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History of Moral Philosophy in England
By William Whewell
Author’s Preface
The following Lectures have, for the most part, been repeatedly delivered, in substance at least, in the Courses which I have read as Professor of Moral Philosophy. But I have of late years found it necessary to introduce into my Course new matter, to an extent which makes it difficult to find room for these. Nevertheless it is convenient for me, in dealing with the subject, to be able to assume that my hearers have such a knowledge of its history as these Lectures contain. I have therefore published them, in the hope that they may be of use to our students, and other persons who feel an interest in the progress of moral speculation in this country.
Being written for oral delivery, they will be found to contain repetitions, and certain inequalities of style which, if I had composed them for the general reader, it would have been my business to avoid.
Some of these peculiarities appeared to contribute to the favourable reception of the Lecture when first delivered; and I have ventured to retain them, trusting that the reader will excuse them in consideration of their original occasion.
Of course I have not forgotten the Dissertations of Dugald Stewart and of Mackintosh, which occupy nearly the same ground as that over which I here travel; indeed the latter work I have myself edited. But it appeared to me that to review the works of the authors here criticized from my own point of view, was a task naturally suggested by my position; and this I attempted to do in the Lectures now published.
To obviate confusion I may mention that I have already (in 1841) published “Two Introductory Lectures" delivered in 1839 and 1841, (one of which is here republished,) and (in 1846) eight other Lectures under the title “Lectures on Systematic Morality, delivered in Lent Term, 1846.”
Trinity College
February 17, 1852
Introductory Lecture: The Point of View
The following Lectures contain criticisms on the views and doctrines of a series of ethical writers; they attempt to point out how far each was right, and in what way he contributed to the progress of moral speculation in this country. It is plain that such judgments must be affected by the views and doctrines of the critic himself Nor is this a disadvantage in such criticism, if the critic’s point of view be definite and evident. In my Elements of Morality I have given that view of the grounds and relations of moral truths to which the best parts of all previous moral speculations appear to me to converge; but it may still be of use to explain here, more briefly and pointedly, the System of Morality there presented.
Schemes of Morality, that is, modes of deducing the Rules of Human Action, are of two kinds:—those which assert it to be the law of human action to aim at some external object, (external, that is, to the mind which aims,) as for example, those which in ancient or modem times have asserted Pleasure, or Utility, or the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, to be the true end of human action; and those which would regulate human action by an internal principle or relation, as Conscience, or a Moral Faculty, or Duty, or Rectitude, or the Superiority of Reason to Desire. These two kinds of schemes may be described respectively as Dependent and Independent Morality. Now it is here held that Independent Morality is the true scheme. We maintain, with Plato, that Reason has a natural and rightful authority over Desire and Affection; with Butler, that there is a difference
Let us begin with the doctrine of Plato just referred to; that Reason has a natural and rightful authority over Desire and Affection, which doctrine Butler has further illustrated. In making this principle the groundwork of morality, we seem to be guilty of an oversight; for the word rightful already involves a moral notion: that is rightful authority, and that only, which it is immoral to disobey. In order to make our scheme complete, we must define rightful, and prove that the authority of Reason over Desire is rightful.
The Definition of rightful, or of the adjective right, is, I conceive, contained in the maxim which I have already quoted as proceeding from the general voice of mankind: namely this, that we must do what is right at whatever cost. That an action is right, is a reason for doing it, which is paramount to all other reasons, and overweighs them all when they are on the contrary side. It is painful: but it is right; therefore we must do it. It is a loss: but it is right; therefore we must do it. It is unkind: but it is right; therefore we must do it. These are self-evident propositions. That a thing is right, is a supreme reason for doing it. Right
And this supreme rule, that we must do what is right, is also the moral rule of human action. Having got this notion of what is right; what we ought to do; what we should do; we are already in the region of morality. What is right; what it is that we ought to do, we must have some means of determining, in order to complete our moral scheme; but whatever we so determine, we are involved in a moral system, as soon as we begin to use such words as right and ought.
Thus then we see that the supreme reason of human actions and the moral nature of them cannot be separated. The two come into our thoughts together, and are in our conceptions identical. And this identity is the foundation, in a peculiar and characteristic manner, of the system of morality to which we have been led.
In thus speaking of the reasons of human actions, it is plain that I am using the term reason, not for the Faculty by which we judge, but for the grounds of our judgment; not for the Power of mental seeing, but for something which we see. Reasons and the Reason thus differ nearly as thoughts and Thought. The Reason sees the reasons for human actions: and among these, it sees the supreme reason, which is, that they are right: and because the Reason is the Faculty which sees this, while Desire and Affection tend blindly to their objects, not seeing reasons, but feeling impulses, or at least, seeing reasons only as subordinate things;—therefore it is that we say that the Reason has a natural and rightful authority over Desire and Affection.
But though the general statement of the ground of Morality may thus be found at a very early period of ethical speculation, several additional steps are requisite in order to deduce from this principle a systematic scheme; and some of these steps, it seems to me, have not been previously made in a satisfactory manner. The Reason, we have said, must control and direct the Desires and Affections;—must so control and direct them, that they may act rightly. But how are we to carry this Rule into detail? What are the conditions of acting rightly, in the case of the Desires and Affections? How is the Supreme Rule of Human Action, Rightness, brought into contact with these Impulses, these Springs of Human Action, as we may call them?
In order to answer this question, we classify the springs of Human Action, as they commonly exist among men, namely, the Desires and Affections; and we look for conditions of rightness, corresponding to this classification of the Desires and Affections. We shall find such.
The task of classifying the Springs of Human Action, the Desires, Affections, and the like, has been attempted by various moralists in modern times, especially by Reid and Dugald Stewart. Their classifications supply useful suggestions, but appear to me to be both defective and redundant. I have had therefore in a great degree to make my own classification. It may be said, I think, that the leading Desires of man, in their largest form, in which they are expressed by means of general terms, and in which they include the Affections, are, The Desire of Personal Safety, the Desire of Having, the Desire of Family Society, (which includes the Family Affections,) and the Desire of Civil Society, (which includes the more general Social Affections). There are
These primary Desires in their various operation regulate the whole scheme of human life. Men’s personal safety, their possessions, their families, and the concerns of the community in which they live, are, in their eyes, the greatest objects which exist. No actions can be conformable to Rule, if the actions which refer to these objects are not conformable to Rule. If these objects are not ordered, secured, respected, reverenced, there can be no order, no security, no respect, no reverence anywhere. However other Desires and Affections be controlled and directed, if these be not, there can be no real control and direction. If these great primary forces are not in equilibrium, or at least in moderated movement, there can be no valid effect produced by adjusting the smaller and slighter impulses which operate upon man.
But the Desires which regard these great primary objects. Personal Safety, Possessions, Family, Civil Society,—how are they to be regulated so that they may conform to the condition which we have assigned; to the Supreme Rule of Human Action; in short, that they may be right? That is the question which we have now to answer.
We do not at present want a complete answer, but a starting point from which we may proceed towards a complete answer. How the Desires and Affections are to be regulated, so that they may be right in the highest sense, is an inquiry which requires a long train of careful thought: but is there no condition which is obviously requisite, as a general rule, in order that those Desires and Affections may be right?
There plainly is such a condition generally established among men. In order that the Desires and Affections with regard to the Personal Safety, Possessions, Family, Civil Condition of other men may be right, they must conform to this primary and universal Condition, that they do not violate the
And here we find, as we said we should find, conditions of rightness corresponding to the primary springs of human action: for we find a classification of Rights corresponding to the classification of primary Desires, to which we were led. As the primary Desires of men are the Desire of Personal Safety, of Possessions, of Family, and of Civil Society; so the primary kinds of Rights among men are everywhere the Rights of the Person, the Rights of Property, the Rights of the Family, and Political Rights, which depend upon the constitution of the community to which they belong, and the place of each man in it.
But these large classes of Rights thus corresponding to the leading Desires and Affections of men, do not quite exhaust the kinds of Rights commonly recognized among men. We cannot make a good and complete arrangement of Rights without putting, as one large class. Rights of Contract;—Rights arising from agreement among men: for though these may often be about Property, and may thus seem to enter into the class of Rights of Property, they may also be about other things as well, and do really depend upon a different principle.
As the other classes of Rights correspond, each to each, to leading Desires of men, we may ask to what Desire do the Rights of Contract correspond; and to this the answer must be, that such Rights do not depend exactly upon a Desire, but upon what may be called more fitly a Need; one of the most universal and dominant Needs of man in his social condition; the Need of a mutual understanding among
So then we have five acting principles,—Springs of Action, and Sources of Rights among men;—the Desire and Love of Personal Safety; of Property; of Family; and of Civil Society; and along with these, Language, or the Desire of a mutual understanding which Language enables them to gratify. And we have in like manner, five classes of Rights;—those of Person, Property, Family, State, and Contract.
This symmetrical division of the Springs of Human Action, and of Rights existing in Human Society is the starting point of our system of Morality; being, as we have said, the point where the Springs of Human Action come in contact with the supreme Rule of Rightness on which Morality depends. For though the adjective right in a moral sense, and the substantive Bight in a legal sense, are words of very different extent, the one is necessarily comprehended within the sphere of the other. Nothing can be a man’s Right but that which it is right he should have, though he may not have a Right to everything which it would be right for others to give him. And thus when we have once arrived at the existence of Rights, we have reached a point from which we may go on to Rightness of a higher kind, and may thus construct the whole edifice of a system of Morality.
In what manner, it may be asked, do we rise from mere legal Rights to moral Rightness? I reply, that we do so in virtue of this principle:—that the Supreme Rule of man’s actions must be a rule which has authority over the whole of man; over his intentions as well as his actions; over his Affections, his Desires, his Habits, his Thoughts, his Wishes. The man’s being cannot be right, except all these be right. If he abstain from outward violations of the Rights of others, he may satisfy Law, but he does not satisfy Morality. It is
To this scheme of Morality various objections may be made, some of which I will here state, and reply to as briefly and as distinctly as I can.
I. It may be said that in the system which has thus been described, Morality is founded upon Law, that is, upon the Laws which actually exist among men; and that such a Morality must necessarily be narrow, low, and formal; being bounded by the nature and extent of its foundation.
To this we reply, that our Morality, though it derives a portion of its form from our classification of Rights, and so far, of Laws, is not at all bounded by the nature and extent of Law, but on the contrary is necessarily immeasurably more comprehensive, deep and high than Law is, in virtue of the principle just stated as the leading principle of our Morality;—that Morality claims empire over the whole man, including internal purpose, affection, and thought; whereas Law is concerned only with outward actions.
We may add to this reply, that Law, or Rights, are in our system, not the foundation, but only the starting point, of Morality. Though we begin from them, we do not build upon them. Indeed with us, Rights, and the Laws which establish them, instead of being the foundation of Morality, are only the foundation of the mode in which Morality regards
II. But again it may be objected that our Morality, being derived from existing Law, must necessarily be controlled by existing Law; so that however absurd, unjust, or oppressive be the Laws, the precepts of our Morality must be conformed to them.
To this we reply, our Morality is not derived from the special commands of existing Laws, but from the fact that Laws exist, and from our classification of their subjects. Personal Safety, Property, Contracts, Family and Civil relations, are everywhere the subjects of Law, and are everywhere protected by Law; therefore we judge that these things must be the subjects of Morality, and must be reverently regarded by Morality. But we are not thus bound to approve of all the special appointments with regard to these subjects, which may exist at a given time in the Laws of a given country. On the contrary, we may condemn the Laws as being contrary to Morality. We cannot frame a Morality without recognizing Property, and Property exists through Law; but yet the Law of Property, in a particular country, may be at variance with that moral purpose for which, in our eyes. Laws exist. Law is the foundation and necessary condition of Justice; but yet Laws may be unjust, and when unjust, ought to be changed. The cases in which Morality and Law come into conflict, are difficult problems in all systems of Morality. We have no greater difficulty in propounding and in solving such problems than any other Moralists.
III. It may be objected that by deriving Morality from existing Laws we make it depend upon something accidental, partial, variable in different countries and times;
And to this we reply, as before, that we do not derive Morality from Law in such a way as to make it share the accidental, partial, variable character of Law. We derive it from the fact that Law everywhere establishes, or endeavours to establish. Personal Security, Property, Contracts, Families and States; which objects of Law are, we conceive, universal,constant, and the necessary conditions of man’s moral existence. So that Morality, however it may begin by borrowing a suggestion from Law, may still be said to be in its nature necessary, universal and eternal.
IV. Again, it may be said that the necessity of which we here speak, when we say that the fundamental kinds of Rights exist necessarily, is the necessity arising from mutual fear. Property, for example, is established by Law, as a kind of term of truce to the endless quarrels concerning the objects of human desire which would otherwise take place among men.
But that mutual fear alone could not establish property and the other kinds of Rights, is evident from this: that such Rights do not exist among brute animals, in spite of their mutual fears and conflicting desires. Rights do not arise from mutual fear, but from the whole nature of man; and especially from his nature as being capable of living under rules of action, and incapable of living otherwise. He cannot live except under rules of external action, directing and controlling him; hence men have Rights. He cannot live except with the recognition of rules of internal action, giving a character to his intentions and purposes, as wrong or right; and thus he must have Morality.
