binding on all rational creatures under any circumstances. The admission, however, is obviously wide enough for all purposes. In spite of the eternal and immutable nature of the abstract laws, the concrete law may vary as widely as even Mandeville could have desired, 12. The tenet of free-will adopted by the whole school encouraged the delusion that to make morals a science of observation was equivalent to making it arbitrary. They would have been under a similar delusion if they had argued that the act of healing was dependent upon fashion because its principles have to be deduced from facts and not from a priori and quasi-mathematical axioms. Price, the last teacher of the school, dwells at greatest length upon this part of the subject. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had popularised the theory of a 'moral sense.' Price understood them to mean that our moral judgments were merely the dictates of a blind instinct, in which the intellect had no share. Their theory, as expounded by him, would have been that murder was wrong simply because we disliked it; the dislike would have been alleged as its own justification. He argues, in opposition to this theory, which would certainly have been disowned by its supposed sponsors, that the intellect has not only a share in laying down moral laws and enforcing our obedience, but that it operates, or ought to operate, without the assistance of the emotions. His language upon those points is rendered obscure by his systematically confusing the questions of the criterion and the motive. It is comparatively plausible to say that the intellect is the sole agent in framing the criterion. His language upon this subject may sometimes remind us of Kant's Categorical Imperative;' and he seems to have been blundering round the same truths or errors from which the great German elaborated a moral theory far more ingenious, though involving the same fundamental fallacy. He finds fault with the language of some of his own school who had said that virtue consisted in 'conformity to the relations of truths and things'-on the ground that virtue cannot be defined. It is an ultimate form of thought. If we will consider why it is right to conform ourselves to the relations in which persons and objects stand to us, we shall find ourselves obliged to terminate our views in a simple immediate percep tion, or in something ultimately approved; and for which no justifying reason can be assigned.'1 This intention constitutes the obligation to act rightly. He asserts that the perception of right and wrong does excite to action, and is alone a sufficient principle of action.' 'It seems extremely evident that excitement belongs to the very ideas of moral right and wrong, and is essentially inseparable from the apprehension of them. When we are conscious that an action is fit to be done, or that it ought to be done, it is not conceivable that we can remain uninfluenced or want a motive to action.'3 . . . 'Instincts, therefore, as before observed in other instances, are not necessary to the choice of ends. The intellectual nature is its own law. It has within itself a spring and guide of action which it cannot suppress or reject.' 4 13. Hence we come to the conclusion that our actions do not, as philosophers have maintained, spring exclusively from a desire of pleasure or a dread of pain, but from the mere perception of a truth. Though Price cannot altogether dissociate our emotions from our actions, he endeavours to represent the passions as properly subsidiary to the intellect, and as superfluities of which we might rid ourselves entirely in a higher state of existence. He admits that 'some degree of pleasure is inseparable from the observation of virtuous actions; but he seems to hold that this is a merely subsidiary, and so to speak illusory, phenomenon. It would be as unreasonable to infer that 'the discernment of virtue is nothing distinct from the reception of this pleasure' as to infer that the so-called primary qualities are only modes of sensation. According to his philosophy, that is, virtue depends upon those real relations of things themselves which are apprehended only by the intellect. The pleasure given to the emotions, like the sensations produced by external phenomena on our ears or noses, have no independent reality. We should be better if we could do without them altogether. The occasion for them' (our passions and appetites) 'arises entirely from our deficiencies and weaknesses. Reason alone, did we pos 'Price's 'Review,' &c., 2 Ib. p. 308. Ib. p. 310. p. 210. Ib. p. 311. 5 Ib. p. 99. sess it in a higher degree, would answer all the ends of them. Thus there would be no need of the parental affection were all parents sufficiently acquainted with the reasons for taking upon them the guidance and support of those whom nature has placed under their care, and were they virtuous enough to be always determined by those reasons.' How there could be any reasons, when the passions and appetites had been eliminated, or how such reasons could determine anybody's conduct, does not appear. Price's argument on this point resembles the assertion that, because the process of intellectual development might enable us at some future day to draw our supplies of heat from some central reservoir instead of maintaining a fire on every hearth, we should therefore be able, if we were clever enough, to do without heat altogether. 14. Not only are the affections superfluous, but any given action is deprived of its merit in so far as they are present. The intellectual determination is, he says, the only spring of action in a reasonable being, so far as he can be deemed morally good and worthy,' and the 'only principle from which all actions flow which engage our esteem of the agents.' 