find a fluctuating compromise between the disposition to repudiate what is artificial and conventional, and the disposition to revere what is actual and established which both equally spring from the very core of thei creed.

Among the primary ends of nature, in which wisdom recognized a certain preferability, the Stoics included freedom from bodily pain; but they refused, even in this outer court of wisdom, to find a place for pleasure. They held that the latter was not an object of uncorrupted natural impulse, but an “aftergrowth,” a mere consequence of natural impulses attaining their ends. They thus endeavoured to resist Epicureanism even on the ground where the latter seems prima facie strongest; in its appeal, namely, to the natural pleasure-seeking of all living things. Nor did they merely mean by pleasure (η⅛ovη) the gratification of bodily appetite; we find (e.g.) Chrysippus urging, as a decisive argument against Aristotle that pure speculation was “a kind of amusement; that is, pleasure.” This being so, the distinction that they drew between pleasure, and the “joy and gladness” (χαρά, d∙(hpo<rυvη) that accompanied the exercise of virtue, cannot but seem somewhat arbitrary. We must observe, however, that even this “moral pleasure,” as a modern would consider it, though inseparable in the Stoic view from wellbeing, was not its most essential constituent. It is only by a modern misrepresentation of Stoicism that tranquillity or serenity of soul is taken as the real ultimate end, to which the exercise of virtue is merely a means. In Zeno’s system, as in Aristotle’s, it is good activity, and not the feeling that attends it, which constitutes the essence of good life. At the same time, since pleasant feeling of some kind must always have been the chief element in the common conception of Greek etδαι∕zovια as well as of English “happiness,” it is probable that the serene joys of virtue and the grieflessness which the sage was conceived to maintain amid the worst tortures, formed the main attractions of Stoicism for ordinary minds. In this sense it may be fairly said that Stoics and Epicureans made rival offers to mankind of the same kind of happiness; and the philosophical peculiarities of either system may be equally traced to the same desire of maintaining that independence of the changes and chances of life which seemed essential to a settled serenity of soul. The Stoic claims on this head were the loftiest; as the wellbeing of their sage was independent, not only of external things and bodily conditions, bat of time itself; it was fully realized in a single exercise of wisdom and could not be increased by duration. This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence. This characteristic, however, is the key to the chief differences between Epicureanism and the more naive hedonism of Aristippus. The latter system gave the simplest and most obvious answer to the inquiry after ultimate good for man; but besides being liable, when developed consistently and unreservedly, to offen 1 the common moral consciousness, it conspicuously failed to provide the “completeness” and “security” which, as Aristotle says, “one divines to belong to man’s true Good.” Philosophy, in the Greek view, should be the art as well as the science of good life; and hedonistic philosophy would seem a bungling and uncertain art of pleasure, as pleasure is ordinarily conceived. Nay, it would even be found that the habit of philosophical reflection often operated adversely to the attainment of this end, by developing the thinker’s self-consciousness, so as to disturb that normal relation to external objects on which the zest of ordinary enjoyment depends. Hence we find that later thinkers of the'Cyrenaic school felt themselves compelled to change their fundamental notion; thus Theodorus defined the good as “gladness” (χαρά) depending on wisdom, as distiuct from mere pleasure, while Hegesias proclaimed that happiness was unattainable, and that the chief function of wisdom was to render life painless by producing indifference to all thing3 that give pleasure. But by such changes their system lost the support that it had had in the pleasure-seeking tendencies of ordinary men; indeed, with Hegesias the pursuit of pleasure has turned into its opposite, and one is not surprised to learn that this hedonist’s lectures were forbidden as stimulating to suicide. It was clear that if philosophic hedonism was to be established on a broad and firm basis, it must somehow combine in its notion of good what the plain man naturally sought with what philosophy could plausibly offer. Such a combination was effected, with some little violence, by Epicurus; whose system withall its defects shewed a remarkable power of standing the test of time, as it attracted the unqualified adhesion of generation after generation of disciples for a period of more than six centuries.

Epicurus maintains, on the one hand, as emphatically as Aristippus, that pleasure is the sole ultimate good, and pain the sole evil; that no pleasure is to be rejected except for its painful consequences, and no pain to be chosen except as a means to greater pleasure; that the stringency of all laws and customs depends solely on the legal and social penalties attached to their violation; that, in short, all virtuous conduct and all speculative activity are empty and useless, except as contributing to the pleasantness of the agent’s life. Aud he assures us that he means by pleasure what plain men mean by it; and that if the gratifications of appetite and sense are discarded, the notion is emptied of its significance. So far the system would seem to suit the inclinations of the most thorough-going voluptuary. But its aspect changes when we learn that the highest point of pleasure, whether in body or mind, is to be attained by the mere removal of pain or disturbance, after which pleasure admits of variation only and not of augmentation; that therefore the utmost gratification of which the body is capable may be provided by the simplest means, and that “natural wealth '' is no more than any man can earn. When further we are told that the attainment of happiness depends almost entirely upon insight and right calculation, fortune having very little to do with it; that the pleasures and pains of the mind are far more important than those of the body, owing to the accumulation of feeling caused by memory and anticipation; and that an indispensable condition of mental happiness lies in relieving the mind of all superstitions, which can only be effected by a thorough knowledge of the physical universe,—we see that an ample place is secured in this system for the exercise of the philosophic intellect. So again, in the stress that Epicuru3 lays on the misery which the most secret wrong-doing must necessarily cause the doer, from the perpetual fear of discovery, and in his exuberaut exaltation of the value of disinterested friendship, we recognize a sincere, though not completely successful, effort to avoid the offence that consistent egoistic hedonism is apt to give to ordinary human feeling. A3 regards friendship, indeed, the example of Epicurus, who was a man of eager and affectionate temperament, and peculiarly unexclusive sympathies, was probably more effective than his teaching. The genial fellowship of the philosophic community that he collected in his garden remained a striking feature in the traditions of his school; and certainly the ideal which Stoics and Epicureans equally cherished, of a brotherhood of sages united in harmonious smooth-flowing existence, was most easily realized on the Epicurean plan of withdrawing from political and dialectical conflict to simple living and serene leisure, in imitation of the eternal leisure of the gods apart from the fortuitous concourse of atoms that we call a world.

The two systems that have just been described were those that most prominently attracted the attention of the ancient world, so far as it was directed to ethics, from their almost simultaneous origin to the end of the 2d century a.d., when Stoicism almost vanishes from our view. But side by side with them the schools of Plato and Aristotle still maintained a continuity of tradition, and a more or less vigorous life; and philosophy, as a recognized element of Graeco-Romau culture, was understood to be divided among these four branches. The internal history, however, of the four schools was very different. We find no development worthy of notice in Aristotelian ethics; in fact the philosophic energy of this school seems to have been somewhat weighed down by the inheritance of the master’s vast work, and distracted by the example of his many-sided activity. The Epicureans, again, from their unquestioning acceptance of the “dogmas” of their founder, almost deserve to be called a sect rather than a school. Ou the other hand, the changes in Stoicism are very noteworthy; and we are peculiarly well able to trace them, as the only original writings of this school which we possess are those of the later Roman Stoics. These changes may be partly attributed to the natural inner development of the system, partly to the reaction of the Roman mind on the essentially Greek doctrine which it received,—a reaction all the more inevitable from the very affinity between the Stoic sage and the ancient Roman ideal of manliness. It was natural that the earlier Stoics should be chiefly occupied with delineating the inner and outer characteristics of ideal wisdom and vir41e, and that the gap between the ideal sage and the actual philosopher, though never ignored, should yet be somewhat overlooked. But when the question “What is man’s good ?” had been answered by an elaborate exposition of perfect wisdom, the other question “How may a man emerge from the misery and folly of the world, and get on the way towards wisdom ?” would naturally attract attention; and the preponderance of moral over scientific interest, which was characteristic of the Roman mind, would tend to give this question especial prominence. Thus philosophy, in the view of Seneca and Epictetus, comes to present itself as the healer to whom men come from a sense of their weakness and disease,—whose business is “with the sick not with the whole;” the wisdom by which she heals is not something that needs long dissertations or dialectical subtleties, but rather continual practice, self-discipline, self-examination. The same sense of the gap between theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new force and a new aspect; the soul, conscious of its weakness, leans on the thought of God, and in the philosopher’s attitude towards external events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference; the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man’s natural life as a mere field for its exercise, shrinks and dwindles, making room for a positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning and hampering the spirit; the body has come to be a “corpse which the soul sustains,” and life a “sojourn in a strange land;” in short, the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the metaphysical idealism of Plato.

In no one of these schools was the outward coherence of tradition so much strained by inner changes as it was in Plato’s. The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics seem to have had less effect on their ethical teaching than might be expected, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of the “ancients ”— Plato and Aristotle. And during the eventful period of a century and a half that intervenes between Antiochus and Plutarch, we may suppose the school to have maintained the old controversy with Stoicism on much the same ground; accepting the formula of “life according to nature,” but demanding that the “good” of man should refer to his nature as a whole, the good of his rational part being the chief element, and always preferable in case of conflict, but yet not absolutely his sole good. When, how ever, we have come to Plutarch, the same tendencies of change show themselves that we have noticed in later Stoicism. The conception of a normal harmony between the higher and lower elements of human life has begun to be disturbed, and the side of Plato’s teaching that deals with the inevitable imperfections of the world of concrete experience becomes again prominent. For example, we find Plutarch adopting and amplifying the suggestion in Plato’s latest treatise (the Laws) that this imperfection is due to a bad world-soul that strives against the good,—a suggestion which is alien to the general tenor of Plato’s doctrine, and had consequently lain unnoticed during the intervening centuries. We observe, again, the value that Plutarch attaches, not merely to the sustainment and consolation of rational religion, but to the supernatural communications vouchsafed by the divinity to certain human beings in certain states,—as in dreams, through oracles, or by special warnings, like those of the genius of Socrates. For these flashes of intuition, he holds, the soul should be prepared by tranquil repose, and the subjugation of sensuality through abstinence. The same estrangement between mind and matter, the same ascetic effort to attain by aloofness from the body a pure receptivity for divine or semi-divine influences, is exhibited in the revived Pythagoreanism of the first and second centuries a.d. But the general tendency that we are noting did not find its full expression in a reasoned philosophical system until we come to the latest-born of the great thinkers of antiquity— the Egyptian Plotinus.

The system of Plotinus (205-270 a.p.) is a striking development of that element of Platonism which has had most fascination for the mediaeval and even for the modern mind, but which had almost vanished out of sight for six centuries. At the same time the differences between this Neo-Platonism and the original Platonism are all the more noteworthy from the reverent adhesion to the latter which the former always maintains. Plato, we saw, identified good with the real essence of things; and this, again, with that in them w hich is definitely conceivable and knowable. It belongs to this view to regard the imperfection or badness of things as somew hat devoid of real being, and so incapable of being definitely thought or known; accordingly, we find that Plato has no technical term for that in the concrete sensible world which hinders it from perfectly expressing the abstract ideal world, and which in Aristotle’s system is distinguished as absolutely formless matter (vλτj). And so, when we pass from the ontology to the ethics of Platonism, we find that, though the highest life is only to be realized by turning away from concrete human aflairs and their material environment, still the sensible world is not yet an object of positive moral aversion; it is rather something which the philosopher is seriously concerned to make as harmonious, good, and beautiful as possible. But in Neo-Platonism the inferiority of the condition in which the embodied human soul finds itself is more intensely and painfully felt; hence an express recognition of formless matter (vλη) as the “first evil,” from which is derived the “second evil,” body (σ⅛α), to whose influence all the evil in the soul’s existence is due. Accordingly the ethics of Plotinus represent, we may say, the moral idealism of the Stoics cut loose from nature. The only good of man is the pure existence of the soul, which in itself, apart from the contagion of the body, is perfectly free from error or defect; all higher or philosophic virtues (as distinguished from the merely “civic” forms of prudence, temperance, justice, and courage) are essentially purifications from this contagion; until the highest mode of goodness is reached, in which the soul has no community with the body, and is entirely turned towards reason. It should be observed that Plotinus himself is still too Platonic to hold that the absolute mortification of natural bodily appetites is required for purifying the soul; but this ascetic inference was drawn to the fullest extent by his disciple Poιρhyιy.