V. The same answer might be made if it were urged that by making our Morality begin from Rights, we really do found it upon Expediency, notwithstanding our condemnation
Thus it will be seen that according to our view. Morality is founded upon the whole nature of man, as containing Desires and Affections, and as subject to a Rule which must govern his whole being. The Reason is employed both in giving to the objects of the Desires and Affections a more general and ideal character, and in discerning the manner in which they may be controlled and directed so as to conform to Rule, and to the Supreme Rule which all other Rules necessarily imply. We thus assent to those who say that it is the office of Reason to govern the Desires and Affections, and we add that Reason, by its nature, must tenet to govern them so that they may be right. We assent to those who say that Virtue consists in acting conformably to man’s Nature; meaning that his nature is a moral nature, and necessarily implies a Rule of rightness. We assent to Butler when he speaks of man as having a determinate mental constitution; meaning thereby a constitution in which the Desires and Affections must be controlled by Rules, and therefore governed by Reason. We assent to those who speak of man as having a moral Faculty, meaning that he has the Faculty of seeing the necessity of such Rules and of referring actions to them. We do not speak of man as having a Moral Sense; because the discovery of the conformity of actions to a Moral Rule is a process entirely different from the operation of any sense. We speak with
We do not rest our Rules of action upon the tendency of actions to produce the Happiness of others, or of mankind in general; because we cannot solve a problem so difficult as to determine which of two courses of action will produce the greatest amount of human happiness: and we see a simpler and far more satisfactory mode of deducing such Rules; namely, by considering that there must be such Rules; that they must be Rules for man; for man living among men; and for the whole of man’s being. Since we are thus led directly to moral Rules, by the consideration of the internal conditions of man’s being, we cannot think it wise to turn away from this method, and to try to determine such Rules by reference to an obscure and unmanageable external condition, the amount of Happiness produced. But we do not doubt of the truth of this doctrine, that right action does produce the greatest amount of human happiness; and we conceive that happiness must be so apprehended and so understood as to be consistent with this general truth.
We do not deduce our Rules of action directly from the tendency of actions to produce our own happiness, in the way of reward; because we do not sufficiently know, on
Though, as we have already said, our Morality does not depend upon actually existing human Laws, nor even upon the necessary existence of Law; yet will Morality, and the Laws which necessarily exist in human society, rest upon the same foundation, the moral nature of man. And in tracing this fundamental basis of Law and of Morality into a system of each, there may be, and naturally will be, a correspondence between certain general provinces and divisions of the one and of the other, of Law and of Morality. And thus as we have five leading kinds of Rights, we have also five leading kinds of Duty and of Virtue. These five are Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity, and Wisdom; which last, reckoned by Aristotle and others as an intellectual virtue,
Duty is a term which especially belongs to Morality, not to Law. The term Obligation is used in both subjects: we speak of the legal Obligation of paying our debts, and the moral Obligation of relieving the distressed. It would produce some convenience if the term were confined to the former meaning; but at any rate the two senses ought not to be confounded. We ought not to speak, as Paley does, of obliged and ought as synonymous terms; seeing that men are often obliged to do what they ought not to do.
Nor again, ought the habit of such phraseology to lead us to suppose that because legal obligations are always obligations to some person, therefore moral obligations are also always due to some person. Duties to others, as they are sometimes termed, are much better spoken of as Duties simply: for they are to be performed not only out of regard to others, as what they ought to have, but far more, from regard to ourselves and what we ought to be.
To every (Legal) Obligation which we contract or have, corresponds a Right which another person requires or has:
And many of our Duties which regard our special relations to particular persons, and which we may therefore term Relative Duties, may be conveniently arranged and treated of according to those Relations.
Having these views of the most convenient way of using the term Obligation, we should avoid using such terms as perfect and imperfect Obligation, which have been common among Moralists. Such phrases have the inconvenience of implying that no Obligations are perfect but those which the law imposes, and that all our Duties are of the nature of Debts, only less perfect in degree.
It may be asked how we can apply these general heads of our System to particular actions and to special moral questions, such as Moralists are expected to decide: and it may be urged that some reference to the results of actions and to some external object of action is requisite for such purposes. But it will be found that this is not so, and that a consideration of the ideas of Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity and Order, determined in the way in which we have determined them, combined with a regard to the various relations in which men stand to each other, will enable us to draw out a complete scheme of human duties. And we conceive that this is not only a possible mode of proceeding, but that it is the way in which men do naturally and spontaneously endeavour to decide for themselves such moral questions as come before them. If the doubt be what course of action Justice, or Truth, requires, and if they reason morally on the question, they do not generally so much consider what will come of each course,—what they will gain or lose by it,—as what
Although we begin the arrangement of our Morality by taking account of the kinds of Rights established among men by actual Law, this, as we have already, said, does not prevent our passing judgment upon existing Laws as moral or immoral, just or unjust. But though some existing Laws may be unjust, we must in our System of Morals, and in all systems of morals which can be recognized by human society, look upon existing Laws in general with great respect, as highly important elements in all moral questions. In general, what is Property, what is a Contract, what is a Marriage, in any Society, must be determined by the Laws of that Society; and as our Duties, as well as our legal Obligations, are concerned about Property, Contract, Marriage, and the like, our Morality must involve a regard to existing Laws. The existing Laws of each state belong to its history;—have grown out of its history or with its history, and change with its historical changes. Hence our Morality, besides involving the ideal elements of which we have spoken, the ideas of Justice, Truth, and the like, must include an historical element, belonging to each separate community. Along with the Idea of Morality we must include the Fact of Law. And the bearings of Law and Morality,—the dependence of what ought to be on what is,—the conversion of what is into what ought to be in each community,—forms a large and important province of speculation which we can by no means leave out of our consideration. To this province belong all general questions of Political Morality; questions concerning the Rights and Duties of Governments as well as of individuals.
The radical part of the term Jurisprudence, namely Jus, (the special study of Jurists) denotes a branch of speculation which may be distinguished from Morality proper by saying that Jus is the doctrine of Rights and Obligations, Morality the doctrine of Virtues and Duties; the term Obligations being here used in the strict sense above spoken of.
Besides these, we conceive it proper to include in our Morality questions as to what is just and right in the dealings of nations with one another. This is commonly termed International Law; but since there is no supreme authority among nations by which Laws affecting them can be enforced, these questions can only be discussed by assuming a common understanding respecting the Rights and Obligations of nations; and hence the subject may rather be termed International Jus.
The subject of Religion is intimately connected with Morality; or indeed Religion may rather be said to include the subject of Morality, regarding it according to her own special view of man’s nature, condition, and prospects. But there result important advantages from treating separately Morality according to Reason, and Morality according to Religion: and this therefore we do.
The explanation which has thus, been given of the relation of our System of Morality to the Systems published by other writers, will have shown in a great degree the objections to the schemes of our predecessors, which prevent our resting satisfied with their labours. With regard to Paley’s Principles of Moral Philosophy in particular, the book which is recognized by the University of Cambridge as
This Note is referred to as an Appendix in a Note to p. 1. It contains the first part of the Lecture delivered on entering on my first Course, April 22, 1839.
I now appear before the University for the first time in the attempt to discharge my public functions as Professor of Casuistry, or Moral Philosophy; to which chair I was elected in June last, 1838. The office of Professor, in this as in other Universities, is generally understood to imply the duty of delivering Public Lectures upon the subject which the Professorship designates; and in the case of the Professorship which I have the honour to hold, this duty is expressly enjoined by the Founder, and directions are given in the deed of Foundation with a view of securing its effectual performance. As, however, notwithstanding these reasons for the delivery of Public Lectures by the holder of this Professorship, circumstances had in fact led to a discontinuance of them, I did not find myself by this appointment placed in a situation in which I had to continue and can on an existing system of teaching, on the subject thus committed to my care. I am well aware that it may easily happen to a Professor, from the nature of his subject, or from other circumstances, that he may better hope to promote the study of his science, and the interests of the academic body to which he belongs, in other ways,—by his advice, his writings, or his judgments on what is done by others,—than by the delivery of Lectures to the general body. With particular subjects, and under particular circumstances, this may very readily be conceived to be so: but in almost all cases it would seem to be desirable, that a person who has conferred upon him such a distinction as is among us implied in a Professorship of any branch of science or learning, should come forwards in some manner which may show to the University that he has made, or is making, a study of that which he professes;—that his attention is employed in examining its principles and tracing its progress;—that he is at his post, prepared with his proper share of the learning and knowledge of past times; and ready, when any new doctrines claim his attention, to resist error, and to welcome truth. It is by possessing a body of persons who hold their respective places in our Universities in such a spirit, whether they bear the name of Professor or Tutor, or any other, that these bodies will be, as such bodies ought to be, the depositaries and diffusers of sound learning—the asylums of solid and substantial truth—the golden links which connect The Permanent with The Progressive. When therefore I was elected into this office, I thought that it became incumbent upon me to show, in some public manner, that I was giving my best attention to the subject with which I was thus charged. And among other steps to which I felt myself thus directed, it appeared to me that a course of Public Lectures, such as the foundation of the Professorship enjoins, might be both of use and of interest to a portion of the University. Such a course, therefore, although in the present year, for reasons which I may hereafter refer to, a brief and very incomplete one, I now purpose to commence.
The subject which I consider as committed to my charge by my professorship is Moral Philosophy, according to that view of the position and limits of the science to which the best modem authors have been led. Even if by taking this subject so defined and bounded, it should appear
I shall therefore reckon upon the implied sanction of this University in considering myself as Professor of Moral Philosophy; a branch of study of which a professorship exists, I believe, in every university but our own: a branch of study, too, as I trust to be able to show, which cannot be excluded without leaving the general body of knowledge, such as we should here present it to our students, in an intolerable degree maimed and imperfect.
You are probably aware that the person holding this professorship is designated in the Foundation Deed, as Professor of Moral Theology or Casuistical Divinity; and has usually been termed Professor of Casuistry. Although, for the reasons I have just stated, I altogether disclaim the notion that my professorial province is to be defined or limited by an antiquarian investigation as to what Casuistry was at first, or at any period; and although, as I have said, another phrase appears to me to be at present far more fitted to express my office, it may interest you, in parting with this subject as an acknowledged science among us, to cast back a glance, very briefly, upon its nature and course.
I need not remind any one here that the term indicates that portion of Christian Morals which treats of Cases of Conscience; and that Cases of Conscience are questions of human conduct in which conflicting duties,
Nor, again, need I remark, (although the circumstance is full of instruction,) that since, in cases where obvious duties appear to be in conflict, we cannot decide either way without transgressing, or seeming to transgress, some plain rule of morality, the common mind is never fully satisfied with such a conclusion: and even when the decision is made on the most purely moral grounds, and when the reasons assigned for it are, to a person capable of following such reasoning, perfectly convincing and demonstrative, still the careless hearer attends to nothing but the fact that reasons are given for omitting a duty.
Hence it has come to pass, that when, in any cases, reasons are stated tending to evade some generally acknowledged rule of conduct, although the reasons have only the most shallow and transparent pretence of morality, still the popular mind will not take the trouble of distinguishing between such sophistry and the indispensable distinctions contemplated by the genuine moralist. And thus such evasive perversion of reason is also called Casuistry; and hence the word, in more modem times, and in certain classes of writers, is used in a somewhat obnoxious sense. Pope will supply us with examples of both shades of signification: as, first, in the sense of decisions on the best authority:—
Who shall decide when doctors disagree,
And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?
and again, in the favourable sense:—
Morality by her false guardians drawn,
Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn.
Technical law and technical morality are both often, as here, the objects of sarcasm and blame. Yet it must be obvious to every considerate person, that laws, to be consistent in practice, must be technical; and a very little attention to the subject will show us that morality also, in order to become a portion of exact truth, must assume, as all sciences must, a technical form. Such a form is one which the popular mind cannot and will not comprehend, and on which it willingly avenges itself by ridicule and dislike.
We know however that, notwithstanding the prevalence of such feelings, it is our business, in this, no less than other subjects, to aim at truth of the most rigorous and exact form, as well as of the most solid certainty. Nor will it ever be possible to treat of morality, in any complete and sufficient manner, without taking into our account the question of conflicting duties, and other questions such as have been termed Cases of Conscience. And though such cases are neither the main part of our subject (Moral Philosophy), nor that from which it can with propriety
The works which contained collections of cases of conscience, and of which the title commonly was Summa Casuum Conscientiae, or something resembling this were compiled at first for the use of confessors and ecclesiastical persons, who had to give their advice and decisions to those who made confession to them. It was requisite for them to know, for instance, in what cases penance of a heavier or lighter kind was to be imposed; and what offenses must, for the time, exclude the offender from the Communion.
As early as the 13th century Raymond of Pennaforti had published his Casuistical Summa, which came into very general use, and was referred to by the greater part of the succeeding casuists.
In the 14th and 15th century the number of such books increased very greatly. These Summae were in common speech known by certain abbreviated names, borrowed from the designation of the author, or other circumstances. Thus there was the Astesana, which derived its name from its author Astesanus, a Minorite of Asti in Piemont; the Angelica, compiled by Angelus de Clavasio, a Genoese Minorite; the Pisana or Pisanella, which was also termed Bartholina or Magistruccia; the Pacfica; the Rosella; the Sylvestrina. In these works the subjects were usually arranged alphabetically, and the decisions were given in the form of Responses to Questions proposed;
* I will give, as an example of the Summae, one of the questions under the word Ebrietas in the Summa Angelica.)
