Chapter XXX (1)

HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE,
FROM 1650 TO 1700.

SECT. I.

ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Pascal’s Provincial Letters--Taylor--Cudworth--Spinosa--Cumberland’s Law of Nature--Puffendorf’s Treatise on the same Subject--Rochefoucault and La Bruyere--Locke on Education--Fenelon._

|Casuistry of the Jesuits.|

|Pascal’s Provincial Letters.|

1. The casuistical writers of the Roman church, and especially of the Jesuit order, belong to earlier periods; for little room was left for anything but popular compilations from large works of vast labour and accredited authority. But the false principles imputed to the latter school now raised a louder cry than before. Implacable and unsparing enemies, as well as ambitious intriguers themselves, they were encountered by a host of those who envied, feared, and hated them. Among those none were such willing or able accusers as the Jansenists whom they persecuted. Pascal, by his Provincial Letters, did more to ruin the name of Jesuit than all the controversies of Protestantism, or all the fulminations of the parliament of Paris. A letter of Antony Arnauld, published in 1655, wherein he declared that he could not find in Jansenius the propositions condemned by the pope, and laid himself open to censure by some of his own, provoked the Sorbonne, of which he was a member, to exclude him from the faculty of theology. Before this resolution was taken, Pascal came forward in defence of his friend, under a fictitious name, in the first of what have been always called Lettres Provinciales, but more accurately Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un Provincial de ses Amis. In the first four of them he discusses the thorny problems of Jansenism, aiming chiefly to show that St. Thomas Aquinas had maintained the same doctrine on efficacious grace which his disciples the Dominicans now rejected from another quarter. But he passed from hence to a theme more generally intelligible and interesting, the false morality of the Jesuit casuists. He has accumulated so long a list of scandalous decisions, and dwelled upon them with so much wit and spirit, and yet with so serious a severity, that the order of Loyola became a bye-word with mankind. I do not agree with those who think the Provincial Letters a greater proof of the genius of Pascal than his Thoughts, in spite of the many weaknesses in reasoning which the latter display. They are at present, finely written as all confess them to be, too much filled with obsolete controversy, they quote books too much forgotten, they have too little bearing on any permanent sympathies, to be read with much interest or pleasure.

|Their truth questioned by some.|

2. The Jesuits had, unfortunately for themselves, no writers at that time of sufficient ability to defend them; and being disliked by many who were not Jansenists, could make little stand against their adversaries, till public opinion had already taken its line. They have since not failed to charge Pascal with extreme misrepresentation of their eminent casuists, Escobar, Busenbaum, and many others, so that some have ventured to call the Provincial Letters the immortal liars (les immortelles menteuses). It has been insinuated, since Pascal’s veracity is hard to attack, that he was deceived by those from whom he borrowed his quotations. But he has declared himself, in a remarkable passage, not only that far from repenting of these letters he would make them yet stronger if it were to be done again, but that although he had not read all the books he has quoted, else he must have spent great part of his life in reading bad books, yet that he had read Escobar twice through, and with respect to the rest, he had not quoted a single passage without having seen it in the book, and examined the context before and after, that he might not confound an objection with an answer, which would have been reprehensible and unjust[877]: it is therefore impossible to save the honour of Pascal, if his quotations are not fair. Nor did he stand alone in his imputations on the Jesuit casuistry. A book called Morale des Jesuites, by Nicolas Perrault, published at Mons in 1667, goes over the same ground with less pleasantry but not less learning.

[877] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 400.

|Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium.|

3. The most extensive and learned work on casuistry which has appeared in the English language is the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor, published in 1660. This, as its title shows, treats of subjective morality, or the guidance of the conscience. But this cannot be much discussed without establishing some principles of objective right and wrong, some standard by which the conscience is to be ruled. “The whole measure and rule of conscience,” according to Taylor, “is the law of God, or God’s will signified to us by nature or revelation; and by the several manners and times and parts of its communication it hath obtained several names:--the law of nature--the consent of nations--right reason--the Decalogue--the sermon of Christ--the canons of the apostles--the laws ecclesiastical and civil of princes and governors--fame or the public reputation of things, expressed by proverbs and other instances and manners of public honesty.... These being the full measures of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, will be the rule of conscience and the subject of the present book.”

|Its character and defects.|

4. The heterogeneous combination of things so different in nature and authority, as if they were all expressions of the law of God, does not augur well for the distinctness of Taylor’s moral philosophy, and would be disadvantageously compared with the Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker. Nor are we deceived in the anticipations we might draw. With many of Taylor’s excellencies, his vast fertility and his frequent acuteness, the Ductor Dubitantium exhibits his characteristic defects; the waste of quotations is even greater than in his other writings, and his own exuberance of mind degenerates into an intolerable prolixity. His solution of moral difficulties is often unsatisfactory; after an accumulation of arguments and authorities we have the disappointment to perceive that the knot is neither untied nor cut; there seems a want of close investigation of principles, a frequent confusion and obscurity, which Taylor’s two chief faults, excessive display of erudition and redundancy of language, conspire to produce. Paley is no doubt often superficial, and sometimes mistaken; yet in clearness, in conciseness, in freedom from impertinent reference to authority, he is far superior to Taylor.