There is, however, a yet higher point to be reached in the upward ascent of the Neo-l'latonist from matter; and here the divergence, of Plotinus from Platonic idealism is none the less striking, because it can to some extent support itself on Platonic authority. The cardinal assumption of Plato’s metaphysic is, that the real is definitely thinkable and knowable in proportion as it is real; so that the further the mind advances in abstraction from sensible particulars and apprehension of real being, the more definite and clear its thought becomes. Plotinus, however, urges that, as all thought involves difference or duality of some kind, it cannot be the primary fact in the universe, what we call God. He must be an essential unity prior to this duality, a Being, wholly without difference or determination; and, accordingly, the highest mode of human existence, in which the soul apprehends this absolute, must be one in which all definite thought is transcended, and all consciousness of self lost in the absorbing ecstacy. Porphyry tells us that his master Plotinus attained the highest state four times during the six years which he spent with him.

Neo-Platonism is originally Alexandrine, and more than a century of its existence has elapsed before we find it flourishing on the old Athenian soil. Hence it is often regarded as Hellenistic rather than Hellenic, a product of the mingling of Greek with Oriental civilization. But however Oriental may have been the cast of mind that eagerly embraced the theosophic and ascetic views that have just been described, the forms of thought by which these views were philosophically reached are essentially Greek ,∙ and it is by a thoroughly intelligible process of natural development, in which the intensification of the moral consciousness represented by Stoicism plays an important part, that the Hellenic pursuit of knowledge culminates in a preparation for ecstacy, and the Hellenic idealization of man’s natural life ends in a settled antipathy to the body and its works. At the same time we ought not to overlook the affinities between the doctrine of Plotinus and that remarkable combination of Greek and Hebrew thought which Philo Judaeus had expounded two centuries before; nor the fact that Neo-Platonism was developed in conscious antagonism to the new religion which had spread from Judea, and was already threatening the conquestof the Graeco Roman world, and also to those fantastic hybrids of Christianity and later paganism, the Gnostic systems; nor, finally, that it furnished the chief theoretical support in the last desperate struggle that was made under Julian to retain the old polytheistic worship. To the new world of thought, that after the failure of this struggle was definitely established upon the ruins of the old, we have now to turn.

1ΓL Christianity and Medtaeval Ethics. —In the present article we are not concerned with the origin of the Christian religion, nor with its outward history; thecauses of its resistless development during the first three centuries; its final triumph over paganism; its failure to check the decay of the Hellenistic civilization that centered in Constantinople, or to withstand in the east and south the force of the new religious movement that burst from Arabia in the 7th century; its success in dominating the social chaos to which the barbarian invasions reduced the Western empire; the important part it took in educing from this chaos the new civilized order to which we belong; the complex and varying relations in which it has since stood to the political organizations, the social life, the progressive science, the literary and artistic culture of our modern world. Nor have we to consider the special doctrines that have formed the bond of union of the Christian communities in any other than their ethical aspect, their bearing on the Systematization of human aims and activities. This aspect, however, must necessarily be prominent in discussing Christianity, which cannot be adequately treated if considered merely as a system of theological beliefs divinely revealed, and special observances divinely sanctioned; as it essentially claims to rule the whole man, and leave no part of his life out of the range of its regulating and transforming influences. It was not till the 4th century a.d. that the first attempt was made to offer anything like a systematic exposition of Christian morality; and nine centuries more had passed away before a genuinely philosophic intellect, trained by a full study of the greatest Greek thinker, undertook to give complete scientific form to the ethical doctrine of the Catholic church. Before, however, we take a brief survey of the progress of systematic ethics from Ambrose to Thomas Aquinas, it may be well to examine the chief features of the new moral consciousness that had spread through Graeco-Roman civilization, and was awaiting philosophic synthesis. In making this examination it will be convenient to consider first the new form or universal characteristics of Christian morality, and afterwards to note the chief points in the matter or particulars of duty and virtue which received an important development or emphasis from the new religion.

The first point to be noticed is the new conception of morality as the positive law of a theocratic community, possessing a written code imposed by divine revelation, and sanctioned by express divine promises and threatenings. It is true that we find in ancient thought, from Socrates downwards, the notion of a law of God, eternal and immutable, partly expressed and partly obscured by the various and shifting codes and customs of actual human societies. But the sanctions of this law were vaguely and, for the most part, feebly imagined; its principles were essentially unwritten and unproraulgated, and thus not referred to the external will of an Almighty Being who claimed unquestioning submission, but rather to the reason that gods and men shared, by the exercise of which alone they could be adequately known and defined. Hence, even if the notion of law had been more prominent than it was in ancient ethical thought, it could never have led to a juridical, as distinct from a philosophical, treatment of morality. Tn Christianity, on the other hand, we early find that the method of moralists determining right conduct is to a great extent analogous to that of jurisconsults interpreting a code. It is assumed that divine commands have been implicitly given for all occasions of life, and that they are to be ascertained in particular cases by interpretation and application of the general rules obtained from texts of scripture, and by analogical inference from scriptural examples. This juridical method descended naturally from the Jewish theocracy, of which Christendom was a universalization. Moral insight, in the view of the most thoughtful Jews, was essentially knowledge of the divine law, to which practical efficacy was given by trust in God’s promises and fear of his judgments; this law having been partly written and promulgated by Moses, partly revealed in the fervid utterances of the later prophets, partly handed down through oral tradition from immemorial antiquity, and having further, before Judaism gave birth to Christianity, received an extensive development through the commentaries and supplementary maxims of several generations of students. Christianity inherited the notion of a written divine code acknowledged as such by the “true Israel”—now potentially including the whole of mankind, or at least the chosen of all nations,—on the sincere acceptance of which the Christian’s share of the divine promises to Israel depended. And though the ceremonial part of the old Hebrew code was altogether rejected, and with it all the supplementary jurisprudence resting on tradition and erudite commentary, still God’s law was believed to be contained in the sacred books of the Jews, supplemented by the records of Christ’s teaching and the writings of his apostles. By the recognition of this law the church was constituted as an ordered community, essentially distinct from the state; the distinction between the two was sharpened and hardened by the withdrawal of the early Christians from civic life, to avoid the performance of idolatrous ceremonies imposed as official expressions of loyalty, and by the persecutions which they had to endure, when the spread of an association apparently so hostile to the framework of ancient society had at length caused the imperial government serious alarm. Nor was the antithesis obliterated by the recognition of Christianity as the state religion under Constantine. The law of God and its interpreters still remained quite distinct from the secular law and jurists of the Roman empire; though the former was of course binding on all mankind, the church was none the less a community of persons who regarded themselves as both specially pledged and specially enabled to obey it,— a community, too, that could not be entered except by a solemn ceremony typifying a spiritual new birth.

Thus the fundamental difference between morality and (human) legality only came out more clearly in consequence of the jural form in which the former was conceived. The ultimate sanctions of the moral code were the infinite rewards and punishments awaiting the immortal soul hereafter; but the church early felt the necessity of withdrawing the privileges of membership from persons guilty of grave offences, and only allowing them to be gradually regained by a solemn ceremonial expressive of repentance, protracted through several years; while in the case of still graver sins this exclusion lasted till death, or was even made absolute. For minor offences, again, all Christians were called upon to express penitence ceremonially, by fasting and abstinence from permitted pleasures, as well as verbally in public and private devotions. “Excommunication” and “penance” thus came to be temporal ecclesiastical sanctions of the moral law; as the graduation of these sanctions naturally became more careful and minute, a correspondingly detailed classification of offences was rendered necessary; the regulations for observing the ordinary fasts and festivals of the church became similarly elaborate; and thus a system of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, prohibitive and ceremonial, was gradually produced, somewhat analogous to that of the rejected Judaism. At the same time this tendency to develop and make prominent a scheme of external duties has always been balanced and counteracted in Christianity by the ineffaceable remembrance of its original antithesis to Jewish legalism. We find that this antithesis, as fantastically understood and exaggerated by some of the Gnostic sects of the 2d and 3d centuries a.d., led, not merely to theoretical antinomianism, but even (if the charges of their orthodox opponents are not entirely to be discredited) to gross immorality of conduct. A similar tendency has shown itself at other periods of church history And though such antinomianism has always been sternly repudiated by the moral consciousness of Christendom, it has never been forgotten that “inwardness,” rightness of heart or spirit, is the special and pre-eminent characteristic of Christian goodness. It must not, of course, be supposed that the need of something more than mere fulfilment of external duty was ignored even by the later Judaism. Rabbinic erudition could not forget the repression of vicious desires in the tenth commandment, the stress laid in Deuteronomy on the necessity of heartfelt and loving service to God, or the inculcations by later prophets of humility and faith. “The real and only Pharisee,” says the Talmud, “is he who does the will of his Father because he loves Him.” But it remains true that the contrast with the “righteousness of the scribes and pharisees’’ has always served to mark the requirement of “inwardness” as a distinctive feature of the Christian code,—an inwardness not merely negative, tending to the repression of vicious desires as well as vicious acts, but also involving a positive rectitude of the inner state of the soul.

In this aspect Christianity invites comparison with Stoicism, and indeed with pagan ethical philosophy generally, if we except the hedonistic schools. Rightness of purpose, preference of virtue for its own cake, suppression of vicious desires, were made essential points by the Aristotelians, who attached the most importance to outward circumstances in their view of virtue, no less than by the Stoics, to whom all outward thiugs were indifferent. The fundamental differences between pagan and Christian ethics do not depend on any difference in the value set on rightness of heart or purpose, but on different views of the essential form or conditions of this inward rightness. In neither case is it presented purely and simply as moral rectitude. By the pagan philosophers it was always conceived under the form of Knowledge or Wisdom, it being inconceivable to all the schools sprung from Socrates that a man could truly know his own good and yot deliberately choose anything else. This knowledge, as Aristotle held, might be permanently precluded by vicious habits, ur temporarily obliterated by passion, but if present in the mind it must produce rightness of purpose. Or even if it were held with some of the Stoics that true wisdom was out of the reach of the best men actually living, it none the less remained the ideal condition of perfect human life; though all actual men were astray in folly and misery, knowledge was none the less the goal towards which the philosopher progressed, the realization of his true nature. By Christian evangelists and teachers, on the other hand, the inner springs of good conduct were generally conceived as Faith and Love. Of these notions the former has a somewhat complex ethical import, it seems to blend several elements differently prominent in different minds. Its simplest and commonest meaning is that emphasized in the contrast of “faith” with “sight,” where it signifies belief in the invisible divine order represented by the church, in the actuality of the law, the threats, the promises of God, in spite of all the influences in man’s natural life that tend to obscure this belief. Out of this contrast there ultimately grew an essentially different opposition between faith and knowledge or reason, according to which the theological basis of ethics was contrasted with the philosophical; the theologians maintaining sometimes that the divine law is essentially arbitrary, the expression of will, not reason; more frequently that its reasonableness is inscrutable, and that actual human reason should confine itself to examining the credentials of God’s messengers, and not the message itself. But in early Christianity this latter antithesis was as yet undeveloped; faith means simply force in clinging to moral and religious conviction, whatever their precise rational grounds may be; this force, in the Christian consciousness, being inseparably bound up with personal loyalty and trust towards Christ, the leader in the battle with evil that is being fought, the ruler of the kingdom to be realized. So far, however, there is no ethical difference between Christian faith and that of Judaism, or its later imitation, Mahometanism; except that the personal affection of Joyal trust is peculiarly stirred by the blending of human and divine natures in Christ, and the rule of duty impressively taught by the manifestation of His perfect life. A more distinctively Christian, and a more deeply moral, significance is given to the notion in the antithesis of “faith" and “works.” Here faith means more than loyal acceptance of the divine law and reverent trust in the lawgiver; it implies a consciousness, at once continually present and continually transcended, of the radical imperfection of all human obedience to the law, and at the same time of the irrémissible condemnation which this imperfection entails. The Stoic doctrine of the worthlessness of ordinary human virtue, and the stern paradox that all offenders are equally, in so far as all are absolutely, guilty, find their counterparts in Christianity; but the latter, while maintaining this ideal severity in the moral standard, with an emotional consciousness of what is involved in it quite unlike that of the Stoic, at the same time overcomes its practical exclusiveness through faith. This faith, again, may be conceived in two modes, essentially distinct though usually combined. In one view it gives the believer strength to attain, by God a supernatural aid or “grace,” a goodness of which he is naturally incapable; in another view it gives him an assurance that, though he knows himself a sinner deserving of utter condemnation, a perfectly just God still regards him with favour on account of the perfect services and suffering of Christ. Of these views the former is the more catholic, more universally present in the Christian consciousness; the latter more deeply penetrates the mystery of the atonement, as learnt by the chief Protestant churches from the Pauline epistles.