P. 61. “Ebrietas est privatio intellectus facta ad aliquod tempus ex immoderato potu vini vel cujuscunque rei potabilis.
“Q. Utrum ebrietas sit peccatum mortale. Respondetur ut colligo ex Alexan. Secunda Secundae, et Glo. xxv. Dist sect. alias ea demum. Et docetur ibidem quod aut raro contigit aut assidud. Si raro: sic distinguo, quod aut inebrians se cognoscit vini potentiam, et suam complexionem dispositam ad ebrietatem, et tunc magis vult ebrietatem incurrere quam a vino abstinere, et sic est peccatum mortale; aut inebrians se nescit vini potentiam et ignorat quod ex tali potu potest inebriari vel non advertit; et sic est nullum peccatum vel veniale secundum excessum in potu, et negligentiam in advertendo. Si vero assidua sit ebrietas: sic est mortale peccatum, non propter iterationem actus, quae multiplicatio actuum venialium non auget in infinitum; sed quod non potest esse quod homo assidue inebrietur quin sciens et volens ebrietatem incurrat: autsaltem omittat diligentiam quam debet adhibere de necessitate ne inebrietur cum habeat tempus deliberationis reprimendi motus veniales ne procedant in regnum peccati.”
I will also give the part of the article which refers to Acidia, ἀκηδία, Indifference, and Dejection with regard to doing good, which the schoolmen had made a special sin. By Aquinas it is ranked among the vices opposite to the Christian virtue of Hope.
P. 3. “Addia, secundum Ricardum de Sancto Victore, est torpor mentis bona inchoari negligentis, et secundum Damascenum est tristitia aggravant mentem ut nihil boni ei agere libeat. Q. Utrum acidia sit contra aliquod prasceptum Decalogi. Respondet Alexander, Trac. de Acidia, quod est specialiter et explicite contra illud. Ecclesiastes 38:20. [Take no heaviness to heart: drive it away, and remember the last end. Forget it not, for there is no turning again: thou shalt not do him good, but hurt thyself.] Implicitè vero est contra illud Exodus 20. [Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath-day.] In acidia est tristitia de spiritual! bono cum amore quietis carnalis. In illo vero precepto est amor sanctae quietis quie cum gaudio est in bono spirituali, licet sit laboriosum.”
P. 68. “Erubesoentia de bono est peccatum, et est filia acidise.”
Thus the casuistical works of the Romanists lost all weight, and almost all value, in the eyes of the Reformed Churches. Indeed, they were looked upon, and in many respects justly, as among the glaring evidences of the perversions and human inventions by which the truth of God had been disfigured; so that a great Reformation became necessary; and from this period, beyond doubt, we may trace the origin of the disrepute under which, up to the present time, the name of Casuistry has laboured.
The writers of the Reformed Churches did not at first attempt to substitute any thing in the place of the casuistical works of the Romish Church. Besides an averseness to the subject itself, which, as I have said, they naturally felt, they were, for a considerable period after the Reformation, fully employed upon more urgent objects. If this had not been so, they could not have failed soon to perceive that, in reality, most persons do require some guidance for their consciences; and that rules and precepts by which men may strengthen themselves against the temptations which cloud the judgment when it is brought into contact with special cases, are of great value to every body of moral and Christian men. But the circumstances of the times compelled them to give their energies mainly to controversies with their Romish and other adversaries, and to leave to each man’s own thoughts the regulation of his conduct and feelings They had to man the walls and carry on a war against an external enemy for their very existence; and hence they could the less bestow their labour in building the halls of justice, the houses of charity, and the temples of God, within their city. Or, to use an image of one of the first of our writers (
“For any public provision of books of casuistical theology, we were almost wholly unprovided; and, like the children of Israel in the days of Saul and Jonathan, we were forced to go down to the forges of the Philistines to sharpen every man his share and his coulter, his axe and his mattock. We had swords and spears of our own, enough for defence, and more than enough for disputation: but in this more necessary part of the conduct of consciences, we did receive our answers from abroad, till we found that our old needs were very ill supplied, and new necessities did every day arise.”
In the use of this image, Taylor followed, perhaps imitated, a still earlier English writer on the same subject—William Ames. In the preface to his “Conscience, with the power and Cases thereof,” (English Ed. 1643), he says
“This part of prophecy hath hitherto been less practised in the schools of the prophets, because our captains were necessarily enforced to fight always in front against the enemies to defend the faith, and to purge the floor of the Church; so that they could not plant and water the fields and vineyards as they desired, as it useth to fall out in time of hot, wars. They thought with themselves in the mean while (as one of some note writeth), if we have that single and clear eye of the gospel, if in the house of our heart the candle of pure faith be set upon a candlestick, these small matters might easily be discussed. But experience hath taught at length, that through neglect of this husbandry, a famine of true godliness hath followed in many places, and out of the famine a grievous spiritual plague; insomuch that the counsel of Nehemiah had need be practised, namely, that every one should labour in this work with one hand holding the plough, and in the other a spear or a dart, whereby he may repel the violence of the enemies.”
[The works of Ames and of other English writers on this subject, are further noticed in Lecture I.]
Lecture I. Perkins, Ames, Hall, Sanderson, Taylor
In order that, in this course of Lectures, we may have before us a field of limited extent and definite boundaries, and thus, accommodated both to the novelty of Moral Philosophy among us as the subject of public lectures, and to the shortness of the time allowed the lecturer for preparation,—I shall direct your attention for the present principally or entirely to English writers of morals. (
Among the earliest and most considerable of the moral writers of the English Church, immediately after the Reformation, I may notice William Perkins, a learned divine who lived in this place in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was educated at Christ’s College, of which he became Fellow in 1582; and being much admired as a preacher, was chosen minister of St Andrew’s Church; in which church he was also buried in 1602. (
“First, because the duty of relieving the conscience is by them commended to the sacrificing priest…
“Secondly, they teach that their priests, appointed to be comforters and relievers of the distressed, are made by Christ himself judges of the conscience, having in their hands a judiciary power and authority truly and properly to bind or loose, to remit or to retain sin, to open or to shut the kingdom of heaven…
“Thirdly, that a man may build himself on the faith of his teachers, and for his salvation rest contented with an implicit and unexpressed faith”…To which other objections are added.
Instead of this transferred responsibility, this submission of the conscience to an earthly tribunal, this reliance on a human foundation, the Reformation taught individual responsibility to a heavenly Master, and removed all other foundation than his word and will. The conscience was subject to no subordinate authority: it might be instructed by man, or enlightened by God; but it had a supremacy of its own for each man. It was, as Perkins declared, (p. 11) “in regard of authority and power, placed in the middle between man and God, so as it is under God, and yet above man.”
In consequence of this change in the authority and force previously ascribed to the decisions of moral writers concerning
Accordingly, we find that the collections of cases of conscience by writers of our Church are, in fact, treatises of Moral Philosophy. This is the case even with the earliest of them, that of Perkins, which I have mentioned; as is noticed by foreign writers upon this subject, among whom his reputation has generally been greater than it has been in his own country. Thus Staüdlin (
We may perhaps discern one reason why Perkins produced no great direct effect upon the studies of English
Although Ames’s book is an important one in the history of the science, I shall not dwell upon it; but proceed to subjects more closely connected with English literature.
Another eminent English writer, who shortly after this time wrote upon Cases of Conscience, was Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich in the time of Charles the First. He was educated at Emmanuel College, of which he also became a fellow. His book, entitled, Resolutions and Decisions of divers Practical Cases of Conscience in continual use among men, was published in 1649, while he resided at Higham, near Norwich; his bishopric having been sequestrated by the Parliamentary Commissioners. This work is, mainly, the resolution of forty separate Questions, many of them relating to the common conduct of life, and affecting individual consciences; as, “Whether the seller is bound to make known to the buyer the faults of that which he is about to sell,”—“Whether, and how far, a man may take up arms in the public quarrel of a war.” But others of these questions are really discussions, not so much concerning the application of moral rules, as concerning the validity both of moral rules and of civil laws:—as, “Whether tithes be a lawful maintenance for ministers under the Gospel,”—“Whether marriages once made may be annulled.” Thus, though this book on Cases of Conscience is not, like others which our Church has produced, a treatise of Morals in general, it still is, for the most part, a series of moral disquisitions, in which questions are decided, not by authority or arbitrary selection, but by reason and Scripture; and in which the individual is supposed to make himself acquainted with the foundations as well as the result of the reasoning.
Bishop Sanderson’s Cases of Conscience are in a great measure of the same nature as Bishop Hall’s; except that they bear still more strongly upon their face the impress of the times in which the work was written; reminding us
The tendency of the Casuistry of the Reformed Churches to become systematic Morality, was apparent in other countries, as well as in our own; and the questions thus brought into discussion being treated with a predominant reference to scriptural authority and religious doctrines, the subject was naturally termed Moral Theology. Treatises with this title became very common in Germany towards the end of the seventeenth century; but, for reasons already mentioned,
The study of the authority of Conscience formed an important part of Moral Theology. Abelard in the twelfth century had already laid down the leading principles of this subject, by teaching that the fundamental principle of morality is the will of God revealed to us by means of our Conscience, as well as by means of the Holy Scriptures. Jeremy Taylor’s view is nearly the same with this. Many of you may recollect the manner in which the noble work of which I have spoken, the Rule of Conscience, or Ductor Dubitantium, opens:—
“God governs the world by several attributes and emanations from himself. The nature of things is supported by his power, the events of things are ordered by his providence, and the actions of reasonable creatures are governed by laws; and these laws are put into a man’s soul or mind as into a treasure or repository: some in his very nature, some in after actions, by education and positive sanction, by learning and custom.”
And having thus stated his general view, Taylor proceeds to illustrate it with his usual copiousness of learning and fancy. (
‘Βροτοῖς ἅπα σισυνείδησις Θεὸς.’
And it had in it this truth, that God, who is everywhere in several manners, hath the appellative of his own attributes and effects in the several manners of his presence.
‘Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris.’
“That Providence,” he adds, “which governs all the world, is nothing else but God present by his providence: and God is in our hearts by his laws; he rules us by his substitute, our conscience.” He then proceeds to illustrate this in his own way: “God sits there, and gives us laws; and, as God said to Moses, I have made thee a God to Pharaoh, that is, to give him laws, and to minister in the execution of these laws, and to inflict angry sentences upon him; so hath God done to us, to give us laws, and to exact obedience to those laws; to punish them that prevaricate, and to reward the obedient. And therefore conscience is called οἰκεῖος φύλαξ, ἐνοικος θεὸς, ἐπίτοπος δαίμων, ‘the household guardian,’ ‘the domestic God,’ ‘the spirit or angel of the place.’”
Taylor’s work is entitled Ductor Dubitantium; but this would have been a more proper title for the collections of Cases of his predecessors of the Romish Church, who pretended to direct the conduct of their disciples, without removing the ground of their doubts. The Rule of Conscience ought rather to be, the Medela Dubitationum—the remedy for doubts; that which brings the Christian’s mind to peace and confidence, and to a clear insight into its proper
Thus, at this period, we may consider the authority of Conscience, its divine commission, and its due place as the basis of sound Morality, to be fully established and recognized among the great writers of our own Church. The period of which I now speak, the seventeenth century, though darkened with calamities and afflictions, in this as in other countries, was not inglorious or unfruitful with regard to that great subject of human speculation with which we are here concerned. Many pious and thoughtful men, disciplined by the needs, and rendered serious and wise by the events, of the time, laid before the world the trains of thought and reasoning which had thus been suggested to their minds. Hooker and Selden, Hammond and Sanderson, Usher and Chillingworth, had enriched English literature with solid and valuable productions in the first part of the century; and when the Church and the Monarchy had shown the depth of their foundations by the violence of the storms which they had survived, the general aspect of the speculative world, at least in England, was one which appeared to tend to comparative repose: all the great fundamental questions of religion, law, and government, having been fully debated, and, to a certain
That this repose was of short duration, or rather, that the promise of it was never fulfilled, I shall soon have occasion to show. It will appear, too, that this idea of Conscience, as the basis and principle of Morals, has not even yet been completely and rigorously worked out into its systematic form and consequences. But these are parts of the subject on which I must treat hereafter.