5. Taylor seems too much inclined to side with those who resolve all right and wrong into the positive will of God. The law of nature he defines to be “the universal law of the world, or of mankind, to which we are inclined by nature, invited by consent, prompted by reason, but which is bound upon us only by the command of God.” Though in the strict meaning of the word, law, this may be truly said, it was surely required, considering the large sense which that word has obtained as coincident with moral right, that a fuller explanation should be given than Taylor has even intimated, lest the goodness of the Deity should seem something arbitrary and precarious. And, though in maintaining, against most of the scholastic metaphysicians, that God can dispense with the precepts of the Decalogue, he may be substantially right, yet his reasons seem by no means the clearest and most satisfactory that might be assigned. It may be added, that in his prolix rules concerning what he calls a probable conscience, he comes very near to the much decried theories of the Jesuits. There was indeed a vein of subtlety in Taylor’s understanding which was not always without influence on his candour.

|Cudworth’s immutable morality.|

6. A treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality, by Cudworth, was first published in 1731. This may be almost reckoned a portion of his Intellectual System, the object being what he has declared to be one of those which he had there in view. This was to prove that moral differences of right and wrong are antecedent to any divine law. He wrote therefore not only against the Calvinistic school, but in some measure against Taylor, though he abstains from mentioning any recent author except Descartes, who had gone far in referring all moral distinctions to the arbitrary will of God. Cudworth’s reasoning is by no means satisfactory, and rests too much on the dogmatic metaphysics which were going out of use. The nature or essence of nothing, he maintains, can depend upon the will of God alone; which is the efficient, but not the formal, cause of all things; a distinction not very intelligible, but on which he seems to build his theory.[878] For moral relations, though he admits that they have no objective existence out of the mind, have a positive essence, and therefore are not nothing; whence, it follows that they must be independent of will. He pours out much ancient learning, though not so lavishly as in the Intellectual System.

[878] P. 15.

|Nicole--La Placette.|

7. The urgent necessity of contracting my sails in this last period, far the most abundant as it is in the variety and extent of its literature, restrains me from more than a bare mention of several works not undeserving of regard. The Essais de Morale of Nicole are less read than esteemed, says a late biographer.[879] Voltaire however prophesied that they would not perish. “The chapter especially,” he proceeds, “on the means of preserving peace among men is a masterpiece to which nothing equal has been left to us by antiquity.”[880] These Essays are properly contained in six volumes; but so many other pieces are added in some editions that the collection under that title is very long. La Placette, minister of a French church at Copenhagen, has been called the Protestant Nicole. His Essais de Morale, in 1692 and other years, are full of a solid morality, rather strict in casuistry, and apparently not deficient in observation and analytical views of human nature. They were much esteemed in their own age. Works of this kind tread so very closely on the department of practical religion that it is sometimes difficult to separate them on any fixed principle. A less homiletical form, a comparative absence of scriptural quotation, a more reasoning and observing mode of dealing with the subject, are the chief distinctions. But in the sermons of Barrow and some others we find a great deal of what may be justly called moral philosophy.

[879] Biog. Univ.

[880] Siècle de Louis XIV.

|Other writers.|

8. A book by Sharrock, De Officiis secundum Rationis Humanæ Dictata, 1660, is occasionally quoted, and seems to be of a philosophical nature.[881] Velthuysen, a Dutch minister, was of more reputation. His name was rather obnoxious to the orthodox, since he was a strenuous advocate of toleration, a Cartesian in philosophy, and inclined to judge for himself. His chief works are De Principiis Justi et Decori, and De Naturali Pudore.[882] But we must now pass on to those who have exercised a greater influence in moral philosophy, Cumberland and Puffendorf, after giving a short consideration to Spinosa.

[881] Cumberland (in præfatione) De Legibus Naturæ.

[882] Biog. Univ., Barbeyrac’s notes on Puffendorf, passim.

