In the preceding account of Christian morality, 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.Development of opinion in early Christianity.Changes in the external condition of Christianity, the different degrees of civilization in the societies of which it was the dominant religion, and the natural process of internal development, continually brought different features into prominence; while again, the important antagonisms of opinion within Christendom frequently involved ethical issues—even in the Eastern Church—until in the 4th century it began to be absorbed in the labour of a dogmatic construction. 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, Clement 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 developed18to come into even 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 (circa300A.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, was indistinguishable 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’sAugustine.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.19For since thenatura seminalisfrom 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 according to their traditional interpretation; but he explains these virtues to be in their true natures only the same love to God in different aspects or exercises. The 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 worth 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 he took an important part in giving currency to the distinction between evangelical “counsels” and “commands,” and so defending the life of marriage and temperate enjoyment of natural good against the attacks of the more extravagant advocate 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 treatiseDe officiis ministrorumwe find for the firstAmbrose.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’s20De officiiswhich served the bishop as a model. Christian Wisdom, so far as it is 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 term. “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. Finally 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 reminded that the earth was made by God a common possession of all, and are bidden to administer their means for the common benefit; Ambrose, we should observe, is thoroughly aware of the fundamental union of these different virtues in Christianity, though he doesnot, like Augustine, resolve them all into the one central affection of love of God.
Under the influence of Ambrose and Augustine, the four cardinal virtues furnished a basis on which the systematic ethical theories of subsequent theologians were built. With them the triad of Christian graces, Faith, Hope andEcclesiastical morality in the “Dark Ages.”Love, and the seven gifts of the Spirit (Isaiah xi. 2) were often combined. In antithesis to this list, an enumeration of the “deadly sins” obtained currency. These were at first commonly reckoned as eight; but a preference for mystical numbers characteristic of medieval theologians finally reduced them to seven. The statement of them is variously given,—Pride, Avarice, Anger, Gluttony, Unchastity, are found in all the lists; the remaining two (or three) are variously selected from among Envy, Vainglory, and the rather singular sins Gloominess (tristitia) and Languid Indifference (acidiaoracedia, from Gr.ἀκηδία). These latter notions show plainly, what indeed might be inferred from a study of the list as a whole, that it represents the moral experience of the monastic life, which for some centuries was more and more unquestioningly regarded as in a peculiar sense “religious.” It should be observed that the (also Augustinian) distinction between “deadly” and “venial” sins had a technical reference to the quasi-jural administration of ecclesiastical discipline, which grew gradually more organized as the spiritual power of the church established itself amid the ruins of the Western empire, and slowly developed into the theocracy that almost dominated Europe during the latter part of the middle ages. “Deadly” sins were those for which formal ecclesiastical penance was held to be necessary, in order to save the sinner from eternal damnation; for “venial” sins he might obtain forgiveness, through prayer, almsgiving, and the observance of the regular fasts. We find that “penitential books” for the use of the confessional, founded partly on traditional practice and partly on the express decrees of synods, come into general use in the 7th century. At first they are little more than mere inventories of sins, with their appropriate ecclesiastical punishments; gradually cases of conscience come to be discussed and decided, and the basis is laid for that system of casuistry which reached its full development in the 14th and 15th centuries. This ecclesiastical jurisprudence, and indeed the general relation of the church to the ruder races with which it had to deal during this period, necessarily tended to encourage a somewhat external view of morality. But a powerful counterpoise to this tendency was continually maintained by the fervid inwardness of Augustine, transmitted through Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, and other writers of the philosophically barren period between the destruction of the Western empire and the rise of Scholasticism.
Scholastic ethics, like scholastic philosophy, attained its completest result in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. But before giving a brief account of the ethical part of his system, it will be well to notice the salient points inMedieval moral philosophy.the long and active discussion that led up to it. In the pantheistic system of Erigena (q.v.) (circa810-877) the chief philosophic element is supplied by the influence of Plato and Plotinus, transmitted through an unknown author of the 5th century, who assumed the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Accordingly the ethical side of this doctrine has the same negative and ascetic character that we have observed in Neoplatonism. God is the only real Being; evil is essentially unreal and incognizable; the true aim of man’s life is to return to perfect union with God out of the degraded material existence into which he has fallen. This doctrine found little acceptance among Erigena’s contemporaries, and was certainly unorthodox enough to justify the condemnation which it subsequently received from Honorius III.; but its influence, together with that of the Pseudo-Dionysius, had a considerable share in developing the more emotional orthodox mysticism of the 12th and 13th centuries; and Neoplatonism (or Platonism received through a Neoplatonic tradition) remained a distinct element in medieval thought, though obscured in the period of mature scholasticism by the predominant influence of Aristotle. Passing on to Anselm (1033-1109), we observe that the Augustinian doctrine of original sin and man’s absolute need of unmerited grace is retained in his theory of salvation; he also follows Augustine in defining freedom as the “power not to sin”; though in saying that Adam fell “spontaneously” and “by his free choice,” though not “through its freedom,” he has implicitly made the distinction that Peter the Lombard afterwards expressly draws between the freedom that is opposed to necessity and freedom from the slavery to sin. Anselm further softens the statement of Augustinian predestinationism by explaining that the freedom to will is not strictly lost even by fallen man; it is inherent in a rational nature, though since Adam’s sin it only exists potentially in humanity, except where it is made actual by grace.
In a more real sense Abelard (1079-1142) tries to establish the connexion between man’s ill desert and his free consent. He asserts that the inherited propensity to evil is not strictly a sin, which is only committed when the conscious self yields to vicious inclination. With a similar stress on the self-conscious side of moral action, he argues that rightness of conduct depends solely on the intention, at one time pushing this doctrine to the paradoxical assertion that all outward acts as such are indifferent.21In the same spirit, under the reviving influence of ancient philosophy (with which, however, he was imperfectly acquainted and the relation of which to Christianity he extravagantly misunderstood), he argues that the old Greek moralists, as inculcating a disinterested love of good—and so implicitly love of God as the highest good—were really nearer to Christianity than Judaic legalism was. Nay, further, he required that the Christian “love to God” should be regarded as pure only if purged from the self-regarding desire of the happiness which God gives. The general tendency of Abelard’s thought was suspiciously regarded by contemporary orthodoxy;22and the over-subtlety of the last-mentioned distinction provoked vehement replies from orthodox mystics of the age. Thus, Hugo of St Victor (1077-1141) argues that all love is necessarily so far “interested” that it involves a desire for union with the beloved; and since eternal happiness consists in this union, it cannot truly be desired apart from God; while Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) more elaborately distinguishes four stages by which the soul is gradually led from (1) merely self-regarding desire for God’s aid in distress, to (2) love him for his loving-kindness to it, then also (3) for his absolute goodness, until (4) in rare moments this love for himself alone becomes the sole all-absorbing affection. This controversy Peter the Lombard endeavoured to compose by the scholastic art of taking distinctions, of which he was a master. In his treatise,Libri sententiarum, mainly based on Augustinian doctrine, we find a distinct softening of the antithesis between nature and grace and an anticipation of the union of Aristotelian and Christian thought, which was initiated by Albert the Great and completed by Thomas Aquinas.