During the period of which we now speak, cases of conscience, discussed in the way which I have endeavoured to describe, had a strong interest, not for divines and speculative men only, but for all classes. Such discussions held somewhat of the place of the graver popular literature of the present day; being, like that, the expression of the natural effort which man, when his mental powers and tastes are cultivated, constantly exerts to reconcile practice with theory;—to understand what is, and to produce what ought to be. We find many evidences of this popularity of Casuistry in the seventeenth century. The very nature of the questions treated by Hall and Sanderson is a proof of this. Sanderson’s decisions were for the most part delivered as answers to questions proposed to him by persons really troubled in their consciences. At the end of one of the most elaborate of his cases (The Case of Unlawful Love (
The treatise De Juramenti Obligatione was translated into English by Charles, during his confinement in the Isle of Wight. And one of the accusations commonly made against that unfortunate monarch by his enemies is, that he cultivated and encouraged the study of Casuistry. But it is easy to find marks of popularity of the subject in other quarters. The treating such subjects in the vernacular language, instead of the language of the learned, was of itself an evidence that it had become the subject of attention with a more diffused and varied audience. In 1658, when, like the rest of the royalist clergy, Sanderson was in great poverty, Boyle engaged him by a salary to write Cases of Conscience. Edward Lord Denny, Baron of Waltham, afterwards Earl of Norwich, was the friend and patron of Perkins while alive, and bestowed kindness upon his family after his death; and the same person also gave to Hall, at an early period of his life, the living of Waltham Cross. The collection of Perkins’s Works is dedicated to Lord Waltham, as Sanderson’s Lectures are to Boyle.
Among the evidences of the general interest felt in such speculations, we may notice the foundation of the Professorship in virtue of which I now stand before you. It was founded in 1 683, by Dr Knightbridge, fellow of St Peters College, and by Anthony Knightbridge his brother, who took the requisite steps for carrying into effect the intentions of the original testator; these being found to be in some degree informally declared. The endowment was afterwards augmented by Dr Smoult, the first person who occupied the professorship. Of others of my predecessors I may have occasion to speak hereafter.
Dr Knightbridge is said to have been of the county of York. The first part of his university education he received at Wadham College, Oxford. When a Bachelor of Arts of three years’ standing, he was brought from Oxford to St Peter’s College; and was, in 1645, made a fellow of that College, in the place of one of the royalists, who were then ejected in great numbers from fellowships in this university by the Parliamentary Commissioners. I have not been able to learn any circumstances which disclose the views which he entertained when he established this foundation of a Professorship, as he terms it, of “Moral Theology or Casuistical Divinity.” Treatises on “Moral Theology” were, as I have already said, very frequently published about this time on the Continent, both by divines of the Roman and the Protestant Churches; and Cases of Conscience, as we have seen, were studied with interest in England. The designation of the Professorship employed by the Founder appears to show that he assented fully to the practice of treating Morality mainly upon theological grounds, which had usually prevailed till his time; but which shortly after began to suffer innovation, as I shall soon have to relate.
In the meantime, I must not terminate my first Lecture, without again begging the indulgence of the University, for the very imperfect manner in which, at the present time,
I have endeavoured to point out the course of things by which the Casuistry of the Romish Church became, in the writers of the Reformed Churches, Moral Philosophy, or, as it was then justly termed, Moral Theology. I have also attempted to show that the doctrine which prevailed among our Divines after this change was one in which an original authority, a divine sanction, and a place as a largo part of the foundation of moral rules, was ascribed to Conscience; the structure of man’s duties being rested upon Conscience and upon the Divine precepts conjointly. It has appeared also that the discussion of such subjects had extended far beyond divines and learned men. The use of a vernacular literature, the right of private judgment which was countenanced and stimulated by the Reformation, and the general tendency to a stirring, questioning, and contentious temper, which was at work in the world, led a very great number of the unlearned, and of persons in all ranks, to take a lively and active interest in speculations concerning questions of morality, even when the inquiry was pursued to the deepest foundations and the most entangled intricacies of the subject. I may add that the amazing and rapid progress of physical science, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, led men to look at other branches of knowledge with a vague expectation that some great improvement might be in store for them also. Novelty had ceased to affright, and had become, in the eyes of many, a recommendation. The old was no longer necessarily the right. Truth might perhaps, it was now imagined, be found elsewhere than in the ponderous
Such an adversary this country soon produced. A man bold, acute, penetrating, unshrinking in speculation, confident in his own powers, contemptuous of the opinions of others, treating with little tenderness, hardly with affected decency, the common prejudices and feelings of mankind, but able to impress his thoughts upon men with singular vividness and energy,—such a man dared to lift his hand against the Moral Theology of the time. He dared to proclaim, to the alarmed ears of his contemporaries, that right and wrong had no independent existence; that moral good and evil were sought and must be sought, not for their own sakes, but on account of extraneous advantages; that the natural condition of man is a state of war; that Might is Right, and that Conscience is only Fear. The person of whom I speak is the celebrated Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, who published his opinions in the time of the Commonwealth and of Charles the Second. He lived in considerable familiarity and respect among the eminent men of his time: but his doctrines were looked upon by most of them as dangerous and offensive novelties. He himself indeed was at least as well persuaded as any of his readers, of the originality of his views. In one of his works
* Elements of Philosophy, 1656, dedicated to the Earl of Devonshire. After mentioning Copernicus, Galileo, Harvey, Kepler, Gassendi, Mersenne, and the College of Physicians in London, as the only true Natural Philosophers, he adds “Natural Philosophy is therefore but young: but Civil Philosophy is yet much younger, as being no older (I say it provoked, that my Detractors may know how little they have wrought upon me) than my book De Cive.”
Hobbes’s doctrines are well known to the general English reader. He derives right and wrong from the consideration of man in a state of nature. And this state of nature is, according to him, (Leviathan, p. 62) a state of mutual war; a constant war of every man against every man. In this state of nature no moral element exists. “To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force and Fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues. Justice and Injustice are none of the faculties either of the body or the mind.” (Leviathan, p. 63). From this state of nature springs the civil body or commonwealth, the origin of rights and duties. And this combination is (Leviathan, p. 87) something more than consent and concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person. The multitude, so united in one person, is called a Commonwealth, “This is the generation,” he adds, “of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently” [that is with the reverence due to it] “of that Mortal God to which we owe (under the Immortal God) our peace and defence.” As there is no element of justice or morality in man while still unsocial, and no society but the union of individuals, it is plain that in this way we can have no right and wrong, except what positive law and consequent punishment make such. Right is the power of enforcing: Duty is the necessity of obeying.
Since the common power thus determines all questions, and acknowledges no counterpoise in man’s moral faculties,
Such then are the consequences which result from taking man, divested of any moral principles, as the element of the world, and building up the frame of Civil Society by the mere juxtaposition of individuals. In this way is formed that Great Leviathan, which, in this system, establishes and rules over all human institutions, and even determines what shall be held as divine. In reading this account we are almost led to imagine to ourselves a monstrous idol, composed of human beings, yet invested with the attributes of superhuman power, and worshipped as the Creator of Justice and Law, Peace and Order, Truth and Religion. But perhaps you think such an image too strange, too monstrous, too terrible to be steadily dwelt upon. Not so. It is the image offered to us by the author of the Leviathan himself:—offered too, not in the vague lineaments and airy colours which words bestow, in which so many an uncouth and extravagant figure
There were many other replies made to Hobbes from the first. Tenison, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, published a book called The Creed of Mr. Hobbes examined, in 1670, and Bishop Bramhall, a little later, wrote The Catching of the Leviathan. (
And yet in truth these tenets, so startling, so alarming, so offensive, were very far from being new. These bold paradoxes had long previously been brought before the eyes of the speculative world. The whole of this controversy had agitated the schools of philosophy many ages earlier. The Greeks, who left few paths of speculation untrodden, and who, in almost every subject, seized the great antithesis between which opinion still oscillates, had taken hold of that opposition of systems which was here concerned, in the most vigorous manner: and the Romans, who pursued as rhetoricians what the Greeks had begun as philosophers, found in this dispute a congenial field for their eloquence and skill. The dialogues of Plato and of Cicero are full of discussions which are, in substance, the same as those which took place between the adversaries and the disciples of Hobbes;—between those who assert that moral right and wrong are peculiar and independent qualities of actions, and those who say that these terms mean only that the actions lead to other
Gassendi was one of the most ardent admirers of the philosopher of Malmesbury, as was Mersenne, who was termed by the Parisians “the resident minister of Descartes.” And the opinions were so far consistent with the tendency of the times, and favoured by external circumstances, that they found many admirers. Many perhaps accepted some of the opinions without seeing the tendency of the system. According to what Clarendon says;—“Of those who have read his book, there are many who, being delighted with some new notions and the pleasant and clear style throughout the book, have not taken notice of those downright conclusions which undermine all those principles of government, which have preserved the peace of this kingdom through so many ages, or restored it to peace when it had at some time been interrupted; and much less of those odious insinuations, and perverting some texts of scripture, which do dishonour and
Undoubtedly such causes had their effect in procuring currency and influence to Hobbes’s opinions. He possessed in a great degree that quality of mind and will which has often characterized the founders of philosophical sects; and a comparison between him and more recent writers who have become the heads of more similar schools might be amusing and instructive. It will be found, at least in Hobbes’s case, that the most extravagant arrogance, joined with great and indeed professed ignorance, does not destroy, if indeed it do not favour, the power of the master over his disciples. What is still more remarkable is, that this power, although it generally implies great acuteness on particular points, and the invention or adoption of some clear short trains of reasoning in special cases, by no means depends upon the faculty of following with certainty and clearness
This matter was the subject of long and angry controversy. Hobbes wrote Quadratura Circuli, Cubatio Sphaerae, Duplicatio Cubi: also De Principiis et Ratocinatione Geometrarum Contra Fastuosum Professorem: also Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics at Oxford (1656): and also Marks of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church Politics, and Barbarisms of John Wallis, Professor of Geometry and Doctor of Divinity. These writings
The same utter want of comprehension of the nature of science appeared in Hobbes’s judgment respecting the Royal Society of London, which he censured at its first institution for attending more to minute experiment than general principles; and said that if the name of a philosopher was to be obtained by relating a multifarious farrago of experiments, we might expect to see apothecaries, gardeners, and perfumers rank among philosophers. And yet the man who thus thought it ridiculous to seek for truth by accumulating experiments, was one who in his youth had lived in habits of intimate intercourse with Lord Chancellor Bacon, and was said to have assisted him in translating his works into Latin. Nor did this contempt of facts withhold him from himself proposing many explanations of physical phenomena; nor did his profound ignorance of the very nature of science prevent his drawing up a general scheme of the branches of science and philosophy. (See The Leviathan, chap. i.)
The fact is, that those system-makers (
Some of Hobbes’s contemporaries did not overlook this unphilosophical character of his mind. Harrington in his Oceana, notices it. “Of this kind,” he says, (p. 2) “is the ratiocination of Leviathan throughout his whole Politics, or worse; as when he saith of Aristotle and of Cicero, of the Greeks and Romans who lived under popular states, that they derived those rights, not from the Principles of Nature, but transcribed them into their books out of the practice of their own commonwealths, as grammarians describe the rules of language out of poets. Which is as if a man should tell the famous Harvey, that he transcribed his circulation of the blood, not out of the Principles of Nature, but out of the anatomy of this or that body.”
Hobbes, in the latter part of his life, received from foreigners and others that kind of attention which is naturally bestowed upon the patriarch of a new and striking system of opinions, good or bad. He had been sent in his youth (1603) to Magdalen Hall, Oxford; and in 1608, was by the recommendation of the Principal of that house, taken into the family of William Cavendish, soon after created Earl of Devonshire, as tutor to his son. In 1631 he became tutor to an Earl of Devonshire of the next generation. On the breaking out of the troubles in England, he returned to Paris, where he lived in intercourse with the most considerable men of letters; but after the publication of the Leviathan, he returned to England, and lived principally at the Earl of Devonshire’s seat, Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, Here he was allowed to live as he liked, his habits being somewhat peculiar; and was treated with the tolerance and indulgence which his relation to the family rendered suitable. But the earl, we are told, “would often express an abhorrence of some of his principles in policy and religion; and
Among the causes which contributed much to the currency of Hobbes’s doctrines, we may, I think, reckon as one, that he was the first writer who habitually and prominently employed, in the explanation of man’s mortal condition, a principle with which we are now very familiar, and which has in it something, at least for a time, very persuasive. I mean, the principle which we now call the Association of Ideas. Hobbes, undoubtedly, very clearly pointed out the process which is thus designated, before Locke, to whom its discovery is usually ascribed. “The cause,”—he says (p. 17) in his Human Nature—“The cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense; as for example, from St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together; from St. Peter to a stone for the same cause; from stone to foundation, because we see them together”; and so on. And thus, he observes, the mind may run almost from anything to anything. But the material step in the introduction of this principle, was, not the stating the facts only, which others also had done, but the using it as an explanation of mental habits and operations. A large part of Hobbes’s philosophy consists in such explanations. Thus he says, “Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s calamity.” The same is the case in his celebrated explanation of laughter: “The passion of laughter proceedeth from the sudden imagination of our own odds, and eminency; for what is else the recommending of ourselves to our own good opinion by comparison with another man’s inferiority or absurdity?”
I do not intend now to discuss the truth of doctrines, so much as to point out their succession and revolutions. Otherwise, I might observe that the Doctrine of the Association of Ideas, applied as an explanation of the moral constitution of man, must be very imperfect, and indeed can never be more than a small fragment of explanation. For if it be asserted that any notion or conception becomes what it is by the association of ideas, if for instance, this is the way in which right comes to be right, and honesty to be honesty, we still want to know with what the outward act or occasion is associated in order to have this impress stamped upon it; and also, to discover whence this new agent derives its power of making things appear right and honest. We are referred back from moral good to something else; but it may easily happen that this object thus referred to may require analysis as much as the good which we first contemplated. In many cases the explanation of results by the association of ideas is only at best treading back a few steps on a winding path, and this can do but little towards telling us where we are. To give us such an explanation, is to show us the final links of the chain, when we want to know the strength of the hook from which its beginning hangs; it is to trace the history of a philosophical doctrine, when we want to know about its truth.
