tion of our sentiments as founded upon it, because we praise a man for other reasons than those which lead us to praise ‘a chest of drawers;' and because the usefulness of any disposition is not the 'first ground of our approbation.'') Utility acts chiefly as facilitating sympathy. (We readily fall in with the sentiments which dictate an action plainly useful to mankind, and in this indirect fashion, the utility stimulates, though it does not cause, approbation.) Many an honest Englishman,' he says, would have been more grieved by the loss of a guinea than by the loss of Minorca; and yet, had it been in his power, would have sacrificed his life a thousand times to defend the fortress. It is because he naturally sympathises with the nation to whom Minorca was of importance, though the utility to him personally may be infinitesimal. Smith, as before, is arguing against the hypothesis that each man acts from calculations of private interest, and does not consider that loyalty and patriotism may have been generated by their obvious utility, though, when developed, their origin passes out of sight.)

2

80. The name of Adam Smith should be mentioned with high respect; but I think that the respect is due chiefly to his economical labours. It may be fully admitted that he shows great ingenuity, and great fertility of illustration, and that he calls attention to a fact which must be taken into account by the moralist. But it is impossible to resist the impression, whilst we read his fluent rhetoric, and observe his easy acceptance of theological principles already exposed by his master Hume, that we are not listening to a thinker really grappling with a difficult problem, so much as to an ambitious professor who has found an excellent opportunity for displaying his command of language, and making brilliant lectures. The whole tone savours of that complacent optimism of the time which retained theological phrases to round a paragraph, and to save the trouble of genuine thought. Smith's main proposition was hardly original, though he has worked it out in detail, and it is rather calculated to lead us dexterously round difficult questions than to supply us with a genuine answer.

1 Adam Smith, i. 395; part iv. ch. ii.

2 Ib. i. 403; part iv. ch. iii.

81. The moralists, whom I have thus considered, may be regarded as successively developing or modifying the theory originally expounded by Shaftesbury. There is, it is maintained by them all, a certain mysterious harmony or order in the universe which reveals itself to the divine faculty of conscience. With Shaftesbury the faculty is almost identified with the æsthetic perceptions, and is rather a sentiment than a power of intellectual intuition. By his followers the doctrine takes a more formal shape. The sense of harmony is made more definite as a perception of final causes. If we may use the old analogy of the watch, Butler holds that the hand of conscience always points to duty, and that its dictates justify themselves. Hutcheson says that, by a prearranged harmony, the hand of the moral sense points to the course productive of the greatest happiness. Hartley and Adam Smith endeavour to take the watch to pieces and describe the mechanism by which this result is attained.) Yet they still hold that the perfection of the contrivance implies a divine artificer. The morality most naturally connects itself with that philosophical Deism which, though it had never much vital power, survived the deist controversy. Except Butler, these writers are all optimists, in regard both to human nature and the universe; they all lay stress upon final causes, and are forced to have recourse to a complex scheme of psychology to account for the assumed intuitions. These doctrines are a logical result from their fundamental conception. God is to them the informing and sustaining Spirit, manifested through the universe and recognised by the human soul. If the universe be thus the external veil of a divine power, everything, including the human mind which recognises it, must be naturally good. Evil is an illusion produced by our imperfect knowledge, or a result of the perverse exercise of that free-will which must be postulated to avoid a lapse into Pantheism. To maintain such a belief, it is necessary to avert one's eyes from the dark side of the world, from evil passions, from hopeless suffering, and to wrap oneself in a cloak of gentle complacency. It is dangerous to ask ultimate questions, or to pry too closely into human motives, in search of their more earthly elements. The origin of our instincts is best left shrouded in mystery, or they must be regarded as a mechanism which testifies to

the design of an all-wise beneficence. If the conscience is the vicegerent of God, the impulse which theologians had placed in the external order is really within us. Yet the impulse still retains the divine attributes of inscrutability and supreme authority.