The moral philosophy of Aquinas is Aristotelianism with a Neoplatonic tinge, interpreted and supplemented by a view of Christian dogma derived chiefly from Augustine. All action or movement of all things irrational as well asThomas Aquinas.rational is directed towards some end or good,—that is, really and ultimately towards God himself, the ground and first cause of all being, and unmoved principle of all movement. This universal though unconscious striving after God, since he is essentially intelligible, exhibits itself in its highest form in rational beings as a desire for knowledge of him; such knowledge, however, is beyond all ordinary exercise of reason, and may be only partially revealed to man here below. Thus thesummum bonumfor 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 herebelow in a normal human existence of virtue and friendship, with mind and body sound and whole and properly trained for the needs of life. The higher happiness is given to man by free grace of God; but it is given to those only whose heart is right, and as a reward of virtuous actions. Passing to consider what actions are virtuous, we first observe generally that the morality of an act is in part, but only in part, determined by its particular motive; it partly depends on its external object and circumstances, which render it either objectively in harmony with the “order of reason” or the reverse. In the classification of particular virtues and vices we can distinguish very clearly the elements supplied by the different teachings which Aquinas has imbibed. He follows Aristotle closely in dividing the “natural” virtues into intellectual and moral, giving his preference to the former class, and the intellectual again into speculative and practical; in distinguishing within the speculative class the “intellect” that is conversant with principles, the “science” that deduces conclusions, and the “wisdom” to which belongs the whole process of knowing the sublimest objects of knowledge; and in treating practical wisdom as inseparably connected with moral virtues, and therefore in a sense moral. His distinction among moral virtues of the justice that renders others their due from the virtues that control the appetites and passions of the agent himself, represents his interpretation of theNicomachean Ethics; while his account of these latter virtues is a simple transcript of Aristotle’s, just as his division of the non-rational element of the soul into “concupiscible” and “irascible” is the old Platonic one. In arranging his list, however, he defers to the established doctrine of the four cardinal virtues (derived from Plato and the Stoics through Cicero); accordingly, the Aristotelian ten have to stand under the higher genera of (1) the prudence which gives reasoned rules of conduct, (2) the temperance which restrains misleading desire, and (3) the fortitude that resists misleading fear of dangers or toils. But before these virtues are ranked the three “theologic” virtues, faith, love and hope, supernaturally “instilled” by God, and directly relating to him as their object. By faith we obtain that part of our knowledge of God which is beyond the range of mere natural wisdom or philosophy; naturally (e.g.), we can know God’s existence, but not his trinity in unity, though philosophy is useful to defend this and other revealed verities; and it is essential for the soul’s welfare that all articles of the Christian creed, however little they can be known by natural reason, should be apprehended through faith; the Christian who rejects a single article loses hold altogether of faith and of God. Faith is the substantial basis of all Christian morality, but without love—the essential form of all the Christian virtues—it is “formless” (informis). Christian love is conceived (after Augustine) as primarily love to God (beyond the natural yearning of the creature after its ultimate good), which expands into love towards all God’s creatures as created by him, and so ultimately includes even self-love. But creatures are only to be loved in their purity as created by God; all that is bad in them must be an object of hatred till it is destroyed. In the classification of sins the Christian element predominates; still we find the Aristotelian vices of excess and defect, along with the modern divisions into “sins against God, neighbour and self,” “mortal and venial sins,” and so forth.
From the notion of sin—treated in its jural aspect—Aquinas passes naturally to the discussion of Law. The exposition of this conception presents to a great extent the same matter that was dealt with by the exposition of moral virtues, but in a different form; the prominence of which may perhaps be attributed to the growing influence of Roman jurisprudence, which attained in the 12th century so rapid and brilliant a revival in Italy. This side of Thomas’s system is specially important, since it is just this blending of theological conceptions with the abstract theory of the later Roman law that gave the starting-point for independent ethical thought in the modern world. Under the general idea of law, defined as an “ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has charge of the community,” Thomas distinguishes (1) the eternal law or regulative reason of God which embraces all his creatures, rational and irrational; (2) “natural law,” being that part of the eternal law that relates to rational creatures as such; (3) human law, which properly consists of more particular deductions from natural law particularized and adapted to the varying circumstances of actual communities; (4) divine law specially revealed to man. As regards natural law, he teaches that God has implanted in the human mind a knowledge of its immutable general principles; and not only knowledge, but a disposition, to which he applies the peculiar scholastic namesynderesis,23that unerringly prompts to the realization of these principles in conduct, and protests against their violation. All acts of natural virtue are implicitly included within the scope of this law of nature; but in the application of its principles to particular cases—to which the term “conscience” should be restricted—man’s judgment is liable to err, the light of nature being obscured and perverted by bad education and custom. Human law is required, not merely to determine the details for which natural law gives no intuitive guidance, but also to supply the force necessary for practically securing, among imperfect men, the observance of the most necessary rules of mutual behaviour. The rules of this law must be either deductions from principles of natural law, or determinations of particulars which it leaves indeterminate; a rule contrary to nature could not be valid as law at all. Human law, however, can deal with outward conduct alone, and natural law, as we have seen, is liable to be vague and obscure in particular applications. Neither natural nor human law, moreover, takes into account that supernatural happiness which is man’s highest end. Hence they need to be supplemented by a special revelation of divine law. This revelation is distinguished into the law of the old covenant and the law of the gospel; the latter of these is productive as well as imperative since it carries with it the divine grace that makes its fulfilment possible. We have, however, to distinguish in the case of the gospel between (1) absolute commands and (2) “counsels,” which latter recommend, without positively ordering the monastic life of poverty, celibacy and obedience as the best method of effectively turning the will from earthly to heavenly things.