But faith, however understood, is rather an indispensable pre-requisite than the essential motive principle of Christian good conduct. This is supplied by the other central notion, love. On love depends the “fulfilling of the law,” and the sole moral value of Christian duty—that is, on love to God, in the first place, which in its fullest development must spring from Christian faith; and, secondly, love to all mankind, as the objects of divine love and sharers in the humanity ennobled by the incarnation. This derivative philanthropy, whether conceived as mingling with and intensifying natural human affection, or as absorbing and transforming it, characterizes the spirit in which all Christian performance of social duty is to be done; loving devotion to God being the fundamental attitude of mind that is to be maintained-throughout the whole of the Christian’s life. But further, as regards abstinence from unlawful acts and desires prompting to them, we have to notice another form in which the inwardness of Christian morality manifests itself, which, though less distinctive, should yet receive attention in any.comparison of Christian ethics with the view of Graeco-Roman philosophy. The profound horror with which the Christian’s conception of a suffering as well as an avenging divinity tended to make him regard all condemnable acts was tinged with a sentiment which we may perhaps describe as a ceremonial aversion moralized,—the aversion, that is, to foulness or impurity. In all religions to some extent, but especially in Oriental religions, the natural dislike of material defilement has been elevated into a religious sentiment. In Judaism, in particular, we find it used to support a complicated system of quasi-sanitary abstinences and ceremonial purifications; at the same time, as the ethical element predominated in the Jewish religion, a moral symbolism was felt to reside in the ceremonial code, and thus aversion to impurity came to be a common form of the ethico-religious sentiment. Then, when Christianity threw off the Mosaic ritual, this religious sense of purity was left with no other sphere besides morality; while, from itβ highly idealized character, it was peculiarly well adapted for that repression of vicious desires which Christianity claimed as its special function.

When we examine the details of Christian morality, we find that most of its distinctive features are naturally con nected with the more general characteristics just stated; though many of them may also be referred directly to the example and precepts of Christ, and in several cases they are clearly due to both causes, inseparably combined. We may notice, in the first place, that the conception of morality as a code which, if not in itself arbitrary, is yet to be accepted by men with unquestioning submission, tends naturally to bring into prominence the virtue of obedience to authority; just as the philosophic view of goodness as the realization of reason gives a special value to self-determination and independence (as we see more clearly in the postAristotelian schools where ethics is distinctly separated from politics). Again, the opposition between the natural world and the spiritual order into which the Christian has been born anew led not merely to a contempt equal to that of the Stoic for wealth, fame, power, and other objects of worldly pursuit, but also, for some time at least, to a com-practive depreciation of the domestic and civic relations of the natural man; while a keen sense of man’s impotence to make this disengagement of the spirit complete induced the same hostility to the body as a clog and hindrance, that we find to some extent in Plato, but more fully developed in Neo-Platonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and other products of the mingling of Greek with Oriental thought. This latter feeling is exhibited in the value set on fasting in the Christian church from the earliest times, and in an extreme form in the self-torments of later monasticism; while both tendencies, anti-worldliness and anti-sensualism, seem to have combined in causing the preference of celibacy over marriage which is common to most early Christian writers. Patriotism, again, and the sense of civic duty, the most elevated and splendid of all social sentiments in the general view of Graeco-Roman civilization, tended, under the influence of Christianity, either to expand itself into universal philanthropy, or to concentrate itself on the ecclesiastical community. “We recognize one commonwealth, the world,' ’ say3 Tertullian; “we know,” says Origen, “that we have a fatherland founded by the word of God.” We might further derive from the general spirit of Christian unworldiness that repudiation of the secular modes of conflict, even in a righteous cause, which substituted a passive patience and endurance for the old pagan virtue of courage, in which the active element was prominent. Here, however, we clearly trace the influence of Christ’s express prohibition of violent resistance to violence, and his inculcation, by example and precept, of a love that was to conquer even natural resentment. An extreme result of this influence is shown in Tertullian’s view, that no Christian could properly hold the office of a secular magistrate in which he would have to doom to death, chains, imprisonment; but even more sober writers, such as Ambrose, extend Christian passivity so far as to preclude self-defence even against a murderous assault. The common sense of Christendom gradually shook off these extravagances; but the reluctance to shed blood lingered long, and was hardly extinguished even by the growing horror of heresy. We have a curious relic of this in the later times of ecclesiastical persecution, when the heretic was doomed to the stake that he might be punished in some manner “short of bloodshed.”

It is, however, in the impulse given to practical beneficence in all its forms, by the exaltation of love as the root of all virtues, that the most important influence of Chris tianity on the particulars of civilized morality is to be found; although the exact amount of thi3 influence is here somewhat difficult to ascertain, since it merely carries further a development distinctly traceable in the history of pagan morality considered by itself. This development clearly appears when we compare the different post-Socratic systems of ethics. In Plato’s exposition of the different virtues there is no mention whatever of benevolence, although bis writings show a keen sense of the importance of friendship as an element of philosophic life, especially of the intense personal affection naturally arising between master and disciple. Aristotle goes somewhat further in recognizing the moral value of friendship (φιλία); and though he considers that in its highest form it can only be realized by the fellowship of the wise and good, he yet extends the notion so as to include the domestic affections, and takes notice of the importance of mutual kindness in binding together all human societies. Still in his formal statement of the different virtues, positive beneficence is only discernible under the notion of “liberality;” in which form its excellence is hardly distinguished from that of graceful profusion in self-regarding expenditure. Cicero, on the other hand, in his well-known paraphrase of a Stoic treatise on external duties (officia), ranks the rendering of positive services to other men as a chief department of social duty; and the St0ic3 generally recognized the universal fellowship and natural mutual claims of humin beings as such. Indeed, this recognition in later Stoicism is sometimes expressed with so much warmth of feeling as to be hardly distinguishable from Christian philanthropy. Nor was this regard for-humanity merely a doctrine of the school. Partly through the influence of Stoic and other Greek philosophy, partly from the natural expansion of human sympathies, the legislation of the empire, during the first three centuries, shows a steady development in the direction of natural justice and humanity; and some similar progress may be traced in the general tone of moral opinion. Still the utmost point that this development reached fell considerably short of the standard of Christian charity. Without dwelling on the immense impetus given to the practice of social duty generally by the religion that made beneficence a form of divine service, and identified “piety ’’ with “pity,” we have to put down as definite changes introduced by Christianity into the current moral view—(1) the severe condemnation and final suppression of the practice of exposing infants; (2) effective abhorrence of the barbarism of gladiatorial combats; (3) immediate moral mitigation of slavery, and a strong encouragement of emancipation; (4) great extension of the eleemosynary provision made for the sick and the poor. As regards almsgiving, however—the importance of which has caused it to usurp, in modern languages, the general name of “charity” —it ought to be observed that Christianity merely univer salized a duty which has always been inculcated and maintained in conspicuous fulness by Judaism, within the limits of the chosen people. The same may be said of the stricter regulation which Christianity enforced on the relations of the sexes; except so far as the prohibition of divorce is concerned, and the stress laid on “purity of heart” as contrasted with merely outward chastity. Even the peculiarly Christian virtue of humility, which presents so striking a contrast to the Greek “highmindness,” was to some extent anticipated in the Rabbinic teaching. Its far greater prominence under the new dispensation may be partly referred to the express teaching and example of Christ; partly, in so far as the virtue is manifested in the renunciation of external rank and dignity, or the glory of merely secular gifts and acquirements, it is one aspect of the unworldliness which we have already noticed; while the deeper humility that represses the claim of personal merit even in the saint belongs to the strict self-examination, the contiuual sense of imperfection, the utter reliance on strength not his own, which characterize the inner moral life of the Christian. Humility in this latter sense, “before God,” is an essential condition of all truly Christian goodness.

Obedience, patience, benevolence, purity, humility, alienation from the “world” and the “flesh,” are the chief novel or striking features which the Christian ideal of practice suggests, so far as it cau be placed side by side with that commonly accepted in Graeco-Roman society. But we have yet to notice the enlargement of the sphere of ethics due to its close connexion with theology; for while this added religious force and sanction to ordinary moral obligations, it equally tended to impart a moral aspect to religious belief and worship. “Duty to God ”—as distinct from duty to man—had not been altogether unrecognized by pagan moralists, though the rather dubious relations of even the more orthodox philosophy to the established polytheism had generally prevented them from laying much stress upon it. But in the views of many Christians, religious worship and contemplation as far surpassed all other modes of human existence as pure philosophic speculation did in the view of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neo-platonists; indeed, the more learned of the eastern monks spoke of themselves as withdrawing from the world to the “pursuit of wisdom” (φιλo<ro<∕>tα). Again, just as the Stoics held wisdom to be indispensable to real rectitude of conduct, while at the same time they included under the notion of wisdom a grasp of physical as well as ethical truth; so the similar emphasis laid on inwardness in Christian ethics caused orthodoxy or correctness of religious belief to be regarded, as essential to goodness, and heresy as the most fatal of vices, corrupting as it did the very springs of Christian life. To the philosophers, however, convinced as they were that the multitude must necessarily miss true wellbeing through their folly and ignorance, it could never occur to guard against these evils by any other method than that of providing philosophic instruction for the few; whereas the Christian clergy, whose function it was to offer truth and eternal life to all mankind, naturally regarded theological misbelief as insidious preventable contagion. Indeed, their sense of its deadliness was so keen that, when they were at length able to control the secular administration, they rapidly overcame their aversion to bloodshed, and initiated that long series of religious persecutions to which we find no parallel in the pre-Christian civilization of Europe. It was not that Christian writers did not feel the difficulty of attributing criminality to sincere ignorance or error. But the difficulty is not really peculiar to theology; and the theologians usually got over it (as some philosophers had surmounted a similar perplexity in the region of ethics proper) by supposing some latent or antecedent voluntary siu, of which the apparently involuntary heresy was the fearful fruit.

