Chapter V

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Besides the theory of knowledge, which forms the central doctrine in his system, Locke had discussed the remaining branches of philosophy, though in less detail, and, by his many-sided stimulation, had posited problems for the Illumination movement in England and in France. Now the several disciplines take different courses, but the after-influence of his powerful mind is felt on every hand. The development of deism from Toland on is under the direct influence of his "rational Christianity"; the ethics of Shaftesbury stands in polemic relation to his denial of everything innate; and while Berkeley and Hume are deducing the consequences of his theory of knowledge, Hartley derives the impulse to a new form of psychology from his chapter on the association of ideas.

%1. Natural Philosophy and Psychology.%

In Locke's famous countryman, Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the modern investigation of nature attains the level toward which it had striven, at first by wishes and demands, gradually, also, in knowledge and achievement, since the end of the mediaeval period. Mankind was not able to discard at a stroke its accustomed Aristotelian view of nature, which animated things with inner, spirit-like forces. A full century intervened between Telesius and Newton, the concept of natural law requiring so long a time to break out of its shell. A tremendous revolution in opinion had to be effected before Newton could calmly promulgate his great principle, "Abandon substantial forms and occult qualities and reduce natural phenomena to mathematical laws," before he could crown the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler with his own. For this successful union of Bacon's experimental induction with the mathematical deduction of Descartes, this combination of the analytic and the synthetic methods, which was shown in the demand for, and the establishment of, mathematically formulated natural laws, presupposes that nature is deprived of all inner life and all qualitative distinctions, that all that exists is compounded of uniformly acting parts, and that all that takes place is conceived as motion. With this Hobbes's programme of a mechanical science of nature is fulfilled. The heavens and the earth are made subject to the same law of gravitation. How far Newton himself adhered to the narrow meaning of mechanism (motion from pressure and impulse), is evident from the fact that, though he is often honored as the creator of the dynamical view of nature, he rejected actio in distans as absurd, and deemed it indispensable to assume some "cause" of gravity (consisting, probably, in the impact of imponderable material particles). It was his disciples who first ventured to proclaim gravity as the universal force of matter, as the "primary quality of all bodies" (so Roger Cotes in the preface to the second edition of the Principia, 1713).

Newton resembles Boyle in uniting profound piety with the rigor of scientific thought. He finds the most certain proof for the existence of an intelligent creator in the wonderful arrangement of the world-machine, which does not need after-adjustment at the hands of its creator, and whose adaptation he praises as enthusiastically as he unconditionally rejects the mingling of teleological considerations in the explanation of physical phenomena. By this "physico-theological" argument he furnishes a welcome support to deism. While the finite mind perceives in the sensorium of the brain the images of objects which come to it from the senses, God has all things in himself, is immediately present in all, and cognizes them without sense-organs, the expanse of the universe forming his sensorium.

The transfer of mechanical views to psychical phenomena was also accompanied by the conviction that no danger to faith in God would result therefrom, but rather that it would aid in its support. The chief representatives of this movement, which followed the example of Gay, were the physician, David Hartley (1704-57), and his pupil, Joseph Priestley, a dissenting minister and natural scientist (born 1733, died in Philadelphia 1804; the discoverer of oxygen gas, 1774).

The fundamental position of these psychologists is expressed in two principles: (1) all cognitive and motive life is based on the mechanism of psychical elements, the highest and most complex inner phenomena (thoughts, feelings, volitions) are produced by the combination of simple ideas, that is, they arise through the "association of ideas "; (2) all inner phenomena, the complex as well as the simple, are accompanied by, or rather depend on, more or less complicated physical phenomena, viz., nervous processes and brain vibrations. Although Hartley and Priestley are agreed in their demand for an associational and physiological treatment of psychology, and in the attempt to give one, they differ in this, that Hartley cautiously speaks only of a parallelism, a correspondence between mental and cerebral processes, and rejects the materialistic interpretation of inner phenomena, pointing out that the heterogeneity of motion and ideas forbids the reduction of the latter to the former, and that psychological analysis never reaches corporeal but only psychical elements. Moreover, it is only with reluctance that, conscious of the critical character of the conclusion, he admits the dependence of brain vibrations on the mechanical laws of the material world and the thoroughgoing determinateness of the human will, consoling himself with the belief that moral responsibility nevertheless remains intact. Priestley, on the contrary, boldly avows the materialistic and deterministic consequences of his position, holds that psychical phenomena are not merely accompanied by material motions but consist in them (thought is a function of the brain), and makes psychology, as the physics of the nerves, a part of physiology. The denial of immortality and the divine origin of the world is, however, by no means to follow from materialism. Priestley not only combated the atheism of Holbach, but also entered the deistic ranks with works of his own on Natural Religion and the Corruptions of Christianity.

As early as in Hartley the principle, which is so important for ethics, appears that things and actions (e.g., promotion of the good of others) which at first are sought and done because they are means to our own enjoyment, in time come to have a direct worth of their own, apart from the original egoistic end. James Mill (1829) has repeated this thought in later times. As fame becomes an immediate object of desire to the ambitious man, and gold to the miser, so, through association, the impulse toward that which will secure approval may be transformed into the endeavor after that which deserves approval.

Among later representatives of the Associational school we may mention Erasmus Darwin (Zoönomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 1794-96).

As Bacon and Descartes had freed natural science, Hobbes, the state, and Grotius, law from the authority of the Church and had placed them on an independent basis, i.e., the basis of nature and reason, so deism seeks to free religion from Church dogma and blind historical faith, and to deduce it from natural knowledge. In so far as deism finds both the source and the test of true religion in reason, it is rationalism; in so far as it appeals from the supernatural light of revelation and inspiration to the natural light of reason, it is naturalism; in so far as revelation and its records are not only not allowed to restrict rational criticism, but are made the chief object of criticism, its adherents are freethinkers.

; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century*, 1876 ; Cairns, *Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881.]]

The general principles of deism may be compressed into a few theses. There is a natural religion, whose essential content is morality; this comprises not much more than the two maxims, Believe in God and Do your duty.

Positive religions are to be judged by this standard. The elements in them which are added to natural religion, or conflict with it, are superfluous and harmful additions, arbitrary decrees of men, the work of cunning rulers and deceitful priests. Christianity, which in its original form was the perfect expression of the true religion of reason, has experienced great corruptions in its ecclesiastical development, from which it must now be purified.

These principles are supported by the following arguments: Truth is one and there is but one true religion. If the happiness of men depends on the fulfilment of her commands, these must be comprehensible to every man and must have been communicated to him; and since a special revelation and legislation could not come to the knowledge of all, they can be no other than the laws of duty inscribed on the human heart. In order to salvation, then, we need only to know God as creator and judge, and to fulfill his commands, i.e.. to live a moral life. The one true religion has been communicated to man in two forms, through the inner natural revelation of reason, and the outer historical revelation of the Gospel. Since both have come from God they cannot be contradictory. Accordingly natural religion and the true one among the positive religions do not differ in their content, but only in the manner of their promulgation. Reason tries historical religion by the standard furnished by natural religion, and distinguishes actual from asserted revelation by the harmony of its contents with reason: the deist believes in the Bible because of the reasonableness of its teachings; he does not hold these teachings true because they are found in the Bible. If a positive religion contains less than natural religion it is incomplete; if it contains more it is tyrannical, since it imposes unnecessary requirements. The authority of reason to exercise the office of a judge in regard to the credibility of revelation is beyond doubt; indeed, apart from it there is no means of attaining truth, and the acceptance of an external revelation as genuine, and not merely as alleged to be such, is possible only for those who have already been convinced of God's existence by the inner light of reason.

To these logical considerations is added an historical position, which, though only cursorily indicated at the beginning, is evidenced in increasing detail as the deistic movement continues on its course. Natural religion is always and everywhere the same, is universal and necessary, is perfect, eternal, and original. As original, it is the earliest religion, and as old as the world; as perfect, it is not capable of improvement, but only of corruption and restoration. Twice it has existed in perfect purity, as the religion of the first men and as the religion of Christ. Twice it has been corrupted, in the pre-Christian period by idolatry, which proceeded from the Egyptian worship of the dead, in the period after Christ by the love of miracle and blind reverence for authority. In both cases the corruption has come from power-loving priests, who have sought to frighten and control the people by incomprehensible dogmas and ostentations, mysterious ceremonies, and found their advantage in the superstition of the multitude,--each new divinity, each new mystery meaning a gain for them. As they had corrupted the primitive religion into polytheism, so Christianity was corrupted by conforming it to the prejudices of those to be converted, in whose eyes the simplicity of the new doctrine would have been no recommendation for it. The Jew sought in it an echo of the Law, the heathen longed for his festivals and his occult philosophy; so it was burdened with unprofitable ceremonial observances and needless profundity, it was Judaized and heathenized. It was inevitable that the doctrines of original sin, of satisfaction and atonement should prove especially objectionable to the purely rational temper of the deists. Neither the guilt of others (the sin of our ancestors) nor the atonement of others (Christ's death on the cross) can be imputed to us; Christ can be called the Savior only by way of metaphor, only in so far as the example of his death leads us on to faith and obedience for ourselves. The name atheism, which, it is true, orthodoxy held ready for every belief incorrect according to its standard, was on the contrary undeserved. The deists did not attack Christian revelation, still less belief in God. They considered the atheist bereft of reason, and they by no means esteemed historical revelation superfluous. The end of the latter was to stir the mind to move men to reflection and conversion, to transform morals, and if anyone declared it unnecessary because it contains nothing but natural truths, he was referred to the works of Euclid, which certainly contain nothing which is not founded in the reason, but which no one but a fool will consider unnecessary in the study of mathematics.

That which we have here summarized as the general position of deism, gained gradual expression through the regular development and specialization of deistic ideas in individual representatives of the movement. The chief points and epochs were marked by Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, 1696; Collins's Discourse of Freethinking, 1713; Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation*, 1730; and Chubb's *True Gospel of Jesus Christ, 1738. The first of these demands a critique of revelation, the second defends the right of free investigation, the third declares the religion of Christ, which is merely a revived natural religion, to be the oldest religion, the fourth reduces it entirely to moral life.

The deistic movement was called into life by Lord Herbert of Cherbury (pp. 79-80) and continued by Locke, in so far as the latter had intrusted to reason the discrimination of true from false revelation, and had admitted in Christianity elements above reason, though not things contrary to reason. Following Locke, John Toland (1670-1722) goes a step further with the proof that the Gospel not only contains nothing contrary to reason, but also nothing above reason, and that no Christian doctrine is to be called mysterious. To the demand that we should worship what we do not comprehend, he answers that reason is the only basis of certitude, and alone decides on the divinity of the Scriptures, by a consideration of their contents. The motive which impels us to assent to a truth must lie in reason, not in revelation, which, like all authority and experience, is merely the way by which we attain the knowledge of the truth; it is a means of instruction, not a ground of conviction. All faith has knowledge and understanding for its conditions, and is rational conviction. Before we can put our trust in the Scriptures, we must be convinced that they were in fact written by the authors to whom they are ascribed, and must consider whether these men, their deeds, and their works, were worthy of God. The fact that God's inmost being is for us inscrutable does not make him a mystery, for even the common things of nature are known to us only by their properties. Miracles are also in themselves nothing incomprehensible; they are simply enhancements of natural laws beyond their ordinary operations, by supernatural assistance, which God vouchsafes but rarely and only for extraordinary ends. Toland explains the mysteries smuggled into the ethical religion of Christianity as due to the toleration of Jewish and heathen customs, to the entrance of learned speculation, and to the selfish inventions of the clergy and the rulers. The Reformation itself had not entirely restored the original purity and simplicity.

Thus far Toland the deist. In his later writings, the five Letters to Serena, 1704, addressed to the Prussian queen, Sophia Charlotte, and the Pantheisticon (Cosmopoli, 1720), he advances toward a hylozoistic pantheism.