But how far is man able to attain either natural or Christian perfection? This is the part of Thomas’s system in which the cohesion of the different elements seems weakest. He is scarcely aware that his Aristotelianized Christianity inevitably combines two different difficulties in dealing with this question: first, the old pagan difficulty of reconciling the proposition that will is a rational desire always directed towards apparent good, with the freedom of choice between good and evil that the jural view of morality seems to require; and, secondly, the Christian difficulty of harmonizing this latter notion with the absolute dependence on divine grace which the religious consciousness affirms. The latter difficulty Thomas, like many of his predecessors, avoids by supposing a “co-operation” of free-will and grace, but the former he does not fully meet. It is against this part of his doctrines that the most important criticism, in ethics, of hisDuns Scotus.rival Duns Scotus (c.1266-1308) was directed. He urged that will could not be really free if it were bound to reason, as Thomas (after Aristotle) conceives it; a really free choice must be perfectly indeterminate between reason and unreason. Scotus consistently maintained that the divine will is similarly independent of reason, and that the divine ordering of the world is to be conceived as absolutely arbitrary. On this point he was followed by the acute intellect of William of Occam (d.c.1347). This doctrine isWilliam of Occam.obviously hostile to all reasoned morality; and in fact, notwithstanding the dialectical ability of Scotus and Occam, the work of Thomas remained indubitably the crowning result of the great constructive effort of medieval philosophy. The effort was, indeed, foredoomed to failure, since it attempted the impossible task of framing a coherentsystem out of the heterogeneous data furnished by Scripture, the fathers, the church and Aristotle—equally unquestioned, if not equally venerated, authorities. Whatever philosophic quality is to be found in the work of Thomas belongs to it in spite of, not in consequence of, its method. Still, its influence has been great and long-enduring,—in the Catholic Church primarily, but indirectly among Protestants, especially in England, since the famous first book of Hooker’sEcclesiastical Polityis to a great extent taken from theSumma theologiae.
Partly in conscious antagonism to the schoolmen, yet with close affinity to the central ethico-theological doctrine which they read out of or into Aristotle, the mystical manner of thought continued to maintain itself in the church.Medieval mysticism.Philosophically it rested upon Neoplatonism, but its development in strict connexion with Christian orthodoxy begins in the 12th century with Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugo of St Victor. It blended the Christian element of love with the ecstatic vision of Plotinus, sometimes giving the former a decided predominance. In its more moderate form, keeping wholly within the limits of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, this mysticism is represented by Bonaventura and Gerson; while it appears more independent and daringly constructive in the German Eckhart, advancing in some of his followers to open breach with the church, and even to practical immorality.
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 theSumma theologiae; in which, for the most part, an excellentCasuistry.combination of moral elevation with sobriety of judgment is shown, though on certain points the scholastic pedantry of definition and distinction is unfavourable to due delicacy of treatment. As the properly philosophic interest of scholasticism faded in the 14th and 15th centuries, the quasi-legal treatment of morality came again into prominence, borrowing a good deal of matter from Thomas and other schoolmen. One result of this was a marked development and systematization of casuistry. The best knownSummae casuum conscientiae, compiled for the conduct of auricular confession, belong to the 14th and 15th centuries. The oldest, theAstesana, from Asti in Piedmont, is arranged as a kind of text-book of morality on a scholastic basis; later manuals are merely lists of questions and answers. It was inevitable that, in proportion as this casuistry assumed the character of a systematic penal jurisprudence, its precise determination of the limits between the prohibited and the allowable, with all doubtful points closely scrutinized and illustrated by fictitious cases, would have a tendency to weaken the moral sensibilities of ordinary minds; the greater the industry spent in deducing conclusions from the diverse authorities, the greater necessarily became the number of points on which doctors disagreed; and the central authority that might have repressed serious divergences was wanting in the period of moral weakness24that the church went through after the death of Boniface VIII. A plain man perplexed by such disagreements might naturally hold that any opinion maintained by a pious and orthodox writer must be a safe one to follow; and thus weak consciences were subtly tempted to seek the support of authority for some desired relaxation of a moral rule. It does not, however, appear that this danger assumed formidable proportions until after the Reformation; when, in the struggle made by the Catholic church to recover its hold on the world, the principle of authority was, as it were, forced into keen, balanced and prolonged conflict with that of reliance on private judgment. To the Jesuits, theThe Jesuits.foremost champions in this struggle, it seemed indispensable that the confessional should be made attractive; for this purpose ecclesiastico-moral law must be somehow “accommodated” to worldly needs; and the theory of “Probabilism” supplied a plausible method for effecting this accommodation. The theory proceeded thus: A layman could not be expected to examine minutely into a point on which the learned differed; therefore he could not fairly be blamed for following any opinion that rested on the authority of even a single doctor; therefore his confessor must be authorized to hold him guiltless if any such “probable” opinion could be produced in his favour; nay, it was his duty to suggest such an opinion, even though opposed to his own, if it would relieve the conscience under his charge from a depressing burden. The results to which this Probabilism, applied with an earnest desire to avoid dangerous rigour, led in the 17th century were revealed to the world in the immortalLettres provincialesof 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,The Reformation. Transition to modern ethical philosophy.even if we consider only its ethical principles and effects. It maintained the simplicity of Apostolic Christianity against the elaborate system of a corrupt hierarchy, the teaching of Scripture alone against the commentaries of the fathers and the traditions of the church, the right of private judgment against the dictation of ecclesiastical authority, the individual responsibility of every human soul before God in opposition to the papal control over purgatorial punishments, which had led to the revolting degradation of venal indulgences. Reviving the original antithesis between Christianity and Jewish legalism, it maintained the inwardness of faith to be the sole way to eternal life, in contrast to the outwardness of works; returning to Augustine, and expressing his spirit in a new formula, to resist the Neo-Pelagianism that had gradually developed itself within the apparent Augustinianism of the church, it maintained the total corruption of human nature, as contrasted with that “congruity” by which, according to the schoolmen, divine grace was to be earned; renewing the fervent humility of St Paul, it enforced the universal and absolute imperativeness of all Christian duties, and the inevitable unworthiness of all Christian obedience, in opposition to the theory that “condign” merit might be gained by “supererogatory” conformity to evangelical “counsels.” It will be seen that these changes, however profoundly important, were, ethically considered, either negative or quite general,relatingto the tone and attitude of mind in which all duty should be done. As regards all positive matter of duty and virtue, and most of the prohibitive code for ordinary men, the tradition of Christian teaching was carried on substantially unchanged by the Reformed churches. Even the old method of casuistry was maintained25during the 16th and 17th centuries; though Scriptural texts, interpreted and supplemented by the light of natural reason, now furnished the sole principles on which cases of conscience were decided.