82. Butler alone retains the belief in human corruption, and with him the voice of nature testifies rather to a stern judge than a benevolent father. The universe is, therefore, ruled by a being who excites our dread more unequivocally than our affection. This view indicates the fundamental weakness of the intuitional system. No one who dares to look facts in the face can be a consistent optimist. Crime and misery are no superficial phenomena to be dismissed as illusory or accidental; they are woven into the very tissue of the world. Men, therefore, who had the strong grasp of palpable facts, characteristic of the scientific temperament, preferred to put aside the beautiful but unsubstantial vision of the complacent school. Man is a strange mixture of good and bad, in whom we cannot trace the living image of a perfect Creator. The doctrine of corruption contains an undeniable truth. No plausible theory of final causes will clear up the strange maze of vice and virtue, folly and wisdom, misery and happiness. One thing alone is plain. (Man wishes to be happy and dreads to be unhappy.) There is the one solid fact, which may guide us through the perplexed labyrinth of good and evil, though it cannot explain why good and evil are so strangely blended. Virtue and vice must be resolved into these primitive desires. All a priori theories may be rejected as illusory, because all end by declaring facts to be an illusion. The tendency of these moralists was to deny the existence of instincts which they could not explain, as the tendency of their antagonists was to pronounce them inexplicable. Such theories as those of Hartley and Adam Smith opened a kind of via media, as suggesting that instincts which appear to be primitive, and which have come to be independent, may be ultimately derived from the simpler elements. But, in the earlier stages, the general tendency of the empirical school was to dispute the existence of an independent conscience rather than to explain the process by which it was generated.

83. Thus we have an apparently internecine conflict, which

yet admits of a number of intermediate combinations of opinion. Those who retain some independent basis of intuitive knowledge are opposed to those who appeal exclusively to experience; the optimists are opposed to the pessimists; the believers in a general harmony to the believers in a universal corruption; the believers in a system of final causes to those who regard the existing order as a product of a blind struggle of opposing forces; the believers in an inspired conscience to those who resolve all conscience into self-love or prudence; and those who love symmetrical theories more than a definite statement of observed fact to those who prefer fact to theory. Shaftesbury and Mandeville represent the opposite tendencies in their purest shape. Other writers generally put together theories from more or less inconsistent fragments. If we admit that on each side there was a certain element of truth, we may infer that a theory is not necessarily the worse because it did not represent either tendency in its purest shape. The ultimate problem is to discover a moral system independent of the old theology. The natural inclination of the sceptical side was to reject every part of the old morality which seemed to be inseparably connected with theology; but as that theology undoubtedly embodied essential truths, there is much to be said for those who would preserve fragments of the old doctrine, even when they could not accommodate them to a new philosophical basis.

VI. THE UTILITARIANS.

84. We must now, however, turn our attention to the moralists who, in later phraseology, have been called utilitarians. Here as elsewhere we may trace the primary impulse to Locke. His attack upon the doctrine of innate ideas brought him into conflict with the intuitional school of morality. The third chapter of the first book of the essay is directed against the ethical application of innate ideas. The argument there stated has served several generations of a utilitarian school; and its cogency within certain limits is irresistible. The theory which he is concerned to overthrow maintains the existence of certain self-evident moral axioms, the truth of which is recognised by all human beings as soon

as they are propounded. The metaphysician regards them as ultimate facts, of which no account can be given, unless he chooses to say that they are divinely implanted in the mind. Nature the metaphysical God-has directly revealed them to all her creatures. It would seem to follow-though there is room for some dispute upon this point-that these moral axioms, whatever they may be, should be recognised throughout the world, and that the moral code of all nations, though not identical to its furthest ramifications, should at any rate comprise a central core of unvarying truth.

1

85. Locke may be mistaken in imputing these doctrines to his opponents, but his answer is interesting inasmuch as it involves the germinal principles of the various utilitarian schools. The first doctrine which he avows is common to them all. He declares that he can find no innate practical principles,' except a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery ;'1 and these are appetites not intellectual intuitions. 'Good or evil,' as he says in a later chapter, 'are nothing but pleasure and pain, or that which occasions pleasure or pain to us.' 2 The one universal motive being a desire for happiness, the moral impulses must be in some way resoluble into it. An ultimate appeal, as we may say, lies to this principle from every other. There is no moral rule, urges Locke, of which we may not ask the reason, and therefore none can be innate. The rule, for example, of doing as we would be done by is susceptible of proof, and a man to whom it was proposed for the first time might fairly ask that its reasonableness should be made plain to him.3 Virtue is approved because visibly conducive to happiness, and conscience is merely our opinion of the conformity of actions to certain moral rules, the utility of which has been proved by experience. It is no mysterious judge laying down absolute decisions for inscrutable reasons.

86. This, the fundamental doctrine of Locke and of all his disciples, is in fact a first form of the primary axiom, upon which depends the possibility of reducing morality within the sphere of scientific observation. It asserts that our moral sentiments have no inscrutable or exceptional character. Its

1 Locke's Essay, book i. ch. iii. sec. 3. Ib. book ii. ch. xxviii. sec. 5.

VOL. II.

G

Ib. book i. ch. ii. sec. 4.