The first of the Letters discusses the prejudices of mankind; the second, the heathen doctrine of immortality; the third, the origin of idolatry; while the fourth and fifth are devoted to Spinoza, the chief defect in whose philosophy is declared to be the absence of an explanation of motion. Motion belongs to the notion of matter as necessarily as extension and impenetrability. Matter is always in motion; rest is only the reciprocal interference of two moving forces. The differences of things depend on the various movements of the particles of matter, so that it is motion which individualizes matter in general into particular things. As the Letters ascribe the purposive construction of organic beings to a divine reason, so the Pantheisticon also stops short before it reaches the extreme of naked materialism. Everything is from the whole; the whole is infinite, one, eternal, all-rational. God is the force of the whole, the soul of the world, the law of nature. The treatise includes a liturgy of the pantheistic society with many quotations from the ancient poets.

Anthony Collins (1676-1729), in his Discourse of Free-thinking, shows the right of free thought (i. e., of judgment on rational grounds) in general, from the principle that no truth is forbidden to us, and that there is no other way by which we can attain truth and free ourselves from superstition, and the right to apply it to God and the Bible in particular, from the fact that the clergy differ concerning the most important matters. The fear that the differences of opinion which spring from freethinking may endanger the peace of society lacks foundation; on the contrary, it is only restriction of the freedom of thought which leads to disorders, by weakening moral zeal. The clergy are the only ones who condemn liberty of thought. It is sacrilege to hold that error can be beneficial and truth harmful. As a proof that freethinking by no means corrupts character, Collins gives in conclusion a list of noble freethinkers from Socrates down to Locke and Tillotson. Among the replies to the views of Collins we may mention the calmly objective Boyle Lectures by Ibbot, and the sharp and witty letter of Richard Bentley, the philologist. Neither of these attacks Collins's leading principle, both fully admitting the right to employ the reason, even in religious questions; but they dispute the implication that freethinking is equivalent to contentious opposition. On the one hand, they maintain that Collins's thinking is too free, that is, unbridled, hasty, presumptuous, and paradoxical; on the other, that it is not free enough (from prejudice).

After Shaftesbury had based morality on a natural instinct for the beautiful and had made it independent of religion, as well as served the cause of free thought by a keenly ironical campaign against enthusiasm and orthodoxy, and Clarke had furnished the representatives of natural religion a useful principle of morals in the objective rationality of things, the debate concerning prophecy and miracles threatened to dissipate the deistic movement into scattered theological skirmishes. At this juncture Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) led it back to the main question. His Christianity as Old as the Creation is the doomsday book of deism. It contains all that has been given above as the core of this view of religion. Christ came not to bring in a new doctrine, but to exhort to repentance and atonement, and to restore the law of nature, which is as old as the creation, as universal as reason, and as unchangeable as God, human nature, and the relations of things, which we should respect in our actions. Religion is morality; more exactly, it is the free, constant disposition to do as much good as possible, and thereby to promote the glory of God and our own welfare. For the harmony of our conduct with the rules of reason constitutes our perfection, and on this depends our happiness. Since God is infinitely blessed and self-sufficient his purpose in the moral law is man's happiness alone. Whatever a positive religion contains beyond the moral law is superstition, which puts emphasis on worthless trivialities. The true religion occupies the happy mean between miserable unfaith, on the one hand, and timorous superstition, wild fanaticism, and pietistical zeal on the other. In proclaiming the sovereignty of reason in the sphere of religion as well as elsewhere, we are only openly demanding what our opponents have tacitly acknowledged in practice (e. g.> in allegorical interpretation) from time immemorial. God has endowed us with reason in order that we should by it distinguish truth from falsehood.

Thomas Chubb (1679-1747), a man of the people (he was a glove maker and tallow-chandler), and from 1715 on a participant in deistic literature and concerned to adapt the new ideas to the men of his class, preached in The True Gospel of Jesus Christ an honorable working-man's Christianity., Faith means obedience to the law of reason inculcated by Christ, not the acceptance of the facts reported about him. The gospel of Christ was preached to the poor before his death and his asserted resurrection and ascension. It is probable that Christ really lived, because of the great effect of his message; but he was a man like other men. His gospel is his teaching, not his history, his own teaching, not that of his followers--the reflections of the apostles are private opinions. Christ's teaching amounts, in effect, to these three fundamental principles: (1) Conform to the rational law of love to God and one's neighbor; this is the only ground of divine acceptance. (2) After transgression of the law, repentance and reformation are the only grounds of divine grace and forgiveness. (3) At the last day every one will be rewarded according to his works. By proclaiming these doctrines, by carrying them out in his own pure life and typical death, and by founding religio-ethical associations on the principle of brotherly equality, Christ selected the means best fitted for the attainment of his purpose, the salvation of human souls. His aim was to assure men of future happiness (and of the earthly happiness connected therewith), and to make them worthy of it; and this happiness can only be attained when from free conviction we submit ourselves to the natural moral law, which is grounded on the moral fitness of things. Everything which leads to the illusion that the favor of God is attainable by any other means than by righteousness and repentance, is pernicious; as, also, the confusion of Christian societies with legal and civil societies, which pursue entirely different aims.

Thomas Morgan (The Moral Philosopher, a Dialogue between the Christian Deist, Philalethes, and the Christian Jew, Theophanes, 1737 seq.) stands on the same ground as his predecessors, by holding that the moral truth of things is the criterion of the divinity of a doctrine, that the Christian religion is merely a restoration of natural religion, and that the apostles were not infallible. Peculiar to him are the application of the first of these principles to the Mosaic law, with the conclusion that this was not a revelation; the complete separation of the New Testament from the Old (the Church of Christ and the expected kingdom of the Jewish Messiah are as opposed to each other as heaven and earth); and the endeavor to give a more exact explanation of the origin of superstition, the pre-Christian manifestations of which he traces back to the fall of the angels, and those since Christ to the intermixture of Jewish elements. He seeks to solve his problem by a detailed critique of Israelitish history, which is lacking in sympathy but not in spirit, and in which, introducing modern relations into the earliest times, he explains the Old Testament miracles in part as myths, in part as natural phenomena, and deprives the heroes of the Jews of their moral renown. The Jewish historians are ranked among the poets; the God of Israel is reduced to a subordinate, local tutelary divinity; the moral law of Moses is characterized as a civil code limited to external conduct, to national and mundane affairs, with merely temporal sanctions, and the ceremonial law as an act of worldly statecraft; David is declared a gifted poet, musician, hypocrite, and coward; the prophets are made professors of theology and moral philosophy; and Paul is praised as the greatest freethinker of his time, who defended reason against authority and rejected the Jewish ritual law as indifferent. Whatever is spurious in Christianity is a remnant of Judaism, all its mysteries are misunderstood and falsely (i.e. literally) applied allegories. Out of regard for Jewish prejudices Christ's death was figuratively described as sacrificial, as in earlier times Moses had been forced to yield to the Egyptian superstitions of his people. Morgan looks for the final victory of the rational morality of the pure, Pauline, or deistic Christianity over the Jewish Christianity of orthodoxy. Among the works of his opponents the following deserve mention: William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, and Samuel Chandler's Vindication of the History of the Old Testament.

It maybe doubted whether Bolingbroke (died 1751; cf. p. 203) is to be classed among the deists or among their opponents. On the one hand, he finds in monotheism the original true religion, which has degenerated into superstition through priestly cunning and fantastical philosophy; in primitive Christianity, the system of natural religion, which has been transformed into a complicated and contentious science by its weak, foolish, or deceitful adherents; in theology, the corruption of religion; in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, types of untrammeled investigation. On the other hand, he seeks to protect revelation from the reason whose cultivation he has just commended, and to keep faith and knowledge distinct, while he demands that the Bible, with all the undemonstrable and absurd elements which it contains, be accepted on its own authority. Religion is an instrument indispensable to the government for keeping the people in subjection. Only the fear of a higher power, not the reason, holds the masses in check; and the freethinkers do wrong in taking a bit out of the mouth of the sensual multitude, when it were better to add to those already there.

As Hume, the skeptic, leads empiricism to its fall, so Hume, the philosopher of religion (see below), leads deism toward dissolution. Among those who defended revealed Christianity against the deistical attacks we may mention the names of Conybeare (1732) and Joseph Butler (1736). The former argues from the imperfection and mutability of our reason to like characteristics in natural religion. Butler (cf. p. 206) does not admit that natural and revealed religion are mutually exclusive. Christian revelation lends a higher authority to natural religion, in which she finds her foundation, and adapts it to the given relations and needs of mankind, adding, however, to the rational law of virtue new duties toward God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. It is evident that in order to be able to deal with their opponents, the apologetes are forced to accommodate themselves to the deistic principle of a rational criticism of revelation.

Notwithstanding the fear which this principle inspired in the men of the time, it soon penetrated the thought even of its opponents, and found its way into the popular mind through the channels of the Illumination.

Although it was often defended and applied with violence and with a superfluous hatred of the clergy, it forms the justifiable element in the endeavors of the deists. It is a commonplace to-day that everything which claims to be true and valid must justify itself before the criticism of reason; but then this principle, together with the distinction between natural and positive religion based upon it, exerted an enlightening and liberating influence. The real flaw in the deistical theory, which was scarcely felt as such, even by its opponents, was its lack of religious feeling and all historical sense, a lack which rendered the idea acceptable that religions could be "made," and priestly falsehoods become world-moving forces. Hume was the first to seek to rise above this unspeakable shallowness. There was a remarkable conflict between the ascription to man, on the one hand, of an assured treasure of religious knowledge in the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience, rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular forms of religion. Here, again, we find that turning away from will and feeling to thought, from history to nature, from the oppressive complexity of that which has been developed to the simplicity of that which is original, which we have noted as one of the most prominent characteristics of the modern period.

%3. Moral Philosophy.%

The watchword of deism was "independence in religion"; that of modern ethical philosophy is "independence in morals." Hobbes had given this out in opposition to the mediaeval dependence of ethics on theology; now it was turned against himself, for he had delivered morality from ecclesiastical bondage only to subject it to the no less oppressive and unworthy yoke of the civil power. Selfish consideration, so he had taught, leads men to transfer by contract all power to the ruler. Right is that which the sovereign enjoins, wrong that which he forbids. Thus morality was conceived in a purely negative way as justice, and based on interest and agreement. Cumberland, recognizing the one-sidedness of the first of these positions, announces the principle of universal benevolence, at which Bacon had hinted before him, and in which he is followed by the school of Shaftesbury. Opposition to the foundation of ethics on self-love and convention, again, springs up in three forms, one idealistic, one logical, and one aesthetic. Ethical ideas have not arisen artificially through shrewd calculation and agreement, but have a natural origin. Cudworth, returning to Plato and Descartes, assumes an innate idea of the good. Clarke and Woolston base moral distinctions on the rational order of things, and characterize the ethically good action as a logical truth translated into practice. Shaftesbury derives ethical ideas and actions from a natural instinct for judging the good and the beautiful. Moreover, Hobbes's ethics of interest experiences, first, correction at the hands of Locke (who, along with a complete recognition of the "legal" character of the good, distinguishes the sphere of morality from that of mere law, and brings it under the law of "reputation," hence of a "tacit" agreement), and then a frivolous intensification under Mandeville and Bolingbroke. A preliminary conclusion is reached in the ethical labors of Hume and Smith.

Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae, 1672) turns to experience with the questions, In what does morality consist? Whence does it arise? and What is the nature of moral obligation? and finds these answers: Those actions are good, or in conformity to the moral law of nature, which promote the common good (commune bonum summa lex). Individual welfare must be subordinated to the good of all, of which it forms only a part. The psychological roots of virtuous action are the social and disinterested affections, which nature has implanted in all beings, especially in those endowed with reason. There is nothing in man more pleasing to God than love. We recognize our obligation to the virtue of benevolence, or that God commands it, from the rewards and punishments which we perceive to follow the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the law,--the subordination of individual to universal good is the only means of attaining true happiness and contentment. Men are dependent on mutual benevolence. He who labors for the good of the whole system of rational beings furthers thereby the welfare of the individual parts, among whom he himself is one; individual happiness cannot be separated from general happiness. All duties are implied in the supreme one: Give to others, and preserve thyself. This principle of benevolence, advanced by Cumberland with homely simplicity, received in the later development of English ethics, for which it pointed out the way, a more careful foundation.

The series of emancipations of morality begins with the Intellectual System of Ralph Cud worth (The Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678; A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, 1731). Ethical ideas come neither from experience nor from civil legislation nor from the will of God, but are necessary ideas in the divine and the human reason. Because of their simplicity, universality, and immutability, it is impossible for them to arise from experience, which never yields anything but that which is particular and mutable. It is just as impossible that they should spring from political constitutions, which have a temporal origin, which are transitory, and which differ from one another. For if obedience to positive law is right and disobedience wrong, then moral distinctions must have existed before the law; if, on the other hand, obedience to the civil law is morally indifferent, then more than ever is it impossible that this should be the basis of the moral distinctions in question. A law can bind us only in virtue of that which is necessarily, absolutely, or per se right; therefore the good is independent, also, of the will of God. The absolutely good is an eternal truth which God does not create by an act of his will, but which he finds present in his reason, and which, like the other ideas, he impresses on created spirits. On the a priori ideas depends the possibility of science, for knowledge is the perception of necessary truth.

In agreement with Cudworth that the moral law is dependent neither on human compact nor on the divine will, Samuel Clarke (died 1729) finds the eternal principles of justice, goodness, and truth, which God observes in his government of the universe, and which should also be the guide of human action, embodied in the nature of things or in their properties, powers, and relations, in virtue of which certain things, relations, and modes of action are suited to one another, and others not. Morality is the subjective conformity of conduct to this objective fitness of things; the good is the fitting. Moral rules, to which we are bound by conscience and by rational insight, are valid independently of the command of God and of all hope or fear in reference to the life to come, although the principles of religion furnish them an effective support, and one which is almost indispensable in view of the weakness of human nature. They are not universally observed, indeed, but universally acknowledged; even the vicious man cannot refrain from praising virtue in others. He who is induced by the voice of passion to act contrary to the eternal relations or harmony of things, contradicts his own reason in thus undertaking to disturb the order of the universe; he commits the absurdity of willing that things should be that which they are not. Injustice is in practice that which falsity and contradiction are in theoretical affairs. In his well-known controversy with Leibnitz, Clarke defends the freedom of the will against the determinism of the German philosopher.

In William Wollaston (died 1724), with whom the logical point of view becomes still more apparent, Clarke found a thinker who shared his convictions that the subjective moral principle of interest was insufficient, and, hence, an objective principle to be sought; that morality consists in the suitableness of the action to the nature and destination of the object, and that, in the last analysis, it is coincident with truth. The highest destination of man is, on the one hand, to know the truth, and, on the other, to express it in actions. That act is good whose execution includes the affirmation (and its omission the negation) of a truth. According to the law of nature, a rational being ought so to conduct himself that he shall never contradict a truth by his actions, i. e., to treat each thing for what it is. Every immoral action is a false judgment; the violation of a contract is a practical denial of it. The man who is cruel to animals declares by his act that the creature maltreated is something which in fact it is not, a being devoid of feeling. The murderer acts as though he were able to restore life to his victim. He who, in disobedience toward God, deals with things in a way contrary to their nature, behaves as though he were mightier than the author of nature. To this equation of truth and morality happiness is added as a third identical member. The truer the pleasures of a being the happier it is; and a pleasure is untrue whenever more (of pain) is given for it than it is worth. A rational being contradicts itself when it pursues an irrational pleasure.--The course of moral philosophy has passed over the logical ethics of Clarke and Wollaston as an abstract and unfruitful idiosyncrasy, and it is certain that with both of these thinkers their plans were greater than their performances. But the search for an ethical norm which should be universally valid and superior to the individual will, did not lack justification in contrast to the subjectivism of the other two schools of the time--the school of interest and the school of benevolence, which made virtue a matter of calculation or of feeling.

The English ethics of the period culminates in Shaftesbury (1671-1713), who, reared on the principles of his grandfather's friend Locke, formed his artistic sense on the models of classical antiquity, to recall to the memory of his age the Greek ideal of a beautiful humanity. Philosophy, as the knowledge of ourselves and that which is truly good, a guide to morality and happiness; the world and virtue, a harmony; the good, the beautiful as well; the whole, a controlling force in the particular--these views, and his tasteful style of exposition, make Shaftesbury a modern Greek; it is only his bitterness against Christianity which betrays the son of the new era. Among the studies collected under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711, the most important are those on Enthusiasm, on Wit and Humor, on Virtue and Merit, and the Moralists.

Shaftesbury's fundamental metaphysical concept is aesthetic: unity in variety is for him the all-pervasive law of the world. In every case where parts work in mutual dependence toward a common result, there rules a central unity, uniting and animating the members. The lowest of these substantial unities is the ego, the common source of our thoughts and feelings. But as the parts of the organism are governed and held together by the soul, so individuals are joined with one another into species and genera by higher unities. Each individual being is a member in a system of creatures, which a common nature binds together. Moreover, since order and harmony are spread throughout the world, and no one thing exists out of relation to all others and to the whole, the universe must be conceived as animated by a formative power which works purposively; this all-ruling unity is the soul of the world, the universal mind, the Deity. The finality and beauty of those parts of the world which we can know justifies the inference to a like constitution of those which are unapproachable, so that we may be certain that the numerous evils which we find in the details, work for the good of a system superior to them, and that all apparent imperfections contribute to the perfection of the whole. As our philosopher makes use of the idea of the world-harmony to support theism and the theodicy, so, further, he derives the content of morality from it, thus giving ethics a natural basis independent of self-interest and conventional fancies.

A being is good when its impulses toward the preservation and welfare of the species is strong, and those directed to its own good not too strong. The virtue of a rational being is distinguished from the goodness of a merely "sensible creature" by the fact that man not only possesses impulses, but reflects upon them, that he approves or disapproves his own conduct and that of others, and thus makes his affections the object of a higher, reflective, judging affection. This faculty of moral distinctions, the sense for right and wrong, or, which amounts to the same thing, for beauty and ugliness, is innate; we approve virtue and condemn vice by nature, not as the result of a compact, and from this natural feeling for good and evil exercise develops a cultivated moral taste or tact. And when, further, the reason, by means of this faculty of judgment, gains control over the passions, man becomes an ethical artist, a moral virtuoso.

Virtue pleases by its own worth and beauty, not because of any external advantage. We must not corrupt the love of the good for its own sake by mixing with it the hope of future reward, which at the best is admissible only as a counter-weight against evil passions. When Shaftesbury speaks of future bliss, his highest conception of the heavenly life is uninterrupted friendship, magnanimity, and nobility, as a continual rewarding of virtue by new virtue.

The good is the beautiful, and the beautiful is the harmonious, the symmetrical; hence the essence of virtue consists in the balance of the affections and passions. Of the three classes into which Shaftesbury divides the passions, one, including the "unnatural" or unsocial affections, as malevolence, envy, and cruelty, which aim neither at the good of the individual nor that of others, is always and entirely evil.

The two other classes, the social (or "natural") affections and the "self-affections," may be virtuous or vicious, according to their degree, i. e., according to the relation of their strength to that of the other affections. In itself a benevolent impulse is never too strong; it can become so only in comparison with self-love, or in respect to the constitution of the individual in question, and conversely. Commonly the social impulses do not attain the normal standard, while the selfish exceed it; but the opposite case also occurs. Excessive parental tenderness, the pity which enervates and makes useless for aid, religious zeal for making converts, passionate partisanship, are examples of too violent social affections which interfere with the activity of the other inclinations. Just as erroneous, on the other side, is the neglect of one's own good. For although the possession of selfish inclinations does not make a man virtuous, yet the lack of them is a moral defect, since they are indispensable to the general good. No one can be useful to others who does not keep himself in a condition for service. The impulse to care for private welfare is good and necessary in so far as it comports with the general welfare or contributes to this. The due proportion between the social passions, which constitute the direct source of good, and those of self-love, consists in subordinating the latter to the former. The kinship of this ethics of harmony with the ethical views of antiquity is evident. It is completed by the eudemonistic conclusion of the system.

As the harmony of impulses constitutes the essence of virtue, so also it is the way to true happiness. Experience shows that unsocial, unsympathetic, vicious men are miserable; that love to society is the richest source of happiness; that even pity for the suffering of others occasions more pleasure than pain. Virtue secures us the love and respect of others, secures us, above all, the approval of our own conscience, and true happiness consists in satisfaction with ourselves. The search after this pure, constant, spiritual pleasure in the good, which is never accompanied by satiety and disgust, should not be called self-seeking; he alone takes pleasure in the good who is already good himself.

Shaftesbury is not well disposed toward positive Christianity, holding that it has made virtue mercenary by its promises of heavenly rewards, removed moral questions entirely out of this world into the world to come, and taught men most piously to torment one another out of pure supernatural brotherly love. In opposition to such transcendental positions Shaftesbury, a priest of the modern view of the world, gives virtue a home on earth, seeks the hand of Providence in the present world, and teaches men to reach faith in God by inspiring contemplation of the well-ordered universe. Virtue without piety is possible, indeed, though not complete. But morality is first and fixed, hence it is the condition and the criterion of genuine religion. Revelation does not need to fear free rational criticism, for the Scriptures are accredited by their contents. Besides reason, banter is with Shaftesbury a second means for distinguishing the genuine from the spurious: ridicule is the test of truth, and wit and humor the only cure for enthusiasm. With these he scourges the over-pious as religious parasites, who for safety's sake prefer to believe too much rather than too little.

Before Shaftesbury's theory of the moral sense and the disinterested affections had gained adherents and developers, the danger, which indeed had not always been escaped, that man might content himself with the satisfaction of possessing noble impulses, without taking much care to realize them in useful actions, called forth by way of reaction, a paradoxical attempt at an apology for vice. Mandeville, a London physician of French extraction, and born in Holland, had aroused attention by his poem, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest, 1706, and in response to vehement attacks upon his work, had added a commentary to the second edition, The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714. The moral of the fable is that the welfare of a society depends on the industry of its members, and this, in turn, on their passions and vices. Greed, extravagance, envy, ambition, and rivalry are the roots of the acquisitive impulse, and contribute more to the public good than benevolence and the control of desire. Virtue is good for the individual, it is true, since it makes him contented with himself and acceptable to God and man, but great states require stronger motives to labor and industry in order to be prosperous. A people among whom frugality, self-denial, and quietness of spirit were the rule would remain poor and ignorant. Besides holding that virtue furthers the happiness of society, Shaftesbury makes a second mistake in assuming that human nature includes unselfish inclinations. It is not innate love and goodness that make us social, but our passions and weaknesses (above all, fear); man is by nature self-seeking. All actions, including the so-called virtues, spring from vanity and egoism; thus it has always been, thus it is in every grade of society. In social life, indeed, we dare not display all these desires openly, nor satisfy them at will. Shrewd lawgivers have taught men to conceal their natural passions and to limit them by artificial ones, persuading them that renunciation is true happiness, on the ground that through it we attain the supreme good--reputation among, and the esteem of our fellows. Since then honor and shame have become the strongest motives and have incited men to that which is called virtue, i.e., to actions which apparently imply the sacrifice of selfish inclinations for the good of society, while they are really done out of pride and self-love. By constantly feigning noble sentiments before others man comes, finally, to deceive himself, believing himself a being whose happiness consists in the renunciation of self and all that is earthly, and in the thought of his moral excellence.--The crass assumptions in Mandeville's reasoning are evident at a glance. After analyzing virtue into the suppression of desire, after labeling the impulse after moral approbation vanity, lawful self-love egoism, and rational acquisitiveness avarice, it was easy for him to prove that it is vice which makes the individual industrious and the state prosperous, that virtue is seldom found, and that if it were universal it would become injurious to society.