|Moral system of Spinosa.|

9. The moral system, if so it may be called, of Spinosa, has been developed by him in the fourth and fifth parts of his Ethics. We are not deceived in what might naturally be expected from the unhesitating adherence of Spinosa to a rigorous line of reasoning, that his ethical scheme would offer nothing inconsistent with the fundamental pantheism of his philosophy. In nature itself, he maintains as before, there is neither perfection nor imperfection, neither good nor evil; but these are modes of speaking, adopted to express the relations of things as they appear to our minds. Whatever contains more positive attributes capable of being apprehended by us than another contains, is more perfect than it. Whatever we know to be useful to ourselves, that is good; and whatever impedes our attainment of good is evil. By this utility Spinosa does not understand happiness, if by that is meant pleasurable sensation, but the extension of our mental and bodily capacities. The passions restrain and overpower these capacities; and coming from without, that is, from the body, render the mind a less powerful agent than it seems to be. It is only, we may remember in a popular sense, and subject to his own definitions, that Spinosa acknowledges the mind to be an agent at all; it is merely so, in so far as its causes of action cannot be referred by us to anything external. No passion can be restrained except by a stronger passion. Hence, even a knowledge of what is really good or evil for us can of itself restrain no passion; but only as it is associated with a perception of joy and sorrow, which is a mode of passion. This perception is necessarily accompanied by desire or aversion; but they may often be so weak as to be controlled by other sentiments of the same class, inspired by conflicting passions. This is the cause of the weakness and inconstancy of many, and he alone is wise and virtuous who steadily pursues what is useful to himself; that is, what reason points out as the best means of preserving his well-being, and extending his capacities. Nothing is absolutely good, nothing therefore is principally sought by a virtuous man, but knowledge, not of things external, which gives us only inadequate ideas, but of God. Other things are good or evil to us, so far as they suit our nature or contradict it; and so far as men act by reason, they must agree in seeking what is conformable to their nature. And those who agree with us in living by reason, are themselves of all things most suitable to our nature; so that the society of such men is most to be desired; and to enlarge that society by rendering men virtuous, and by promoting their advantage when they are so, is most useful to ourselves. For the good of such as pursue virtue may be enjoyed by all, and does not obstruct our own. Whatever conduces to the common society of mankind and promotes concord among them is useful to all; and whatever has an opposite tendency is pernicious. The passions are sometimes incapable of excess, but of this the only instances are joy and cheerfulness; more frequently they become pernicious by being indulged, and in some cases, such as hatred, can never be useful. We should therefore, for our own sakes, meet the hatred and malevolence of others with love and liberality. Spinosa dwells much on the preference due to a social above a solitary life, to cheerfulness above austerity, and alludes frequently to the current theological ethics with censure.

10. The fourth part of the Ethics is entitled, On Human Slavery, meaning the subjugation of the reason to the passions; the fifth, On Human Liberty, is designed to show, as had been partly done in the former, how the mind or intellectual man is to preserve its supremacy. This is to be effected, not by the extinction, which is impossible, but the moderation of the passions; and the secret of doing this, according to Spinosa, is to contemplate such things as are naturally associated with affections of no great violence. We find that when we look at things simply in themselves, and not in their necessary relations, they affect us more powerfully; whence it may be inferred that we shall weaken the passion by viewing them as parts of a necessary series. We promote the same end by considering the object of the passion in many different relations, and, in general, by enlarging the sphere of our knowledge concerning it. Hence, the more adequate ideas we attain of things that affect us, the less we shall be overcome by the passion they excite. But most of all it should be our endeavour to refer all things to the idea of God. The more we understand ourselves and our passions, the more we shall love God; for the more we understand anything, the more pleasure we have in contemplating it; and we shall associate the idea of God with this pleasurable contemplation, which is the essence of love. The love of God should be the chief employment of the mind. But God has no passions; therefore he who desires that God should love him, desires, in fact, that he should cease to be God. And the more we believe others to be united in the same love of God, the more we shall love him ourselves.

11. The great aim of the mind, and the greatest degree of virtue, is the knowledge of things in their essence. This knowledge is the perfection of human nature; it is accompanied with the greatest joy and contentment; it leads to a love of God, intellectual, not imaginative, eternal, because not springing from passions that perish with the body, being itself a portion of that infinite love with which God intellectually loves himself. In this love towards God our chief felicity consists, which is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor is anyone happy because he has overcome the passions, but it is by being happy, that is, by enjoying the fulness of divine love, that he has become capable of overcoming them.

12. These extraordinary effusions confirm what has been hinted in another place, that Spinosa, in the midst of his atheism, seemed often to hover over the regions of mystical theology. This last book of the Ethics speaks, as is evident, the very language of Quietism. In Spinosa himself it is not easy to understand the meaning; his sincerity ought not, I think, to be called in question; and this enthusiasm may be set down to the rapture of the imagination expatiating in the enchanting wilderness of its creation. But the possibility of combining such a tone of contemplative devotion with the systematic denial of a Supreme Being, in any personal sense, may put us on our guard against the tendency of mysticism, which may again, as it has frequently, degenerate into a similar chaos.

|Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturæ.|

13. The science of ethics, in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, seemed to be cultivated by three very divergent schools; by that of the theologians who went no farther than revelation, or at least than the positive law of God, for moral distinctions; by that of the Platonic philosophers, who sought them in eternal and intrinsic relations; and that of Hobbes and Spinosa, who reduced them all to selfish prudence. A fourth theory, which, in some of its modifications, has greatly prevailed in the last two centuries, may be referred to Richard Cumberland, afterwards bishop of Peterborough. His famous work, De Legibus Naturæ Disquisitio Philisophica, was published in 1672. It is contained in nine chapters, besides the preface or prolegomena.

|Analysis of prolegomena.|

14. Cumberland begins by mentioning Grotius, Selden, and one or two more who have investigated the laws of nature _à posteriori_, that is, by the testimony of authors and the consent of nations. But as some objections may be started against this mode of proof, which, though he does not hold them to be valid, are likely to have some effect, he prefers another line of demonstration, deducing the laws of nature, as effects, from their real causes in the constitution of nature itself. The Platonic theory of innate moral ideas, sufficient to establish natural law, he does not admit. “For myself, at least, I may say that I have not been so fortunate as to arrive at the knowledge of this law by so compendious a road.” He deems it therefore necessary to begin with what we learn by daily use and experience, preserving nothing but the physical laws of motion shown by mathematicians, and the derivation of all their operations from the will of a First Cause.

