the centre of any formal controversy, apart from the main current of discussion. They were, however, attacked by three writers of marked ability. In 1724 appeared Law's 'Remarks on the Fable of the Bees.'' In 1732 Berkeley published the 'Minute Philosopher,' the second dialogue of which refers to Mandeville, and the third to Shaftesbury. Many years later (in 1751) Brown published a formal Essay on the 'Characteristics,' in which Mandeville, too, comes in for a brief notice.

44. Law's pamphlet is, perhaps, the ablest of these attacks. With the controversial ability in which he had scarcely a superior in that time, he assaults some of Mandeville's singular paradoxes. He points out, for example, with admirable clearness, that an action is not the less virtuous because we are prompted to it by natural instincts or by acquired habits. It is virtuous because it is in obedience to reason and the laws of God, and does not cease to be so because the body is either formed by use or created by disposition, easy and ready for the performance of it. . . . Nay, all habits of virtue would, upon this foot, be blamable, because such habits must be supposed to have rendered both body and mind more ready and exact in goodness.' 2 The fallacy thus attacked is rather an outlying part of Mandeville's system, though he makes great use of it by giving a libellous tone to his remarks on human nature. Oddly enough, the cynic Mandeville asserts the reality of benevolent impulses in order to throw doubt upon human virtue. The more serious question remains, whether virtue is to be called real. Mandeville and Law follow the intellectual school in the assumption that, if virtue included an element of taste and observation, it was in some sense 'unreal.' Mandeville argues that the taste for philanthropy, humility, and chastity may vary like the taste for big or little buttons. The true answer would be that a taste for buttons is just as much the product of fixed laws as a taste for philanthropy; though as incomparably less permanent instincts are concerned, the taste is correspondingly variable. Assuming, however, that virtue would become purely arbitrary if admitted to depend on the changing elements of human nature, Law asserts, with great vigour, that 'moral virtue is founded on the immu

'Law's pamphlet was republished in 1844, with a preface by Mr. Maurice. 2 Law's Works, ii. 41,

table relations of things, in the perfections and attributes of God, and not in the pride of man or the craft of cunning politicians.' The singular hypothesis indicated in the last phrase is attacked with admirable force. Do but suppose all first principles to be invented,' he says, 'and then it will follow that nothing could be invented in any science.' If the primary reasons of mathematicians are mere arbitrary assumptions, the science disappears. 'Were we not all mathematicians and logicians, there would be no such sciences; for science is only an improvement of those first principles which nature has given us.' 2 He ingeniously compares Mandeville's theory of the invention of virtue to an imaginary invention of an erect posture. The first legislators,' says his supposed theorist, 'having examined the strength and weakness of man's body, discovered that he was not so top-heavy but that he might stand upright on his feet; but the difficulty was how to raise him up. Some philosophers, more sanguine than the rest, found out that, though man crept on the ground, yet he was made up of pride, and that, if flattery took hold of that, he might easily be set on his legs. Making use of this bewitching engine, they extolled the excellence of his shape above other animals, and told him what a grovelling thing it was to creep on all fours like the meanest animals. Thus did these philosophers shame poor man out of his natural state of creeping, and wheedled him into the dignity and honour of standing upright to serve their own ambitious ends, and that they might have his hands to be employed in their drudgery.'' The parallel is only too perfect. Law does not perceive that, beside the theory which represents man as wheedled into walking, and that which represents him as walking by an inherent and immutable necessity of his nature, there is the theory that the walking may have been evolved from the creeping animal by the operation of natural laws.

45. Berkeley's 'Minute Philosopher' is the least admirable performance of that admirable writer. The most characteristic part is the attempt to erect a proof of theology upon his own peculiar metaphysical theory. The remainder consists for the most part of the familiar commonplaces, expressed in a style of exquisite grace and lucidity, but not 3 Ib. p. 20.

1 Law's Works, ii. 29.

2 Ib. p. 22.

implying any great originality. The general tendency of his remarks, both upon Mandeville and Shaftesbury, may be described as utilitarian. Although, as already noticed, he seems to be incapable of detecting the economical fallacy involved in Mandeville's eulogy upon extravagance, he, of course, sees, and has no difficulty in proving, that vice is prejudicial to a community. He establishes with rather superfluous care that immorality of all kinds is ruinous to the constitution of individuals, and destructive to a state. Virtue is not a mere fashion, but implies obedience to the laws upon which men's physical and spiritual health depends. Shaftesbury is condemned on the same grounds. Admitting Shaftesbury's leading principle of the beauty of virtue, Berkeley argues that our sense of beauty consists essentially in our perception of the right adaptation of means to ends. The beauty of the universe consists, therefore, in the existence of an intelligent principle, governing all things, punishing the wicked, protecting the virtuous. In such a system, vice is madness, cunning is folly, wisdom and virtue all the same thing;' and whatever seems amiss, will, in the last act, be ultimately wound up according to the strictest rules of wisdom and justice. Shaftesbury's ruling mind must, therefore, be either the Christian Deity, or another name for blind Fate. In the latter case, a man must be a 'Stoic or a Knighterrant' to be virtuous; the 'minute philosopher' is the devotee of 'an inexplicable enthusiastic notion of moral beauty,' or, as Lysicles, the representative of Mandeville, puts it, his doctrine 'hath all the solid inconveniences, without the amusing hopes and prospects, of the Christian.'3