With different shading and with less one-sidedness, Bolingbroke (cf. p. 193) defended the standpoint of naturalism. God has created us for happiness in common; we are destined to assist one another. Happiness is attainable in society alone, and society cannot exist without justice and benevolence. He who exercises virtue, i.e., promotes the good of the species, promotes at the same time his own good. All actions spring from self-love, which, guided at first by an immediate instinct, and later, by reason developed through experience, extends itself over ever widening spheres. We love ourselves in our relatives, in our friends, further still, in our country, finally, in humanity, so that self-love and social love coincide, and we are impelled to virtue by the combined motives of interest and duty. This is an ethic of common sense from the standpoint of the cultured man of the world--which at the proper time has the right, no doubt, to gain itself a hearing.

Meanwhile Shaftesbury's ideas had impressed Hutcheson and Butler, according to the peculiarities of each. Both of these writers deem it necessary to explain and correct the distinction between the selfish and the benevolent affections by additions, which were of influence on the ethics of Hume; both devote their zeal to the new doctrine of feelings of reflection or moral taste, in which the former gives more prominence to the aesthetic, merely judging factor, the latter to the active or mandatory one.

Francis Hutcheson (died 1747), professor at Glasgow, in his posthumous System of Moral Philosophy, 1755, which had been preceded by an Inquiry concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725, pursues the double aim of showing against Hobbes and Locke the originality and disinterestedness both of benevolence and of moral approval. Virtue is not exercised because it brings advantage to the agent, nor approved on account of advantage to the observer.

(1) The benevolent affections are entirely independent of self-love and regard for the rewards of God and of man, nay, independent even of the lofty satisfaction afforded by self-approbation. This last, indeed, is vouchsafed to us only when we seek the good of others without personal aims: the joy of inward approval is the result of virtue, not the motive to it. If love were in reality a concealed egoism, it would yield to control in cases where it promises advantage, which, as experience shows, is not the fact. Benevolence is entirely natural and as universal in the moral world as gravitation in the corporeal; and like gravitation further in that its intensity increases with propinquity--the nearer the persons, the greater the love. Benevolence is more widespread than malevolence; even the criminal does more innocent and kind acts in his life than criminal ones--the rarity of the latter is the reason why so much is said about them.

(2) Moral judgment is also entirely uninfluenced by consideration of the advantageous or disadvantageous results for the agent or the spectator. The beauty of a good deed arouses immediate satisfaction. Through the moral sense we feel pleasure at observing a virtuous action, and aversion when we perceive an ignoble one, feelings which are independent of all thought of the rewards and punishments promised by God, as well as of the utility or harm for ourselves. Hutcheson argues a complete distinction between moral approval and the perception of the agreeable and the useful, from the facts that we judge a benevolent action which is forced, or done from motives of personal advantage, quite differently from one inspired by love; that we pay esteem to high-minded characters whether their fortunes be good or ill; and that we are moved with equal force by fictitious actions, as, for instance, on the stage, and by those which really take place.

(3) A few further particulars may be emphasized from the comprehensive systematization which Hutcheson industriously and thoughtfully gave to Shaftesbury's ideas. Two points reveal the forerunner of Hume. First, the rôle assigned to the reason in moral affairs is merely subsidiary. Our motive to action is never the knowledge of a true proposition, but always simply a wish, affection, or impulse. Ultimate ends are given by the feelings alone; the reason can only discover the means thereto. Secondly, the turbulent, blind, rapidly passing passions are distinguished from the calm, permanent affections, which are mediated by cognition. The latter are the nobler; among them, in turn, the highest place is occupied by those conducive to the general good, whose worth is still further determined by the extent of their objects. From this is derived the law that a kind affection receives the more lively approval, the more calm and deliberate it is, the higher the degree of happiness experienced by the object of the action, and the greater the number of persons affected by it. Patriotism and love of mankind in general are higher virtues than affection for friends and children. As the goal of the self-regarding affections, perfection makes its appearance--for the first time in English ethics--by the side of happiness.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752; Sermons on Human Nature, 1726; cf. p. 194) maintains still more strictly than Hutcheson the immediateness both of the affections and the moral estimation of them. He declares that even the self-regarding impulses as such are un-egoistic, and makes moral judgment leave out of view all consequences, either foreseen or present, whereas his predecessor had resolved the goodness of the action into its advantageous effects (not for the agent and the spectator, but for its object and) for society. The conscience--so Butler terms the moral sense--directly approves or disapproves characters and actions in themselves, no matter what good or ill they occasion in the world. We judge a mode of action good, not because it is useful to society, but because it corresponds to the demands of the conscience. This must be unconditionally obeyed, whatever be the issue. We must not act contrary to truth and justice, even if it should seem to bring about more happiness than misery.--Butler, too, furnishes material for the ethics of Hume, by his revival of the separation, previously defended by the Stoics, of desire and passion from self-love or interest. Self-love desires a thing because it expects pleasure from it, but the natural impulses impel us toward their objects immediately, i. e., without a representation of the pleasure to be gained; and repetition is necessary before the artificial motive of egoistic pleasure-seeking can be added to the natural motive of inborn desire. Self-love always presupposes original, immediate affections.

The English moral science of the century is brought to a conclusion by Adam Smith (1723-90), the celebrated founder of political economy. Smith not only takes into consideration--like his greater friend, Hume--all the problems proposed by his predecessors, but, further (in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, published while he was professor at Glasgow), combines the various attempts at their solution, not by eclectic co-ordination but by working them over for himself, and arranges them on a uniform principle, thus accomplishing a work which has not yet received due recognition beyond the limits of his native land. He reached this comprehensive moral principle by recognizing the full bearing of a thought which Hume had incidentally expressed, that moral judgment depends on participation in the feelings of the agent, and by following out with fine psychological observation this sympathy of men into its first and last manifestations. In this way a twofold kind of morality was revealed to him: mere propriety of behavior and real merit in action. On the one hand, that is, the sympathy of the spectator--as Hume has one-sidedly emphasized--is directed to the utility of the consequences (or to the "merit") of the action, and, on the other, to the fitness of the motives (or their "propriety"). An action is proper when the impartial spectator is able to sympathize with its motive, and meritorious if he can sympathize also with its end or effect; i.e., if, in the first case, the feelings are suitable to their objects (neither too strong nor too weak), and, in the second case, the consequences of the act are advantageous to others. Merit = propriety + utility. The main conclusion is this: Sympathy is that by means of which virtue is recognized and approved, as well as that which is approved as virtue; it is ratio cognoscendi as well as ratio essendi, the criterion as well as the source of morality. Thus Smith endeavors to solve the two principal problems of English ethics--the criterion and the origin of virtue--with a common answer.

"Sympathy" denotes primarily nothing more than the innate and purely formal power of imitating to a certain degree the feelings of others. From this modest germ is developed by a progressive growth the wide-spreading tree of morality: moral judgment, the moral imperative with its religious sanction, and ethical character. Accordingly we may distinguish different stages in the development of sympathy--the psychological stage of mere fellow-feeling, the aesthetic stage of moral appreciation, the imperative stage of moral precepts, which further on are construed as commands of God (the famous Kantian definition of religion was announced in Glasgow a generation earlier than in Königsberg), finally, the concluding stage wherein these laws of duty are taken up into the disposition. Besides these, there results from the mechanism of the sympathetic feelings a series of phenomena, which, although they do not entirely conform to the ethical standard, yet exercise a salutary effect on the permanence of society; e.g., our exceptional judgment of the deeds of the great, the rich, and the fortunate, as also the higher worth ascribed to good (and, conversely, the greater guilt to bad) intentions when successfully carried out into action, in comparison with those which fall short of their result.

The first, the purely psychological stage, includes three cases. The spectator sympathizes (1) with the feelings of the agent; (2) with the gratitude or anger of the person affected by the action; (3) the person observed sympathizes in return with the imitative and judging feelings of the spectator.

The fundamental laws of sympathy are as follows: We are roused to imitate the feeling of another by the perception either of its signs (its natural consequences or its natural expression in visible and audible motions), or of its causes (the circumstances and experiences which occasion it), the latter exercising a more potent influence than the former. The wooden leg of the beggar is more effective in exciting our pity than his anxious air; the sight of dental instruments is more eloquent than the plaints of the sufferer from toothache. In order to be able to imitate vividly the feelings of a person, we must know the causes of them.--The feeling of the spectator is, on the average, less intense than that of the person observed, so long as the latter does not control and repress his emotions in view of the calmness of the former. The difference of intensity between the original and the sympathetic feelings differs widely with the various classes of emotions. It is difficult to take part in feelings which arise from bodily conditions, but easy to share those in the production of which the imagination is concerned--hence easier to share in hope and fear than in pleasure and pain.--We sympathize more readily with feelings which are agreeable to the observer, the observed, and other participants than with such as are not so; more willingly, therefore, with cheerfulness, love, benevolence than with grief, hatred, malevolence. This is not only true of temporary affections, but especially of those general dispositions which depend on a more or less happy situation in life; we sympathize more vividly with the fortunes of the rich and noble, because we consider them happier than the poor and lowly. Wealth and high rank are objects of general desire chiefly because their possessor enjoys the advantage of knowing that whatever gives him joy or sorrow always arouses similar feelings in countless other men. The root of all ambition is the wish to rule over the hearts of our fellows by compelling them to make our feelings their own; the central nerve of all happiness consists in seeing our own sensations shared by those about us and reflected back, as it were, from manifold mirrors. Small annoyances often have a diverting effect on the spectator; great success easily excites his envy; great sorrows and minor joys, on the contrary, are always sure of our sympathy. Hence the morose man, to whom everything is an occasion of ill-humor, is nowhere welcome, and the man of cheerful disposition, who rejoices in each little event and whose good spirits are contagious, everywhere.

Not less admirable than the fine gift of observation which guides Smith in his discovery of the primary manifestations and the laws of sympathy is the skill with which he deduces moral phenomena, from the simplest to the most complex--moral judgment, the moral law, its application to one's own conduct, the conscience--from the interchange of sympathetic feelings. From involuntary comparison of the representative feeling of the spectator with its original in the person observed arises an agreeable or disagreeable feeling of judgment, a judgment of value, approbating or rejecting the latter. This is approving when the intensity of the original harmonizes with that of the copy, disapproving when the former exceeds or fails to attain the latter. In the one case the emotion is judged suitable to the object which causes it; in the other, too violent or too weak. It is always a certain mean of passion which, as "proper," receives approval (esteem, love, or admiration). In the case of the social passions excess is more readily condoned, in the case of the unsocial and selfish ones, defect; hence we judge the over-sensitive more leniently than the over-vengeful. Anger must be well-grounded and must express itself with great moderation to arouse in the spectator a like degree of sympathetic resentment. For here the sympathy of the spectator is divided between two parties, and fellow-feeling with the angry one is weakened by fear for the person menaced by him, whereas, in the case of kind affections, sympathy is increased by doubling. While our judgment of propriety or decorum rests on simple participation in the sentiments of the agent, our judgment of merit and demerit is based, in addition, on sympathy with the feelings of gratitude or resentment experienced by the person on whom the action terminates. An act is meritorious if it appears to us to deserve thanks and reward, ill-deserving if it seems to merit resentment and punishment. Nature has inscribed on the heart, apart from all reflection on the utility of punishment, an independent, immediate, and instinctive approbation of the sacred law of retribution. This is the point at which a hitherto purely contemplative sympathy passes over into an active impulse, which prepares us to support the victim of attack and insult in his defense and revenge.

