'is as if a man should contend that, though two and three are equal to five, yet five are not equal to two and three.' It is characteristic that Clarke does not perceive that this interpretation of the common precept reduces it to a truism. The essence of the rule would be, according to him, that if the circumstances are the same, the same law will give the same results; and it would be as compatible, for example, with a law of mutual hatred as of mutual love. In fact, he argues that the identity of reason is implied in a more special assertion; and then assumes that the universal postulate is the vital principle of the assertion. Finally, our duty to ourselves is deduced from our duty to God, and, therefore, rests upon the same intuitions.

7. An obvious difficulty underlies all reasoning of this class, even in its most refined shape. The doctrine might, on the general assumptions of Clarke's philosophy, be applicable to the 'Laws of Nature,' but is scarcely to be made applicable to the moral law. Every science is potentially deducible from a small number of primary truths; to which Clarke would have added that those truths were intuitively apprehended, and that their denial involved a contradiction in terms. Thus, for example, a being of sufficient knowledge might construct a complete theory of human nature, of which every proposition would be either self-evident or rigorously deducible from self-evident axioms. Such propositions would take the form of laws in the scientific, not in the moral, sense; the copula would be 'is,' not 'ought;' the general formula would be 'all men do so and so,' not 'thou shalt do so and so.' Clarke would have denied the possibility of such a science, because he disjointed the system which would otherwise have conducted him to Spinozism by the unphilosophical hypothesis of free-will. The language, however, which he uses about the moral law is, in reality, applicable to the scientific law alone. It might be said with plausibility (we need not ask whether it could be said with accuracy) that the proposition 'all men are mortal' is capable of being deductively proved by inference from some self-evident axioms. A denial of it would, therefore, involve a contradiction. But the proposition 'thou shalt not kill' is a threat, not a statement of a truth; and Clarke's i attempt to bring it under the same category involves a con

fusion fatal to his whole theory. It is, in fact, a confusion between the art and the science of human conduct.

8. If, to evade this difficulty, we throw the statement into a different form, we obtain, indeed, a body of doctrines to which Clarke's arguments may be applicable; but then we introduce precisely the considerations which he endeavoured to exclude. It may, for example, be a demonstrable proposition that all murderers will be damned, or that they will all be hateful, or that their conduct diminishes the sum of general happiness. Such propositions are the groundwork of ethical science, if not the science itself. But, if Clarke's doctrine were stretched so as to include them, it would be merged in a system of theological, or intuitional, or utilitarian morality. Any such formula includes of necessity some references to the feelings with which we regard actions, or to their consequences to mankind. It forms part of the science of human nature, and it was Clarke's ambition, as it has substantially been the ambition of other metaphysicians, to expound a theory of human conduct which should be entirely independent of any observation of human nature. Morality must not be subjective.' That means, it must be independent of the idiosyncrasies of individuals. Clarke translates this into the statement: Morality must be independent of the character of the race. He wished to elevate morality into the sphere of pure mathematics, or, what he held to be equivalent, of absolute truth, where the promptings of passion and the lessons of experience should be entirely excluded. He tried to argue from our a priori knowledge of the essence of the divine and human natures, and not from the a posteriori experience of their relations. Once more, he was transporting a method, applicable in the theological stage of thought, into a metaphysical region where it collapsed from want of the necessary supports. Theologians who-it matters not how-.. were capable of defining the character of God could deduce a set of rules independent of, or even contradictory to, experience. Given a just or vindictive and omnipotent ruler, it was easy to infer what should be the conduct of his creatures. But when for Jehovah or the Christian Trinity was substituted the colourless conception of a supreme nature, the a priori method could give no results except certain neutral rules

applicable to every fact, and, therefore, condemnatory or approbatory of none. From this fatal circle Clarke vainly endeavours to free himself, when he has once taken the suicidal course of refusing to interrogate nature, in order to discover what is pleasing to the God of nature. He is forced, in order to give any plausibility to his arguments, to supplement them by heterogeneous reasonings drawn from other systems of morality. When his wings fail to support him in the heavenly spaces beyond the atmosphere, he has recourse to purely utilitarian arguments drawn from the influence of morality upon human happiness.