15. By diligent observation of all propositions which can be justly reckoned general moral laws of nature, he finds that they may be reduced to one, the pursuit of the common good of all rational agents, which tends to our own good as part of the whole; as its opposite tends not only to the misery of the whole system, but to our own.[883] This tendency, he takes care to tell us, though he uses the present tense (conducit), has respect to the most remote consequences, and is so understood by him. The means which serve to this end, the general good, may be treated as theorems in a geometrical method.[884] Cumberland, as we have seen in Spinosa, was captivated by the apparent security of this road to truth.

[883] Prolegomena, sect. 9.

[884] Sect. 12.

16. This scheme, he observes, may at first sight want the two requisites of a law, a legislator, and a sanction. But whatever is naturally assented to by our minds, must spring from the author of nature. God is proved to be the author of every proposition which is proved to be true by the constitution of nature, which has him for its author.[885] Nor is a sanction wanting in the rewards, that is the happiness which attends the observance of the law of nature, and in the opposite effects of its neglect; and in a lax sense, though not that of the jurists, reward as well as punishment may be included in the word sanction.[886] But benevolence, that is love and desire of good towards all rational beings, includes piety towards God, the greatest of them all, as well as humanity.[887] Cumberland altogether abstains from arguments founded on revelation, and is perhaps the first writer on natural law who has done so, for they may even be found in Hobbes. And I think that he may be reckoned the founder of what is awkwardly and invidiously called the utilitarian school; for though similar expressions about the common good may sometimes be found in the ancients, it does not seem to have been the basis of any ethical system.

[885] Sect. 13.

[886] Sect. 14.

[887] Sect. 15.

17. This common good, not any minute particle of it, as the benefit of a single man, is the great end of the legislator and of him who obeys his will. And such human actions as by their natural tendency promote the common good may be called naturally good, more than those which tend only to the good of any one man, by how much the whole is greater than this small part. And whatever is directed in the shortest way to this end may be called right, as a right line is the shortest of all. And as the whole system of the universe, when all things are arranged so as to produce happiness, is beautiful, being aptly disposed to its end, which is the definition of beauty, so particular actions contributing to this general harmony may be called beautiful and becoming.[888]

[888] Sect. 16.

18. Cumberland acutely remarks, in answer to the objection to the practice of virtue from the evils which fall on good men, and the success of the wicked, that no good or evil is to be considered, in this point of view, which arises from mere necessity, or external causes and not from our virtue or vice itself. He then shows that a regard for piety and peace, for mutual intercourse, and civil and domestic polity, tends to the happiness of every one; and in reckoning the good consequences of virtuous behaviour we are not only to estimate the pleasure intimately connected with it, which the love of God and of good men produces, but the contingent benefits we obtain by civil society which we promote by such conduct.[889] And we see that in all nations there is some regard to good faith and the distribution of property, some respect to the obligation of oaths, some attachments to relations and friends. All men therefore acknowledge, and to a certain extent perform, those things which really tend to the common good. And though crime and violence sometimes prevail, yet these are like diseases in the body which it shakes off; or if, like them, they prove sometimes mortal to a single community, yet human society is immortal; and the conservative principles of common good have in the end far more efficacy than those which dissolve and destroy states.

[889] Sect. 20.

19. We may reckon the happiness consequent on virtue as a true sanction of natural law annexed to it by its author, and thus fulfilling the necessary conditions of its definition. And though some have laid less stress on these sanctions, and deemed virtue its own reward, and gratitude to God and man its best motive, yet the consent of nations and common experience show us that the observance of the first end, which is the common good, will not be maintained without remuneration or penal consequences.

20. By this single principle of common good, we simplify the method of natural law, and arrange its secondary precepts in such subordination as best conduces to the general end. Hence, moral rules give way in particular cases, when they come in collision with others of more extensive importance. For all ideas of right or virtue imply a relation to the system and nature of all rational beings. And the principles thus deduced as to moral conduct are generally applicable to political societies, which in their two leading institutions, the division of property and the coercive power of the magistrate, follow the steps of natural law, and adopt these rules of polity, because they perceive them to promote the common weal.