This participation in the circumstances and feelings of others is a reciprocal phenomenon. The spectator takes pains to share the sentiments of the person observed; and the latter, on his part, endeavors to reduce the emotions which move him to a degree which will render participation in them possible for the former. In these reciprocal efforts we have the beginnings of the two classes of virtues--the gentle, amiable virtues of sympathy and sensibility, and the exalted, estimable virtues of self-denial and self-command. Both of these conditions of mind, however, are considered virtues only when they are manifested in unusual intensity: humanity is a remarkably delicate fellow-feeling, greatness of soul a rare degree of self-command. (The consideration for those about one which is ethically demanded is given, moreover, to a certain extent involuntarily. The man in trouble and the merry man alike restrain themselves in the company of persons who are indifferent, or in an opposite mood, while they give rein to their emotions when with those similarly affected. Joy is enhanced by sympathy, and grief mitigated.) Thus the perfection of human nature and the divinely willed harmony among the feelings of men are dependent on every man feeling little for himself and much for others; on his holding his selfish inclinations in check and giving free course to his benevolent ones. This is the injunction of Christianity as well as of nature. And as, on the one hand, the content of the moral law is thus deduced from sympathy, so, on the other, this yields the formal criterion of good: Look upon thy sentiments and actions in the light in which the impartial spectator would see them. Conscience is the spectator taken up into our own breast. It remains to consider the origin of this third, imperative stage.

From daily experience of the fact that we judge the conduct of others, and they ours, and from the wish to gain their approval, arises the habit of subjecting our own actions to criticism. We learn to look at ourselves through the eyes of others, we assign the spectator and judge a place in our own heart, we make his calm objective judgment our own, and hear the man within calling to us: Thou art responsible for thy acts and intentions. In this way we are placed in a position to overcome two great delusions, one of passion, which overestimates the present at the expense of the future, and one of self-love, which overestimates the individual at the expense of other men; delusions from which the impartial spectator is free, for the pleasure of the moment seems to him no more desirable than pleasure to come, and one person is just the same to him as another. Through comparison of like cases in the exercise of self-examination certain rules or principles are formed concerning what is right and good. Reverence for these general rules of living is called the sense of duty. The last step in the process consists in our enhancement of the binding authority of moral rules by looking on them as commands of God. Here Smith adds subtle discussions of the question, in what cases actions ought to be done simply out of regard for these abstract maxims, and in what others we welcome the co-operation of a natural impulse or passion. We ought to be angry and to punish with reluctance, merely because reason enjoins it, but, on the other hand, we should be benevolent and grateful from affection; she is not a model wife who performs her duties merely from a sense of duty, and not from inclination also. Further, in all cases where the rules cannot be formulated with perfect exactness and definiteness (as they can in the case of justice), and are not absolutely valid without exception, reverence for them must be assisted by a natural taste for modifying and supplementing the general maxims to suit particular instances.

In this sketch of the course of Smith's moral philosophy much that is fine and much that is of importance has of necessity been passed over--his excellent analysis of the relations of benevolence and justice, and numerous descriptions of traits of character, e. g., his ingenious parallel between pride and vanity. We may briefly mention, in conclusion, his observations on the irregularities of moral judgment. Prosperity and success exert an influence on this, which, though hurtful to its purity, must, on the whole, be considered advantageous to mankind. Our lenience toward the defects of princes, the great, and the rich, and our over-praise for their excellent qualities are, from the moral standpoint, an injustice, but one which has this advantage, that it encourages ambition and industry, and maintains social distinctions intact, which without loyalty and respect toward superiors would be broken down. For most men the road to fortune coincides with the path to virtue. Again, it is a beneficent provision of nature that we put a higher estimate on a successfully executed act of benevolence, and reward it more, than a kind intention which fails of execution; that we judge and punish the purposed crime which is not carried out more leniently than the one which is completed; that we even ascribe a certain degree of accountability to an unintentional act of good or evil--although in these cases the moralist is compelled to see an ethically unjustifiable corruption of the judgment by external success or failure beyond the control of the agent. The first of these irregularities does not allow the man of good intentions to content himself with noble desires merely, but spurs him on to greater endeavors to carry them out--man is created for action; the second protects us from the inquisitorial questioning of motives, for it is easy for the most innocent to fall under grave suspicion. To this inconsistency of feeling we owe the necessary legal principle that deeds only, not intentions, are punishable. God has reserved for himself judgment concerning dispositions. The third irregularity, that he who inflicts unintentional injury is not guilty, even in his own eyes, but yet seems bound to make atonement and reparation, is useful in so far as it warns everyone to be prudent, while the corresponding illusion, in virtue of which we are grateful to an involuntary benefactor--for instance, the bearer of good tidings--and reward him, is at least not harmful, for any reason appears sufficient for the bestowal of kind intentions and actions.

It is impossible to explain in brief the relation of Smith's ethical theory to his political economy. His merit in the former consists in his comprehensive and characteristic combination of the results reached by his predecessors, and in his preparation for Kantian views, so far as this was possible from the empirical standpoint of the English. His impartial spectator was the forerunner of the categorical imperative.

English ethics after Smith may, almost without exception, be termed eclecticism. This is true of Ferguson (Institutes of Moral Philosophy, 1769); of Paley (1785); of the Scottish School (Dugald Stewart, 1793). Bentham's utilitarianism was the first to bring in a new phase.

%4. Theory of Knowledge.%

(a) %Berkeley%.--George Berkeley, a native of Ireland, Bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753; An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision, 1709; A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge*, 1710; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713; *Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1732, against the freethinkers; Works, 1784. Fraser's edition of the Collected Works appeared in 1871, in four volumes), is related to Locke as Spinoza to Descartes. He notices blemishes and contradictions allowed by his predecessor to remain, and, recognizing that the difficulty is not to be remedied by minor corrections and artificial hypotheses, goes back to the fundamental principles, takes these more earnestly than their author, and, by carrying them out more strictly, arrives at a new view of the world. The points in Locke's doctrines which invited a further advance were the following: Locke proclaims that our knowledge extends no further than our ideas, and that truth consists in the agreement of ideas among themselves, not in the agreement of ideas with things. But this principle had scarcely been announced before it was violated. In spite of his limitation of knowledge to ideas, Locke maintains that we know (if not the inner constitution, yet) the qualities and powers of things without us, and have a "sensitive" certainty of their existence. Against this, it is to be said that there are no primary qualities, that is, qualities which exist without as well as within us. Extension, motion, solidity, which are cited as such, are just as purely subjective states in us as color, heat, and sweetness. Impenetrability is nothing more than the feeling of resistance, an idea, therefore, which self-evidently can be nowhere else than in the mind experiencing it. Extension, size, distance, and motion are not even sensations (we see colors only, not quantitative determinations), but relations which we in thinking add to the sense-qualities (secondary qualities), and which we are not able to represent apart from them; their relativity alone would forbid us to consider them objective. And material substances, the "support" of qualities invented by the philosophers, are not only unknown, but entirely non-existent. Abstract matter is a phrase without meaning, and individual things are collections of ideas in us, nothing more. If we take away all sense-qualities from a thing, absolutely nothing remains. Our ideas are not merely the only; objects of knowledge, but also the only existing things--nothing exists except minds and their ideas. Spirits alone are active beings, they only are indivisible substances, and have real existence, while the being of bodies (as dependent, inert, variable beings, which are in a constant process of becoming) consists alone in their appearance to spirits and their being perceived by them. Incogitative, hence passive, beings are neither substances, nor capable of producing ideas in us. Those ideas which we do not ourselves produce are the effects of a spirit which is mightier than we. With this a second inconsistency was removed which had been overlooked by Locke, who had ascribed active power to spirits alone and denied it to matter, but at the same time had made the former affected by the latter. If external sense is to mean the capacity for having ideas occasioned by the action of external material things, then there is no external sense. A third point wherein Locke had not gone far enough for his successor, concerned the favorite English doctrine of nominalism. Locke, with his predecessors, had maintained that all reality is individual, and that universals exist only in the abstracting understanding. From this point Berkeley advances a step further, the last, indeed, which was possible in this direction, by bringing into question the possibility even of abstract ideas. As all beings are particular things, so all ideas are particular ideas.

Berkeley looks on the refutation of these two fundamental mistakes--the assumption of general ideas in the mind, and the belief in the existence of a material world outside it--as his life work, holding them the chief sources of atheism, doubt, and philosophical discord. The first of these errors arises from the use of language. Because we employ words which denote more than one object, we have believed ourselves warranted in concluding that we have ideas which correspond to the extension of the words in question, and which contain only those characteristics which are uniformly found in all objects so named. This, however, is not the case. We speak of many things which we cannot represent: names do not always stand for ideas. The definition of the word triangle as a three-sided figure bounded by straight lines, makes demands upon us which our faculties of imagination are never fully able to meet; for the triangle that we represent to ourselves is always either right-angled or oblique-angled, and not--as we must demand from the abstract conception of the figure--both and neither at once. The name "man" includes men and women, children and the aged, but we are never able to represent a man except as an individual of a definite age and sex. Nevertheless we are in a position to make a safe use of these non-presentative but useful abbreviations, and by means of a particular idea to develop truths of wider application. This takes place when, in the demonstration, those qualities are not considered which distinguish the idea from others with a like name. In this case the given idea stands for all others which are known by the same name; the representative idea is not universal, but serves as such. Thus when I have demonstrated the proposition, the sum of all the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, for a given triangle, I do not need to prove it for every triangle thereafter. For not only the color and size of the triangle are indifferent, but its other peculiarities as well; the question whether it is right-angled or obtuse-angled, whether it has equal sides, whether it has equal or unequal angles, is not mentioned in the demonstration, and has no influence upon it. Abstracta exist only in this sense. In considering the individual Paul I can attend exclusively to those characteristics which he has in common with all men or with all living beings, but it is impossible for me to represent this complex of common qualities apart from his individual peculiarities. Self-observation shows that we have no general concepts; reason, that we can have none, for the combination of opposite elements in one idea would be a contradiction in terms. Motion in general, neither swift nor slow, extension in general, at once great and small, abstract matter without sensuous determinations--these can neither exist nor be perceived.

The "materialistic" hypothesis--so Berkeley terms the assumption that a material world exists apart from perceiving mind, and independently of being perceived--is, first, unnecessary, for the facts which it is to explain can be explained as well, or even better, without it; and, second, false, since it is a contradiction to suppose that an object can exist unperceived, and that a sensation or idea is the copy of anything itself not a sensation or idea. Ideas are the only objects of the understanding. Sensible qualities (white, sweet) are subjective states of the soul; sense objects (sugar), sensation-complexes. If sensations need a substantial support, this is the soul which perceives them, not an external thing which can neither perceive nor be perceived. Single ideas, and those combined into objects, can exist nowhere else than in the mind; the being of sense objects consists in their being perceived (esse est percipi). I see light and feel heat, and combine these sensations of sight and touch into the substance fire, because I know from experience that they constantly accompany and suggest each other. The assumption of an "object" apart from the idea is as useless as its existence would be. Why should God create a world of real things without the mind, when these can neither enter into the mind, nor (because unperceived) be copied by its ideas, nor (because they themselves lack perception and power) produce ideas in it? Ideas signify nothing but themselves, i. e., affections of the subject.