2 It follows that 'instinctive benevolence is no principle of virtue nor are any actions flowing merely from it virtuous. As far as this influences, so far something else than reason and goodness influence, and so much I think is to be subtracted from the moral worth of any action or character.' 3 He argues, for example, that the tenderness of a mother is less valuable morally, as it flows more from instincts and is less attended. with reflection on their reasonableness and fitness; and in the same way as virtue is only virtue when it is the product of an intellectual perception, so vice is only vicious so far as the agent knows his actions to be vicious. The fallacy here is not peculiar to Price or his school; but it is useless to attempt to unravel any further the curious web of sophistry which thus passed for philosophical truth. We have dwelt sufficiently on the strange delusion which would represent the ideal man to be a mere calculating machine without passions or affections, employed in meditating on the eternal relations of things in a universe purified of all emotion. Infallibility and not impeccability constitutes the ultimate perfection, and 1 Price, p. 124. 2 Ib. p. 313. 3 Ib. p. 318. • Ib. p. 326. the perfect man would be lost, not in the love of God or of his race, but in the profoundest mathematical speculations. Price, oddly enough, represents himself as a disciple of Butler, of whom he speaks with the highest reverence, and does not perceive that Butler is in closer agreement with his adversary Shaftesbury than with himself. III. SHAFTESBURY AND MANDEVILLE. 15. It soon appeared that the moral Euclid which was the ideal of these philosophers would never get beyond the primary axioms which are equally true and trifling. Their metaphysical system decayed, leaving as its sole relic a magniloquent trick of language about the eternal and immutable nature of things. The phrase was familiar to the schools of Clarke and Tindal, but it gradually became too empty for use even in theological controversy. The serious discussion of ethical problems was continued by two schools, which correspond to the speculative tendencies embodied in Reid's Common Sense and Hume's scepticism. Both of them recognised tacitly or explicitly the impossibility of constructing a moral code from the ontological bases. 16. The common-sense school was alarmed by the apparent consequences of this admission. The same logic justified the belief in God and the belief in virtue. If that logic were admitted to be insecure, might not God and virtue disappear - from the universe? The common-sense philosophers held, as we have seen, that the vital principles might be preserved,! though their truth could not be exhibited as a necessary conclusion of the pure reason. A principle which cannot be demonstrated, and which is yet held to possess independent authority, must be recognised by a kind of intellectual instinct. In ethical discussions, the faculty in which this mysterious power resided was generally described as the moral sense or the conscience. To the ontologist such a theory appeared to be a mere empiricism, for it abandoned the claim of tracing back moral dogmas to an ultimate truth. The empiricist, on the other hand, was offended by the recognition of certain dogmas as possessing an authority requiring no confirmation from experience. The radical weakness, indeed, 8-20 of a philosophy which tries to save the superstructure whilst abandoning the foundation, which multiplies first principles at will, because it cannot prove them, was sufficiently proved by the barrenness of Reid's philosophy. In ethical ques tions the same weakness appears in another form. The intellectual cowardice which refuses to ask fundamental questions is naturally connected with the moral cowardice which refuses to look facts in the face. In the moralists whom we are about to consider there is generally a provoking tendency to a flimsy optimism. They inherit the pantheistic sentiment that whatever is, is right,' though they do not adopt the pantheistic logic; and as nature is still their God, they overlook the dark side of nature. The instinct which believes in God and virtue is very apt to disbelieve in the existence of natural evil and moral wickedness. There was, as we shall see, one great exception in Butler, who owes much of his power to his peculiar position in this respect. His conscience gives an account of the world very unlike that of his complacent brother philosophers. The want of thoroughness common to most of the school, the desire to obtain a comfortable and symmetrical theory at the expense of facts, did not prevent them from discharging a most important function. When the world is without a genuine philosophy, it becomes extremely desirable to assert the existence and value of those impulses which (whatever their nature) we call conscience. The sceptical school was sapping the very foundations of the system with which, rightly or wrongly, the whole moral doctrine had been connected. In such a case, a blind and inexplicable instinct was at least better than none. The commonsense school might be wrong in asserting that the conscience was essentially a primitive and inexplicable faculty. They might, nevertheless, be right in saying that it existed, and that neither they nor their opponents could disprove its reality nor explain its origin. In the sphere of practice they maintained an ideal of virtuous action which was seriously threatened; in the sphere of speculation they at least kept before the world an important problem-what, namely, is the origin of the virtuous impulses? 17. Round this point raged the most active controversies of the period which we have to consider. Is conscience a |