But yet it is far easier to most minds to follow the explanations which trace such associations through a few steps, than to seize hold of the fundamental moral ideas on which moral truths depend. Hence, such a philosophy as that of Hobbes’s appeals to the common intellect with great advantage; and they who reason against it, before a popular audience, have a difficult task to perform. They have to appeal to ideas which are dimly and waveringly entertained
The opponents of Hobbes found this difficulty in their task. The course and state of the times increased the difficulty; for the audience to which moralists and metaphysicians had now to appeal was of a far more popular cast than it had been in earlier times. Literature now addressed itself to a very extensive and miscellaneous public; not, as of yore, to a few persons, all of whom were, more or less studious, learned and thoughtful. All persons claimed a right to judge on such matters, though few had had their intellects disciplined so as to understand the principles; or were acquainted with any study which made them feel the force of philosophical reason. The young age, as was natural, wished to show itself independent of the past, by rejecting its doctrines. To contradict the ancient teachers was an easy mode of throwing off the humiliation of being their scholars. But besides this advantage on the part of the assailants, the assertors of independent morality had not developed their own genuine principle, and formed their own coherent system to such an extent as to be
And besides these disadvantages, they were pressed and borne down by another, perhaps more overwhelming still; I mean the influence of new systems, both of physics and of metaphysics, with which the new philosophy of morals allied itself. For in these new systems, much was so clearly convincing, that it was impossible to resist the evidence of its truth. And it was a matter of great difficulty, requiring profound thought and great acuteness, and even with these advantages, requiring time and experience also, to discern how far and in what form these new truths were to be accepted, and built into the edifice of human knowledge, so that the eternal foundations of right and wrong should not be moved or undermined. And thus, the defence of a genuine and independent morality was conducted in a manner disunited, vacillating, sometimes illogical, sometimes doggedly opposed to the most boasted discoveries of modem times. To reconstruct moral philosophy after the ancient systems of philosophy had been shaken to their foundations by the powerful hands of Descartes and Hobbes, Bacon and Newton, was no easy task. Strenuous and persevering efforts, skill and genius, were needed to remove the rubbish of. the ruin; to work down again to the foundation-stones; to show that these were still in their places, and to build up upon them a fair and solid edifice. In the meantime, men were content, or compelled, to dwell in huts made of wrecks and fragments, building for the day, providing for the hour, daring not to dig downwards, nor to raise any
Lecture III. Henry More, Whichcote, Worthington, Wilkins
I have said that after the sensual system of morals of which Hobbes was the promulgator in England had been brought before the public, it was opposed in two different ways.
Hobbes had declared the sole intelligible end of man’s actions to be his own gratification, and had made virtue into a mere means, subordinate to this end. In opposition to this doctrine, one class of writers allowed that the proper end of man’s actions was the pursuit of happiness or well-being, but asserted that virtue was in a peculiar and eminent manner the condition of this well-being: the other class held that virtue by its own nature was the right rule and end of human action; and I have stated, that the difficulty of successfully maintaining either of these systems was increased by the changes which about this time took place in other parts of philosophy. I shall now offer some further remarks on this period of the history of Ethics.
Without attempting to enumerate all the writers who belong even to the English branch of this controversy, or to give a full account of those whom I mention, I may observe that to the former class belong Sharrock, Henry More, and Cumberland, to the latter, Cudworth and Clarke.
The greater number of writers on these subjects at the time of which I speak, belonged to the University of Cambridge, but Sharrock was a Fellow of New College, Oxford. His work was printed in 1660, and was entitled Ύπόθεσις ἠθικ, De Officiis secundum Naturae Jus, seu De Moribus ad Rationis Normam conformandis Doctrina; unde Casus omnes
Dr. Henry More, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is less known as an ethical writer than as a divine, of a profoundly contemplative and pious character, of great learning, but with a strong turn to an enthusiastic and mystical cast of thought. He was greatly esteemed by his contemporaries, and his writings, in their day, were extensively read and much admired. Hobbes declared that whenever he discovered his own philosophy to be untenable, he would embrace the opinions of Dr More; and Addison terms his Enchiridion Ethicum an admirable system of Ethics. This is the work of his with which I have here mainly to do. It was written, it appears by the preface, in 1667, the author setting about
It becomes obvious, in such expressions, how easy the transition is, from the consideration of virtue as the source of happiness, to virtue as perceived by a peculiar faculty; since, in this view, the happiness, as well as the perception, requires a peculiar faculty for its realization. “If any one,” More says, “estimates the fruit of virtue by that imaginary
Reader, sith it is the fashion
To bestow some salutation,
I greet thee; give thee leave to look
And nearly view my opened Book;
But see thou that thine eyes be clear
If aught thou would’st discover there.
Expect from me no Teian strain,
No light wanton Lesbian vein.
Silent Recess, waste Solitude,
Thoughts deep-searching oft renew’d;
Still conflict ’gainst importunate vice
That daily doth the soul entice
From her high throne of circling light
To plunge her in eternal night;
Collection of the mind from stroke
Of this world’s magic, that doth cloke
Her with foul smothering mists and stench,
And in Lethean waves her drench;
A dally Death, dread Agony,
Privation, dry sterility;
Who is well entered in these ways
Fit’st is to read my lofty lays.
But whom but fear and wrath control
Scarce know their body from their soul.
If any such chance hear my verse.
Dark numerous nothings I rehearse
To them; make out an idle sound
In which no inward sense is found.
The production to which this address is prefixed is a collection of allegorical poems, in the stanza, and very much
These poems are entitled, Platonic Sangs of the Soul, treating of the Life of the Soul, her Immortality, the Sleep of the Soul (against which he argues), the Unity of Souk, and Memory after Death. Perhaps I may be allowed to quote a single stanza as a specimen:
But yet, my Muse, still take a higher flight.
Sing of Platonic faith in the First Good,
That Faith that doth our souls to God unite.
So strongly, tightly, that the rapid flood
Of this swift flux of things, nor with foul mud
Can stain, nor strike us off from unity,
Wherein we steadfast stand, unshak’d, unmov’d.
Engrafted by a deep vitality.
The prop and stay of things is God’s benignity.
There can be little doubt that More’s Enchiridion was written with a view of counteracting the poison of the Hobbian doctrines: yet the name of Hobbes is, I think, nowhere mentioned in the book. On the other hand, Descartes is constantly referred to, almost always with commendation, though often with dissent and warning. And to the Enchiridion is appended a letter to a V. C. “containing an apology for Descartes, and fit to serve as an Introduction to the Cartesian Philosophy.” When we consider the want of reverence to the ancient philosophers which pervaded Descartes’s style of philosophizing, and the materialist aspect of his physical doctrines, this admiration of him on the part of More may seem somewhat strange and inconsistent. Yet we find this tendency in other works of the same school, as in the Intellectual System of Cudworth. And it may, I think, be in a great measure explained. Besides that the Cartesian Philosophy embodied and systematized many of the new
But without here pursuing this thought, I may further observe, that the connexion and coherency of Descartes’s system, the professed severity of deduction with which a few simple assumptions were traced into a mass of details apparently commensurate with the phenomena of the universe, the pleasure of demonstration, and the triumph of reason, to which the new doctrine ministered, might very naturally seduce men of speculative, acute, and inquiring minds. The force of system on Hobbes’s side was most easily balanced by the force of a different system, by which, though not directly opposed, it might be counterpoised.
A part of Descartes’s philosophy which found great favour with the moralists of the time, and with Henry More among the rest, is the classification and analysis of the Passions. But without here dwelling upon this, it is of more
It is easy to see how widely this analysis of the Passions is opposed to that of Hobbes, who resolves all our impulses into selfish fear and selfish desire; and rejects rules of action which give them any other interpretation.
Burnet, in his History of His Own Times, speaks of More as one of a knot of men, principally of Cambridge, who did honour to the Church, and who, agreeing with each other in a great measure in their moral and religious views, were
I may add here the remainder of what Burnet says of this body of men, for they peculiarly belong to our Cambridge history. The better of the clergy who appeared in Charles the Second’s time, “were generally,” he says, “of Cambridge, formed under some divines, the chief of whom were Drs. Whitchcote, Cudworth, Wilkins, More, and Worthington. Whitchcote was a man of rare temper, very mild and obliging. He had great credit with some that had been eminent in the late times, but made all the use he could of it to protect good men of all persuasions. He was much for liberty of conscience; and being disgusted with the dry systematical way of those times, he studied to raise those who conversed with him to a nobler set of thoughts, and
I here pass over what Burnet says of Wilkins and Worthington, though interesting in itself, as not so closely bearing upon my subject. I may add, that Whichcote was of Emmanuel College, and in 1633 became fellow and tutor; and several of his pupils became eminent in the church. In 1643 he was appointed to the provostship of King’s College, in the room of Dr Collins, who was ejected by the Parliamentary Commissioners. He held the rectory of Milton near this place, and also gave an afternoon lecture at Trinity Church in this town. He was removed from the provostship at the Restoration, but without harshness or disgrace; and died in 1683, at the Lodge of Christ’s College, where he was visiting his friend Cudworth. His leading tendency is to dwell upon the divine impress of good in man’s mind susceptible of indefinite improvement. His opinions are said to have sometimes clothed themselves, even in conversation, in phrases more learned and abstract than belong to the common language of other men. It is related of him that one day seeing two boys fighting in the street, he went up and parted them, exclaiming, “What! moral entities, and yet pugnacious!”
Of Cudworth I shall say more hereafter; but I may here observe, that he, like Whichcote, was appointed to the mastership of a college in Cambridge (Clare Hall) by the
I may say a few words of Worthington and Wilking, the remaining two of the Cambridge divines mentioned by Burnet in the above passage. The former was, I believe, a relation of Whichcote, his mother being niece to Sir Jeremy Whichcote, Bart. He was educated at Emmanuel College, of which he became a fellow about 1640 (B.D. 1646, D.D. 1655). He was afterwards chosen Master of Jesus College, when it was vacant by the ejectment of Dr. Richard Sterne, afterwards Archbishop of York: but it is said that he was with some difficulty prevailed upon to submit to the choice and request of the fellows, his inclination being to a more private and retired life; and soon after the Restoration he resigned that mastership to Dr. Sterne. In all this, we see much of the same kind of unworldly contemplative character which we have noticed in Henry More. Tillotson, who preached his funeral sermon, says of him, that to set off his other virtues, there was added the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which we can readily believe. His writings are, for the most part, of a theological rather than an ethical nature; and the largest and most characteristic of them is a Discourse on Christian Resignation, in which virtue he declares all duty and all happiness to be included. But I may notice expressions respecting conscience which occur in Worthington, of the same kind as those which I have already quoted from other writers of this period. “Conscience,” he says, (p. 582), “is God’s deputy and vicegerent; the voice of conscience is God’s voice.” “There is no such satisfaction: nor are there any such joyous reflections as these (of men of a good conscience): it is their μήτε ἐορτὴν ἄλλο τἰ ἡγοῦνται ἢ, τα δεόντα πράττειν, their only feast to do their duty, as was said of the Athenians; and accordingly a good conscience
The name of Wilkins is probably better known to general readers than some of those which I have mentioned; for he published several books which excited much notice at the time, and are not yet forgotten. Some of these had reference to the new discoveries in physical science, which, as I have said, led to an expectation of a revolution in philosophy of all kinds. In 1638, when he was only twenty-four years old, he published a book entitled, The Discovery of a New World: or a Discourse tending to prove that it is possible there may be another habitable world in the Moon; with a Discourse concerning the possibility of a passage hither. Two years afterwards appeared his Discourse concerning a new Planet tending to prove that it is probable our Earth is one of the
Perhaps it may not be without some interest, even in connexion with our subject, to refer to another remarkable and celebrated work of Wilkins, his Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, for such an attempt must have a bearing, it would seem, on every part of philosophy. Such an attempt, he observes in the Preface, contributes much to clearing of differences in Religion, “by unmasking many wild errors that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases, which being philosophically unfolded, and rendered according to the genuine and natural importance of the words, will appear to be inconsistencies and contradictions.
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I have the more willingly dwelt a little upon the Cambridge Moralists of this period, because I conceive that there has always been in this place an important school of moralists; and it is interesting not only to us, but to all who
I now turn back to speak of the effect produced on the public by these opponents of Hobbes. Morels religion writings were extremely admired in their day. The Mystery of Godliness, and the Mystery of Iniquity, were extraordinarily popular; as also his Divine Dialogues concerning the Attributes and Providence of God. These works found a peculiar public who delighted in his pure and tranquil tone of thought, and his trains of religious contemplation, by which they found themselves elevated and soothed. But this mystical and enthusiastic spirit was altogether out of sympathy with the general temper of the most active-minded men of the times, and with the tendency of their speculations. The enquirers of the age demanded something far more definite and material than the Platonic First Good; and looked for something exhibiting more of the air of novelty. Hence we shall not be surprised that More’s doctrines made few converts among the newer school: and that his writings did not produce any very general effect in resisting the spread of the Hobbian tenets; which, more or less modified, made their way very extensively. The doctrine of a complete distinction of virtuous and sensual enjoyments, when considered only as enjoyments, was not easy to impress upon the popular mind. And gradually, as the difficulty of maintaining the war at this point was more and more felt, the higher school of moralists sought for aid in another element of the subject;—namely the will and government of the Divine Lawgiver.