The further question arises, What is the origin of ideas? Men have been led into this erroneous belief in the reality of the material world by the fact that certain ideas are not subject to our will, while others are. Sensations are distinguished from the ideas of imagination, which we can excite and alter at pleasure, by their greater strength, liveliness, and distinctness, by their steadiness, regular order, and coherence, and by the fact that they arise without our aid and whether we will or no. Unless these ideas are self-originated they must have an external cause. This, however, can be nothing else than a willing, thinking Being; for without will it could not be active and act upon me, and without ideas of its own it could not communicate ideas to me. Because of the manifoldness and regularity of our sensations the Being which produces them must, further, possess infinite power and intelligence. The ideas of imagination are

The natural or created ideas which God impresses on us are copies of the eternal ideas which he himself perceives, not, indeed, by passive sensation, but through his creative reason. Accordingly when it was maintained that things do not exist independently of perception, the reference was not to the individual spirit, but to all spirits. When I turn my eyes away from an object it continues to exist, indeed, after my perception has ended--in the minds of other men and in that of the Omnipresent One. The pantheistic conclusion of these principles, in the sense of Geulincx and Malebranche, which one expects, was really suggested by Berkeley. Everything exists only in virtue of its participation in the one, permanent, all-comprehensive spirit; individual spirits are of the same nature with the universal reason, only they are less perfect, limited, and not pure activity, while God is passionless intelligence. But if, in the last analysis, God is the cause of all, this does not hold of the free actions of men, least of all of wicked ones. The freedom of the will must not be rejected because of the contradictions which its acceptance involves; motion, also, and mathematical infinity imply incomprehensible elements. In the philosophy of nature Berkeley prefers the teleological to the mechanical view, since the latter is able to discover the laws of phenomena only, but not their efficient and final causes. Sense and experience acquaint us merely with the course of phenomenal effects; the reason, which opens up to us the realm of causation, of the spiritual, is the only sure guide to science and truth. The understanding does not feel, the senses do not know. We have no (sensuous) idea of other spirits, but only a notion of them; instead of themselves we perceive their activities merely, from which we argue to souls like ourselves, while we know our own mind by immediate self-consciousness.

In contrast to the fearlessness with which Berkeley propounds his spiritualism, his anxious endeavors to take away the appearance of paradox from his immaterialistic doctrine, and to show its complete agreement with common sense, excite surprise. Even the common man, he argues, desires nothing more than that his perceptions be real; the distinction between idea and object is an invention of philosophers. Here Berkeley cannot be acquitted of a certain sophistical play upon the term "idea," which, in fact, is ambiguous. He understands by it that which the soul perceives (its immediate, inner object), but the popular mind, that through which the soul perceives an object. The reality of an idea in us is different from the idea of a real thing, or from the reality of that which is perceived without us by means of the idea, and it is just this last meaning which common sense affirms and Berkeley denies. In any case it was a work of great merit to have transferred the existence of objects beyond our ideas, of things-in-themselves, out of the region of the self-evident into the region of the problematical. We never get beyond the circle of our ideas, and if we posit a thing-in-itself as the ground and object of the idea, this also is simply a thought, an idea. For us there is no being except that of the perceiver and the perceived. Later we shall meet two other forms of idealism, in Leibnitz and Fichte. Both of these agree with Berkeley that spiritual beings alone are active, and active beings alone real, and that the being of the inactive consists in their being perceived. But while in Berkeley the objective ideas are impressed upon finite spirits by the Infinite Spirit from without and singly, with Leibnitz they appear as a fullness of germs, which God implanted together in the monads at the beginning, and which the individual develops into consciousness, and with Fichte they become the unconscious productions of the Absolute Ego acting in the individual egos. For the two former as many worlds exist as there are individual spirits, their harmony being guaranteed, in the one case, by the consistency of God's working, and, in the other, by his foresight. For Fichte, on the other hand, there is but one world, for the absolute is not outside the individual spirits, but the uniformly working force within them.

(b) Hume.--David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711, and died in the same city, 1776. His position as librarian, which he held in the place of his birth, 1752-57, gave the opportunity for his History of England( 1754-62). His chief work, the Treatise on Human Nature, which, however, found few readers, was composed during his first residence in France in 1734-37. Later he worked over the first book of this work into his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748); the second book into A Dissertation on the Passions*; and the third *into An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. These, and others of his essays, found so much favor that, during his second sojourn in France, as secretary to Lord Hertford, in 1763-66, he was already honored as a philosopher of world-wide renown. Then, after serving for some time as Under-Secretary of State, he retired to private life at home (1769).

The three books of the Treatise on Human Nature, which appeared in 1739-40, are entitled Of the Understanding, Of the Passions, Of Morals. Of the five volumes of the Essays, the first contains the Essays Moral, Political, and Literary*, 1741-42; the second, the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1748; the third, the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751; the fourth, the *Political Discourses, 1752; the fifth, 1757, the Four Dissertations, including that On the Passions and the Natural History of Religion. After Hume's death appeared the Autobiography, 1777; the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 1779; and the two small essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, 1783. The Philosophical Works were published in 1827, and frequently afterward.

Hume's object, like that of Berkeley, is the improvement of Locke's doctrine of knowledge. In several respects he does not go so far as Berkeley, in others very much farther. In agreement with Berkeley's ultra-nominalism, which combats even the possibility of abstract ideas, he yet does not follow him to the extent of denying external reality. On the other hand, he carries out more consistently Berkeley's hint that immediate sensation includes less than is ascribed to it (e.g., that by vision we perceive colors only, and not distance, etc.), as well as his principle--destructive to the certainty of our knowledge of nature--that there is no causality among phenomena; and brings the question of substance to, the negative conclusion, that there is no need whatever for a support for groups of qualities, and, therefore, that substantiality is to be denied to immaterial as well as to material beings. The points in Locke's philosophy which seemed to Hume to need completion were different from those at which Berkeley had struck in. The antithesis of rational and empirical knowledge is more sharply conceived; the combination of ideas is not left to the choice of the understanding but placed under the dominion of psychological laws; and to the distinction between outer and inner experience (to the former of which priority is conceded, on the ground that we must have had an external sensation before we can, through reflection, be conscious of it as an internal phenomenon), there is added a second, as important as the other and crossing it, between impressions and ideas, of which the former are likewise made prior to the latter.

Everyone will acknowledge the considerable difference between a sensation actually present (of heat, for instance) and the mere idea of one previously experienced, or shortly to come. This consists in the greater force, liveliness, and vividness of the former. Although these two classes of states (the idea of a landscape described by a poet and the perception of a real one, anger and the thought of anger) are only quantitatively distinct, they are scarcely ever in danger of being confused--the most lively idea is always less so than the weakest perception. The actual, outer or inner, sensations may be termed impressions; the weaker images of memory or imagination, which they leave behind them, ideas. Since nothing can gain entrance to the soul except through the two portals of outer and inner experience, there is no idea which has not arisen from an impression or several such; every idea is the image and copy of an impression. But as the understanding and imagination variously combine, separate, and transpose the elements furnished by the senses and lingering in memory, the possibility of error arises. A hidden, and, therefore more dangerous source of error consists in the reference of an idea to a different impression than the one of which it is the copy. The concepts substance and causality are examples of such false reference.

The combination of ideas takes place without freedom, in a purely mechanical, way according to fixed rules, which in the last analysis reduce to three fundamental laws of association: Ideas are associated (1) according to their resemblance and contrast; (2) according to their contiguity in space and time; (3) according to their causal connection. Mathematics is based on the operation of the first of these laws, on the immediate or mediate knowledge of the resemblance, contrariety, and quantitative relations of ideas; the descriptive and experimental part of the sciences of nature and of man on the second; religion, metaphysics, and that part of physical and moral science which goes beyond mere observation on the third. The theory of knowledge has to determine the boundaries of human understanding and the degree of credibility to which these sciences are entitled.

The objects of human thought and inquiry are either relations of ideas or matters of fact. To the former class belong the objects of mathematics, the truths of which, since they are analytic (i. e., merely explicate in the predicate the characteristics already contained in the subject, and add nothing new to this), and since they concern possible relations only, not reality, possess intuitive or demonstrative certainty. It is only propositions concerning quantity and number that are discoverable a priori by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on real existence, and that can be proved from the impossibility of their opposites--mathematics is the only demonstrative science.

We reach certainty in matters of fact by direct perception, or by inferences from other facts, when they transcend the testimony of our senses and memory. These arguments from experience are of an entirely different sort from the rational demonstrations of mathematics; as the contrary of a fact is always thinkable (the proposition that the sun will not rise to-morrow implies no logical contradiction), they yield, strictly speaking, probability only, no matter how strong our conviction of their accuracy may be. Nevertheless it is advisable to separate this species of inferences from experience--whose certainty is not doubted except by the philosophers--from uncertain probabilities, as a class intermediate between the latter and demonstrative truth (demonstrations--proofs--probabilities). All reasonings concerning matters of fact are based on the relation of cause and effect. Whence, then, do we obtain the knowledge of cause and effect? Not by a priori thought. Pure reason is able only to analyze concepts into their elements, not to connect new predicates with them. All its judgments are analytic, while synthetic judgments rest on experience. Judgments concerning causation belong in this latter class, for effects are entirely distinct from causes; the effect is not contained in the cause, nor the latter in the former. In the case of a phenomenon previously unknown we cannot tell from what causes it has proceeded, nor what its effect will be. We argue that fire will warm us, and bread afford nourishment, because we have often perceived these causal pairs closely connected in space and time. But even experience does not vouchsafe all that we desire. It shows nothing more than the coexistence and succession of phenomena and events; while the judgment itself, e. g., that the motion of one body stands in causal connection with that of another, asserts more than mere contiguity in space and time, it affirms not merely that the one precedes the other, but that it produces it--not merely that the second follows the first, but that it results from it. The bond which connects the two events, the force that puts forth the second from the first, the necessary connection between the two is not perceived, but added to perception by thought, construed into it. What, then, is the occasion and what the warrant for transforming perceived succession in time into causal succession, for substituting must for is, for interpreting the observed connection of fact into a necessary connection which always eludes observation?

We do not causally connect every chance pair of successive events, but those only which have been repeatedly observed together. The wonder is, then, that through oft-repeated observation of certain objects we come to believe that we know something about the behavior of other like objects, and the further behavior of these same ones. From the fact that I have seen a given apple fall ten times to the ground, I infer that all the apples in the world do the same when loosened, instead of flying upward, which, in itself, is quite as thinkable; I infer further that this has always been the case, and will continue to be so to all eternity. Where is the intermediate link between the proposition, "I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect," and this other, "I foresee that other objects which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects"? This postulate, that the future will be like the past, and that like causes will have like effects, rests on a purely psychological basis. In virtue of the laws of association the sight of an object or event vividly recalls the image of a second, often observed in connection with the former, and leads us involuntarily to expect its appearance anew. The idea of causal connection is based on feeling (the feeling of inner determination to pass from one idea to a second), not upon insight; it is a product of the imagination, not of the understanding. From the habitual perception of two events in connection (sunshine and heat) arises the mental determination to think of the second when we perceive the first, and, anticipating the senses, to count on its appearance. It is now possible to state of what impression the idea of the causal nexus is the copy: the impression on which it is based is the habitual transition from the idea of a thing to its customary attendant. Hence the idea of causality has a purely subjective significance, not the objective one which we ascribe to it. It is impossible to determine whether there is a real necessity of becoming corresponding to the felt necessity of thought. In life we never doubt the fact, but for science our conviction of the uniformity of nature remains a merely probable (though a very highly probable) conviction. Complete certainty is vouchsafed only by rational demonstration and immediate experience. The necessary bond which we postulate between cause and effect can neither be demonstrated nor felt.