Lastly, we must observe that in proportion as the legal conception of morality as a code of which the violation deserves supernatural punishment predominated over the philosophic view of ethics as the method for attaining natural felicity, the question of man’s freedom of will to obey the law necessarily became prominent. At the same time it cannot be broadly said that Christianity took a de cisive side in the metaphysical controversy on free-will and necessity; since, just as in Greek philosophy the need of maintaining freedom as the ground of responsibility clashes with the conviction that no one deliberately chooses his own harm, so in Christian ethics it clashes with th® attribution of all true human virtue to supernatural grace, as well as with the belief in divine foreknowledge. All we can say is that in the development of Christian thought the conflict of conceptions was far more profoundly felt, and far more serious efforts were made to evade or transcend it.

In the preceding account of Christian morιlity, it has been already indicated that the characteristics delineated did not all exhibit themselves simultaneously to the same extent, or with perfect uniformity throughout the church. Partly the changes in the external condition of Christianity, and the different degrees of civilization in the societies of which it was the dominant religion, partly the natural process of internal development, continually brought different features into prominence; while again, the important antagonisms of opinion that from time to time expressed themselves in sharp controversies within Christendom frequently involved ethical issues—even in the Eastern church until the great labour of a dogmatic construction began in the 4th century, and in the Western church alwaye. Thus, for example, the anti-secular tendencies of the new creed, to which Tertullian (160-220) gave violent and rigid expression, were exaggerated in the Montanist heresy which he ultimately joined; on the other hand, Clemens of Alexandria, in opposition to the general tone of his age, maintained the value of pagan philosophy for the development of Christian faith into true knowledge (Gnosis), and the value of the natural development of man through marriage for the normal perfecting of the Christian life. So again, there is a marked difference between the writers before Augustine and those that succeeded him in all that concerns the internal conditions of Christian morality. By Justin and other apologists the need of redemption, faith, grace is indeed recognized, but the theological system depending on these notions is not sufficiently developed to come intoeven apparent antagonism with the freedom of the will. Christianity is for the most part conceived as essentially a proclamation through the Divine Word, to immortal beings gifted with free choice, of the true code of conduct sanctioned by eternal rewards and punishments. This legalism contrasts strikingly with the efforts of pagan philosophy to exhibit virtue as its own reward; and the contrast is triumphantly pointed out by more than one early Christian writer. Lactantius (circ. 300 A.D.), for example, roundly declares that Plato and Aristotle, referring everything to this earthly life, “made virtue mere folly;” though himself maintaining, with pardonable inconsistency, that man’s highest good did not consist in mere pleasure, but in the consciousness of the filial relation of the soul to God. It is plain, however, that on this external legalistic view of duty it was impossible to maintain a difference in kind between Christian and pagan morality; the philosopher’s conformity to the rules of chastity and beneficence, so far as it went, wgs indistin guishable from the saint’s. But when this inference was developed in the teaching of Pelagius, it was repudiated as heretical by the church, under the powerful leadership of Augustine (354-430); and the doctrine of man’s incapacity to obey God’s law by his unaided moral energy was pressed to a point at which it was difficult to reconcile it with the freedom of the will. Augustine is fully aware of the theoretical indispensability of maintaining Free Will, from its logical connexion with human responsibility and divine justice; but he considers that these latter points are sufficiently secured if actual freedom of choice between good and evil is allowed in the single case of our progenitor Adam. For since the natura seminalis from which all men were to arise already existed in Adam, in his voluntary preference of self to God humanity chose evil once for all; for which ante-natal guilt all men are justly condemned to perpetual absolute sinfulness and consequent punishment, unless they are elected by God’s unmerited grace to share the benefits of Christ’s redemption. Without this grace it is impossible for man to obey the “first greatest commandment” of love to God; and, this unfulfilled, he is guilty of the whole law, and is only free to choose between degrees of sin: his apparent external virtues have no moral value, since inner rightness of intention is wanting. “All that is not of .faith is of sin; ’’ and faith and love are mutually involved and inseparable; faith springs from the divinely imparted germ of love, which in its turn is developed by faith to its full strength, while from both united springs hope, joyful yearning towards ultimate perfect fruition of the object of love. These three Augustine (after St Paul) regards as the three essential elements of Christian virtue; along with these he recognizes the fourfold division of virtue into prudence, temperance, courage, and justice; which, however, he explains to be in their true natures only the same love to God in different aspects or exercises. The severe uncompromising mysticism of this view may be at once compared and contrasted with the philosophical severity of Stoicism. Love of God in the former holds the same absolute and unique position as the sole element of moral work in human action, which, as we have seen, was occupied by knowledge of Good in the latter; and we may carry the parallel further by observing that in neither case is this severity in the abstract estimate of goodness necessarily connected with extreme rigidity in practical precepts. Indeed, an important part of Augustine’s work as a moralist lies in the reconciliation which he laboured to effect between the anti-worldly spirit of Christianity and the necessities of secular civilization. For example, we find him arguing for the legitimacy of judicial punishments and military service against an over-literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. And, more generally, by adopting and giving currency to the well-known distinction between evangelical “counsels” and “commands,” he defended the life of marriage and temperate enjoyment of natural good against the attacks of the more extravagant advocates of celibacy and self-abnegation; although he fully admitted the superiority of the latter method of avoiding the contamination of sin.

The attempt to Christianize the old Platonic list of virtues, which we have noticed in Augustine’s system, was probably due to the influence of his master Ambrose; in whose treatise De officii s ministrorum we find for the first time an exposition of Christian duty systematized on a plan borrowed from a pre-Christian moralist. It is interesting to compare Ambrose’s account of what subsequently came to be known as the “four cardinal virtues” with the corresponding delineations in Cicero’s De officiis which has served the bishop as a model. Christian Wisdom, so far as speculative, is of course primarily theological; it has God, as the highest truth, for its chief object, and is therefore necessarily grounded on faith. Christian Fortitude is essentially firmness in withstanding the seductions of good and evil fortune, resoluteness in the conflict perpetually waged against wickedness without carnal weapons—though Ambrose, with the Old Testament in his hand, will not quite relinquish the ordinary martial application of the virtue. “Temperantia” retains the meaning of “observance of due measure” in all conduct, which it had in Cicero’s treatise; though its notion is partly modified by being blended with the newer virtue of humility; while in the exposition of Christian Justice the Stoic doctrine of the natural union of all human interests is elevated to the full height and intensity of evangelical philanthropy; the brethren are bidden to regard all things useful as the common property of all. Ambrose, we should observe, is thoroughly aware of the fundamental union of these different virtues in Christianity, though he does not, like Augustine, resolve them all into the one central affection of love of God.

The combination which Augustine introduced between these four cardinal virtues and the triad of Christian graces, Faith, Hope, and Love, determined the ground-plan of the treatment of systematic ethics for subsequent ecclesiastical writers generally. In antithesis to this list of virtues, an enumeration of the chief deadly sins obtained currency. These were at first commonly reckoned as eight; but a preference for mystical numbers characteristic of mediaeval theologians finally reduced the received list to seven. The statement of them is somewhat variously given by different writers,—Pride, Avarice, Anger, Gluttony, Unchastity, are found in all the lists; the remaining two (or three) are variously selected from among Envy, Vain-glory, and the rather singular sins Gloominess (Tristitia) and Languid Indifference (Acidia or Acedia, from Greek awη8laf These latter notions show pretty plainly, what indeed might be inferred from a study of the list as a whole, that it especially 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 7 th 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 elaboration of 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 Augustinian doctrine, transmitted through Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and other influential writers of the philosophically barren period that intervened between the destruction of the Western empire and the rise of Scholasticism.

The great effort of the scholastics to philosophize in harmony with the Christian dogma 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 just to uotice the salient points in the long and active discussion that led upto it,—the dogmatic construction of Anselm, the bold questions and suggestive paradoxes of Abelard, the subtle distinctions of Petrus Lombardus, and the novel Aristotelian erudition of Albertus Magnus; nor must we overlook the Neo-Platonic mysticism of Johannes Scotus (Erigena), though separated in time and thought from the main course of scholasticism. In the pantheistic system of this earliest of the great mediaeval thinkers (circ. 810-877), the chief philosophic element is supplied by the influence of Plotinus, transmitted through an unknown author of the 5th century, who assumed the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Accordingly the ethical side of his doctrine has the same negative and ascetic character that we have observed in Neo-Platonism. God is the only real Being; evil is essentially unreal aud incognizable, and the concrete world of individuals only real in so far as it partakes of the divine nature; 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 no immediate acceptance, and was certainly unorthodox enough to justify the condemnation which it subsequently received from Pope 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 remained a distinct element in mediaeval thought, though obscured by the growing influence of Aristotle, until its revival in the age of the Renaissance. Passing on to Anselm (1033-1109), the first real scholastic of importance, 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 Petrus Lombardus 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,—like the faculty of sight in a dark place,—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; boldly asserting 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. In the same spirit, under the reviving influence of ancient philosophy (though as yet imperfectly known), 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, in the Christian “love to God” he distinguishes the disinterested love of God for Himself from the affection of which the real object is the happiness which God gives, and regards the former alone as pure. The general tendency of Abelard’s thought was suspiciously regarded by contemporary orthodoxy; and the over-subtlety of the last-mentioned distinction provoked vehement replies from more than one of the 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 distin- 'guishes 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, as well as others, Petrus Lombardus endeavoured to compose by the scholastic art of taking distinctions, of which he was a master. His famous treatise, Bibri Sententiarum, though not systematic or profound, deserved the place it long held as a text-book of Catholic theology, by its combined comprehensiveness and minuteness of view, and its sobriety of judgment. It is mainly based on Augustinian doctrine, though we find in it a distinct softening of the traditional antithesis between nature and grace; somewhat anticipating the remarkable union of Aristotelian and Christian thought, which, in the succeeding century, when the study of Aristotle had been revived by the influence of the great Arabian commentators, was initiated by Albert the Great and completed by Thomas Aquinas.

The moral philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is Ansto-telianism with a Neo-Platonic tinge, interpreted and supplemented by Christian dogma. 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 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 only be 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 only given to those 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 Thomas has imbibed. In dividing the “natural” virtues into intellectual and moral, giving his preference to the former class, and distinguishing in it the “intellect” that is conversant with principles, the “science” which deduces conclusions, and the “wisdom” to which belongs the whole process of knowing the sublimest objects of knowledge, Thomas follows Aristotle closely; 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; 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 the passions, and (3) the fortitude that strengthens the soul against them. But before these virtues, which belong to the nature of man as a rational creature, and can be acquired, though not perfectly, as a mere natural result of training and practice, are ranked the three “theologic” virtues, faith, love, and hope, supematurally “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.yj), we can know God’s existence, but not His trinity in unity, though philosophy is useful to defend this and other revealed verities. 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,” &c.

When from the essentially jural notion of sin we pass to the discussion of law, we observe an other element in Thomas’s doctrine, drawn from a different part of the renascent intellectual activity of Europe,—from the study, namely, 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 to notice, 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 adapted to the circumstances of particular societies; (4) divine law specially revealed to man. As regards natural law, he teaches that God has firmly implanted in the human mind a knowledge of its immutable general principles, although the applications of them may sometimes be obscured and perverted by bad education and custom. Human law is required, not merely to determine the details for which natural law gives no clear guidance, but also to supply the force necessary for practically securing, among imperfect men, the observance of the most necessary rules of mutual behaviour. A further force is supplied by the revealed code of the decalogue aud the gospel combined, which again goes beyond natural law in directing the way to eternal life. 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. Finally, to express the manner in which the moral law operates in the mind, Thomas uses and defines the specially Christian notion of conscience, distinguishing the “synderesis ’ ' (σνντηρησ^) by which moral principles are permanently retained from the “conscientia” by which they are applied to particular cases.