21. From all intermixture of scriptural authority Cumberland proposes to abstain, building only on reason and experience; since we believe the scriptures to proceed from God because they illustrate and promote the law of nature. He seems to have been the first christian writer who sought to establish systematically the principles of moral right independently of revelation. They are indeed taken for granted by many, especially those who adopted the Platonic language; or the schoolmen may have demonstrated them by arguments derived from reason, but seldom, if ever, without some collateral reference to theological authority. In this respect, therefore, Cumberland may be deemed to make an epoch in the history of ethical philosophy, though Puffendorf, whose work was published the same year, may have nearly equal claims to it. If we compare the Treatise on the Laws of Nature with the Ductor Dubitantium of Taylor, written a very few years before, we shall find ourselves in a new world of moral reasoning. The schoolmen and fathers, the canonists and casuists, have vanished like ghosts at the first daylight; the continual appeal is to experience, and never to authority; or if authority can be said to appear at all in the pages of Cumberland, it is that of the great apostles of experimental philosophy, Descartes or Huygens, or Harvey or Willis. His mind, liberal and comprehensive as well as acute, had been forcibly impressed with the discoveries of his own age, both in mathematical science and in what is now more strictly called physiology. From this armoury he chose his weapons, and employed them, in some instances, with great sagacity and depth of thought. From the brilliant success, also, of the modern analysis, as well as from the natural prejudice in favour of a geometrical method, which arises from the acknowledged superiority of that science in the determination of its proper truths, he was led to expect more from the use of similar processes in moral reasoning than we have found justified by experience. And this analogy had probably some effect on one of the chief errors of his ethical system, the reduction, at least in theory, of the morality of actions to definite calculation.

|His theory expanded afterwards.|

22. The prolegomena or preface to Cumberland’s treatise contains that statement of his system with which we have been hitherto concerned, and which the whole volume does but expand. His manner of reasoning is diffuse, abounding in repetitions, and often excursive; we cannot avoid perceiving that he labours long on propositions which no adversary would dispute, or on which the dispute could be little else than one of verbal definition. This however is almost the universal failing of preceding philosophers, and was only put an end to, if it can be said yet to have ceased, by the sharper logic of controversy, which a more general regard to metaphysical inquiries, and a juster sense of the value of words, brought into use.

23. The question between Cumberland and his adversaries, that is, the school of Hobbes, is stated to be, whether certain propositions of immutable truth, directing the voluntary actions of men in choosing good and avoiding evil, and imposing an obligation upon them, independently of civil laws, are necessarily suggested to the mind by the nature of things and by that of mankind. And the affirmative of this question he undertakes to prove from a consideration of the nature of both; from which many particular rules might be deduced, but above all that which comprehends all the rest, and is the basis of his theory--namely, that the greatest possible benevolence (not a mere languid desire but an energetic principle) of every rational agent towards all the rest constitutes the happiest condition of each and of all, so far as depends on their own power, and is necessarily required for their greatest happiness; whence, the common good is the supreme law. That God is the author of this law appears evident from his being the author of all nature and of all the physical laws according to which impressions are made on our minds.

24. It is easy to observe by daily experience that we have the power of doing good to others, and that no men are so happy or so secure as they who most exert this. And this may be proved synthetically and in that more rigorous method which he affects, though it now and then leads the reader away from the simplest argument, by considering our own faculties of speech and language, the capacities of the hand and countenance, the skill we possess in sciences and in useful arts; all of which conduce to the social life of mankind and to their mutual co-operation and benefit. Whatever preserves and perfects the nature of anything, that is to be called good, and the opposite evil; so that Hobbes has crudely asserted good to respect only the agent desiring it, and consequently to be variable. In this it will be seen that the dispute is chiefly verbal.

25. Two corollaries of great importance in the theory of ethics spring from a consideration of our physical powers. The first is, that inasmuch as they are limited by their nature, we should never seek to transgress their bounds, but distinguish, as the Stoics did things within our reach, τα εφ’ ἡμιν [ta eph' hêmin], from those beyond it, τα ουκ εφ’ ἡμιν [ta ouk eph' hêmin], thus relieving our minds from anxious passions, and turning them to the prudent use of the means assigned to us. The other is one which applies more closely to his general principles of morals; that as all we can do in respect of others, and all the enjoyment we or they can have of particular things, is limited to certain persons, as well as in space and time, we perceive the necessity of distribution, both as to things, from which spring the rights of property, and as to persons, by which our benevolence, though a general rule in itself, is practically directed towards individuals. For the conservation of an aggregate whole is the same as that of its divided parts, that is, of single persons, which requires a distributive exercise of the powers of each. Hence, property and dominion, or meum and tuum, in the most general sense, are consequences from the general law of nature. Without a support from that law, according to Cumberland, without a positive tendency to the good of all rational agents, we should have no right even to things necessary for our preservation; nor have we that right, if a greater evil would be incurred by our preservation than by our destruction. It may be added as a more universal reflection, that as all we see in nature is so framed as to persevere in its appointed state, and as the human body is endowed with the power of throwing off whatever is noxious and threatens the integrity of its condition, we may judge from this that the conservation of mankind in its best state must be the design of nature, and that their own voluntary actions conducing to that end must be such as the author of nature commands and approves.