If all experiential reasonings depend on the idea of causality, and this has no other support than subjective mental habit, it follows that all knowledge of nature which goes beyond mere observed fact is not knowledge (neither demonstrative knowledge nor knowledge of fact), but belief. The probability of our belief in the regularity of natural phenomena increases, indeed, with every new verification of the assumptions based thereon; but, as has been shown, it never rises to absolute certainty. Nevertheless inferences from experience are trustworthy and entirely sufficient for practical life, and the aim of the above skeptical deliverances was not to shake belief--only a fool or a lunatic can doubt in earnest the immutability of nature--but only to make it clear that it is mere belief, and not, as hitherto held, demonstrative or factual knowledge. Our doubt is intended to define the boundary between knowledge and belief, and to destroy that absolute confidence which is a hindrance rather than a help to investigation. We should recognize it as a wise provision of nature that the regulation of our thoughts and the belief in the objective validity of our anticipation of future events have not been confided to the weak, inconstant, inert, and fallacious reason, but to a powerful instinct. In life and action we are governed by this natural impulse, in spite of all the scruples of the skeptical reason.

In Hume's earlier work his destructive critique of the idea of cause is accompanied by a deliverance in a similar strain on the concept of substance, which is not included in the shorter revision. Substances are not perceived through impressions, but only qualities and powers. The unknown something which is supposed to have qualities, or in which these are supposed to inhere, is an unnecessary fiction of the imagination. A permanent similarity of attributes by no means requires a self-identical support for these. A thing is nothing more than a collection of qualities, to which we give a special name because they are always found together. The idea of substance, like the idea of cause, is founded in a subjective habit which we erroneously objectify. The impression from which it has arisen is our inner perception that our thought remains constant in the repeated experience of the same group of qualities (whenever I see sugar, I do the same thing, that is, I combine the qualities white color, sweet taste, hardness, etc., with one another), or the impression of a uniform combination of ideas. The idea of substance becomes erroneous through the fact that we refer it not to the inner activity of representation, to which it rightly belongs, but to the external group of qualities, and make it a real, permanent substratum for the latter. Mental substances disappear along with material substances. The soul or mind is, in reality, nothing more than the sum of our inner states, a collection of ideas which flow on in a continuous and regular stream; it is like a stage, across which feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and volitions are passing while it does not itself come into sight. A permanent self or ego, as a substratum of ideas, is not perceived; there is no invariable, permanent impression. That which leads to the assumption of personal identity is only the frequent repetition of similar trains of ideas, and the gradual succession of our ideas, which is easily confused with constancy. Thus robbed of its substantiality, the soul has no further claims to immateriality and immortality, and suicide ceases to be a crime.

Is Hume roundly to be called a skeptic? He never impugned the validity of mathematical reasonings, nor experimental truths concerning matters of fact; in regard to the former his thought is rationalistic, in regard to the latter it is empirical or, more accurately, sensationalistic. His attitude toward the empirical sciences of nature and of mind is that of a semi-skeptic or probabilist, in so far as they go beyond the establishment of facts to the proof of connections under law and to inferences concerning the future. Habit is for him a safe guide for life, although it does not go beyond probabilities; absolute knowledge is unattainable for us, but not indispensable. Toward metaphysics, as an alleged science of the suprasensible, he takes up an entirely negative attitude. If an argument from experience is to be assured of merely that degree of probability which is sufficient for belief, it must not only have a well-established fact (an impression or memory-image) for its starting point, but, together with its conclusion, it must keep within the limits of possible experience. The limits of possible experience are also the limits of the knowable; inferences to the continued existence of the soul after death and to the being of God are vain sophistry and illusion. According to the famous conclusion of the Essay, all volumes which contain anything other than "abstract reasonings concerning quantity or number" or "experimental reasonings concerning matter of fact and existence" deserve to be committed to the flames. In view of this limitation of knowledge to that which is capable of exact measurement and that which is present in experience, as well of the principle that the elements added by thought are to be sharply distinguished from the positively given (the immediate facts of perception), we must agree with those who call Hume the father of modern positivism.

As a philosopher of religion Hume is the finisher and destroyer of deism. Of the three principles of the deists--religion, its origin and its truth are objects of scientific investigation; religion has its origin in the reason and the consciousness of duty; natural religion is the oldest, the positive religions are degenerate or revived forms of natural religion--he accepts the first, while rejecting the other two. Religion may correspond to reason or contradict it, but not proceed from it. Religion has its basis in human nature, yet not in its rational but its sensuous side; not in the speculative desire for knowledge, but in practical needs; not in the contemplation of nature, but in looking forward with fear or joy to the changing events of human life. Anxiety and hope concerning future events lead us to posit unseen powers as directing our destiny, and to seek their favor. The capriciousness of fortune points to a plurality of gods; the tendency to conceive all things like ourselves gives them human characteristics; the powerful impression made by all that comes within the sphere of the senses incites us to connect the divine power with visible objects; the allegorical laudation and deification of eminent men leads to a completed polytheism. That this and not (mono-) theism was the original form of religion, Hume assumes to be a fact for historical times, and a well-founded conjecture for prehistoric ages. Those who hold that humanity began with a perfect religion find it difficult to explain the obscuration of the truth, endow immature ages with a developed use of the reason which they can scarcely have possessed, make error grow worse with increasing culture, and contradict the historical progress upward which is everywhere else observed. The philosophical knowledge of God is a very late product of mature reflection; even monotheism, as a popular religion, did not arise from rational reflection, although its chief principle is in agreement with the results of philosophy, but from the same irrational motives as polytheism. Its origin from polytheism is accomplished by the transformation of the leading god (the king of the gods or the tutelary deity of the nation) through the fear and emulous flattery of his votaries into the one, infinite, spiritual ruler of the world. Amid the folly of the superstitious herd, however, this refined idea is not long preserved in its purity; the more exalted the conception entertained of the supreme deity, the more imperatively the need makes itself felt for the interpolation between this being and mankind of mediators and demi-gods, partaking more of the human nature of the worshipers and more familiar to them. Later a new purification takes place, so that the history of religion shows a continuous alternation of the lower and higher forms.

After depriving theism of its prerogative of originality, Hume further takes away from it its fame as in every respect the best religion. It is disadvantageously distinguished from polytheism by the fact that it is more intolerant, makes its followers pusillanimous, and, by its incomprehensible dogmas, puts their faith to severer tests; while it is on a level with polytheism in that most of its adherents exalt belief in foolish mysteries, fanaticism, and the observance of useless customs above the practice of virtue.

The Natural History of Religion, which far outbids the conclusions of the deists by its endeavors to explain religion, not on rational, but on historical and psychological grounds, and to separate it entirely from knowledge by relegating it to the sphere of practice, leaves the possibility of a philosophical knowledge of God an open question. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion greatly diminish this hope. The most cogent argument for the intelligence of the world-ground, the teleological argument, is a hypothesis which has grave weaknesses, and one to which many other equally probable hypotheses may be opposed. The finite world, with its defects and abounding misery amid all its order and adaptation, can never yield an inference to an infinite, perfect unit-cause, to an all-powerful, all-wise, and benevolent deity. To this the eleventh section of the Enquiry adds the argument, that it is inadmissible to ascribe to the inferred cause other properties than those which are necessary to explain the observed effect. The tenth section of the same Essay argues that there is no miracle supported by a sufficient number of witnesses credible because of their intelligence and honesty, and free from a preponderance of contradictory experiences and testimony of greater probability. In short, the reason is neither capable of reaching the existence of God by well-grounded inference nor of comprehending the truth of the Christian religion with its accompanying miracles. That which transcends experience cannot be proven and known, but only believed in. Whoever is moved by faith to give assent to things which contradict all custom and experience, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person.

Hume never denied the existence of God, never directly impugned revelation. His final word is doubt and uncertainty. It is certain that his counsel not to follow the leadership of the reason in religious matters, but to submit ourselves to the power of instinct and common opinion, was less earnest and less in harmony with the nature of the philosopher than his other advice, to take refuge from the strife of the various forms of superstition in the more quiet, though dimmer regions of--naturally, the skeptical--philosophy. Hume's originality and greatness in this field consist in his genetic view of the historical religions. They are for him errors, but natural ones, grounded in the nature of man, "sick men's dreams," whose origin and course he searches out with frightful cold-bloodedness, with the dispassionate interest of the dissector.

In his moral philosophy Hume shows himself the empiricist only, not the skeptic. The laws of human nature are capable of just as exact empirical investigation as those of external nature; observation and analysis promise even more brilliant success in this most important, and yet hitherto so badly neglected, branch of science than in physics. As knowledge and opinion have been found reducible to the associative play of ideas, and the store of ideas, again, to original impressions and shown derivable from these; so man's volition and action present themselves as results of the mechanical working of the passions, which, in turn, point further back to more primitive principles. The ultimate motives of all action are pleasure and pain, to which we owe our ideas of good and evil. The direct passions, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, are the immediate effects of these original elements. From the direct arise in certain circumstances the indirect passions, pride and humility, love and hatred (together with respect and contempt); the first two, if the objects which excite feeling are immediately connected with ourselves, the latter, when pleasure and pain are aroused by the accomplishments or the defects of others. While love and hate are always conjoined with a readiness for action, with benevolence or anger, pride and humility are pure, self-centered, inactive emotions.

All moral phenomena, will, moral judgment, conscience, virtue, are not simple and original data, but of a composite or derivative nature. They are without exception products of the regular interaction of the passions. With such views there can be, of course, no question of a freedom of the will. If anyone objects to determinism, that virtues and vices, if they are involuntary and necessary, are not praise-or blame-worthy, he is to be referred to the applause paid to beauty and talent, which are considered meritorious, although they are not dependent upon our choice. The legal attitude of theology and law first caused all desert to be based upon freedom, whereas the ancient philosophers spoke unhesitatingly of intellectual virtues.

Hume does not, like nearly all his predecessors and contemporaries, find the determining grounds of volition in ideas, but in the feelings. After curtailing the rights of the reason in the theoretical field in favor of custom and instinct, he dispossesses her also in the sphere of practice. Impassive reason, judging only of truth and falsehood, is an inactive faculty, which of itself can never inspire us with inclination and desire toward an object, can never itself become a motive. It is only capable of influencing the will indirectly, through the aid of some affection. Abstract relations of ideas, and facts as well, leave us entirely indifferent so long as they fail to acquire an emotional value through their relation to our state of mind. When we speak of a victory of reason over passion it is nothing but a conquest of one passion by another, i. e., of a violent passion by a calm one. That which is commonly called reason here is nothing but one of those general and calm affections (e. g., the love of life) which direct the will to a distant good, without exciting any sensible emotion in the mind; by passion we commonly understand the violent passions only, which engender a marked disturbance in the soul and the production of which requires a certain propinquity of the object. A man is said to be industrious "from reason," when a calm desire for money makes him laborious. It is a mistake to consider all violent passions powerful, and all calm ones weak. The prevalence of calm affections constitutes the essence of strength of mind.

As reason is thus degraded from a governor of the will to a "slave of the passions," so, further, judgment concerning right and wrong is taken away from her. Moral distinctions are determined by our sense of the agreeable and the disagreeable. We pass an immediate judgment of taste on the actions of our fellow-men; the good pleases, evil displeases. The sight of virtue gives us satisfaction; that of vice repels us. Accordingly an action or trait of mind is virtuous when it calls forth in the observer an agreeable, disinterested sentiment of approbation.

What, then, are the actions which receive such general approval, and how is the praise to be explained which the spectator bestows on them? We approve such traits of character as are immediately agreeable or useful, either to the person himself or to others. This yields four classes of praiseworthy qualities. The first class, those which are agreeable to the possessor (quite apart from any utility to himself or to others), includes cheerfulness, greatness of mind, courage, tranquillity, and benevolence; the second, those immediately agreeable to others, modesty, good manners, politeness, and wit; the third, those useful to ourselves, strength of will, industry, frugality, strength of body, intelligence and other mental gifts. The fourth class comprises the highest virtues, the qualities useful to others, benevolence and justice. Pleasure and utility are in all cases the criterion of merit. The monkish virtues of humility and mortification of the flesh, which bring no pleasure or advantage either to their possessor or to society, are considered meritorious by no one who understands the subject.