9. The nugatory character of his system appears in the curious development given to it by Wollaston. Wollaston's doctrine is theexpansion of the hint just quoted from Clarke. The system which results is, one would have thought, sufficiently ingenious to have amused a clever undergraduate; his contemporaries rated it higher, and received it with the highest applause." So, at least, Conybeare assures us, who himself speaks of the theory as though it were a discovery in morals, fit to be placed beside the Newtonian discoveries in astronomy. He who acts upon the hypothesis that things are so and so, says Wollaston, proclaims by his acts that they are so and so; and no act that interferes with a true proposition (as if any act could interfere' with a true proposition!) can be right. Hence, I ought not to kill a man because, by so doing, I deny him to be a man. To which it was obvious to reply that my action proclaims the very reverse, and that, in any case, it is a mere verbal juggle to call an action a lie. The doctrine, whether in Clarke's or Wollaston's hands, is, in fact, a kind of offshoot from the common theory of metaphysicians which identifies crime with error, and which had lately been presented in a more logical form by the most consistent of metaphysicians, Spinoza. It may, indeed, be urged that all sin involves an element of intellectual error. To one who had adequate conceptions of the universe, and to whose intellect, therefore, all the consequences of his actions were immediately present, the wisdom of virtue would be so evident that crime would be impossible. God's omniscience implies his moral perfection. Our passions lead us into error by distorting

1 Conybeare's 'Defence,' &c. p. 239.

our judgments; and perfectly sound judgment would disperse the mists excited by the passions. This doctrine, whatever its value, was distorted in the school of Clarke. One would have thought it plain that, whether the intellectual error or the passionate impulse were the essential element in wrongdoing, either of them was produced by nature. We obey the law of nature when we blunder as much as when we judge soundly; for to break that law is not a crime, but an impossibility. The confusion, however characteristic of metaphysicians generally, between the objective and subjective, generated an indistinct impression that a confusion in our conceptions was, in some sense, a confusion in the order of nature itself. If every error involved a contradiction, it seemed that a wrong belief was the ultimate element in every wrong action, and the mistake was identified with the impossible crime of disobedience to nature. Wollaston capped this confusion by calling the blunder a lie.

10. He inevitably fails to extract any intelligible results from this fanciful form of an illusory theory. He is either confined to a series of those barren statements for which metaphysicians have found high-sounding names, such as the doctrine that 'whatever is, is'; or that 'A is not not-A'; or has to interpret his doctrine as including any statement reconcilable with those propositions. Thus Wollaston slides into utilitarianism. He proclaims that 'happiness must not be denied to be what it is; and' thus 'it is by the practice of truth that we arrive at that happiness which is true,' 'true' being characteristically used as identical with 'real.' Hence he makes room for a utilitarian or even a purely selfish system of morality. For if the obligation to truth is interpreted as including the obligation to pursue happiness, we find that all or any of the ordinary sanctions are admissible under this scheme.

II. The nugatory character of the doctrine is still clearer in the application which was most important in the eyes of its supporters. Clarke's doctrine had its root in the laudable desire to prove that morality was not a mere fashion; and with him and his followers the phrase 'eternal and immutable' becomes a kind of catchword. Yet, after all, it was obvious

'Religion of Nature,' p. 52.

to remark that a proposition is either true or not true; and that to add 'eternal and immutable' makes no real difference. Those words properly refer to the matter of the proposition, not to its permanence. Every true proposition is, in a sense, 'eternally and immutably' true. If it is true that in the year 1700 a particular bubble burst, it will always be true to the end of time, and it always was true from the beginning of time to say that the bubble burst or would burst in 1700. The real question is not whether the statement that men should not commit murder in the eighteenth century was eternally and immutably true, granting it to be true at the time; for that would be allowed by Hobbes as freely as by Clarke; but whether the wickedness of murder in the eighteenth century proved the wickedness of murder in all times and places. Yet Clarke interprets his phrases in such a way as to make them equivalent to the truism, and to leave the other proposition untouched. The nature and relations, the proportions and disproportions, the fitnesses and unfitnesses of things,' he says, are eternal, and in themselves absolutely unalterable; but this is only upon supposition that the things themselves exist, and exist in such a manner as they actually do.' So that the thing which is really 'immutable and eternal' is that mysterious entity-a bare proposition which may be applicable to nothing that exists, or ever did exist. Nobody surely need trouble himself much as to the truth or falsehood of an abstract proposition which is entirely independent of any concrete embodiment. The point is stated more explicitly by one of Clarke's disciples, Balguy. After asserting that the moral relations are manifestly 'independent and immutable in whatever state or relation rational creatures may be supposed to be placed,' he adds that we may 'conceive human nature so framed that the relations of princes and subjects, parents and children, masters and servants, &c., should have no place in our duty, or lie dormant, as it were, in respect of mankind; nevertheless these relations, and all truths connected with them, will be in themselves, that is, in the divine understanding, precisely what they are now.' 2 He goes on to qualify this admission by adding that some duties, such as love to God and justice to men, will be 1 Clarke, p. 640. 2 Balguy, Second Letter to a Deist,' Tracts, p. 304.