In the 17th century, however, the interest of this quasi-legal treatment of morality gradually faded; and the ethical studies of educated minds were occupied with the attempt, renewed after so many centuries, to find an independentHumanism.philosophical basis for the moral code. The renewal of this attempt was only indirectly due to the Reformation; it is rather to be connected with the more extreme reaction from the medieval religion which was partly caused by, partly expressed in, that enthusiastic study of the remains of old pagan culture that spread from Italy over Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. To this “humanism” the Reformation seemed at first more hostile than the Roman hierarchy; indeed, the extent to which this latter had allowed itself to become paganized by the Renaissance was one of the points that especially roused the Reformers’ indignation. Not the less important is the indirect stimulus given by the Reformation towards the development of a moral philosophy independent alike of Catholic and Protestant assumptions. Scholasticism, while reviving philosophy as a handmaid to theology, had metamorphosed its method into one resembling that of its mistress; thus shackling the renascent intellectualactivity which it stimulated by the double bondage to Aristotle and to the church. When the Reformation shook the traditional authority in one department, the blow was necessarily felt in the other. Not twenty years after Luther’s defiance of the pope, the startling thesis “that all that Aristotle taught was false” was prosperously maintained by the youthful Ramus before the university of Paris; and almost contemporaneously the group of remarkable thinkers in Italy who heralded the dawn of modern physical science—Cardanus, Telesio, Patrizzi, Campanella, Bruno—began to propound their Aristotelian theories of the constitution of the physical universe. It was to be foreseen that a similar assertion of independence would make itself heard in ethics also; and, indeed, amid the clash of dogmatic convictions, and the variations of private judgment, it was natural to seek for an ethical method that might claim universal acceptance from all sects.
C.Modern Ethics.—The need of such independent principles was most strongly felt in the region of man’s civil and political relations, especially the mutual relations of communities. Accordingly we find that modern ethicalGrotius.controversy began in a discussion of the law of nature. Albericus Gentilis (1557-1611) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) were the first to give a systematic account. Natural law, according to Grotius and other writers of the age, is that part of divine law which follows from the essential nature of man, who is distinguished from animals by his “appetite” for tranquil association with his fellows, and his tendency to act on general principles. It is therefore as unalterable, even by God himself, as the truths of mathematics, although its effect may be overruled in any particular case by an express command of God; hence it is cognizablea priori, from the abstract consideration of human nature, though its existence may be knowna posteriorialso from its universal acceptance in human societies. The conception, as we have seen, was taken from the later Roman jurists; by them, however, the law of nature was conceived as something that underlay existing law, and was to be looked for through it, though it might ultimately supersede it, and in the meanwhile represented an ideal standard, by which improvements in legislation were to be guided. Still the language of the jurists in some passages (cf.Inst. of Justinian, ii. 1, 2) clearly implied a period of human history in which men were governed by natural law alone, prior to the institution of civil society. Posidonius had identified this period with the mythical “golden age”; and such ideas easily coalesced with the narrative in Genesis. Thus there had become current the conception of a “state of nature” in which individuals or single families lived side by side—under none other than those “natural” laws which prohibited mutual injury and interference in the free use of the goods of the earth common to all, and upheld parental authority, fidelity of wives, and the observance of compacts freely made. This conception Grotius took, and gave it additional force and solidity by using the principles of this natural law for the determination of international rights and duties, it being obvious that independent nations, in their corporate capacities, were still in that “state of nature” in their mutual relations. It was not, of course, assumed that these laws were universally obeyed; indeed, one point with which Grotius is especially concerned is the natural right of private war, arising out of the violation of more primary rights. Still a general observance was involved in the idea of a natural law as a “dictate of right reason indicating the agreement or disagreement of an act with man’s rational and social nature”; and we may observe that it was especially necessary to assume such a general observance in the case of contracts, since it was by an “express or tacit pact” that the right of property (as distinct from the mere right to non-interference during use) was held by him to have been instituted. A similar “fundamental pact” had long been generally regarded as the normal origin of legitimate sovereignty.
The ideas above expressed were not peculiar to Grotius; in particular the doctrine of the “fundamental pact” as the jural basis of government had long been maintained, especially in England, where the constitution historically established readily suggested such a compact. At the same time the rapid and remarkable success of Grotius’s treatise (De jure belli et pacis) brought his view of Natural Right into prominence, and suggested such questions as—“What is man’s ultimate reason for obeying these laws? Wherein exactly does this their agreement with his rational and social nature consist? How far, and in what sense, is his nature really social?”
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 psychologicalHobbes.views to which Hobbes had been led, possibly to some extent under the influence of Bacon,26partly perhaps through association with his younger contemporary Gassendi, who, in two treatises, published between the appearance of Hobbes’sDe cive(1642) and that of theLeviathan(1651), endeavoured to revive interest in Epicurus. Hobbes’s psychology is in the first place materialistic; he holds, that is, that in any of the psycho-physical phenomena of human nature the reality is a material process of which the mental feeling is a mere “appearance.” Accordingly he regards pleasure as essentially motion “helping vital action,” and pain as motion “hindering” it. There is no logical connexion between this theory and the doctrine that appetite of desire has always pleasure (or the absence of pain) for its object; but a materialist, framing a system of psychology, will naturally direct his attention to the impulses arising out of bodily wants, whose obvious end is the preservation of the agent’s organism; and this, together with a philosophic wish to simplify, may lead him to the conclusion that all human impulses are similarly self-regarding. This, at any rate, is Hobbes’s cardinal doctrine in moral psychology, that each man’s appetites or desires are naturally directed either to the preservation of his life, or to that heightening of it which he feels as pleasure.27Hobbes does not distinguish instinctive from deliberate pleasure-seeking; and he confidently resolves the most apparently unselfish emotions into phases of self-regard. Pity he finds to be grief for the calamity of others, arising from imagination of the like calamity befalling oneself; what we admire with seeming disinterestedness as beautiful (pulchrum) is really “pleasure in promise”; when men are not immediately seeking present pleasure, they desire power as a means to future pleasure, and thus have a derivative delight in the exercise of power that prompts to what we call benevolent action. Since, then, all the voluntary actions of men tend to their own preservation or pleasure, it cannot be reasonable to aim at anything else; in fact, nature rather than reason fixes this as the end of human action; it is reason’s function to show the means. Hence if we ask why it is reasonable for any individual to observe the rules of social behaviour that are commonly called moral, the answer is obvious that this is only indirectly reasonable, as a means to his own preservation or pleasure. It is not, however, in this, which is only the old Cyrenaic or Epicurean answer, that the distinctive point of Hobbism lies. It is rather in the doctrine that even this indirect reasonableness of the most fundamental moral rules is entirely conditional on their general observance, which cannot be secured apart from government. For example, it is not reasonable for me to perform my share of a contract, unless I have reason for believing that the other party will perform his; and this I cannot have, except in a society in which he will be punished for non-performance. Thus the ordinary rules of social behaviour are only hypothetically obligatory; they are actualized by the establishment of a “common power”that may “use the strength and means of all” to enforce on all the observance of rules tending to the common benefit. On the other hand Hobbes yields to no one in maintaining the paramount importance of moral regulations. The precepts of good faith, equity, requital of benefits, forgiveness of wrong so far as security allows, the prohibition of contumely, pride, arrogance,—which may all be summed up in the formula, “Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself” (i.e.the negative of the “golden rule”)—he still calls “immutable and eternal laws of nature”—meaning that, though a man is not unconditionally bound to realize them, he is, as a reasonable being, bound to desire that they should be realized. The pre-social state of man, in his view, is also pre-moral; but it is therefore utterly miserable. It is a state in which every one has a right to everything that may conduce to his preservation;28but it is therefore also a state of war—a state so wretched that it is the first dictate of rational self-love to emerge from it into social peace and order. Hence Hobbes’s ideal constitution naturally comes to be an unquestioned and unlimited—though not necessarily monarchical—despotism. Whatever the government declares to be just or unjust must be accepted as such, since to dispute its dictates would be the first step towards anarchy, the one paramount peril outweighing all particular defects in legislation and administration. It is perhaps easy to understand how, in the crisis of 1640, when the ethico-political system of Hobbes first took written shape, a peace-loving philosopher should regard the claims of individual conscience as essentially anarchical, and dangerous to social well-being; but however strong might be men’s yearning for order, a view of social duty, in which the only fixed positions were selfishness everywhere and unlimited power somewhere, could not but appear offensively paradoxical.
