special faculty was needed to produce dread of his vengeance or an enthusiastic reverence for his goodness. So long, therefore, as the older theological conception of the universe is unhesitatingly accepted, the only moral enquiry which is likely to flourish is casuistry, or the discussion as to the details of that legal code whose origin and sanction are abundantly clear.

2. But wider speculations as to morality inevitably occur as soon as the vision of God becomes faint; when the Almighty retires behind second causes, instead of being felt as an immediate, presence, and his existence becomes the subject of logical proof, or belief is refined into sentiment. If the old system of government disappears, what is to take its place? The prohibition of murder is no longer uttered by a visible Deity from Mount Sinai. Why, then, should we not commit murder? and how do we know that it is wrong? Hell no longer yawns before us; what punishment has the murderer to dread? The sentiment of disapproval survives the clearly divine character of the prohibition. What, then, is its meaning and origin? Attention had been called to these most important questions by Hobbes, the keenest and most audacious of all contemporary speculators. Throughout the seventeenth and the first years of the eighteenth century he represented the evil principle to moralists as well as to theologians. The two classes are indeed one. The whole theology of the eighteenth century has a specially moral turn. Religion was regarded far less as providing expression for our deepest emotions, or as a body of old tradition invested with the most touching poetical associations, than as a practical rule of life. This preoccupation with the direct moral bearing of theology gives a prosaic turn to the writing of the day; but, in fact, this aspect of the great problem was of vital importance. How could order be preserved when the old sanctions were decaying? Can a society of atheists be maintained? was a question put by Bayle, and taken up by Shaftesbury. It was nothing more than an epigrammatic form of a question, to which it was of the deepest importance to find an answer, and which was rightly discussed with an eagerness tending rather to cast into the shade the more poetical aspects of religion. How, to put

the question less bluntly, should morality survive theology? Various answers were given in England by various schools of thought-by Clarke, Wollaston, and Price, by Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson, by Hartley and Adam Smith, by Locke, Hume, Tucker, Paley, and Bentham. What was the nature of the solutions suggested? and what relation do the various theories bear to each other?

II. THE INTELLECTUAL SCHOOL.

3. That which comes first in the order of thought is represented by the writers generally known as the intellectual school of moralists. Its leading representatives are Clarke, Wollaston, and Price. The first two names have already encountered us in the deist controversy. Price belonged to a later generation. He was born in 1723, the year preceding Wollaston's death, and six years before the death of Clarke. He was more conspicuous in political than moral or theological controversies, and is remembered chiefly as the inventor of the younger Pitt's sinking fund, and as affording the occasion of one of Burke's most brilliant invectives against revolutionary principles. His 'Review of the principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals' was first published in 1758 before he had taken part in political discussions and become the friend of Priestley and Shelburne. His writings are of interest as illustrating the connection, so often noticed by Burke, between revolutionary theories in politics and the a priori doctrines of metaphysicians. The advocate of the most mathematical view of morality naturally became the advocate of the indefeasible rights of man in politics. The absolute spirit is the same in both cases. His philosophical speculations are curious, though they hardly possess high intrinsic merit. His book on morality is the fullest exposition of the theory which it advocates; but the theory was already antiquated; and Price, though he makes a great parade of logical systematisation, is a very indistinct writer. It is often difficult to discover his precise drift, and the discovery does not always reward the labour which it exacts. Clarke's theory is contained in his 'Sermons on Natural and Revealed Religion,' and Wollaston's in his 'Religion

of Nature Delineated.' Both of these books have a reference to the deist controversy, with which the first is principally occupied. The theory which they expound was accepted by the whole school of which Clarke was the most conspicuous leader. We have already been led to notice it in the history of the deist controversy, and it is simply the application to ethical speculations of the metaphysical system which dates from Descartes. A brief examination will sufficiently indicate the main cause of the rapid decay of a doctrine which had so little influence upon the main problems of human life.