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 composing it seems weakest. He is scarcely aware that his Aristo-telianized Christianity inevitably combines two different difficulties in dealing with this question: first, the old pagan difficulty of reconciling the position 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 (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,—a point on which he was followed by the acute intellect of William of Occam (d. 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 mediaeval 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 “the Philosopher”—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.

Partly in conscious antagonism to the erudite labours and dialectical conflicts of 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 leant upon Neo-Platonism, but always blending the Christian element of love with the ecstatic vision of Plotinus, and 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 Eckhardt, advancing in some of his followers to open breach with the church, and even to practical immorality.

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 14tli and 15th centuries, the quasi-legal treatment of morality came again into prominence, borrowing a good deal of matter from Thomas and other schoolmen. The best known Summae Casuum Conscientiae, compiled for the conduct of auricular confession, belong to the 14th and 15th centuries. As the chief of these we may mention the Λstesana (14th century) and the Angelica (15th century) by two Franciscans, Astesanus and Angelus de Clavasio respectively. It was inevitable that, in proportion as this casuistry assumed the character of a complete and 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; while, again, the more industry and ingenuity were spent in deducing conclusions from the diverse authorities accepted in the church, 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 that the church went through, between the death of Boniface VIII. and the counter

Reformation. A plain man perplexed by such disagree mente might naturally hold that any opinion maintained by a pious and orthodox writer must be a tolerably safe one to follow; and thus weak consciences might be 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 competition w ith that of private judgment for the guidance of men’s consciences. 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 Bomehow “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 result« 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.

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, apart from the political and social aims and tendencies with which it was connected in different European countries. 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 in the discourses and writings of the Reformed churches. Even the old method of casuistry was maintained during the 16th and 17 th centuries; though scriptural texts, interpreted and supplemented by the light ol natural reason, now furnished the sole principles on which cases of conscience were decided. But in the 17th century 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 ouly indirectly due to the Reformation; it is rather to be connected with the more extreme reaction from the mediaeval 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 and exercised 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, Telesius, Patritius, Campanella, Bruno—began to propound their un-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, the variations and aberrations of private judgment, that the multiplying divisions of Christendom exhibited after the Reformation, reflective persons would naturally be led to seek for an ethical method that might claim universal acceptance from all sects.

IV. Modern, especially English, 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 was commenced in the form of a discussion of the law of nature, of which first Albericus Gentilis (1557-1611), then Hugo Grotius (1583 —1645) in his epoch-making work on international law, endeavoured to give a complete theoretical view. Natural law, according to Grotius, is that part of divine law which follows from the essential nature of man; it is therefore as unalterable even by God himself as the truths of mathematics, although it may be overruled in any particular case by express revelation; hence it is cognizable a priori, from the abstract consideration of human nature, though its existence may also be known a yκ>steriori 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 hardly conceived as actually having a substantive existence independent of positive codes; it was rather something that underlay existing law, and was to be looked for through it, though it might perhaps be expected ultimately to supersede it, and in the meanwhile represented an ideal standard, by which improvements in legislation were to be guided. Hence they do not seem to have framed, except in poetical or mythical imagination, the notion of a state of nature in which human beings were governed by the law of nature alone. But as soon as the principles of this code were contemplated as determining international rights and duties, it was obvious that in the present mutual relations of independent nations, regarded as corporate units, we have an actual example of this state of nature. Thus it was an easy step to suppose definitely that in prehistoric times individuals or single families lived similarly side by side,—under none other than such “natural” laws as those prohibiting mutual injury, and mutual interference with each other’s use of the goods of the earth that were common to all, giving parents authority over their children, imposing on wives a vow of fidelity to their husbands, and obliging all to the observance of compacts freely entered into. 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 to have beeu instituted; and only by a similar “fundamental pact” could men be thought to pass legitimately from the state of nature to that of an organized society.

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 would bring his view of Natural Right into prominence, and would suggest to penetrating minds such questions as—“What is man’s ultimate reason for obeying these laws! Wherein does this their agreement with his rational and social nature exactly consist! How far, and in what sense, is his nature really social!”

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, partly under the influence of Bacon, 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 the life and teaching of Epicurus. Hobbes’s psychology is in the first place materialistic; he holds, that is, that in any of the psychophysical 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 or desire has always pleasure (or the absence of pain) for its object; still 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 material 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; including the aversions that are similarly directed “fromward” pain. 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, to which 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; but 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 without the intervention of government. E.g., it is not reasonable for me to perform my share of a contract, unless I have adequate reason for believing that the other party will perform his; and this adequate reason I cannot have, except in a state of society in which he will be punished for non-performance. Thus the ordinary rules of social behaviour are only hypothetically obligatory in any society, until they are actualized by the establishment of a strong central authority. 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, and other subordinate rules, he still calls “immutableand eternal laws of nature,”— meaning that, though they do not unconditionally bind us to realize them, they always bind to a 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; but it is therefore also a state of war in which every man’s hand is against his neighbour’s,—a state so wretched and perilous 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 taken to be so, 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 1651, a peace-loving philosopher, weary of the din of warring sects, should regard the claims of individual conscience as essentially anarchical, and the most threatening danger to social wellbeing; 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.

However, offensive or not, there was an originality, a force, an apparent coherence in Hobbism 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 are combined by Hobbes’s peculiar political doctrines into a coherent whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected. Its theoretical basis is the principle of egoism, that it is natural and so reasonable for each individual to aim solely at his own preservation or pleasure; while, for practically determining the particulars of duty it makes morality entirely dependent on positive law and institution. It is this latter part or 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. The latter retains the legal view of morality, and endeavours, while showing the actuality of the laws of nature, to systematize them by reducing them to a single principle. The former, regarding morality primarily as a body of truth rather than a code of rules, insist on its absolute character and intuitive certainty.

Cudworth was the most distinguished of the little group of thinkers at Cambridge in the 17th century, commonly known as the “Cambridge Platonists,” who, embracing what they conceived to be Platonic principles, but also strongly influenced by the new thought of Descartes, endeavoured to blend rational theology with religious philosophy. In his treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality (which was not published till more than 40 years after his death in 1688), 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 or intellect as much as any physical fact; and he endeavours to refute Hobbism—which he treats as a “novantique philosophy,” a mere revival of the relativism of Protagoras —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 sense that varies from man to man, but of the intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore an inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in morals, an objective world of duty, which the mind by its normal activity clearly apprehends as such. Cudworth, in the work above mentioned, gives no systematic exposition of the ethical principles which he holds to be clearly apprehended. But we may supply this deficiency from the jEncAm<‰n 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 are purely egoistic,—as (e.g.) that goods differ in quality as well as duration, and that the superior good is always to be preferred, and similarly the lesser evil; 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 did not relate 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.” If we ask what motive any individual has to conform-to these social principles when they conflict with his natural desires, 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 defined and 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. But this does not seem to be 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, Platonism, in More’s mind, has been so far modernized that it turns out as hedonistic as Hobbism; the difference between the two lies merely in the degree of refinement of the pleasure that is taken as ultimate end.

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 discuss and 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 Naturoe (1672), though written like More’s in Latin, is yet in its ethical matter thoroughly modern. Cumberland is a thinker both original and comprehensive, who has furnished material to more than one better-known moralist; but his academic prolixity and discursiveness, his academic language, and a want of clearness of view in spite of an elaborate display of exact and complete demonstration, have doomed his work to oblivion. At any rate 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, to which all other rules and virtues are strictly subordinate. So far he may be fairly called the precursor of modern utilitarianism. 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 moral perfection or virtue, and save his theory from an obvious logical circle. A notion so vague could not possibly be used for determining the subordinate rules of morality with any precision; but in fact Cumberland does not attempt this; his supreme principle is not designed 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 the effects of its observance or violation on the agent’s happiness. That the divine will is expressed by the proposition “that all rationals should aim at the common good of all,” 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 seems either indistinct or inconsistent.

The clearness which we seek in vain from Cumberland is found to the fullest extent in a more famous writer, whose Essay on the Human Understanding (1690) was already planned when Cumberland’s treatise appeared. And 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. This morality 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 incontestible as those in mathematics, the measures 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 would seem that the supreme rule of his system, as of Cumberland’s, must prescribe universal benevolence; though the only instances which he gives of intuitive moral truths are the purely formal p ’ ∙ρpositions, “No government allows absolute liberty,” and “Where there is no property there is no injustice.”

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, essentially truths of relation, Clarke is quite in accordance with Locke; while of the four fundamental rules that he expounds, Piety, 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 second axiom 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-creatu res,” 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 aud 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 3ubn1it to a demonstrated truth.” Here no doubt Clarke is opposed to Locke; and even goes beyond the Platonists in affirming the immediate absolute determination of will by reason. 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 observed that he is not prepared to apply this doctrine in its unqualified form to such a creature as man, who feels as well as reasons. At least when he comes to argue the preferability of virtue to vice in reference to actual human choice, he does not make more than the very moderate claim 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 cither.” 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.”

The truth is that the impressive earnestness with which Clarke enforces the doctrine of rational morality only renders 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 cannot maintain that such preference is irrational.

It remains to adopt another line of reasoning; 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. Not, of course, that he is original in insisting on the actual fact of natural affections binding men to their fellows; Cumberland, to say nothing of earlier writers, had dwelt on tlιis at some length. But no moralist before Shaftesbury had made this the cardinal point in his system; no one had undertaken to distinguish clearly, by careful analysis of experience, the disinterested and self-regarding elements of our appetitive nature, or to prove inductively their perfect harmony. He begins by attacking the egoistic interpretation of good which Hobbes had put forward, and which, as we have seen, was not necessarily excluded by the doctrine of moral intuitions. This interpretation, he says, would be only true if we considered man as a wholly unrelated individual. Such a being we might doubtless call “good,” if his impulses and dispositions were harmonized and 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 only call him “good” when his impulses and dispositions arc so graduated and balanced as to tend towards the good of this whole. And observe, he adds, we do not attribute goodness to him merely because his outward acts have this tendency; the worst of men may be chained from harm, and lashed into usefulness by the fear of punishment. When we speak of a man as “morally” 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 such. Moral goodness, then, involves 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 “selfaffections” existing in a duly limited degree are morally good. The moral ideal, in short, consists in due combination of both sorts of “affections,” tendency to promote general good being taken as the criterion of the right mixture or balance. This being established, the main aim of Shaftesbury’s argument is to prove that the same balance and blending 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 and exercising 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.

One more special impulse remains to be noticed. We have seen that goodness of character consists in a certain balance and 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.

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 play of the 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; while again, 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, connected as it was with a natural theology that implied the Christian scheme to be superfluous, challenged attack equally from orthodox divines and from infidel pessimists. Of these latter Mandeville, the author of The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits (1724), 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 philosophical 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 eccentric 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.

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, so far as Hobbe3 deals with it, though conventional and 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 new thesis that unrestrained egoism is natural, tended to produce results which, though not perhaps practically subversive of peace, were at any rate dangerous to social well-being. To meet this view Butler does not content himself, as he is sometimes carelessly supposed to do, with simply insisting on the natural claim to authority of the conscience which his opponent repudiated as artificial; he also uses a more 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 more directly to self-preservation; then going further and 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. Thus the object (e.g.^) 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 may certainly 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 enough 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 chimaera; for (1) man’s primary impulses cannot be sweepingly called egoistic in any sense, since the objects of all are other than his own happiness, aυd the tendencies of some are as obviously social in the first instance as those of others are self-regarding; and (2) a man cannot be consistently egoistic without being continually self-regulative. 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. Γf, 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 be hardly 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 only necessary 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 gooduess 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; 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.

This dualism of governing principles in Butler’s system, and perhaps, too, his revival of the Platonic conception of human nature as an ordered and governed community of impulses, may be partly attributed to the influence of Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1722). Here, for the first time, we find “moral good” and “natural good” or “happiness” treated separately as tw o 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.