There was, however, in his theory an originality, a force, an apparent coherence which rendered it undeniably impressive; in fact, we find that for two generations the efforts to construct morality on a philosophical basis take more or less the form of answers to Hobbes. From an ethical point of view Hobbism divides itself naturally into two parts, which by Hobbes’s peculiar political doctrines are combined into a coherent whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected. Its theoretical basis is the principle of egoism; while, for practically determining the particulars of duty it makes morality entirely dependent on positive law and institution. It thus affirmed the relativity of good and evil in a double sense; good and evil, for any individual citizen, may from one point of view be defined as the objects respectively of his desire and his aversion; from another, they may be said to be determined for him by his sovereign. It is this latter aspect of the system which is primarily attacked by the first generation of writers that replied to Hobbes. This attack, or rather the counter-exposition of orthodox doctrine, is conducted on different methods by the Cambridge moralists and by Cumberland respectively. Cumberland is content with the legal view of morality, but endeavours to establish the validity of the laws of nature by taxing them on the single supreme principle of rational regard for the “common good of all,” and showing them, as so based, to be adequately supported by the divine sanction. The Cambridge school, regarding morality primarily as a body of truth rather than a code of rules, insist on its absolute character and intuitive certainty.
Cudworth was the most distinguished of the little group of thinkers at Cambridge in the 17th century, commonly known as the Cambridge Platonists (q.v.). In his treatise onEternal and Immutable Moralityhis main aim is to maintain theThe Cambridge moralists, Cudworth.“essential and eternal distinctions of good and evil” as independent of mere will, whether human or divine. These distinctions, he insists, have an objective reality, cognizable by reason no less than the relations of space or number; and he endeavours to refute Hobbism—which he treats as a “novantique philosophy,” a mere revival of the relativism of Protagoras—chiefly by the followingargumentum ad hominem. He argues that Hobbes’s atomic materialism involves the conception of an objective physical world, the object not of passive sense that varies from man to man, but of the active intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore, he urges, an inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in morals, and an objective world of right and wrong, which the mind by its normal activity clearly apprehends as such.
Cudworth, in the work above mentioned, gives no systematic exposition of the ethical principles which he holds to be thus intuitively apprehended. But we may supply this deficiency from theEnchiridion Ethicumof HenryMore.More, another thinker of the same school. More gives a list of 23Noemata Moralia, the truth of which will, he says, be immediately manifest. Some of these admit of a purely egoistic application, and appear to be so understood by the author—as (e.g.) that goods differ in quality as well as in duration, and that the superior good or the lesser evil is always to be preferred; that absence of a given amount of good is preferable to the presence of equivalent evil; that future good or evil is to be regarded as much as present, if equally certain, and nearly as much if very probable. Objections, both general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of formulating man’s natural pursuit of self-interest; but the serious controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism related not to such principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a (real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows. Such are the evangelical principle of “doing as you would be done by”; the principle of justice, or “giving every man his own, and letting him enjoy it without interference”; and especially what More states as the abstract formula of benevolence, that “if it be good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on.” The question, however, still remains, what motive any individual has to conform to these social principles when they conflict with his natural desires. To this Cudworth gives no explicit reply, and the answer of More is hardly clear. On the one hand he maintains that these principles express an absolute good, which is to be called intellectual because its essence and truth are apprehended by the intellect. We might infer from this that the intellect, so judging, is itself the proper and complete determinant of the will, and that man, as a rational being, ought to aim at the realization of absolute good for its own sake. In spite, however, of possible inferences from his definition of virtue, this does not seem to be really More’s view. He explains that though absolute good is discerned by the intellect, the “sweetness and flavour” of it is apprehended, not by the intellect proper, but by what he calls a “boniform faculty”; and it is in this sweetness and flavour that the motive to virtuous conduct lies; ethics is the “art of living well and happily,” and true happiness lies in “the pleasure which the soul derives from the sense of virtue.” In short, More’s Platonism appears to be really as hedonistic as Hobbism; only the feeling to which it appeals as ultimate motive is of a kind that only a mind of exceptional moral refinement can habitually feel with the decisive intensity required.