4. The starting-point is the identification of God with nature. The Almighty is not with these philosophers the ruler of a universe, in some sort independent of him, or external to him, but the first cause of all things. He moves the stars and directs the course of a bubble. The moral as well as the material universe is absolutely dependent on his laws. Men like Hobbes and Spinoza, who dared to push their logic to its legitimate consequences, saw that the most trifling and transitory phenomenon must be ascribed to the action of an omnipotent and omniscient Creator as distinctly as those which, in our language, are most important and lasting. It matters not how many links intervene between the earthly end of the chain perceptible to our senses and the heavenly end which is in the immediate grasp of the Creator. He who, with absolutely infallible knowledge, has present to his mind the remotest ramifications of the infinite series of causes and effects, guides the raindrop, or moves the hand of the murderer as distinctly as if he directly intervened at the moment. If, then, 'law' means the same thing when we speak of moral and natural laws, it would seem that morality is annihilated by this conception. 'Fish,' says Spinoza, are determined by nature to swim; and big fish to eat little fish, and therefore it is by the highest natural right that fish possess the water, and that big fish eat little fish.' Whatever is, it would seem, on this showing, is in the strictest sense of the word right. A murderer obeys a natural 'law' as much as a saint; a 'Borgia and a Catiline' are as much the products of nature as a shark or a St. Paul. If, in short, the moral law expresses simply the Spinoza, 'Tract. Theologico-Politicus,' p. 252.

will of the legislator, and the legislator is nature, everything which happens is, by the very definition, in conformity with the law. To break the law is not wrong, but impossible.

5. Spinoza's method of escaping the difficulty need not be considered, for though his name is often quoted by the English writers of the time, neither opponents nor followers appreciated his position. Hobbes's writings, on the contrary, were, as I have said, the most potent stimulant to English thought in the last half of the seventeenth, and even during the first half of the eighteenth, century in England. He had, indeed, fewer disciples than antagonists; but the writer who provokes a reaction does as much in generating ideas as the writer who propagates his own ideas. Hobbes's mode of defining morality had, at least, the merit of simplicity. He audaciously identified the moral with the positive law. That is wrong, he said, which the sovereign forbids; that is right which he allows. The answer-paradoxical enough—is clear and coherent. It does not, it should be noticed, render morality arbitrary in the sense of being essentially a matter of chance; for in Hobbes's view there is no chance. The action of the sovereign is as much the result of inexorable laws as every other phenomenon. But it does imply that the moral standard varies according to time and place; for that which is wrong in Turkey may be right in England. How far Hobbes shrank from the full application of his own principles is a question which need not here be discussed. The doctrine thus set forth is that which later English moralists sought to impugn, and of which they considered Hobbes to be the chief representative.

6. The particular form of the theory which commended itself to Clarke-for the skill of metaphysicians has woven doctrines substantially identical into various forms at different periods of speculation-follows from the fundamental assumptions of the metaphysical school, from which he was an offshoot. The mathemathical universe in which he believed consisted of two elements; on one side was matter with its primary qualities, or, in other words, the objects of sense stripped of all qualities except those of which the mathematician takes cognisance; and, on the other, the hierarchy of spirits from the divine to the human. All other qualities were

1

merely the modifications raised in the spirit in consequence of the mysterious action and reaction between itself and matter. The reason was the faculty by which the invariable relations between these ultimate facts were perceived; whilst the senses presented us with a shifting phantasmagoria of unrealities. To prove, then, that morality was not arbitrary and variable seemed to him to be the same thing as proving that it belonged to those eternal and immutable relations, and not to the sphere of observation, where the accidental and the essential were indistinguishably blended. The foundation of his argument for revealed religion was a proof that there was an unalterable natural law, to which revelation provided a necessary supplement. Clarke attacks Hobbes as asserting that 'there is no such real difference originally, necessarily, and absolutely in the nature of things; but that all obligation to God arises merely from his absolutely irresistible power; and all duty towards men merely from positive compact.' In opposition to this view, some of the consequences of which he exposes with great clearness, he sets up his system of mathematical morality. He that wilfully refuses to honour and obey God is 'really guilty of an equal absurdity and inconsistency in practice as he that in speculation denies the effect to owe anything to its cause, or the whole to be bigger than its part. He that refuses to deal with all men equitably' makes the same mistake as 'he that in another case should affirm one number or quantity to be equal to another, and yet that other, at the same time, not to be equal to the first.' The three great primary duties, to God, to each other, and to ourselves, may be deduced in the same way as the propositions of Euclid. 'There is no congruity or proportion, in the uniform disposition and correspondent order of any bodies or magnitudes, no fitness and agreement in the application of similar and equal geometrical figures one to another,'' so plain as the fitness of God's receiving honour from his creatures. To deny that I should do for another man what he in the like case should do for me, and to deny it, either in word or action' (a phrase which suggests the singular crotchet soon afterwards expounded by Wollaston), Ib. p. 618. ♦ Ib. p. 619.

1 Clarke's Works, ii. 609.

2 Ih. p. 613.