Undoubtedly this aspect of moral duty had never been lost sight of by Christian Moralists; but still there was, philosophically speaking, a difference in the modes in which the Divine sanctions of Morality were introduced by different writers; which difference it is, for our purpose, necessary
Lecture IV. Cumberland, Cudworth
I have already said that there were, among those of the English moralists, who rejected the doctrines of Hobbes, two schools: those who held that goodness was an absolute and inherent quality of actions, of whom was Cudworth; and those who did not venture to say so much, but derived morality from the nature of man and the will of God jointly; and so doing, introduced more special and complex views.
Richard Cumberland, Fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge (about 1655), afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, was the opponent of Hobbes who took the principal step towards the latter result which I have mentioned. His Disquisitio De Legibus Naturae published in 1672, is the first extensive attempt to construct a system of morals, which, being founded on the consideration of the consequences of actions, should still satisfy those moral feelings and judgments of man in his usual social condition, which had been revolted by many of Hobbes’s doctrines and modes of reasoning. That the work was intended to contain a refutation of the Hobbian doctrines, is stated on the title-page; and is evident, not only in the controversial parts of the work, which constitute a large portion of it, but also in the selection of the main principles of the doctrine. Hobbes had maintained that the state of the nature of man is a universal war of each against all; and that there is no such thing as natural right and justice; these notions being only creations of civil society, and deriving their sanction entirely from the civil ruler. Cumberland’s fundamental proposition is, that the law of nature with regard to man’s actions is a universal benevolence
But Cumberland further, as I have said, calls to his aid another great principle, which also was used still more prominently by his successors. The proof which he gives, that
We appear now to have advanced very far towards the systems of morals prevalent in our own time; yet a slight attention to the differences which still remain will show us that there are several wide steps to make before we pass from the moral system of Cumberland to that of recent authors. In the first place, it is very remarkable that though he thus introduces and repeatedly insists on this aspect of the Laws of Nature as the commands of a Divine Legislator, he nowhere distinctly fortifies his system by a reference to a future retribution; still less does he aid himself by an appeal to the revealed will and promises of God. This may appear very strange to those who are acquainted only with the more recent aspect of this subject; and I will therefore quote the passages which specially refer to this part of the argument. After explaining (
“Further, if God teaches men to judge, that it is necessary both to the common good and the private good of particular persons, that all violations of the peace should be restrained by punishments, when men come to know of what evil consequence they are;—we may clearly gather by parity of reason, not only that He himself so judges, and wills that men should do so too; but also that He makes the same judgment on actions equally hurtful, which men either do not know or cannot punish.…This reasoning is obvious to all; whence they cannot but think with themselves that God has appointed punishments to their secret crimes; and that He will avenge their insults upon the weak; for there is no reason to doubt but that He will pursue this end, the common good, in which both His own honour and the happiness of rational beings is contained. For a greater end there cannot be: and a less end cannot be taken for the greatest by Him who judges truly.”
Here we might expect, from the order of the thought, to find a reference to a future state, in which those sins are punished which escape with impunity in this life. But we do not find this. On the contrary, the author merely says, “Thus the pangs and obligations of conscience take their origin from the government of God.” And having thus, as he would seem to imagine, provided sufficiently for the punishment of secret crimes, he proceeds to another section, beginning thus: “But let us return to the punishments inflicted by men.” He does, indeed, a little afterwards, say (
Perhaps it is not difficult to see why this most weighty and solemn consideration of a future state, is introduced in so subordinate a manner, and so soon dismissed again, by a writer of unquestioned and earnest piety. Hobbes had made his attack upon the established theory of morals, as it was commonly entertained among men; and it was the object of the moral writers of his time to repulse this robust and audacious assailant. According to the opinions current up to the period of this controversy, Virtue might claim respect and obedience on all grounds. She was an eternal and independent power, not a creation of command supported by external force. She had a natural and indisputable authority, not needing the assistance of threat and promise. She was her own reward, even if she had no other. She had the promise of this life, as well as of that which is to come. She was beautiful in herself, as well as rich in her dowry. These were the pretensions which Hobbes so rudely assailed. These opinions therefore the opponents of Hobbes could not at once abandon. If they had immediately called in a future life, as the only mode of defending the cause of virtue, they would have seemed to give up the very point which was assaulted. Could they instantly relinquish to the sensualist the empire of this world? Could they grant to him, that, so far as the present life is concerned, his doctrines are a wise rule of action? Could they forthwith abandon all mention of the dignity, the beauty, the authority, the peace and joy, which belong to Virtue? To do this at once, would have been too shocking. If they had thought of it, the very
Yet, on the other hand, it is tolerably evident that, in truth, some of the most important doctrines of the Christian religion had a large share in making moralists become more willing than they had hitherto been, to give up the independent authority of Virtue. The views of man’s nature, and of his relation to his heavenly Master, which prevailed among our divines, cooperating with the inherent defects of the ancient system of morals,—defects never supplied, nor capable of being supplied,—made men not unwilling to try what could be done to satisfy the cravings of his speculative nature by combining moral with religious views. The deficiencies of the moral system which spoke of the inherent beauty and independent authority of virtue were indeed evident
I shall not here discuss these views at length. I will only observe, in order to obviate any mistakes which the statement of these opinions without any corrective might occasion, that if we make Holiness, Justice, and Purity, the mere result of God’s commands, we can no longer find any
It is with reluctance that I have introduced these subjects, even in the most transient manner: but it seemed to me that if I were not to do so, the state of the question, which I am now treating historically, could not be understood: and I trust to the indulgence of all my hearers, to interpret in the most favourable manner, these scanty hints thus occasionally thrown out, on subjects of the deepest importance.
But to return to the author of the Treatise De Legibus Naturae, of whose place in this discussion I was speaking. I observe that the considerations to which I have referred, and which withheld the moralists of his time even when they made consequences their only guide, from at once reducing Virtue to the mere pursuit of enjoyment, have very strongly affected his work; and have left it full of expressions and tenets which his successors in this path gradually abandoned. For instance, he attaches great importance to what he calls Right Reason, and thus often approximates to the school of Independent Morality; as when he speaks of the obligation of the Laws of Nature as immutable (
I will only further observe, as one of the causes which contributed to the influence of this book upon the succeeding course of English Moral Philosophy, that it is constructed with a laborious imitation of mathematical forms of demonstration; which, from the reputation of the writings of Descartes, and the progress of mathematical physics, were now beginning to be looked upon as the genuine forms d true knowledge. In the same spirit, there is a frequent reference to mathematical examples to illustrate the nature of necessary truths and demonstrative reasonings: and the recent physiological discoveries are called in to confirm the other indications which tend to shew that universal benevolence is the law of nature. Thus he quotes from Willis, the physician, an account of the Plexus Nervosus of the intercostal nerve, and even inserts a copper-plate, in order still further to explain this structure; because, as he says, this part of the nervous system is one of the things which better enable man to rule his affections. His quotation from Willis is curious: “That the thoughts relating to acts of the will or understanding (in which the powers of prudence and the virtues are conspicuous) may be duly formed, it is necessary that the torrent of blood in the breast be kept within bounds, and the inordinate motions of the heart be restrained by the nerves, as by reins, and be reduced to regularity.” Which purpose the intercostal nerve, he conceives, answers; for “by these branches it supplies the place of an extraordinary courier, communicating, to and fro, the mutual sensations of the heart and brain.”
The indications of purpose in man’s structure and constitution are most rightly taken into account, by the moralist as well as by the physiologist; but I do not conceive that this part of Cumberland’s reasoning was very happily developed by him. Indeed the whole work, notwithstanding its mathematical form, is wanting in method, and is constantly
These occurrences I must afterwards notice, but I must first attend to the other division of the opponents of Hobbes. I have spoken of those who treated virtue as a means to some other end: I must now speak of those who considered it as an end in itself. I have described the reasonings of those who considered Virtue as commendable, because she leads to man’s happiness and well-being: but I must now give an account of those who ascribe to her an independent value. The former, as we have seen, approximated by degrees towards a view of morality such as now prevails; the tendency of the doctrines of the latter will appear as we proceed.
We have attended to those opponents of Hobbes who dealt with Virtue as a means; and especially Cumberland: we now come to the other division, those who consider it as an end. The morality of the former class was subservient to man’s happiness and well-being; we now have to do with the assertors of independent morality. Of these Cudworth is the principal. Ralph Cudworth, Fellow of Emmanuel College about 1637, Master of Clare Hall in 1644.
This view of the nature of knowledge is proved, as I have already said, upon the principles which are unfolded so skillfully and agreeably in Plato’s Dialogues; the exposition being however materially modified with reference to the state of modern philosophy. But the application of this doctrine of the eternal and immutable nature of truth in general to the particular case of moral truth, is less fully and clearly developed (
It must, I think, be allowed that the treatise of Immutable Morality produced very little effect on the Hobbian controversy: and though always mentioned as one of our standard works on Morals, even now produces little impression on most of those who view it as an ethical work. (
But besides this reason, another may be mentioned, which much impeded the influence of Cudworth’s book upon general readers. It was a book written in the fashion of the past rather than of the present; a book of erudition rather than of formal demonstration. I have already noticed that Cumberland’s work gained in efficacy by adopting the modern
But besides these two reasons of the little effect produced by Cudworth’s Immutable Morality (reasons residing in the work itself), there was a third, an external cause, which contributed to the same result. The book was, as it were, born out of due time: it did not come before the world till many years after the death of its author, when the controversy
Cudworth and Locke are perhaps the two greatest English names on the two contrary sides of the question respecting the nature of knowledge. But these two speculators made their philosophical voyage with very different fortune. They started from the opposite shores of the great ocean of speculation: Cudworth in a vessel of heavy and antique fashion, deeply laden with ancient treasures; Locke in a lighter bark, fitted to skim nearer the surface, and exhibiting in its rigging the improvements of modern times. But this was not all the difference. The breezes of popular favour, which had long veered between the opposite quarters of Ideas and Sense, at last set steadily in favour of the latter; the Lockian theory rushed on before the prosperous wind, with expanded sails and flying colours; while the system of Cudworth, ill suited for such a rivalry, endeavoured in vain to make head against the adverse influences. And thus at this period all seems to be in favour of the ultimate success of the new doctrine.
Such a point of union we may consistently hope there will be found. We know from the history of all the most clear and undoubted portions of our knowledge, that except we are rightly guided by Ideas, Truth is not to be found. From the physical sciences themselves, the great boast of the philosophy of experience, we know that experience cannot lead to solid knowledge, except so far as it is combined with a careful investigation of the ideas which knowledge must involve. We know that the attempts to reject these fundamental elements of truth involve us in endless change,
The Philosophy of Morals is closely connected with the Philosophy of Mind. New views respecting the human understanding cannot fail to produce new views of the foundations of duty: for in Psychology, we cannot define the powers and operations of the Understanding without treating of the Affections and the Will; and in Ethics, it is not enough to consider the office of the Will, we must also trace its dependence upon the Understanding.
The historical sketch, which I have endeavoured in previous lectures to give, of the progress of the controversy concerning the Foundation of Morals, so far as English writers are concerned in it, has brought us to the well-known name of John Locke; who is commonly considered the author of a great revolution in the metaphysical system prevalent in England. To his place in our argument we must therefore now turn our attention. His celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding was first published in 1689, and therefore, in point of time, is very little later than the works of which we have already spoken. But still, in the tone and spirit of his writings he belongs to a newer school; for Cudworth, and Clarendon, and Harrington, and even Cumberland, were disciples of the philosophy which prevailed in England before the civil wars; but Locke was deeply and decidedly formed by the opinions which came into vogue towards the end of that stirring period. He is commonly looked upon, indeed, as the founder and master of the New Philosophy which then succeeded the Old; but I think it will be acknowledged, by anyone who carefully looks into the literary history
Moreover, the general scope and leading principles of Locke’s system had the same tendency. All our ideas, he holds, are derived from Sensation and Reflection. The latter term, Reflection, is so vague that it allows his disciples to make of his doctrines what they please. The meaning of this term may be extended, as it has been extended by the more temperate philosophers and genuine moralists of his school, in all times, and especially in recent times, so as to save the interests of morality for practical purposes, and to avoid, I might say to evade, all glaringly offensive consequences. But on the other hand, the term ‘Reflection’ may be so limited and restricted as almost to lose its effect in the general proposition, and to leave the doctrine much the same as if it had asserted ideas to arise from sensation only. When a term so wide and vague, or so complex and multifarious, so thin and shadowy, or so ponderous and unmanageable,
Yet, in fact, Locke himself would not only have disclaimed this position, into which his followers have thus thrust him, but he really did cherish many views and speculations which were altogether at variance with the spirit and tendency of the Sensualist system of morals. These were probably the remnants of his education in the philosophical school which preceded him. In truth, this inconsistency is a general, perhaps a universal character of the founders of new systems of opinion: such persons run onwards from their predecessors, but they do not cease to hear their voices, and to share their feelings. They reach a new point of view, but they look backwards with regard, as well as forwards with hope. They mount some unfrequented summit, but they retain traces of the vale out of which they have climbed. They point the way to a new region, but they themselves retain the habiliments
Some such indications we find in the moral doctrines of Locke. For example, notwithstanding the account which, as you have heard, he gives of the nature of Morals, he repeatedly and anxiously discusses the question, whether Morality be capable of demonstration. And he decides that it is so, or may become so, on the ground of that very system of ideas which he had laboured so strenuously to destroy. This is the way he reasons. “The idea of a Supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and on whom we depend; and the idea of ourselves, as understanding, natural beings: being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action, as might place morality among the sciences capable of demonstration; wherein I doubt not but from self-evident propositions, by necessary consequences as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out to any one that will apply himself with the same indifferency and attention to the one as he does] to the other of these sciences” (
But how this is to be made consistent with the doctrine that moral good and evil are only pleasure and pain; or how the amount of pleasure or pain which any action produces is to be brought into such a demonstration, are far harder questions: questions which, I think, none of Locke’s follower, have yet solved.