26. Cumberland next endeavours, by an enlarged analysis of the mental and bodily structure of mankind, to evince their aptitude for the social virtues, that is, for the general benevolence which is the primary law of nature. We have the power of knowing these by our rational faculty, which is the judge of right and wrong, that is, of what is conformable to the great law; and by the other faculties of the mind, as well as by the use of language, we generalise and reduce to propositions the determinations of reason. We have also the power of comparison, and of perceiving analogies, by means of which we estimate degrees of good. And if we are careful to guard against deciding without clear and adequate apprehensions of things, our reason will not mislead us. The observance of something like this general law of nature by inferior animals, which rarely, as Cumberland supposes, attack those of the same species, and in certain instances live together, as if by a compact for mutual aid; the peculiar contrivances in the human body which seem designed for the maintenance of society; the possession of speech, the pathognomic countenance, the efficiency of the hand, a longevity beyond the lower animals, the duration of the sexual appetite throughout the year, with several other arguments derived from anatomy, are urged throughout this chapter against the unsocial theory of Hobbes.

27. Natural good is defined by Cumberland, with more latitude than has been used by Paley and by those of a later school, who confine it to happiness or pleasurable perception. Whatever conduces to the preservation of an intelligent being, or to the perfection of his powers, he accounts to be good, without regard to enjoyment. And for this he appeals to experience, since we desire existence, as well as the extension of our powers of action, for their own sakes. It is of great importance to acquire a clear notion of what is truly good, that is, of what serves most to the happiness and perfection of everyone; since all the secondary laws of nature, that is, the rules of particular virtues, derive their authority from this effect. These rules may be compared one with another as to the probability, as well as the value of their effects upon the general good; and he anticipates greater advantage from the employment of mathematical reasoning and even analytical forms in moral philosophy than the different nature of the subjects would justify, even if the fundamental principle of converting the theory of ethics into calculation could be allowed.[890]

[890] Ea quippe tota (disciplina morum) versatur in æstimandis
rationibus virium humanarum ad commune bonum entium rationalium
quicquam facientium, quæ quidem variant in omni casuum
possibilium varietate. Cap. ii., sect. 9. The same is laid down in
several other passages. By _rationibus_ we must understand
_ratios_; which brings out the calculating theory in the
strongest light.

28. A law of nature, meaning one subordinate to the great principle of benevolence, is defined by Cumberland to be a proposition manifested by the nature of things to the mind according to the will of the First Cause, and pointing out an action tending to the good of rational beings, from the performance of which an adequate reward, or from the neglect of which a punishment, will ensue by the nature of such rational beings. Every part of this definition he proves with exceeding prolixity in the longest chapter--namely the fifth, of his treatise; but we have already seen the foundations of his theory upon which it rests. It will be evident to the reader of this chapter that both Butler and Paley have been largely indebted to Cumberland.[891] Natural obligation he defines thus:--No other necessity determines the will to act than that of avoiding evil and of seeking good, so far as appears to be in our power.[892] Moral obligation is more limited, and is differently defined.[893] But the main point, as he justly observes, of the controversy, is the connection between the tendency of each man’s actions, taking them collectively through his life, to the good of the whole, and that to his own greatest happiness and perfection. This he undertakes to show, premising that it is twofold; consisting immediately in the pleasure attached to virtue, and ultimately in the rewards it obtains from God and from man. God, as a rational being, cannot be supposed to act without an end, or to have a greater end than the general good; that is, the happiness and perfection of his creatures.[894] And his will may not only be shown _à priori_, by the consideration of his essence and attributes, but by the effects of virtue and vice in the order of nature, which he has established. The rewards and punishments which follow at the hands of men are equally obvious; and whether we regard men as God’s instruments, or as voluntary agents, demonstrate that virtue is the highest prudence. These arguments are urged rather tediously, and in such a manner as to encounter none of the difficulties which it is desirable to overcome.

[891] A great part of the second and third chapters of Butler’s
Analogy will be found in Cumberland. See cap. v., sect. 22.

[892] Non alia necessitas voluntatem ad agendum determinat, quam
malum in quantum tale esse nobis constat fugiendi bonumque
quatenus nobis apparet prosequendi. Cap. v., sect. 7.

[893] Sect. 27.

[894] Sect. 19.

29. Two objections might be alledged against this kind of proof; that the rewards and punishments of moral actions are too uncertain to be accounted clear proofs of the will of God, and consequently of their natural obligation, and that by laying so much stress upon them we make private happiness the measure of good. These he endeavours to repel. The contingency of a future consequence has a determinate value, which, if it more than compensates, for good or evil, the evil or good of a present action, ought to be deemed a proof given by the author of nature that reward or punishment are annexed to the action, as much as if they were its necessary consequences.[895] This argument, perhaps sophistical, is an instance of the calculating method affected by Cumberland, and which we may presume, from the then recent application of analysis to probability, he was the first to adopt on such an occasion. Paley is sometimes fond of a similar process. But after these mathematical reasonings, he dwells, as before, on the beneficial effects of virtue, and concludes that many of them are so uniform as to leave no doubt as to the intention of the Creator. Against the charge of postponing the public good to that of the agent, he protests that it is wholly contrary to his principle, which permits no one to preserve his life, or what is necessary for it, at the expense of a greater good to the whole.[896] But his explication of the question ends in repeating that no single man’s greatest felicity can, by the nature of things, be inconsistent with that of all; and that every such hypothesis is to be rejected as an impossible condition of the problem. It seems doubtful whether Cumberland uses always the same language on the question whether private happiness is the final motive of action, which in this part of the chapter he wholly denies.