It is to be observed that though More lays down the abstract principle of regarding one’s neighbour’s good as much as one’s own with the full breadth with which Christianity inculcates it, yet when he afterwards comes to classify virtues he is too much under the influence of Platonic-Aristotelian thought toCumberland.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 treatiseDe Legibus Naturae(1672), though written like More’s in Latin, is yet in its ethical matter thoroughly modern. Cumberland is a thinker both original and comprehensive, and, in spite of defects in style and clearness, he is noteworthy as having been the first to lay down that “regard for the common good of all” is the supreme rule of morality or law of nature. So far he may be fairly called the precursor of later utilitarianism. His fundamental principle and supreme “Law of Nature” is thus stated: “The greatest possible benevolence of every rational agent towards all the rest constitutes the happiest state of each and all, so far as depends on their own power, and is necessarily required for their happiness; accordingly Common Good will be the Supreme Good.” It is, however, important to notice that in his “good” is included not merely happiness but “perfection”; and he does not even define perfection so as to exclude from it the notion of absolute moral perfection and save his theory from an obvious logical circle. A notion so vague could not possibly be used with any precision for determining the subordinate rules of morality; but in fact Cumberland does not attempt this; his supreme principle is designed not to rectify, but merely to support and systematize, common morality. This principle, as was said, is conceived as strictly a law, and therefore referred to a lawgiver, God, and provided with a sanction in its effects on the agent’s happiness. That the divine will is expressed by it, Cumberland, “not being so fortunate as to possess innate ideas,” tries to prove by a long inductive examination of the evidences of man’s essential sociality exhibited in his physical and mental constitution. His account of the sanction, again, is sufficiently comprehensive, including both the internal and the external rewards of virtue and punishments of vice; and he, like later utilitarians, explains moral obligation to lie in the force exercised on the will by these sanctions; but as to the precise manner in which individual is implicated with universal good, and the operation of either or both in determining volition, his view is indistinct if not actually inconsistent.
The clearness which we seek in vain from Cumberland is found to the fullest extent in Locke, whoseEssay on the Human Understanding(1690) was already planned when Cumberland’s treatise appeared. Yet Locke’s ethicalLocke.opinions have been widely misunderstood; since from a confusion between “innate ideas” and “intuitions,” which has been common in recent ethical discussion, it has been supposed that the founder of English empiricism must necessarily have been hostile to “intuitional” ethics. The truth is that, while Locke agrees entirely with Hobbes as to the egoistic basis of rational conduct, and the interpretation of “good” and “evil” as “pleasure” and “pain,” or that which is productive of pleasure and pain, he yet agrees entirely with Hobbes’s opponents in holding ethical rules to be actually obligatory independently of political society, and capable of being scientifically constructed on principles intuitively known,—though he does not regard these principles as implanted in the mind at birth. The aggregate of such rules he conceives as the law of God, carefully distinguishing it, not only from civil law, but from the law of opinion or reputation, the varying moral standard by which men actually distribute praise and blame; as being divine it is necessarily sanctioned by adequate rewards and punishments. He does not, indeed, speak of the scientific construction of this code as having been actually effected, but he affirms its possibility in language remarkably strong and decisive. “The idea,” he says, “of a Supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and upon whom we depend, and the idea of ourselves, as understanding rational beings, being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action, as might place morality among the sciences capable of demonstration; wherein, I doubt not, but from self-evident propositions, by necessary consequences as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measure of right and wrong might be made out.” As Locke cannot consistently mean by God’s “goodness” anything but the disposition to give pleasure, it might be inferred that the ultimate standard of right rules of action ought to be the common happiness of the beings affected by the action; but Locke does not explicitly adopt this standard. The only instances which he gives of intuitive moral truths are the purely formal propositions, “No government allows absolute liberty,” and “Where there is no property there is no injustice,”—neither of which has any evident connexion with the general happiness. As regards his conception of the Law of Nature, he takes it in the main immediately from Grotius and Pufendorf, more remotely from the Stoics and the Roman jurists.
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 theBeing and Attributes of God(1704). It is true that Locke is not particularlyClarke.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,29essentially truths of relation, Clarke is quite in accordance with Locke; while of the four fundamental rules that he expounds, Piety towards God, Equity, Benevolence and Sobriety (which includes self-preservation), the first is obtained, just as Locke suggests, by “comparing the idea” of man with the idea of an infinitely good and wise being on whom he depends; and the second and third are axioms self-evident on the consideration of the equality or similarity of human individuals as such. The principle of equity—that “whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him,” is merely a formal statement of the golden rule of the gospel. We may observe that, in stating the principle of benevolence, “since the greater good is always most fit and reasonable to be done, every rational creature ought to do all the good it can to its fellow-creatures,” Clarke avowedly follows Cumberland, from whom he quotes the further sentence that “universal love and benevolence is as plainly the most direct, certain and effectual means to this good as the flowing of a point is to produce a line.” The quotation may remind us that the analogy between ethics and mathematics ought to be traced further back than Locke; in fact, it results from the influence exercised by Cartesianism over English thought generally, in the latter half of the 17th century. It must be allowed that Clarke is misled by the analogy to use general ethical terms (“fitness,” “agreement” of things, &c.), which overlook the essential distinction between what is and what ought to be; and even in one or two expressions to overleap this distinction extravagantly, as (e.g.) in saying that the man who “wilfully acts contrary to justice wills things to be what they are not and cannot be.” What he really means is less paradoxically stated in the general proposition that “originally and in reality it is natural and (morally speaking) necessary that the will should be determined in every action by the reason of the thing and the right of the case, as it is natural and (absolutely speaking) necessary that the understanding should submit to a demonstrated truth.” But though it is an essential point in Clarke’s view that what is right is to be done as such, apart from any consideration of pleasure or pain, it is to be inferred that he is not prepared to apply this doctrine in its unqualified form to such a creature as man, who is partly under the influence of irrational impulses. At least when he comes to argue the need of future rewards and punishments we find that his claim on behalf of morality is startlingly reduced. He now only contends that “virtue deserves to be chosen for its own sake, and vice to be avoided, though a man was sure for his own particular neither to gain nor lose anything by the practice of either.” He fully admits that the question is altered when vice is attended by pleasure and profit to the vicious man, virtue by loss and calamity; and even that it is “not truly reasonable that men by adhering to virtue should part with their lives,if thereby they deprived themselves of all possibility of receiving any advantage from their adherence.”
