referred to a law-giver, 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 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 primarily in the force exercised on the will by these sanctions. He considers, however, that while this egoistic motive is indispensable, and is the normal spring of action in the earlier stages of man's moral obedience, yet rational beings tend to rise from this to the nobler motives of love to God, regard for His honour, and disinterested affection for the common good. At the same time it is difficult to put together in a clear and consistent view his different statements as to the connection between the good of the individual and universal good, and as to the manner in which the rational apprehension of either or both goods operates in determining volition.

1704).

The clearness which we seek in vain from Cumberland Locke (1632is 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.

But this is a complete misapprehension,

so far as the determination of moral rules is concerned though it is no doubt true that Locke rejects the view that the mere apprehension by the reason of the obligatoriness of certain rules is, or ought to be, a sufficient motive to their performance, apart from the foreseen consequences to the individual of observing or neglecting them. He agrees, in fact, with Hobbes in interpreting "good" and "evil" as "nothing but pleasure and pain or that which occasions or procures pleasure and pain"; and he defines "Moral good and evil as "only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby good and evil is drawn on us from the will and power of the lawmaker." But none the less he 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 human 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,—and being divine he assumes it to be sanctioned by adequate rewards and punishments. He does not, indeed, speak of the scientific ascertainment of this code as having been completely 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 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. In the passage from which I have just quoted, the propositions which he gives as instances or intuitive moral truths-"no government allows absolute liberty," and "where there is no property there is no injustice"-have no evident connection with general happiness; so again in his treatise on "Civil Government," where he expounds that part of the code of nature which appears to him important in determining the source and limits of governmental power, his rationale of the rules laid down is not utilitarian, except in a latent or secondary way. His conception of the Law of Nature is, in the main, that which has come to him immediately from Grotius and his disciple Puffendorf, more remotely from the Stoics and the Roman jurists; though one or two important modifications are due to his own reflection. That all men are originally free and equal; that one ought not to harm another, but rather aid in preserving him, so far as his own preservation is not thereby impeded; that compacts ought to be kept; that parents have a power to control and direct their children, corresponding to their duty of maturing and training them, but only till they come to the age of reason; that the goods of the earth are common to all in the first instance, but become the private property of one who has "mixed

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his labour" with them, if there is "enough and as good left in common for others"-these principles appear to Locke intelligible and plain to any rational being who will contemplate the relations of men, as originally created, to each other and to God, without any explicit reference to general happiness as the supreme end. God, he argues, has made men similar in nature and faculties, therefore they are to be regarded as mutually independent; He has made them to last during His pleasure, therefore every one is bound to preserve his own life and that of others; and so forth. Not that Locke is averse to arguments showing the tendency of moral rules to promote general happiness: he has no doubt that they have this tendency, and he uses such arguments to some extent; but this line of reasoning is not fundamental in his system. Hence if his view be called in any sense utilitarian in respect of its method of determining right action, and not merely in respect of the motive it accepts as normal, it ought to be added that the utilitarianism is for the most part latent and unconscious.2

1 This is, perhaps, the most important innovation of Locke's; in the view of Grotius, as we saw, the right of private property was held to depend on an express or tacit compact.

2 I think that Locke's relation to utilitarianism is exactly characterised by some phrases of Puffendorf in which the latter is speaking of his own method. "In assigning," he says, "the cause and reason [for a law of nature] we are wont to have recourse, not to the benefit proceeding from it, but to the general nature in which it is founded." For example, if we are to give a reason why one man ought "not to hurt another, we do not usually say because abstaining from mutual violence is profitable (although it is so indeed in the highest degree), but because the person is another man, that is, an animal related to us by nature whom it would be criminal to harm." It may, I think, be inferred from the manner in which Locke mentions Puffendorf in his essay on education that he was in substantial agreement with his view of the Law of Nature.

(16751729).

Fifteen years after the publication of Locke's treatises § 5. Clarke on Civil Government (1705), an impressive attempt was made by Clarke to "place morality among the sciences capable of demonstration, from self-evident propositions as incontestible as those in mathematics"; but it was made on the lines of Cudworth's reasoning rather than of Locke's; as it maintained against Hobbes and Locke,1 that the cognition of self-evident practical propositions is in itself, independently of pleasure and pain, a sufficient motive to a rational being as such for acting in accordance with them. The aim of the lectures in which Clarke's system was expounded was to prove the "reasonableness and certainty" of the Christian revelation: and, with this view, to exhibit on the one hand the eternal and immutable obligations of morality "incumbent on men from the very nature and reason of things themselves," and on the other hand the impossibility of "defending" these obligations "to any effectual purpose," or enforcing them with any sufficient strength, without the belief in immortality and future rewards and punishments. This doubleness of aim—which, as we shall see, complicates Clarke's task rather seriously-must always be kept in view in examining his system. He is anxious to show both that moral rules are binding independently of the sanctions that divine legislation has attached to them, and also that such rules are laws of God, with adequate sanctions attached to their observance and violation; the two propositions are, in his view, necessarily connected, since only from the absolute bindingness of justice on all rational wills are we able to infer with philosophic certainty that God, being necessarily just, will

1 It should be observed that Clarke's polemic is formally directed against Hobbes alone; he does not, so far as I am aware, ever define his relation to Locke.