[895] Sect. 37.

[896] Sua cujusque felicitas est pars valde exigua finis illius,
quem vir verè rationalis prosequitur, et ad totum finem, scilicet
commune bonum cui a natura seu a Deo intertexitur, eam tantum
habet rationem quam habet unus homo ad aggregatum ex omnibus
rationalibus, quæ minor est quam habet unica arenula ad molem
universi corporis. Sect. 23 and sect. 28.

30. From the establishment of this primary law of universal benevolence, Cumberland next deduces the chief secondary principles, which are commonly called the moral virtues. And among these he gives the first place to justice, which he seems to consider, by too lax an use of terms, or too imperfect an analogy, as comprehending the social duties of liberality, courtesy, and domestic affection. The right of property, which is the foundation of justice, he rests entirely on its necessity for the common good; whatever is required for that prime end of moral action being itself obligatory on moral agents, they are bound to establish and to maintain separate rights. And all right so wholly depends on this instrumentality to good, that the rightful sovereignty of God over his creatures is not founded on that relation he bears to them, much less on his mere power, but on his wisdom and goodness, through which his omnipotence works only for their happiness. But this happiness can only be attained by means of an absolute right over them in their Maker, which is therefore to be reckoned a natural law.

31. The good of all rational beings is a complex whole, being nothing but the aggregate of good enjoyed by each. We can only act in our proper spheres, labouring to do good. But this labour will be fruitless, or rather mischievous, if we do not keep in mind the higher gradations which terminate in universal benevolence. No man must seek his own advantage otherwise than that of his family permits; or provide for his family to the detriment of his country; or promote the good of his country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind, if it were possible, without regard to the majesty of God.[897] It is, indeed, sufficient that the mind should acknowledge and recollect this principle of conduct, without having it present on every single occasion. But where moral difficulties arise, Cumberland contends that the general good is the only measure by which we are to determine the lawfulness of actions, or the preference due to one above another.

32. In conclusion, he passes to political authority, deriving it from the same principle, and comments with severity and success, though in the verbose style usual to him, on the system of Hobbes. It is, however, worthy of remark, that he not only peremptorily declares the irresponsibility of the supreme magistrate in all cases, but seems to give him a more arbitrary latitude in the choice of measures, so long as he does not violate the chief negative precepts of the decalogue, than is consistent with his own fundamental rule of always seeking the greatest good. He endeavours to throw upon Hobbes, as was not uncommon with the latter’s theological opponents, the imputation of encouraging rebellion while he seemed to support absolute power; and observes with full as much truth that if kings are bound by no natural law, the reason for their institution--namely, the security of mankind, assigned by the author of the Leviathan, falls to the ground.

[897] Cap. viii., sect. 14, 15.

|Remarks on Cumberland’s theory.|

33. I have gone rather at length into a kind of analysis of this treatise, because it is now very little read, and yet was of great importance in the annals of ethical philosophy. It was, if not a textbook in either of our universities, concerning which I am not confident, the basis of the system therein taught, and of the books which have had most influence in this country. Hutcheson, Law, Paley, Priestley, Bentham, belong, no doubt some of them unconsciously, to the school founded by Cumberland. Hutcheson adopted the principle of general benevolence as the standard of virtue; but by limiting the definition of good to happiness alone, he simplified the scheme of Cumberland, who had included conservation and enlargement of capacity in its definition. He rejected also what encumbers the whole system of his predecessor, the including the Supreme Being among those rational agents whose good we are bound to promote. The schoolmen, as well as those whom they followed, deeming it necessary to predicate metaphysical infinity of all the divine attributes, reckoned unalterable beatitude in the number. Upon such a subject no wise man would like to dogmatise. The difficulties on both sides are very great, and perhaps among the most intricate to which the momentous problem concerning the cause of evil has given rise. Cumberland, whose mind does not seem to have been much framed to wrestle with mysteries, evades, in his lax verbosity, what must perplex his readers.