Thus, on the whole, the impressive earnestness with which Clarke enforces the doctrine of rational morality only rendered more manifest the difficulty of establishing ethics on an independent philosophical basis; so long at least as the psychological egoism of Hobbes is not definitely assailed and overthrown. Until this is done, the utmost demonstration of the abstract reasonableness of social duty only leaves us with an irreconcilable antagonism between the view of abstract reason and the self-love which is allowed to be the root of man’s appetitive nature. Let us grant that there is as much intellectual absurdity in acting unjustly as in denying that two and two make four; still, if a man has to choose between absurdity and unhappiness, he will naturally prefer the former; and Clarke, as we have already seen, is not really prepared to maintain that such preference is irrational.30
It remains to try another psychological basis for ethical construction; instead of presenting the principle of social duty as abstract reason, liable to conflict to any extent with natural self-love, we may try to exhibit theShaftesbury.naturalness of man’s social affections, and demonstrate a normal harmony between these and his self-regarding impulses. This is the line of thought which Shaftesbury (1671-1713) may be said to have initiated. This theory had already been advanced by Cumberland and others, but Shaftesbury was the first to make it the cardinal point in his system; no one had yet definitely transferred the centre of ethical interest from the Reason, conceived as apprehending either abstract moral distinctions or laws of divine legislation, for the emotional impulses that prompt to social duty; no one had undertaken to distinguish clearly, by analysis of experience, the disinterested and self-regarding elements of our appetitive nature, or to prove inductively their perfect harmony. In hisInquiry concerning Virtue and Merithe begins by attacking the egoism of Hobbes, which, as we have seen, was not necessarily excluded by the doctrine of rational intuitions of duty. This interpretation, he says, would be true only if we considered man as a wholly unrelated individual. Such a being we might doubtless call “good,” if his impulses were adapted to the attainment of his own felicity. But man we must and do consider in relation to a larger system of which he forms a part, and so we call him “good” only when his impulses and dispositions are so balanced as to tend towards the good of this whole. And again we do not attribute goodness to him merely because his outward acts have beneficial results. When we speak of a man as good, we mean that his dispositions or affections are such as tend of themselves to promote the good or happiness of human society. Hobbes’s moral man, who, if let loose from governmental constraint, would straightway spread ruin among his fellows, is not what we commonly agree to call good. Moral goodness, then, in a “sensible creature” implies primarily disinterested affections, whose direct object is the good of others; but Shaftesbury does not mean (as he has been misunderstood to mean) that only such benevolent social impulses are good, and that these are always good. On the contrary, he is careful to point out, first, that immoderate social affections defeat themselves, miss their proper end, and are therefore bad; secondly, that as an individual’s good is part of the good of the whole, “self-affections” existing in a duly limited degree are morally good. Goodness, in short, consists in due combination, in just proportion, of both sorts of “affections,” tendency to promote general good being taken as the criterion of the right degrees and proportions. This being established, the main aim of Shaftesbury’s argument is to prove that the same balance of private and social affections, which tends naturally to public good, is also conducive to the happiness of the individual in whom it exists. Taking the different impulses in detail, he first shows how the individual’s happiness is promoted by developing his social affections, mental pleasures being superior to bodily, and the pleasures of benevolence the richest of all. In discussing this he distinguishes, with well-applied subtlety, between the pleasurableness of the benevolent emotions themselves, the sympathetic enjoyment of the happiness of others, and the pleasure arising from a consciousness of their love and esteem. He then exhibits the unhappiness that results from any excess of the self-regarding impulses, bodily appetite, desire of wealth, emulation, resentment, even love of life itself; and ends by dwelling on the intrinsic painfulness of all malevolence.31
One more special impulse remains to be noticed. We have seen that goodness of character consists in a certain harmony of self-regarding and social affections. But virtue, in Shaftesbury’s view, is something more; it implies a recognition of moral goodness and immediate preference of it for its own sake. This immediate pleasure that we take in goodness (and displeasure in its opposite) is due to a susceptibility which he calls the “reflex” or “moral” sense, and compares with our susceptibility to beauty and deformity in external things; it furnishes both an additional direct impulse to good conduct, and an additional gratification to be taken into account in the reckoning which proves the coincidence of virtue and happiness. This doctrine of the moral sense is sometimes represented as Shaftesbury’s cardinal tenet; but though characteristic and important, it is not really necessary to his main argument; it is the crown rather than the keystone of his ethical structure.
The appearance of Shaftesbury’sCharacteristics(1713) marks a turning-point in the history of English ethical thought. With the generation of moralists that followed, the consideration of abstract rational principles falls into the background, and its place is taken by introspective study of the human mind, observation of the actual play of its various impulses and sentiments. This empirical psychology had not indeed been neglected by previous writers. More, among others, had imitated Descartes in a discussion of the passions, and Locke’s essay had given a still stronger impulse in the same direction; still, Shaftesbury is the first moralist who distinctly takes psychological experience as the basis of ethics. His suggestions were developed by Hutcheson into one of the most elaborate systems of moral philosophy which we possess; through Hutcheson, if not directly, they influenced Hume’s speculations, and are thus connected with later utilitarianism. Moreover, the substance of Shaftesbury’s main argument was adopted by Butler, though it could not pass the scrutiny of that powerful and cautious intellect without receiving important modifications and additions. On the other hand, the ethical optimism of Shaftesbury, rather broadly impressive than exactly reasoned, and connected as it was with a natural theology that implied the Christian scheme to be superfluous, challenged attack equally from orthodoxMandeville.divines and from cynical freethinkers. Of these latter Mandeville, the author ofThe Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits(1723), was a conspicuous if not a typical specimen. He can hardly be called a “moralist”; and though it is impossible to deny him a considerable share of philosophic penetration, his anti-moral paradoxes have not even apparent coherence. He is convinced that virtue (where it is more than a mere pretence) is purely artificial; but not quite certain whether it is a useless trammel of appetites and passions that are advantageous to society, or a device creditable to the politicians who introduced it by playing upon the “pride and vanity” of the “silly creature man.” The view, however, to which he gave audacious expression, that moral regulation is something alien to the natural man, and imposed on him from without, seems to have been very current in the polite society of his time, as we learn both from Berkeley’sAlciphronand 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 calledHobbist, although Butler fairly treats it as having a philosophical basis in Hobbes’s psychology. It was, so to say,Butler.Hobbism turned inside out,—rendered licentious and anarchical instead of constructive. Hobbes had said “the natural state of man is non-moral, unregulated; moral rules are means to the end of peace, which is a means to the end of self-preservation.” On this view morality, though dependent for its actuality on the social compact which establishes government, is actually binding on man as a reasonable being. But the quasi-theistic assumption that what is natural must be reasonable remained in the minds of Hobbes’s most docile readers, and in combination with his thesis that egoism is natural, tended to produce results which were dangerous to social well-being. To meet this view Butler does not content himself, as is sometimes carelessly supposed, with insisting on the natural claim to authority of the conscience which his opponent repudiated as artificial; he adds a subtle and effective argumentad hominem. He first follows Shaftesbury in exhibiting the social affections as no less natural than the appetites and desires which tend directly to self-preservation; then reviving the Stoic view of theprima naturae, the first objects of natural appetites, he argues that pleasure is not the primary aim even of the impulses which Shaftesbury allowed to be “self-affections”; but rather a result which follows upon their attaining their natural ends. We have, in fact, to distinguish self-love, the “general desire that every man hath of his own happiness” or pleasure, from the particular affections, passions, and appetites directed towards objects other than pleasure, in the satisfaction of which pleasure consists. The latter are “necessarily presupposed” as distinct impulses in “the very idea of an interested pursuit”; since, if there were no such pre-existing desires, there would be no pleasure for self-love to aim at. Thus the object of hunger is not the pleasure of eating but food; hunger is therefore, strictly speaking, no more “interested” than benevolence; granting that the pleasures of the table are an important element in the happiness at which self-love aims, the same at least may be said for the pleasures of love and sympathy. Further, so far from bodily appetites (or other particular desires) being forms of self-love, there is no one of them which under certain circumstances may not come into conflict with it. Indeed, it is common for men to sacrifice to passion what they know to be their true interests; at the same time we do not consider such conduct “natural” in man as a rational being; we rather regard it as natural for him to govern his transient impulses. Thus the notion of natural unregulated egoism turns out to be a psychological chimera. Indeed, we may say that an egoist must be doubly self-regulative, since rational self-love ought to restrain not only other impulses, but itself also; for as happiness is made up of feelings that result from the satisfaction of impulses other than self-love, any over-development of the latter, enfeebling these other impulses, must proportionally diminish the happiness at which self-love aims. If, then, it be admitted that human impulses are naturally under government, the natural claim of conscience or the moral faculty to be the supreme governor will hardly be denied.