Accordingly, the greater part of Locke’s disciples have
In saying this, it will be understood that I speak of the general tendency of the Lockian philosophy: for in its actual result, its evil consequences were averted by means of cautionary principles introduced by the most moderate and judicious writers of the school, and countenanced, as we have already seen, by Locke himself. But all these stipulations and correctives did not prevent the promulgation of Locke’s philosophy from being felt as a vast accession of strength by the lower, and a great addition to the difficulty of their task by the higher, school of morality. Since that time, the morality of consequences has been almost universally accepted; and the assertors of essential and independent distinctions of good and evil have found but a scanty audience and a cold reception.
Still, however, the other side of the question has never been without its representatives; and I must now notice those who belong to the time of which I speak. The principal
Clarke, then, is an assertor of the independent and necessary character of moral distinctions. But in making this assertion, he declares such distinctions to be perceived by the Reason; and this he does, just at the time when, in virtue of the teaching of Descartes, Locke, and others, the
Clarke was one of the most zealous promoters of the new physical philosophy. Soon after taking his degree in this University, he was actively engaged in introducing into the academic course of study, first, the philosophy of Descartes in its best form, and next, the philosophy of Newton immediately after its first publication. He was naturally led therefore, both by his familiarity with recent metaphysical distinctions, and by his love of demonstration, to ascribe a great weight to intellectual relations, and to overlook as parts of the subject those in which the intellect had not a direct or sole jurisdiction. If this had not been the case, he hardly have failed to see how insufficient an account of moral distinctions it was, to say that the denial of them implies an absurdity and a contradiction. When Cudworth and the ancient philosophers talked of wickedness being contrary to Right Reason, the Reason was looked upon as the governing faculty of all provinces of man’s nature. It was the fountain and treasure-house of all fundamental general principles, by which we judge of truth of all kinds; and it was also the authority which applied these principles to their practical uses. So viewed, therefore, the Reason was qualified to pronounce moral judgments; to extricate out of her own nature the speculative truths which are involved in her recognized functions. But now the case was altered. The office of Reason had been greatly narrowed and bounded; and this had been done, I will suppose, for the sake of argument, with great advantage to the clearness and distinctness of metaphysical doctrines; still this change made it less safe than before to say, that eternal distinctions of moral good
Thus the doctrine of Clarke, like the opinion of Locke which I before mentioned, that Morality is capable of demonstration, may be considered as remnants retained by them of a philosophy then past;—propositions already antiquated when they were published;—traditionary assertions repeated, because they who asserted them did not perceive how great a revolution the import of their terms had undergone. If morality is still to be capable of demonstration,—if her distinctions are really steadfast and unchangeable,—we must seek some new source of just principles for our reasoning, some new basis of fixity and permanency. The discursive Reason, generalizing and combining the measures of good and ill which she obtains from the senses, can never soar back again into the higher region of absolute good; though she may retain some dim remembrance of it, which may still influence her wanderings in this lower world.
Lecture VI. Mandeville, Warburton
I have endeavoured to explain in my previous lecture that the tendency towards the lower view of morality, which rests its rules upon consequences merely, had acquired an extensive and powerful prevalence in the beginning of the last century. This view had been connected by Locke and his followers with their metaphysical doctrines; and these again, besides their other recommendations, had been connected, how rightly or necessarily it may hereafter be our business to consider, but in men’s minds they had been connected, with the general progress of science and knowledge, and of new opinions, which that period witnessed. And so striking and wonderful was that progress, that we cannot at all marvel if men were carried too rapidly onwards by the current, and were led to think that the new metaphysical doctrines which had thus formed an alliance with an admirable body of new truths, must be far sounder and better than the old modes of speculation, which had been pursued for so many ages with so little visible positive result he two sides of the great alternative of the Theory of Morals, the Morality of Principles, and the Morality of Consequences, had been combined respectively with the old and the new metaphysical systems. Or rather, while the Morality of Principles, as a system, remained still involved in great perplexity and obscurity, the Morality of Consequences was perpetually worked out into clearer and clearer forms, and expressed in a more pointed and precise manner. Hence, both Clarke, who asserted the doctrines of the higher moral school in terms no longer well fitted to express them, and
The general diffusion of the estimate of moral good and ill by the pleasure and pain to which it leads, produced a profligate and sensual tone of moral discussion; and this extended with a rapidity not unaptly represented by the above image. As a prominent example of this spirit, we may take the well-known Fable of the Bees. This was a short apologue in verse, published in 1705, by a physician of the name of Mandeville, the professed object of which was to shew that
The book was presented as a nuisance, on account of its profligacy, by the grand jury of the county of Middlesex in 1723. And although this circumstance may be alleged, I hope justly, as proving that the poison of the principles promulgated by this author had not yet entirely pervaded English society, we may observe, on the other hand, that the Presentment states that many books and pamphlets are published almost every week against religion and morals; and it assigns this general viciousness of literature as the reason for singling out this book, and another which is mentioned, for condemnation.
Similar complaints, most emphatically expressed, are made by almost all the Divines and Moralists of the time. Attacks on religion and on morals (for these were, as may be supposed, very generally combined), were so common and
In such a state of things it manifestly became the duty of the lovers and guardians of morality to collect their forces and put themselves in a condition suited for defence. They had been fighting loosely and carelessly, and disunited; so confident of their inherent strength, so relying upon general respect, that they had hardly believed the combat was in earnest. They had looked upon it rather as a mere academic disputation than as a trial in which their preservation or ruin was involved: rather as an encounter of wits for superiority, than as a struggle of moral principles for life. That the battles of speculators concerning Morals, Politics, and Religion were an affair of real practical import, heavy with the most solemn consequences, the history of the remainder of this eighteenth century showed too clearly; but it was only about the time of which I speak, that this conviction began to force itself upon the minds of the friends of the principles then established. It was however now plain, that the Emergency was a weighty one, and that it behoved the teachers of morals and religion to provide for the safety of the host which looked up to them for guidance.
A bold and vigorous champion stepped forth, and proceeded to order the mode of defence which the defenders of morality were to adopt. Learned in ancient and accomplished in modern literature, acute in the conduct of arguments, ingenious in the invention of theories, self-confident almost to haughtiness, sarcastic, lively, he was beyond doubt the ablest controversialist of his day. I speak of Warburton; who did, in fact, give to the theory of morals the form in which it has been received among us almost up to the present time. He, I say, at the time now under consideration,set himself to arrange the principles of morality in such a form that
Lecture VII. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Balguy, South
In my last Lecture, I stated that when the general prevalence of licentious speculative opinions respecting morality had become very alarming, of which state of things the publication of the Fable of the Bees and similar works was an indication, Warburton tried to put the cause of sound morals in a better condition for defence, by combining all the principles which had been employed by his predecessors against the doctrines of the sensual school. The principles which he thus associated were, I stated, these: Right Reason, the Moral Sense, and the Divine Command. Of the first of these doctrines and its features, I have already given an account in several Lectures. I must now trace the rise and progress of the other two forms of opinion; and first the Moral Sense.
In a former Lecture, I endeavoured to explain how the controversy between the school of independent morality, and the school of the morality of consequences, was affected by the new metaphysical opinions to which Locke’s essay gave currency and authority. It appeared that those who had, till then, maintained that moral rectitude consists in eternal and immutable relations recognizable by the reason of man, had their arguments weakened and perplexed by the analysis of the human mind which was now generally admitted, and by the limits within which the province of the reason was now circumscribed. Such doctrines as those of Cudworth and Clarke, though still asserted by some, began now to be considered as remnants of a past philosophy;—propositions antiquated before they were published;—traditionary assertions,
Yet in this, as in other cases, when a great controversy is thrown into confusion by a change in the speculative opinions which its terms imply, after a season of vacillation and misunderstanding, the antagonist parties again form themselves, and stand, as before, with opposite fronts, though, it may be, with new watch words on each side. From the time of Locke, the morality of consequences appeared to prevail over the morality of a priori principles; but still the spirit of independent morality was alive, and soon found a garb in which it could claim the respect of men.
Though moralists no longer found the common voice of mankind respond to them, when they declared that virtue and vice were founded upon eternal and immutable distinctions,apprehended by the reason, there were still many who could not be content with such a representation of man’s nature, as that which assigns to him no higher motives than the love of pleasure and the aversion to pain. And these persons sought in various quarters, and under various forms, the principles of genuine morality, and the faculties by which we apprehend those principles. One such principle, thus ascribed to human nature, was a general benevolence and sociality,—a love of his kind,—which man possesses, it was held, in addition to his regard for his individual pleasure and interest. This doctrine was at this time very commonly maintained by moralists and jurists throughout Europe, having been made by Grotius and Puffendorf the basis of their systems. Cumberland
Of the moralists of this school, in the period immediately
“’Twas Mr Locke,” he adds, “that struck the home blow, for Mr Hobbes’s character and base slavish principles of government, took off the poison of his philosophy. ’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural and without foundation in our minds.”
In opposition to these dangerous and degrading opinions, Shaftesbury maintained the independent and original nature of moral distinction. He calls himself a Moral Realist, as opposed to others who he says (Characteristics, ii., 257) are mere Nominal Moralists, making virtue nothing in itself, a creature of Will only, or a mere name of Fashion. His view of the ground of morality is nearly the same as that which we have already seen in Cumberland. Virtue requires an attention in each individual to the good of the whole; and the loss of this
It is not difficult to see here and in similar explanations of the school of moral realists, that although calamity, misery, unhappiness, and the like terms, are used to describe those attributes of vice which make it a thing to be shunned and hated, the real fundamental notion of this evil is the violation of man’s nature, as a system in which the parts have certain essential relations to each other, and to the whole. Accordingly the author adds, immediately after the passage I have quoted, “The parts and proportions of the mind, their mutual relation and dependency, the connection and frame of those passions which constitute the soul or temper, may easily be understood by any one who thinks it worth his while to study this inward anatomy. ’Tis certain that the order or symmetry of this inward part is in itself no less real and exact
Shaftesbury possesses great merits as a writer, and was much admired by a great number of his contemporaries. And beyond doubt his influence contributed to preserve his countrymen in some measure from that very low scheme of morals which results from resolving virtue into a mere pursuit of pleasure. But while he did this, he found, or fancied, that there was a school of divines, as well as a school of philosophers, whose tenets were at variance with his; and the harshness, and I may say petulance, with which he condemns and ridicules these adverse theological doctrines, together with his want of reverence for revealed religion, produced an enmity between him and Christian writers, to whom, on some points, he might otherwise have been a valuable ally. The main point of offence with him is the practice, which he lays to the charge of divines, of making virtue a mere matter of self-love, by resting her obligation entirely on the hopes and fears of a future life (ii. 59). If any divines had done this in such a way as to lose sight of the goodness and justice of the great Judge, and of the love of goodness which he demands even more than outward acts, they would be justly liable to the accusation of perverting religion, no less than morality. I am not aware of the existence, at this time, of books of any degree of general currency which put forth such mistaken views; and I think we may rather ascribe this noble writer’s ebullitions of ill humour on such subjects to a dislike towards the clergy and their peculiar views; which we may trace very generally in the men of the world of the period now under consideration.
Without here attempting to analyse the origin of this
Shaftesbury is to be condemned so far as he opposed morality to religion; but the objections to him would have been unphilosophical if they had merely depended upon his distinguishing morality and religion. We must not refuse to accept Shaftesbury as the origin of a new school of real moralists, if he be indeed so. And there was an opening for such a school.
The ancient school of Cudworth and Clarke was now nearly extinct; yet a divine of some note who answered Shaftesbury, still upheld the credit of this school. This was John Balguy, vicar of Northallerton, and prebendary of Salisbury (B.A. in 1705). In 1726 and 1728 he wrote replies to Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue, and also to the work of Hutcheson, which we shall soon have to mention. In these publications he speaks of “that excellent, that inestimable book, Dr. Clarke’s Boyle’s Lectures,” and expresses his surprise that a person of the discernment and penetration which he ascribes to his adversary, rose dissatisfied from that work with regard to the points before us, namely, the foundations of morals (Tracts, p. 66).