34. In establishing the will of a supreme lawgiver as essential to the law of nature, he is followed by the bishop of Carlisle and Paley, as well as by the majority of English moralists in the eighteenth century. But while Paley deems the recognition of a future state so essential, that he even includes in the definition of virtue that it is performed “for the sake of everlasting happiness,” Cumberland not only omits this erroneous and almost paradoxical condition, but very slightly alludes to another life, though he thinks it probable from the stings of conscience and on other grounds; resting the whole argument on the certain consequences of virtue and vice in the present, but guarding justly against the supposition that any difference of happiness in moral agents can affect the immediate question except such as is the mere result of their own behaviour. If anyone had urged, like Paley, that without taking a future state into consideration, the result of calculating our own advantage will either not always be in favour of virtue, or, in consequence of the violence of passion, will not always seem so, Cumberland would probably have denied the former alternative, and replied to the other, that we can only prove the truth of our theorems in moral philosophy, and cannot compel men to adopt them.

35. Sir James Mackintosh, whose notice of Cumberland is rather too superficial, and hardly recognises his influence on philosophy, observes that “the forms of scholastic argument serve more to encumber his style than to insure his exactness.”[898] There is not, however, much of scholastic form in the treatise on the Laws of Nature, and this is expressly disclaimed in the Preface. But he has, as we have intimated, a great deal too much of a mathematical line of argument which never illustrates his meaning, and has sometimes misled his judgment. We owe, probably to his fondness for this specious illusion, I mean the application of reasonings upon quantity to moral subjects, the dangerous sophism that a direct calculation of the highest good, and that not relatively to particulars, but to all rational beings, is the measure of virtuous actions, the test by which we are to try our own conduct and that of others. And the intervention of general rules, by which Paley endeavoured to dilute and render palatable this calculating scheme of utility, seems no more to have occurred to Cumberland than it was adopted by Bentham.

[898] Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, p. 48.

36. Thus as Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium is nearly the last of a declining school, Cumberland’s Law of Nature may be justly considered as the herald, especially in England, of a new ethical philosophy, of which the main characteristics were, first, that it stood complete in itself without the aid of revelation; secondly, that it appealed to no authority of earlier writers whatever, though it sometimes used them in illustration; thirdly, that it availed itself of observation and experience, alledging them generally, but abstaining from particular instances of either, and making, above all, no display of erudition; and fourthly; that it entered very little upon casuistry, leaving the application of principles to the reader.

|Puffendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations.|

37. In the same year, 1672, a work still more generally distinguished than that of Cumberland, was published at Lund, in Sweden, by Samuel Puffendorf, a Saxon by birth, who filled the chair of moral philosophy in that recently-founded university. This large treatise, On the Law of Nature and Nations, in eight books, was abridged by the author, but not without some variations, in one perhaps more useful, On the Duties of a Man and a Citizen. Both have been translated into French and English; both were long studied in the foreign universities, and even in our own. Puffendorf has been, perhaps, in moral philosophy, of greater authority than Grotius, with whom he is frequently named in conjunction; but this is not the case in international jurisprudence.

|Analysis of this work.|

38. Puffendorf, after a very diffuse and technical chapter on moral beings, or modes, proceeds to assert a demonstrative certainty in moral science, but seems not to maintain an inherent right and wrong in actions antecedent to all law, referring the rule of morality altogether to the divine appointment. He ends, however, by admitting that man’s constitution being what it is, God could not, without inconsistency, have given him any other law than that under which he lives.[899] We discern good from evil by the understanding, which judgment when exercised on our own actions is called conscience; but he strongly protests against any such jurisdiction of conscience, independent of reason and knowledge, as some have asserted. This notion “was first introduced by the schoolmen, and has been maintained in these latter ages by the crafty casuists for the better securing, of men’s minds and fortunes to their own fortune and advantage.”[900] Puffendorf was a good deal imbued with the Lutheran bigotry which did no justice to any religion but its own.

[899] C. 2.

[900] C. 3.

39. Law alone creates obligation; no one can be obliged except towards a superior. But to compel and to oblige being different things, it is required for this latter that we should have received some great good at the hands of a superior, or have voluntarily submitted to his will. This seems to involve an antecedent moral right, which Puffendorf’s general theory denies.[901] Barbeyrac, his able and watchful commentator, derives obligation from our natural dependence on the supreme authority of God, who can punish the disobedient and reward others. In order to make laws obligatory, it is necessary, according to Puffendorf, that we should know both the law and the lawgiver’s authority. Actions are good or evil, as they conform more or less to law. And, coming to consider the peculiar qualities of moral actions, he introduces the distinction of perfect and imperfect rights, objecting to that of Grotius and the Roman lawyers, expletive and distributive justice.[902] This first book of Puffendorf is very diffuse; and some chapters are wholly omitted in the abridgment.

[901] C. 6.

[902] C. 7.

40. The natural state of man, such as in theory we may suppose, is one in which he was never placed, “thrown into the world at a venture, and then left entirely to himself, with no larger endowments of body or mind than such as we now discover in men.” This, however, he seems to think physically possible to have been, which I should incline to question. Man, in a state of nature, is subject to no earthly superior; but we must not infer thence that he is incapable of law, and has a right to everything that is profitable to himself. But, after discussing the position of Hobbes that a state of nature is a state of war, he ends by admitting that the desire of peace is too weak and uncertain a security for its preservation among mankind.[903]

[903] L. ii. c. 2.