But has not self-love also, by Butler’s own account, a similar authority, which may come into conflict with that of conscience? Butler fully admits this, and, in fact, grounds on it an important criticism of Shaftesbury. We have seen that in the latter’s system the “moral sense” is not absolutely required, or at least is necessary only as a substitute for enlightened self-regard; since if the harmony between prudence and virtue, self-regarding and social impulses, is complete, mere self-interest will prompt a duly enlightened mind to maintain precisely that “balance” of affections in which goodness consists. But to Butler’s more cautious mind the completeness of this harmony did not seem sufficiently demonstrable to be taken as a basis of moral teaching; he has at least to contemplate the possibility of a man being convinced of the opposite; and he argues that unless we regard conscience as essentially authoritative—which is not implied in the term “moral sense”—such a man is really bound to be vicious; “since interest, one’s own happiness, is a manifest obligation.” Still on this view, even if the authority of conscience be asserted, we seem reduced to an ultimate dualism of our rational nature. Butler’s ordered polity of impulses turns out to be a polity with two independent governments. Butler does not deny this, so far as mere claim to authority is concerned;32but 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, conscience and self-love, in Butler’s system, and perhaps, too, his revival of the Platonic conception of human nature as an ordered and governed community of impulses, is perhaps most nearly anticipatedWollaston.in Wollaston’sReligion of Nature Delineated(1722). Here, for the first time, we find “moral good” and “natural good” or “happiness” treated separately as two essentially distinct objects of rational pursuit and investigation; the harmony between them being regarded as matter of religious faith, not moral knowledge. Wollaston’s theory of moral evil as consisting in the practical contradiction of a true proposition, closely resembles the most paradoxical part of Clarke’s doctrine, and was not likely to approve itself to the strong common sense of Butler; but his statement of happiness or pleasure as a “justly desirable” end at which every rational being “ought” to aim corresponds exactly to Butler’s conception of self-love as a naturally governing impulse; while the “moral arithmetic” with which he compares pleasures and pains, and endeavours to make the notion of happiness quantitatively precise, is an anticipation of Benthamism.
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 theSermons, indeed (1729), Butler seems to treat conscience and calm benevolence as permanently allied though distinct principles, but in theDissertation on Virtue, appended to theAnalogy(1739), he maintains that the conduct dictated by conscience will often differ widely from that to which mere regard for the production of happiness would prompt. We may take this latter treatise as representing the first in the development of English ethics, at which what were afterwards called “utilitarian” and “intuitional” morality were first formally opposed; in earlier systems the antithesis is quite latent, as we have incidentally noticed in the case of Cumberland and Clarke. The argument in Butler’s dissertation was probablyHutcheson.directed chiefly against Hutcheson, who in hisInquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtuehad definitely identified virtue with benevolence. The identification is slightly qualified in Hutcheson’s posthumously publishedSystem of Moral Philosophy(1755), in which the general view of Shaftesbury is more fully developed, with several new psychological distinctions, including Butler’s separation of “calm” benevolence—as well as, after Butler, “calm self-love”—from the “turbulent” passions, selfish or social. Hutcheson follows Butler again in laying stress on the regulating and controlling function of the moral sense; but he still regards “kind affections” as the principal objects of moral approbation—the “calm” and “extensive” affections being preferred to the turbulent and narrow—together with the desire and love of moral excellence which is ranked with universal benevolence, the two being equally worthy and necessarily harmonious. Only in a secondary sense is approval due to certain “abilities and dispositions immediately connected with virtuous affections,” as candour, veracity, fortitude, sense of honour; while in a lower grade still are placed sciences and arts, along with even bodily skills and gifts; indeed, the approbation we give to these is not strictly moral, but is referred to the “sense of decency or dignity,” which (as well as the sense of honour) is to be distinguished fromthe moral sense. Calm self-love Hutcheson regards as morally indifferent; though he enters into a careful analysis of the elements of happiness,33in order to show that a true regard for private interest always coincides with the moral sense and with benevolence. While thus maintaining Shaftesbury’s “harmony” between public and private good, Hutcheson is still more careful to establish the strict disinterestedness of benevolent affections. Shaftesbury had conclusively shown that these were not in the vulgar sense selfish; but the very stress which he lays on the pleasure inseparable from their exercise suggests a subtle egoistic theory which he does not expressly exclude, since it may be said that this “intrinsic reward” constitutes the real motive of the benevolent man. To this Hutcheson replies that no doubt the exquisite delight of the emotion of love is a motive to sustain and develop it; but this pleasure cannot be directly obtained, any more than other pleasures, by merely desiring it; it can be sought only by the indirect method of cultivating and indulging the disinterested desire for others’ good, which is thus obviously distinct from the desire for the pleasure of benevolence. He points to the fact that the imminence of death often intensifies instead of diminishing a man’s desire for the welfare of those he loves, as a crucial experiment proving the disinterestedness of love; adding, as confirmatory evidence, that the sympathy and admiration commonly felt for self-sacrifice depends on the belief that it is something different from refined self-seeking.