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 ethic3, 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 against Hutcheson, who in his “inquiry concerning the original of our ideas of virtue” had definitely identified virtue with benevolence. The identifi cation 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” self-love and benevolence from the “turbulent” passions, selfish or social. Hutcheson also follows Butler in laying stress on the “governing * character 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, 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 only begot indirectly by cultivating the affection, which is thus obviously distinct from the desire for benevolent pleasure, being (as is ordinarily supposed) an immediate desire for other’s good. He poiuts 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. 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.

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 ⅛t at the outset; bat 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. 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.”

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.

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, connected by transference with the qualities that tend to cause such pleasure, why is not this specific feeling excited by other things beside virtue? On this point Hume contents himself with thevague 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. 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). Adam Smith does not deny the actuality or importance of that sympathetic pleasure in the perceived or inferred effects of virtues and vices on which Hume laid stress. He does not, however, think that the essential part of common moral sentiment is constituted by this, but 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 feeling with another’s. By means of this primary element, compounded in various ways, Adam Smith explains all the different 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. “To approve of the passions of another as suitable to their objects is the same thing as to sympathize with them.” Similarly we disapprove of passion exhibited in a degree to which our sympathy cannot reach; and even, too, when it falls short; since, as he acutely points out, we often sympathize with the merely imagined feelings of others, and are thus disappointed, when we find the reality absent. 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 a direct antipathy to the feelings of the misdoer takes the place of sympathy; but the chief part of the 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. To the obvious objection that we often approve and disapprove without sympathizing, it is replied that in such cases we correct or supplement present feelings by the general rules derived from preceding experience of our ordinary sentiments. Similarly the received maxims to which we commonly appeal as recognized standards of judgment are formed by the concurrent and mutually confirmed sympathies of mankind generally. 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. When, however, such judgments are passed on our own conduct, a further complication of the fundamental element is required to explain them. What we call our conscience is really sympathy with the feelings of an imaginary impartial spectator looking at our conduct. Such a spectator, it is true, would not have full means for forming a judgment, but these we can supply in imagination; thus, “praiseworthy” (as distinguished from actually praised) conduct may be defined as “that with which an impartial and fully informed spectator would sympathize.”

That the general rules of morality impressed on us by this complicated play of sympathy are “justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity,” Adam Smith takes care to assure us; but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. In the same way 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 was, that amid the observations and analysis of feelings to which the moral sentimentalism of Shaftesbury’s school had led, the fundamental ethical 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 doe3; and it seems only another way of putting Hume’s doctrine, that reason is not’ concemed 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’s Review (f 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 the earlier school of rational moralists; but with several specific differences which it is important to notice. 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, is henceforth distinctly recognized as accompanying the intellectual intuition, though it is carefully subordinated to it. While right and wrong, in Price’s view, are “real objective qualities” of actions, moral “beauty and deformity” aie 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 or instinct co-operate in the impulse to virtuous conduct, though the rational element is primary and paramount. Price further distinguishes 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 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 because he (like Reid and Stewart afterwards) appeals to common sense rather than abstract reason as the judge of moral evidence. Thus he main tains with Butler that gratitude, veracity, fulfilment of promises, and justice are obligatory independently of their conduciveness to happiness; but he does not exactly exhibit the self-evidence of the abstract proposition “that truth ought to be spoken;” he rather argues, by an inductive reference to common moral opinion, that “we cannot avoid pronouncing that there is an intrinsic rectitude insincerity.” Similarly in expounding justice,— “that part of virtue which regards property,”—he seems prepared to accept en bloc as ultimate the traditional principles of Roman jurisprudence, which refer the right of property to “first possession, labour, succession, and donation.” We must bear in mind that Price’s task is considerably more difficult than that of the earlier rational moralists; owing to the new antithesis to the view of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson by which his controversial position is complicated, so that he is specially concerned to show the existence of ultimate principles besides 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.

On this latter point Reid, in his Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788), adopts a more moderate and less Stoical conclusion, 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 coordinate 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 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, since Reid accepts the common moral opinion of mankind as a final test of the truth of ethical theories, the construction of a scientific method of ethics is a matter of no practical moment to him. 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 and lax Stoical phrase, 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 might not be equally well stated by Paley or any religious utilitarian is the second (also Stoical), “that so far as the intention of nature appears in· the constitution of man, we ought to act according to that intention,” the vagueness of which is obvious.

A similar incompleteness in the statement of mo'∙al 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 Reid and Price,— expounded with more neatness and grace, 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.

It will be seen that neither Reid nor Stewart offers more than a very meagre and tentative contribution to that ethical science by which, as they maintain, the received rules of morality may be rationally deduced from intuitive first principles. A more ambitious attempt in the same direction was made by Whewell in his Elements of Morality (1846). WbewelΓs general moral view differs from that of his Scotch predecessors chiefly in a point where we may trace the influence of Kant; viz., in his rejection of self-love as an independent rational and governing principle, and his consequent refusal to admit happiness, apart from duty, as a reasonable end for the individual. The moral reason, thus left in sole supremacy, is represented as enunciating five ultimate principles,—those of benevolence, justice, truth, purity, and order. With a little straining these are made to correspond to five chief divisions of Jus,—personal security (benevolence being opposed to the ill-will that commonly causes personal injuries), property, contract, marriage, and government; while the first, second, and fourth, again, regulate respectively the three chief classes of human motives,—affections, mental desires, and appetites. Thus the list, with the addition of two general principles, “earnestness” and “moral purpose,” has a certain air of systematic completeness. When, however, we look closer, we find that the principle of order, or obedience to government, is not seriously intended to imply the political absolutism which it seems to express, and which English common sense emphatically repudiates; while the formula of justice is given in the tautological or perfectly indefinite proposition “that every man ought to have his own.” Whewell, indeed, explains that this latter formula must be practically interpreted by positive law, though he inconsistently speaks as if it supplied a standard forjudging laws to be right or wrong. The principle of purity, again, “that the lower parts of our nature ought to be subject to the higher,” merely particularizes that supremacy of reason over non-rational impulses which is involved in the very notion of reasoned morality. Thus, in short, if we ask for a clear and definite fundamental intuition, distinct from regard for happiness, we find really nothing in WhewelΓs doctrine except the single rule of veracity (including fidelity to promises); and even of this the axiomatic character becomes evanescent on closer inspection, since it is not maintained that the rule is practically unqualified, but only that it is practically undesirable to formulate its qualifications.

On the whole, it must be admitted that the doctrine of the intuitional school of the present and preceding century has been developed with less care aud consistency than might have been expected, in its statement of the fundamental axioms or intuitively known premises of moral reasoning. And if the controversy which this school has conducted with utilitarianism had turned principally on the determination of the matter of duty, there can be little doubt that it would have been forced into more serious and systematic effort to define precisely and completely the principles and method on which we are to reason deductively to particular rules of conduct. But in fact the difference between in-tuitionists and utilitarians as to the method of determining the particulars of the moral code was complicated with a more fundamental disagreement as to the very meaning of “moral obligation.” This Paley and Bentham (after Locke) interpreted as merely the effect on the will of the pleasures or pains attached to the observance or violation of moral rules, combining with this the doctrine of Cumberland or Hutcheson, that “general good” or “happiness” is the final end and'standard of these rules; while they eliminated all vagueness from the notion of general happiness by defining it to consist in “excess of pleasure over pain ”— pleasures and pains being regarded as “differing in nothing but continuance or intensity.” The utilitarian system gained an attractive air of simplicity by thus using a single perfectly clear notion—pleasure and its negative quantity pain—to answer both the fundamental questions of morals, “What is right ?” and “Why should I do it ?” But since there is no logical connexion between the answers that have thus come to be considered as one doctrine, this apparent unity and simplicity has really hidden fundamental disagreements, and caused no little confusion in current ethical debate.

In Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy is the immediate rule or criterion of virtue .... but it is evident from the nature of God that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness; and therefore he wills their happiness; therefore that my behaviour so far as it may be a means to the happiness of mankind should be such; so this happiness of mankind may be said to be the criterion of virtue once removed.” The same dissertation also contains the germ of Hartley’s system, as we shall presently notice. ]

(1785), the link between general pleasure (the standard) and private pleasure or pain (the motive) is supplied by the conception of divine legislation. To be “obliged” is to be “urged by a violent motive resulting from the command of another;” in the case of moral obligation, the command proceeds from God, and the motive lies in the expectation of beiug rewarded and punished after this life. The commands of God are to be ascertained “from scripture and the light of nature combined.” Paley, however, holds that scripture is given less to teach morality than to illustrate it by example and enforce it by new sanctions and greater jertainty, and that the light of nature makes it clear that God wills the happiness of his creatures. Hence, his method in deciding moral questions is chiefly that of estimating the tendency of actions to promote or diminish the general happiness. To meet the obvious objections to this method, based on the immediate happiness caused by admitted crimes (such as “knocking a rich villain on the head”), he lays stress on the necessity of general rules in any kind of legislation; while, by urging the importance of forming and maintaining good habits, he partly evades the difficulty of calculating the consequences of particular actions. In this way the utilitarian method is freed from the subversive tendencies which Butler and others had discerned in it; as used by Paley, it merely explains the current moral and jural distinctions, exhibits the obvious basis of expediency which supports most of the received rules of law and morality, and furnishes a simple solution, in harmony with common sense, of some perplexing casuistical questions. Thus (e.g.) “natural rights” become rights of which the general observance would be useful apart from the institution of civil government; as distinguished from the no less binding “adventitious rights,” the utility of which depends upon this institution. Private property is in this sense “natural,” from its obvious advantages in encouraging labour, skill, preservative care; though actual rights of property depend on the general utility of conforming to the law of the land by which they are determined. So, again, many perplexities respecting the duties of veracity aud good faith are solved, so as to avoid jesuitical laxities no less than superstitious scruples, by basing their obligation on the utilities general and particular of satisfying expectations deliberately produced. So, too, the general utilitarian basis of the established sexual morality is effectively expounded. We observe, however, that Paley’s method is often mixed with reasonings that belong to an alien and older manner of thought; as when he supports the claim of the poor to charity by referring to the intention of mankind “when they agreed to a separation of the common fund,” or when he infers that monogamy is a part of the divine design from the equal numbers of males and females born. In other cases his statement of utilitarian considerations is fragmentary and unmethodical, and tends to degenerate into loose exhortation on rather trite topics.