1

2

46. John Brown, better known as the author of the 'Estimate,' was a writer of genuine ability. His style is clear, and he is free from the coarse abuse and the cavilling at petty details, which are the prevailing faults of controversialists of the time. His essays, directed against a writer who had been nearly forty years dead, may be regarded as some testimony to the enduring influence of Shaftesbury; but they are, perhaps, rather an indication that poor Brown, who had a 1 Dial. iii. sec. 10. s Ib. sec. 7. Mr. Mill, in his essay on Bentham, refers with very high praise to this performance of Brown.

2 Ib. sec. 12.

hard struggle to win fame and some solid rewards, was looking out for a good text for the display of his talents than anxious to encounter a vital error. The immediate suggestion came from Warburton, who had been told by Pope that the 'Characteristics' had to his knowledge done more harm to revealed religion in England than all other infidel books. The essays are three in number. In the first, directed against Shaftesbury's theory of ridicule as the test of truth, which had been attacked by Warburton, and supported by Akenside, he establishes without much trouble the obvious truism that raillery is not argument. In the last, he puts the ordinary arguments against Shaftesbury's sneers at revelation. The second considers the moral theory of Shaftesbury, and more briefly that of Mandeville. The argument depends on the utilitarian principle, which he had probably learnt from Hume, though he only refers to him as 'a late writer of subtlety and refinement,' in order to controvert his view of the existence of purely benevolent affections. Brown, in substance, anticipates Paley, and insists in the same spirit upon the necessity of some effective sanction to the moral law. 'Where selfish or malevolent affections happen to prevail, there can be no internal motive for virtue,'' and, therefore, we cannot do without a hell. He separates very clearly the question of the criterion from that of the sanction; and he points to the fundamental weakness which is common to the intellectual and to the moral sense school, whose opposition he accordingly regards as a mere logomachy, of setting up no really intelligible standard of virtue. That standard he discovers in the tendency of all good actions to promote happiness. Virtue is the voluntary production of the greatest possible happiness.' Thus he tries to supplant Shaftesbury's vague declamation and Clarke's nugatory metaphysics by a fixed and intelligible standard. In fact, the criticism strikes at Shaftesbury's fundamental weakness. He had no more escaped than the intellectual school from the dilemma produced by identifying God with nature, or rather his escape was palpably a mere evasion. He makes nature divine by denying the most patent facts; and is obliged to introduce a kind of tacit Manichæism, by calling the evil passions, when he condescends • Ib. p. 158.

1 Dial. ii. 163.

2 Ib. p. 184.

to speak of them, 'unnatural.' But if there are unnatural things in nature, what becomes of his optimism? Brown's utilitarianism provides a practical rule, though, of course, it does not attempt to answer the problem of the existence of evil. The clearness of his exposition is remarkable, but I may postpone the consideration of the development of his theory in other hands till I have followed the series of writers who may be considered as embodying Shaftesbury's impulse.

IV. THE COMMON-SENSE SCHOOL.

47. The greatest of these, and, with the exception of Hume, the acutest moralist of the century, is Butler, and the characteristic doctrine of Butler is another mode of solving the difficulty just noticed. No two men can present a greater contrast than exists in some respects between Butler and Shaftesbury; the contemplative nature shrinking from the rude contact of the world; and the polished 'virtuoso;' the man to whom life is a weary burden, lightened only by hopes of a future happiness, and yet rendered heavier by the dread of future misery; and the man who is so resolute an optimist as almost to deny the existence of evil-are at opposite poles of feeling; and yet their intellectual relation is close and unmistakable, as, indeed, is explicitly admitted by Butler.

48. Butler's sermons, published in 1726, repose fundamentally upon a conception identical with that which was afterwards expounded in the 'Analogy.' The whole theory may be regarded as a modification from a theological point of view of Shaftesbury's doctrines. The fifteenth sermon, for example, on 'the ignorance of man,' contains the germ of the 'Analogy;' and the germ of the fifteenth sermon is to be found in Shaftesbury's conception of the universe as embodying a partially understood 'frame of things.'1 Shaftesbury's optimism is, indeed, radically opposed to Butler's melancholy temper. The world, regarded as the ante-room to heaven and hell, is no longer that harmonious whole which excited Shaftesbury's facile artistic enthusiasm. Butler-and it is the great secret of his power—is always depressed by the

1 See, for example, 'Moralists,' part iii. sec. I.