If the moral value of actions is thus made to depend on their effects, we cannot dispense with the assistance of reason in judging moral questions, since it alone can inform us concerning these results of action. Reason, however, is not sufficient to determine us to praise or blame. Nothing but a sentiment can induce us to give the preference to beneficial and useful tendencies over pernicious ones. This feeling is evidently no other than satisfaction in the happiness of men and uneasiness in view of their misery--in short, it is sympathy. By means of the imagination we enter into the experiences of others and participate in their joy and sorrow. Whatever depresses or rejoices them, whatever inspires them with pride, fills us with similar emotions. From the habit of sympathetically passing moral judgment on the actions of others, and of seeing our own judged by them, is developed the further one of keeping a constant watch over ourselves and of considering our dispositions and deeds from the standpoint of the good of others. This custom is called conscience. Allied to this is the love of reputation, which continually leads us to ask, How will our behavior appear in the eyes of those with whom we associate?

Within the fourth and most important class, the social virtues, Hume distinguishes between the natural virtues of humanity and benevolence and the artificial virtues of justice and fidelity. The former proceed from our inborn sympathy with the good of others, while the latter, on the other hand, are not to be derived from a natural passion, an instinctive love of humanity, but are the product of reflection and art, and take their origin in a social convention.

In order that an action may gain the approval of the spectator two other things are required besides its salutary effects: it must be a mark of character, of a permanent disposition, and it must proceed from disinterested motives. Hume is obliged by this latter position to show that disinterested benevolence actually exists, that the unselfish affections do not secretly spring from self-love. To cite only one of the thousand examples of benevolence in which no discernible interest is concerned, we desire happiness for our friends even when we have no expectation of participating in it. The accounts of human selfishness are greatly overdrawn, and those who deduce all actions from it make the mistake of taking the inevitable consequences of virtue--the pleasure of self-approval and of being esteemed by others--for the only motives to virtue. Because virtue, in the outcome, produces inner satisfaction and is praised by others, it does not follow that it is practiced merely for the sake of these agreeable consequences. Self-love is a secondary impulse, whose appearance at all presupposes primary impulses. Only after we have experienced the pleasure which comes from the satisfaction of such an original impulse (e. g., ambition), can this become the object of a conscious reflective search after pleasure, or of egoism. Power brings no enjoyment to the man by nature devoid of ambition, and he who is naturally ambitious does not desire fame because it affords him pleasure, but conversely, fame affords him pleasure because he desires it. The natural propensity which terminates directly on the object, without knowledge or foresight of the pleasurable results, comes first, and egoistic reflection directed toward the hoped-for enjoyment can develop only after this has been satisfied. The case is the same with benevolence as with the love of fame. It is implanted in the constitution of our minds as an original impulse immediately directed toward the happiness of other men. After it has been exercised and its exercise rewarded by self-satisfaction, admiration, thanks, and reciprocation, it is indeed possible for the expectation of such agreeable consequences to lead us to the repetition of beneficent acts. But the original motive is not an egoistic, regard for useful consequences. If, from the force of the passion alone, vengeance may be so eagerly pursued that every consideration of personal quiet and security is silenced, it may also be conceded that humanity causes us to forget our own interests. Nay, further, the social affections, as Shaftesbury has proven, are the strongest of all, and the man will rarely be found in whom the sum of the benevolent impulses will not outweigh that of the selfish ones.

In the section on justice Hume attacks the contract theory. Law, property, and the sacredness of contracts exist first in society, but not first in the state. The obligation to observe contracts is, indeed, made stronger by the civil law and civil authority, but not created by them. Law arises from convention, i. e., not from a formal contract, but a tacit agreement, a sense of common interest, and this agreement, in turn, proceeds from an original propensity to enter into social relations. The unsocial and lawless state of nature is a philosophical fiction which has never existed; men have always been social. They have all at least been born into the society of the family, and they know no-more terrible punishment than isolation. States are not created, however, by a voluntary act, but have their roots in history. The question at issue between Hobbes and Hume was thus adjusted at a later period by Kant: the state, it is true, has not historically arisen from a contract, yet it is allowable and useful to consider it under the aspect of a contract as a regulative idea.

Only once since David Hume, in Herbert Spencer, has the English nation produced a mind of like comprehensive power. Hume and Locke form the culminating points of English thought. They are national types, in that in them the two fundamental tendencies of English thinking, clearness of understanding and practical sense, were manifested in equal force. In Locke these worked together in harmonious co-operation. In Hume the friendly alliance is broken, the common labor ceases; each of the two demands its full rights; a painful breach opens up between science and life. Reason leads inevitably to doubt, to insight into its own weakness, while life demands conviction. The doubter cannot act, the agent cannot know. It is true that a substitute is found for defective knowledge in belief based upon instinct and custom; but this is a makeshift, not a solution of the problem, an acknowledgment of the evil, not a cure for it. Further, Hume's greatness does not consist in the fact that he preached modesty to the contending parties, that he banished the doubting reason into the study and restricted life to belief in probabilities, but in the mental strength which enabled him to endure sharp contradictions, and, instead of an overhasty and easy reconciliation, to suspend the one impulse until the other had made its demands thoroughly, completely, and regardlessly heard. Though he is distinguished from other skeptics by the fact that he not only shows the fundamental conceptions of our knowledge of nature and the principles of religion uncertain and erroneous, but finds necessary errors in them and acutely uncovers their origin in the lawful workings of our inner life, yet his historical influence essentially rests on his skepticism. In his own country it roused in the "Scottish School" the reaction of common sense, while in Germany it helped to wake a kindred but greater spirit from the bonds of his dogmatic slumbers, and to fortify him for his critical achievements.

(c) %The Scottish School%.--Priestley's associational psychology, Berkeley's idealism, and Hume's skepticism are legitimate deductions from Locke's assumption that the immediate objects of thought are not things but ideas, and that judgment or knowledge arises from the combination of ideas originally separate. The absurdity of the consequences shows the falsity of the premises. The true philosophy must not contradict common sense. It is not correct to look upon the mind as a sheet of white paper on which experience inscribes single characters, and then to make the understanding combine these originally disconnected elements into judgments by means of comparison, and the belief in the existence of the object come in as a later result added to the ideas by reflection. It is rather true that the elements discovered by the analysis of the cognitive processes are far from being the originals from which these arise. It is not isolated ideas that come first, but judgments, self-evident axioms of the understanding, which form part of the mental constitution with which God has endowed us; and sensation is accompanied by an immediate belief in the reality of the object. Sensation guarantees the presence of an external thing possessing a certain character, although it is not an image of this property, but merely a sign for something in no wise resembling itself.

This is the standpoint of the founder of the Scottish School, Thomas Reid (1710-96, professor in Aberdeen and Glasgow; An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense*, 1764; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1785, *Essays on the Active Powers, 1788, together under the title, Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind. Collected Works, 1804, and often since, especially the edition by Hamilton, with valuable notes and dissertations, 7th ed., 2 vols., 1872). We may recognize in it a revival of the common notions of Herbert, as well as a transfer of the innate faculty of judgment inculcated by the ethical and aesthetic writers from the practical to the theoretical field; the "common sense" of Reid is an original sense for truth, as the "taste" of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was a natural sense for the good and the beautiful. Like Jacobi at a later period, Reid points out that mediate, reasoned knowledge presupposes a knowledge which is immediate, and all inference and demonstration, fixed, undemonstrable, immediately certain fundamental truths. The fundamental judgments or principles of common sense, which are true for us, even if [possibly] not true in themselves, are discoverable by observation (empirical rationalism). In the enumeration of them two dangers are to be avoided: we must neither raise contingent principles to the position of axioms, nor, from an exaggerated endeavor after unity, underestimate the number of these self-evident principles. Reid himself is always more sparing with them than his disciples. He distinguishes two classes: first principles of necessary truth, and first principles of contingent truth or truth of fact. As first principles of necessary truth he cites, besides the axioms of logic and mathematics, grammatical, aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical principles (among the last belong the principles: "That the qualities which we perceive by our senses must have a subject, which we call body, and that the thoughts we are conscious of must have a subject, which we call mind"; "that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause which produced it"). He lays down twelve principles as the basis of our knowledge of matters of fact, in which his reference to the doubt of Berkeley and Hume is evident. The most important of these are: "The existence of everything of which I am conscious"; "that the thoughts of which I am conscious, are the thoughts of a being which I call myself, my mind, my person"; "our own personal identity and continued existence, as far back as we remember anything distinctly"; "that those things do really exist which we distinctly perceive by our senses, and are what we perceive them to be"; "that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will"; "that there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men"; "that there is a certain regard due... to human authority in matters of opinion"; "that, in the phenomena of nature, what is to be, will probably be like what has been in similar circumstances."

The widespread and lasting favor experienced by this theory, with its invitation to forget all earnest work in the problems of philosophy by taking refuge in common sense, shows that a general relaxation had succeeded the energetic endeavors which Hume had demanded of himself and of his readers. With this declaration of the infallibility of common consciousness, the theory of knowledge, which had been so successfully begun, was incontinently thrust aside, although, indeed, empirical psychology gained by the industrious investigation of the inner life by means of self-observation. James Beattie continued the attack on Hume in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, 1770, on the principle that wisdom must never contradict nature, and that whatever our nature compels us to believe, hence whatever all agree in, is true. In his briefer dissertations Beattie discussed Memory and Imagination, Fable and Romance, the Effects of

Poetry and Music, Laughter, the Sublime, etc. While Beattie had given the preference to psychological and aesthetic questions, James Oswald (1772) appealed to common sense in matters of religion, describing it as an instinctive faculty of judgment concerning truth and falsehood. The most eminent among the followers of Reid was Dugald Stewart (professor in Edinburgh; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792-1827; Collected Works, edited by Hamilton, 1854-58), who developed the doctrines of the master and in some points modified them. Thomas Brown (1778-1820), who is highly esteemed by Mill, Spencer, and Bain, approximated the teachings of Reid and Stewart to those of Hume. The philosophy of the Scottish School was long in favor both in England and in France, where it was employed as a weapon against materialism.

By way of appendix we may mention the beginnings of a psychological aesthetics in Henry Home (Lord Kames, 1696-1782), and Edmund Burke (1728-97). Home, in ethics a follower of Hutcheson, is fond of supporting his aesthetic views by examples from Shakespeare. Beauty (chap. iii.) appears to belong to the object itself, but in reality it is only an effect, a "secondary quality," of the object; like color, it is nothing but an idea in the mind, "for an object is said to be beautiful for no other reason but that it appears so to the spectator." It arises from regularity, proportion, order, simplicity--properties which belong to sublimity as well (chap, iv.), but to which they are by no means so essential, since it is satisfied with a less degree of them. While the beautiful excites emotions of sweetness and gayety, the sublime rouses feelings which are agreeable, it is true, but which are not sweet and gay, but strong and more serious. Burke's explanation goes deeper. He derives the antithesis of the sublime and the beautiful from the two fundamental impulses of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation and the social impulse. Whatever is contrary to the former makes a strong and terrible impression on the soul; whatever favors the latter makes a weak but agreeable one. The terrible delights us (first depressing and then exalting us), when we merely contemplate it, without being ourselves affected by the danger or the pain--this is the sublime. On the other hand, that is beautiful which inspires us with tenderness and affection without our desiring to possess it. Sublimity implies a certain greatness, beauty, a certain smallness. Delight in both is based on bodily phenomena. Terror moderated exercises a beneficent influence on the nerves by stimulating them and giving them tension; the gentle impression of beauty exerts a quieting effect upon them. The disturbances caused by the former, and the recovery induced by the latter, are both conducive to health, and hence, experienced as pleasures.