In unity, consistency, and thoroughness of method, Bentham’s utilitarianism has a decided superiority over Paley’s. He throughout considers actions solely in respect of their pleasurable and painful consequences, expected or actual; and he fully recognizes the need of making an exhaustive and systematic register of these consequences, free from the influences of common moral opinion, as expressed in the “eulogistic” and “dyslogistic” terms in ordinary use. Further, the effects that he estimates are all of a definite, palpable, empirically ascertainable quality; they are such pleasures and pains as most men feel and all can observe to be felt, so that all political or moral inferences drawn by Bentham’s method lie open at every point to the test of practical experience. Every one, it would seem, can tell what value he sets on the pleasures of alimentation, sex, the senses generally, wealth, power, curiosity, sympathy, antipathy (malevolence), the goodwill of individuals or of society at large, and on the corresponding pains, as well as the pains of labour and organic disorders; and can pretty well guess the rate at which they are valued by others; therefore if it be once granted that all actions are determined by pleasures and pains, and are to be tried by the same standard, the art both of legislation and of private conduct is apparently placed on a broad, simple, and clear empirical basis. Bentham, no doubt, seems to go beyond the limits of mundane experience in recognizing “religious” pains and pleasures in his fourfold division of sanctions, side by side with the “physical,” “political,” aud “moral” or “social;” but the truth is that he does not seriously take account of them, except in so far as religious hopes and fears are motives actually operating, which therefore admit of being observed and measured as much as any other motives. He does not himself use the will of an omnipotent and benevolent being as a means of logically connecting individual and general happiness. He thus undoubtedly simplifies his system, and avoids the doubtful inferences from nature and Scripture in which Paley’s position is involved; but this gain is dearly purchased. For in answer to the question that immediately arises, How then is the maximum happiness of any individual shown to be always conjoined with the maximum general happiness, he is obliged to admit that “the only interests which a man is at all times sure to find adequate motives for consulting are his own.” Indeed, in many parts of his vast work, in the department of legislative and constitutional theory, it is rather assumed that the interests of some men will continually conflict with those of their fellows, unless we alter the balance of prudential calculation by a careful readjustment of penalties. But on this assumption a satisfactory system of private conduct on utilitarian principles cannot be constructed until legislative and constitutional reform has been perfected. And, in fact, “private ethics,” as conceived by Bentham, does not exactly expound such a system; but rather exhibits the coincidence, so far as it extends, between private and general happiness, in that part of each man’s conduct that lies beyond the range of useful legislation. It was not his place, as a practical philanthropist, to dwell on the defects in this coincidence; and since what men generally expect from a moralist is a completely reasoned account of what they ought to do, it is not surprising that some of Bentham’s disciples should have either ignored or endeavoured to supply the gap in his system. One section of the school even maintained it to be a cardinal doctrine of utilitarianism that a man always gains his own greatest happiness by promoting that of others; another section, represented by John Austin, apparently returned to Paley’s position, and treated utilitarian morality as a code of divine legislation; others, with Grote, are content to abate the severity of the claims made by “general happiness” on the individual, and to consider utilitarian duty as practically limited by reciprocity; while J. S. Mill, who has done more than any other member of the school to spread and popularize utilitarianism in ethics and politics, exalts the “moral hero” for voluntarily sacrificing his own happiness to promote that of others—a phenomenon, it should be observed, which in Bentham’s view is not even possible.

The fact is that there are several different ways in which a utilitarian system of morality may be used, without deciding whether the sanctions attached to it are always adequate. (1 ) It may be presented as practical guidance to all who choose “general good” as their ultimate end, whether they do so on religious grounds, or through the predominance in their minds of impartial sympathy, or because their conscience acts in harmony with utilitarian principles, or for any combination of these or any other reasons; or (2) it may be offered as a code to be obeyed not absolutely, but only so far as the coincidence of private and general interest may in any case be judged to extend; or agaiu (3) it may be proposed as a standard by which men may reasonably agree to praise and blame the conduct of other3, even though they may not always think fit to act on it. We may regard morality as a kind of supplementary legislation, supported by public opinion, which we may expect the public, when duly enlightened, to frame in accordance with the public interest. Still, even from this point of view, which is that of the legislator or social reformer rather than the moral philosopher, our code of duty must be greatly influenced by our estimate of the degrees in which men are normally influenced by self-regard (in its ordinary sense of regard for interests not sympathetic) and by sympathy or benevolence, and of the range within which sympathy may be expected to be generally effective. Thus, for example, the moral standard for which a utilitarian will reasonably endeavour to gain the support of public opinion must be essentially different in quality, according as he holds with Bentham that nothing but self-regard will “serve for diet,” though “for a dessert benevolence is a very valuable addition;” or with J. S. Mill that disinterested public spirit should be the prominent motive in the performance of all socially useful work, and that even hygienic precepts should be inculcated, not chiefly on grounds of prudence, but because “by squandering our health we disable ourselves from rendering services to our fellow-creatures.”

Not less important is the interval that separates Ben tham’s polemical attitude towards the moral sense from Mill’s conciliatory position, that “the mind is not in a state conformable to utility unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable in itself.” Such love of virtue Mill holds to be in a sense natural, though not an ultimate and inexplicable fact of human nature; it is to be explained by the “Law of Association” of feelings and ideas, through which objects originally desired as a means to some further end come to be directly pleasant or desirable. Thus, the miser first sought money as a means to comfort, but ends by sacrificing comfort to money; and similarly though the first promptings to justice (or any other virtue) spring from the non-moral pleasures gained or pain3 avoided by it, through the link formed by repeated virtuous acts the performance of them ultimately comes to have that immediate satisfaction attached to it which we distinguish as moral. Indeed, the acquired tendency to virtuous conduct may become so strong that the habit of willing it may continue, “even when the reward which the virtuous man receives from the consciousness of well-doing is anything but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes or the wishes he may have to renounce.” It is thus that the before-mentioned self-sacrifice of the moral hero is conceived by Mill to be possible and actual. The moral sentiments, on this view, are not phases of self-love as Hobbes held; nor can they be directly identified with sympathy, either in Hume’s way or in Adam Smith’s; in fact, though apparently simple they are really derived in a complex manner from self-love and sympathy combined with more primitive impulses. Justice (e.y.) is regarded by Mill as essentially resentment moralized by enlarged sympathy and intelligent self-interest; what we mean by injustice is harm done to an assignable individual by a breach of some rule for which we desire the violator to be punished, for the sake both of the person injured and of society at large, including ourselves. As regards moral sentiments generally, the view suggested by Mill is more definitely given by the chief living representative of the associationist school, Professor Bain; by whom the distinctive characteristics of conscience are traced to “education under government or authority,” though prudence, disinterested sympathy, and other emotions combine to swell the mass of feeling vaguely denoted by the term moral. The combination of antecedents is somewhat differently given by different writers; but all agree in representing the conscience of any individual as naturally correlated to the interests of the community of which he is a member, and thus a natural ally in enforcing utilitarian rules, or even a valuable guide when utilitarian calculations are difficult and uncertain.

This substitution of hypothetical history for direct analysis of the moral sense is really older than the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham, which it has so profoundly modified. The effects of association in modifying mental phenomena were noticed by Locke, and made a cardinal point in the metaphysic of Hume; who also referred to the principle slightly in his account of justice and other “artificial” virtues. Some years earlier, Gay, admitting Hutcheson’s proof of the actual disinterestedness of moral and benevolent impulses, had maintained that these (like the desires of knowledge or fame, the delight of reading, hunting, and planting, &c.) were derived from self-love by “the power of association.” But a thorough and systematic application of the principle to ethical psychology is first found in. Hartley’s Observations on Man (1748). Hartley, too, was the first to conceive association as producing, instead of mere cohesion of mental phenomena, a quasi-chemical combination of these into a compound apparently different from its elements. He shows elaborately how the pleasures and pains of “imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense” are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation; by the coalescence into really complex but apparently single ideas of the “miniatures” or faint feelings which the repetition of sensations contemporaneously or in immediate succession tends to produce in cohering groups. His theory assumes the correspondence of mind and body, and is applied pari passu to the formation of ideas from sensations, and of “compound vibratiuucules in the medullary substance” from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense. The same general view was afterwards developed on the psychical side alone by James Mill in his Analysis of the Human Mind, with much vigour and clearness. The whole theory has been persistently controverted by writers of the intuitional school, who (unlike Hartley) have usually thought that this derivation of moral sentiments from more primitive feelings would be detrimental to the authority of the former. The chief argument against this theory has been based on the early period at which these sentiments are manifested by children, which hardly allows time for association to produce the effects ascribed to it. This argument has been met in recent times by the application to mind of the physiological theory of heredity, according to which changes produced in the mind (brain) of a parent, by association of ideas or otherwise, tend to be inherited by his offspring; so that the development of the moral sense or any other faculty or susceptibility of existing man may be hypothetically carried back into the prehistoric life of the human race, without any change in the manner of derivation supposed. At present, however, the theory of heredity is usually held iu conjunction with Darwin’s theory of natural selection; according to which different kinds of living things in the course of a series of generations come gradually to be endowed with organs, faculties, and habits tending to the preservation of the individual or species under the conditions of life iu which it is placed. Thus we have a new zoological factor iu the history of the moral sentiments; which, though in no way opposed to the older psychological theory of their formation through coalescence of more primitive feelings, must yet be conceived as controlling and modifying the effects of the law of association by preventing the formation of sentiments other than those tending to the preservation of human life. The influence of the Darwinian theory, moreover, has extended from historical psychology to ethics, tending to substitute “preservation of the race under its conditions of existence” for “happiness” as the ultimate end aud standard of virtue.

Before concluding this sketch of the development of English ethical thought from Hobbes to the present time, it will be well to notice briefly the views held by different moralists on the question of free-will,—so far, that is, as they have been put forward as ethically important. We must first distinguish three meanings in which “freedom” is attributed to the will or “inner self” of a human being, viz., (1) the general power of choosing among different alternatives of action without a motive, or against the resultant force of conflicting motives; (2) the power of choice between the promptings of reason and those of appetites (or other non-rational impulses) when the latter conflict with reason; (3) merely the quality of acting rationally in spite of conflicting impulses, however strong, the non posse peccare of the mediaeval theologians. It is obvious that “freedom” in this third sense is in no way incompatible with complete determination; and, indeed, is rather an ideal state after which the moral agent ought to aspire than a property which the human will can be said to possess. In the first sense, again, as distinct from the second, the assertion of “freedom” has no ethical significance, except in so far as it introduces a general uncertainty into all our inferences respecting human conduct. Even in the second sense it hardly seems that the freedom of a man’s will can be an element to be considered in examining what it is right or best for him to do (though of course the clearest convictions of duty will be fruitless if a man has not sufficient self-control to enable him to act on them); it is rather when we ask whether it is just to punish him for wrong doing that it seems important to know whether he could have done otherwise. But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid auy stress on the relation of freewill either to duty generally or to justice in particular. Neither the doctrine of Hobbes, that deliberation is a mere alternation of competing desires, voluntary action immediately following the “last appetite,” nor the hardly less decided Determinism of Locke, who held that the will is always moved by the greatest present uneasiness, appeared to either author to require any reconciliation with the belief in human responsibility. Even in Clarke’s system, where Indeterminism is no doubt a cardinal notion, its importance is metaphysical rather than ethical; Clarke’s view being that the apparently arbitrary particularity in the constitution of the cosmos is really only explicable by reference to creative free-will. In the ethical discussion of Shaftesbury and sentimental moralists generally this question drops naturally out of sight; and the cautious Butler tries to exclude its perplexities as far as possible from the philosophy of practice. But since the reaction, led by Price and Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact, it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill desert which these writers give as an essential element in their analysis of the moral consciousness. An irresistible motive, it is forcibly said, palliates or takes away guilt; no one can blame himself for yielding to necessity, and no one can properly be punished for what he could not have prevented. In answer to this argument some necessarians have admitted that punishment can only be legitimate if it be beneficial to the person punished; others, again, have held that the lawful use of force is to restrain lawless force; but most of those who reject free-will defend punishment on the ground of its utility in deterring others from crime, as well as in correcting or restraining the criminal on whom it falls.

In the preceding sketch we have traced the course of English ethical speculation without bringing it into relation with contemporary European thought on the same subject. And in fact almost all the systems described, from Hobbes downward, have been of essentially native growth, showing hardly any traces of foreign influence. We may observe that ethics is the only department in which this result appears. The physics and psychology of Descartes were much studied in England, and his metaphysical system was certainly the most important antecedent of Locke’s; but Descartes hardly touched ethics proper. So again the controversy that Clarke conducted with Spinoza, and afterwards with Leibnitz, was entirely confined to the metaphysical region. Catholic France was a school for Englishmen iu many subjects, but not in morality; the great struggle between Jansenists and Jesuits had a very remote interest for us. It was not till near the close of the 18th century that the impress of the French revolutionary philosophy begins to manifest itself on this side the channel; and even then its influence is mostly political rather than ethical. It is striking to observe how even in the case of writers such as Godwin, who were most powerfully affected by the French political movement, the moral basis, oι∖ which the new social order of rational and equal freedom is constructed, is almost entirely of native origiu; even when the tone and spirit are French, the forms of thought and manner of reasoning are still purely English. In the derivation of Benthamism alone—which, it may be observed, first become widely known in the French paraphrase of Dumont—an important element is supplied by the works of a French writer, Helvetius; as Bentham himself was fully conscious. It was from Helvetius that he learnt that, men being universally and solely governed by self-love, the so-called moral judgments are really the common judgments of any society as to its common interests; that it is therefore futile on the one hand to propose any standard of virtue, except that of conduciveness to general happiness, and on the other hand useless merely to lecture men on duty and scold them for vice; that the moralist’s proper function is rather to exhibit the coincidence of virtue with private happiness; that, accordingly, though nature has bound men’s interests together in many ways, and education by developing sympathy and the habit of mutual help may much extend the connexion, still the most effective moralist is the legislator, who by acting on self-love through legal sanctions may mould human conduct as he chooses. These few simple doctrines give the ground plan of Bentham’s indefatigable and life-long labours.

So again, in the modified Benthamism which the persuasive exposition of J. S. Mill recently made popular in England, the influence of a French thinker, Auguste Comte {Philosophie Positive, 1829-42, and Système de Politique Positive, 1851—4) appears as the chief modifying element. This influence, so far as it has affected moral as distinct from political speculation, has been exercised primarily through the general conception of human progress; which, in Comte’s view, consists in the ever-growing preponderance of the distinctively human attributes over the purely animal, social feelings being ranked highest among human attributes, and highest of all the most universalized phase of human affection, the devotion to humanity as a whole. Accordingly, it is the development of benevolence in man, and of the habit of “living for others, - ’ which Comte takes as the ultimate aim and standard of practice, rather than the mere increase of happiness He holds, indeed, that the two are inseparable,and that the more altruistic any man’s sentiments and habits of action can be made, the greater will be the happiness enjoyed by himself as well as by others. But he does not seriously trouble himself to ar gue with egoism, or to weigh carefully the amount of happiness that might be generally attained by the satisfaction of egoistic propensities duly regulated; a supreme unquestioning self-devotion, in which all personal calculations are suppressed, is an essential feature of his moral ideal. Such a view is almost diametrically opposed to Bentham’s conception of normal human existence; the newer utilitarianism ∩f Mill represents an endeavour to find the right middle path between the two extremes.

It is to be observed that, in Comte’s view, devotion to humanity is the principle not merely of morality but of religion; 7.r., it should not merely be practically predominant, but should be manifested and sustained by regular and partly symbolical forms of expression, private and public. This side of Comte’s system, however, and the details of his ideal reconstruction of society, in which this religion plays an important part, have had but little influence either in England or elsewhere. It is more important to notice the general effect of his philosophy on the method of determining the particulars of morality as well as of law (as it ought to be). In the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham the proper rules of conduct, moral and legal, are determined by comparing the imaginary consequences of different modes of regulation on men and women, conceived as specimens of a substantially uniform and unchanging type. It is true that Bentham expressly recognizes the varying influences of climate, race, religion, government, as considerations which it is important for the legislator to take into account; but his own work of social construction was almost entirely independent of such considerations, and his school generally appear to have been convinced of their competence to solve all important ethical and political questions for human beings of all ages and countries, without regard to their specific differences. But in the Comtian conception of social science, of which ethics and politics are the practical application, the know ledge of the laws of the evolution of society is of fundamental and continually increasing importance; humanity is regarded as having passed through a series of stages, in each of which a somewhat different set of laws and institutions, customs and habits, is normal and appropriate. Thus present man is a being that can only be understood through a knowledge of his past history; and any effort to construct for him a moral and political ideal, by a purely abstract and unhistorical method, must be necessarily futile; whatever modifications may at any time be desirable in positive law and morality can only be determined by the aid of “social dynamics.” This view extends far beyond the limits of Comte’s special school or sect, and, indeed, seems to be very widely accepted among educated persons at the present day.

When we turn from French philosophy to German, we find the influence of the latter on English ethical thought almost insignificant until a very recent period. In the 17th century, indeed, the treatise of Puffendorf on the Laιo oj Nature, in which the general view of Grotius was restated with modifications, partly designed to effect a com promise with the new doctrine of Hobbes, seems to have been a good deal read at Oxford and elsewhere. Locke includes it among the books necessary to the complete education of a gentleman. But the subsequent development of the theory of conduct in Germany dropped almost entirely out of the cognizance of Englishmen; even the long dominant system of Wolff (d. 1754), imposing in its elaborate and complete construction, was hardly known to our best informed writers. Nor did the greater fame and more commanding genius of Kant (1724-1804) procure him any English disciples of note, or even lead to the serious study of his ethical system by English moralists, until the second quarter of the present century. We find, however, distinct traces of Kantian influence in Whewell and other recent writers of the intuitional school; and the continually increasing interest in the products of the German mind which Englishmen have shown during the last 40 years has caused tho works of Kant to be so widely known that it would hardly be fit to close the present article without some account of his ethical doctrines.

The English moralist with whom Kant has most affinity is Price; in fact, Kantism, in the ethical thought of modern Europe, holds a place somewhat analogous to that occupied by the teaching of Price and Reid among ourselves. Kant, like Price and Reid, holds that the reason declares the immediate obligation of certain kinds of conduct, or (to use his phrase) issues “categorical imperatives.” Like Price he holds that an action is not good unless done from a good motive, and that this motive must be essentially different from natural inclination of any kind; duty, to be duty, must be done for duty’s sake; and he argues, with more subtlety than Price or Reid, that though a virtuous act is no doubt pleasant to the virtuous agent, and any violation of duty painful, this moral pleasure (or pain) cannot strictly be the motive to the act, because it follows instead of preceding the recognition of our obligation to do it.

With Price, again, he holds that rightness of intention and motive is not only an indispensable condition or element of the rightness of an action, but actually the sole determinant of its moral worth; but with more philosophical penetration he draws the inference—of which the English moralist does not seem to have dreamt—that there can be no separate rational principles for determining the “material” rightness of conduct, as distinct from its “formal” rightness; and therefore that all rules of duty must admit of being deduced from the one general principle that duty ought to be done for duty’s sake. This deduction is the most original part of Kant’s doctrine. The dictates of reason, he points out, must necessarily be addressed to all rational beings as such; hence, my intention cannot be right unless I am prepared to will the principle on which I act to be a universal law. He considers that this fundamental rule or imperative “act on a maxim which thou canst will to be law universal” supplies a sufficient criterion for determining particular duties in all cases. The rule excludes wrong conduct with two degrees of stringency. Some offences, such as breach of contract, we cannot even conceive universalized; as soon as every one broke promises no one would make them. Other maxims, such as that of leaving persons in distress to shift for themselves, we can easily conceive to be universal laws, but we cannot without contradiction will them to be such; for when we are ourselves in distress we cannot help desiring that others should help us.

Another important peculiarity of Kant’s doctrine is his development of the connexion between duty and free-will. He holds that it is through our moral consciousness that ιve know that we are free; in the cognition that I ought to do what is right because it is right and not because I like it, it is implied that this purely rational volition is possible; that my action can be determined, not “mechanically,” through the necessary operation of the natural stimuli of pleasurable and painful feelings, but in accordance with the laws of my true, reasonable self. The realization of reason, or of human wills so far as rational, thus presents itself as the absolute end of duty; and we get, as a new form of the fundamental practical rule, “act so as to treat humanity, in thyself or any other, as an end always, and never as a means only.” We may observe, too, that the notion of freedom connects ethicswith jurisprudence in a simple and striking manner The fundamental aim of jurisprudence is to realize external freedom by removing the hindrances imposed on each one’s free action through the interferences of other wills. Ethics shows how to realize internal freedom by resolutely pursuing rational ends in opposition to those of natural inclination. But what practicable ends are there which reason prescribes, and which can therefore be stated absolutely as ends at which human beings ought to aim whatever their actual desires may be? There are two such ends, Kant holds,—perfection and hap f z.ness; more precisely, what we are morally bound to seek is perfection for ourselves and happiness for others; since (1) no one can directly promote the moral perfection of others, depending as it does on free choice of right; and (2) one’s own happiness being necessarily an object of natural desire cannot also be regarded as a duty The latter limitation contrasts strikingly with the view of Butler and Reid, that man, as a rational being, is under a “manifest obligation” to seek his own interest. The difference, however, is not really so great as it seems; since in another part of his system Kant fully recognizes the reasonableness of self-love. Though duty, in his view, excludes regard for private happiness, the summum bonum is not duty alone, but duty and happiness combined; the demand for happiness as the reward of duty is so essentially reasonable that we must postulate a universal connexion between the two is the order of the universe; indeed, the practical necessity of this postulate is the only adequate rational ground that we have for believing in the existence of God.

Before the ethics of Kant had begun to be seriously studied in England, the rapid and remarkable development of metaphysical view and method of which the three chief stages are represented by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel respectively had already taken place; and the system of the latter was occupying the most prominent position in the philosophical thought of Germany. Hegel’s ethical doctrine (expounded chiefly in his Philosophie des Rechts, 1821) shows a close affinity, and also a striking contrast, to Kant’s. He holds, with Kant, that duty or good conduct consists in the conscious realization of the free reasonable will, which is essentially the same in all rational beings. But in Kant’s view the universal content of this will is only given in the formal condition of “only acting as one can desire all to act,” to be subjectively applied by each rational agent to his own volition; whereas Hegel conceives the universal will as objectively presented to each man in the laws, institutions, and customary morality of the community of which he is a member. Thus, in his view, not merely natural inclinations towards pleasures, or the desires for selfish happiness, require to be morally resisted; buteven the prompting of theindividual’s conscience, the impulse to do what seems to him right, if it comes into conflict with the common sense of his community. It is true that Hegel regards the conscious effort to realize one’s own conception of good as a higher stage of moral development than the mere conformity to the jural rules establishing property, maintaining contract, and allotting punishment to crime, in which the universal will is first expressed; since in such conformity this will is only accomplished accidentally by the outward concurrence of individual wills, and is not essentially realized in any of them. He holds, however, that this conscientious effort is self deceived and futile, is even the very root of moral evil, except it attains its realization in harmony with the objective social relations in which the individual finds himself placed. Of these relations the first grade is constituted by the family, the second by civil society, and the third by the state, the organization of which is the highest manifestation of universal reason in the sphere of practice.

Hegelianism appears as a distinct element in English ethical thought at the present day; but the direct influence of Hegel’s system is perhaps less important than that indirectly exercised through the powerful stimulus which it has given to the study of the historical development of human thought and human society. According to Hegel, the essence of the universe is a process of thought from the abstract to the concrete; and a right understanding of this process gives the key for interpreting the evolution in time of European philosophy. So again, in his view, the history of mankind is a history of the necessary development of the free spirit through the different forms of political organization: the first being that of the Oriental monarchy, in which freedom belongs to the monarch only; the second, that of the Graeco-Roman republics, in which a select body of free citizens is sustained on a basis of slavery; while finally in the modern societies, sprung from the Teutonic invasion of the decaying Roman empire, freedom is recognized as the natural right of all members of the community. The effect of the lectures (post humously edited) in which Hegel’s “Philosophy of History” and “History of Philosophy” were expounded has extended far beyond the limits of his special school; indeed, the present predominance of the historical method in all departments of the theory of practice is not a little due to their influence. What place the study of history ought to take in the systematic establishment of fundamental ethical principles or of particular moral rules is, however, still a matter of eager controversy. (h. s.) Contents of Article Ethics. [table] [table]