Balguy (Tracts, p. 66) did not hesitate still to declare his assent to the ancient formularies of the Cambridge school—that the morality of actions consists in conformity to
But these were now becoming antique and unusual sounds. In general the moral realists were aware that they gave their adversaries an advantage, when they ascribed the discernment of moral relations to the Reason, narrowed as the domain of that faculty had in later times been. They now found it more convenient to assert that moral distinctions were perceived by a peculiar and separate Faculty. To this faculty some did not venture to give a name, but described it only by its operations and results, while others applied to it a term, The Moral Sense, which introduced a new set of analogies and connections. Each of these courses had its inconveniences for the assertors of the faculty, as we shall see. And first of the latter course.
It has been customary of late among those who have written concerning the History of Ethics in England, to speak of Hutcheson as the writer who introduced this term the Moral Sense. The phrase, however, is repeatedly used by Shaftesbury, whose follower Hutcheson was. In the Inquiry concerning Virtue we are told (p. 44), “Sense of right and wrong being as natural to us as natural affection itself, and being a first principle in our constitution and
As this phrase, and the faculty to which it is applied, have in more recent times become so celebrated, perhaps it will be allowed me to lay before you more particularly the manner in which the faculty was described, when it was first, in its modern form, brought into a prominent position in Ethics. Shaftesbury likens the natural sense of the right, to the natural sense of the beautiful, which he assumes as incontestable. “The mind,” he remarks (Inquiry, p. 29), “observes not only things, but actions and affections. The mind which is thus spectator and auditor of other minds cannot be without its eye and ear; so as to discern proportion, distinguish sound, and scan each sentiment or thought which comes before it.” He goes on to say that thus observing, it must admire or condemn—“It finds a foul and a fair, a harmonious and a dissonant, as really and truly here as in musical members or visible forms. It cannot withhold its admiration and ecstasies, its aversion and scorn. To deny the common and natural sense of a sublime and beautiful, is,” the noble writer pronounces, “mere affectation. And as this is true of the natural, so is it of the moral world. The heart at such a spectacle cannot possibly remain neutral: however false and corrupt it be, it judges other hearts. It must approve in some measure what is natural and honest, and
disapprove what is dishonest and corrupt.”
I shall not stop to show how this assumption of such a Sense is employed by Shaftesbury in establishing that which is the general Thesis of his Inquiry:—that it is according to the private interest and good of every one to work towards the general good; which if a creature ceases to promote, he is actually so far wanting to himself, and ceases to
* Lord Shaftesbury, 1699, Inquiry concerning Virtue,
Dr. F. Hutcheson, 1727, Inquiry into the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue.
Dr. Balguy, 1728, The Foundation of Moral Goodness,
Dr. Butler, 1726, Sermons. Wollaston, 1726, Religion of Nature.
Warburton, 1738, Divine Legation.
Francis Hutcheson was the son of a dissenting minister in Ireland, and was educated at the University of Glasgow. His Inquiry into the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue was much admired on its first appearance (about 1727). In this work the author notes that fundamental antithesis of moral systems which we have all along kept in view. There are, he says, two opinions entirely opposite, both intelligible, each consistent with itself (pp. 207-211). The first of these opinions is, that all actions flow from the prospect of private happiness; the other which he opposes to this is, that we have not only self-love, but benevolent affections, and a moral sense. The moral sense he describes as that which determines us to approve the actions which flow from the love of others.
It is evident that the Moral Sense here comes forward as the main element on the side of independent morality, and thus takes the place of the fitness, truth, right reason, and other former strong-holds of that school. But though the Moral Sense is thus substituted for the ancient Rectitude, the things are very far from being equivalent; and by this substitution, the character of the controversy was very materially altered.
It will perhaps best serve to show the nature of this transition if we inquire how the new view was looked upon by the remaining adherents of the old realist school—those who maintained, with Clarke and Cudworth, that the morality of actions consisted in their conformity to Reason.
The main force of these arguments as they apply against the assertion of a Moral Sense,—and it is in fact a very weighty consideration,—resides in this: that the doctrine of the Moral Sense, as delivered by Hutcheson, represents that Sense as a mere Instinct, and thus takes Virtue out of the domain of the Reason. This, as was to be supposed, the disciple of Clarke conceives to be a monstrous and degrading proceeding, (p. 63.) “To make the Rectitude of Moral
It cannot be denied, as I have already intimated, that there is great force and signification in this remonstrance. Beyond all doubt we do not rise to a just idea of virtue except we represent it to ourselves as a rational activity, not an instinctive impulse of our nature. Instinct is blind, but Virtue must see her object and be conscious of her purpose. She partakes of the nature of Reason in the highest sense of the term. Whatever be the source of the truth which Virtue contemplates, it is a part of her office to contemplate truth; even to discover it when hidden;—to bring it forth when obscure;—to combine principles;—to look to consequences;— to conduct trains of demonstration;—to detect fallacies; to expose sophistry. If virtue be not a mere modification of the Reason, at least she must be both reasonable and rational; conformable to right reason, capable of just reasoning.
It is true, as I have already remarked, the identification of Virtue with Right Reason which had long found favour in the eyes of moralists, was now dissolved by the circumscription which the province of Reason had undergone in modern times. Reason was now no longer, at least no longer commonly,
Thus the moralists of Right Reason, the old Cudworthian school, had arguments of no small weight to urge against the new assertors of the Moral Sense. These latter moralists, actuated, unconsciously perhaps, by a perception of the difficulties which the Realist school had of late suffered, in maintaining its old high ground, had moved downwards, but had been by no means cautious in the exact selection of their new position; and had not taken pains to adopt the most unexceptionable phraseology to express their views. The term Instinct, which exposed the system to such glaring objections, had not been shunned by Hutcheson. He says (Vol. i. p. 155): “The true spring of virtue is some determination of our nature to study the good of others, or some instinct which influences us to the love of others, as the moral sense determines us to approve” certain actions. Even the term which was employed as the most usual designation of the principle thus spoken of, and which has now almost acquired an established place as a technical term, the moral Sense, was very far from being unexceptionable. In its wider signification, no doubt, this term might be employed to designate any mode of apprehending things and the relations of things. Shaftesbury, the leader of this school, had illustrated his Sense of right and wrong, by comparing it with the Apprehension of beauty and deformity; and thus had shown plainly enough that he did not intend to suggest the analogy
To avoid this vagueness, the defenders of the existence of the Moral Sense inclined to give more definiteness to the term by accepting the analogy which it offered with the bodily senses. This course at first seemed to offer some advantages. For instance, it enabled them, when pressed for a definition of moral right and good, to avail themselves of the Lockian maxim that “simple ideas are incapable of definition”;—that right and good were as undefinable as whiteness, and warmth; and were, notwithstanding, like the others, real and clear ideas. But though this answer might serve for the moment, it could hardly render much service to the party who could find none better. For who could steadily and calmly maintain the existence of a sense which tells us whether any given action is good and right, of the same nature as the senses which tell us that snow is white and cold? When the Theory of a Moral Sense is presented to
Thus the assertors of the Moral Sense found it very difficult to make good the intermediate position between the higher and the lower schools of moralists, into which they had thrown themselves, as the fortress whence they were prepared to defend the cause of genuine morality. The old champions of immutable morality directed their antique artillery of Right Reasons and Eternal Relations upon the Moral Sense, as too low, too blind, too arbitrary, too variable, too limited, to be the main element of virtue: while the sensual school angrily assailed the for, on the other side, as built upon their own foundations, and presuming to tower above them with most arrogant and absurd pretensions. The new moralists tried to occupy a position between Reason and Sense, and upon this, the advocates both of Sense and of Reason turned upon them as foes. Their natural alliance was doubtless with the latter: for if Virtue must belong either to Reason or to bodily Sense, it is plain that her place is in the domain of the former. Even if we take the Lockian division of all Ideas into those of Sensation and those of Reflection, it cannot be doubted that the Idea of Right and of Moral Good must derive its existence from Reflection, not from Sensation.
If all our conceptions and notions belong either to Sense or to Reason, Virtue must be ranged either in one division or the other. If, on the other hand. Virtue be neither a part of Sense nor of Reason, this cannot be a complete case, from the course of the controversy which I
We must do this, that is, if we can, and as soon as we can. It is easy to say, “we must discover,” but this declaration of necessity does not necessarily lead to discovery. It is easy to say, “we must analyze,” but it is hard to analyze aright. If it be true that in recent times the Senses and the Intellect have been more thoroughly studied, more completely dissected, their structure and processes better determined than had before been done; how much labour, how much time, how much ability, how long a succession of persevering enquirers, each profiting by the labours of his predecessors, has this progress required! How little can one man, one generation, perform in such a task! If, after all the attempts to discover the true nature and grounds of moral rectitude, we have the labour to recommence, we can hardly hope that we shall be permitted to see it completed.
But this is not so. It is far from being true, in the
If we have learnt that the foundation of Morality is not to be sought either in the Sense or in the Intellect, there is already something learnt. If the perception of this foundation, though wrongly designated as a Sense, be still a peculiar operation of our inward being, we may perhaps apply to it a more suitable designation. If we cannot tell what this perception is, we may still perhaps be able to say what it does. If we cannot assign to it an exact place in the human constitution, we may still mark out, in some wider manner, the region of human nature in which its operations are carried on; and may thus prepare the way for a closer approximation at some future time.
We have seen some of the inconveniences which the defenders of independent morality incurred by designating by a special name, and attempting to describe with some exactness, the faculty which discerns moral distinctions. But, as I have already mentioned, there was another class of writers, who, aware perhaps of the danger of entangling themselves in the defence of a theory technically enunciated, contented themselves with asserting their doctrines in general and variable phraseology, so as to show that they did not consider the truth of their system wrapt up in any one or two special forms of expression. Of these writers I must now speak.
Those who have asserted Independent Morality without introducing any technical name, like the Moral Sense of the
I will only illustrate what I have said by a single example, which may serve to show in a striking manner the functions and character ascribed to Conscience during the prevalence of these views. In a sermon of South’s on the Image of God, he makes it his business to describe man with the glorious attributes which he possessed before his Fall from his original brightness. The description of the faculties and powers of man in that primary condition is, of course, a representation of all that was conceived most consummate and complete, both in the faculties and in their relation to each other. The preacher passes in review the various parts of the mind such as I have just stated them; he says on the subject now before us, such things as these:
“The Image of God was no less resplendent in that which we call Man’s Practical Understanding, namely that storehouse of the Soul in which are treasured up the Rules of Action and the Seeds of Morality”: and after speaking of the notions which reside in this province of the soul, he adds, “It was the privilege of Adam innocent, to have these notions also firm and untainted, to carry his monitor in his bosom, his law in his heart, and to have such a conscience as might be its own casuist. Reason was his tutor, and First Principles his Magna Moralia—the Decalogue of Moses was but a transcript, not an original—all the laws of nations or wise decrees of states, the Statutes of Solon and the Twelve Tables, were but a paraphrase upon this standing rectitude of nature; Justice,” that is, as it appears by his context, the internal principle of Justice, “was not subject to be imposed upon by a deluded fancy, nor yet
It would be easy to select other passages containing similar representations of the functions and authority of conscience, in writers of the period of which I now speak (the early part of the eighteenth century); although they become more rare as the systematic representations of morality as founded on pleasure and pain on the one side, and on a peculiar moral sense on the other, encroach upon the old more natural and familiar modes of representing man’s moral nature. It would be easy also to adduce other forms of expression employed by unsystematic writers to designate the powers, habits, faculties, and acts of man’s nature by which he judges of his own deeds and affections. But enough had probably been said to show that the old opinions concerning the functions, duties, and authority of that part of man’s
Butler then I look upon as the successor of the unsystematic writers on morals. He took the phraseology of the subject as he found it in use among those who wrote on morals for practical purposes, and he abstained, studiously as it might appear, from giving an exclusive or constant reference to any one of them. In this way be obtained some advantages, but also incurred some inconveniences; and these must now be considered by us.
Lecture VIII. Butler, Shaftesbury, Warburton,
Berkeley, Tindal, Balguy
The view which I have given of the progress of ethical speculation in England has brought us to Butler. I have already attempted in some measure to point out the place which he occupies in reference to the different schools of moralists. The controversy which had divided philosophers from the time of Plato, between the higher and the lower moralists, had assumed various aspects. At first it was the opposition of Ideas and Sense;—of Ideas, the principles of eternal truths, not derived from the material world; and of Sense, which supplied to man manifest undeniable material good. The reign of a purer religion had for fifteen hundred years suppressed the sensual doctrine; but at the end of that time. Sense began vigorously to reassert its claims, as the source at least of rich stores of natural knowledge; and the reverence for Ideas began to waver. When this struggle was carried into Ethics, at first the supporters of Ideas put them forth in their ancient form, as the foundations of Eternal and Immutable Relations: but it appeared that in this shape, they were no longer well suited to resist the new philosophy of Sense, flushed as it was with triumphs obtained in the natural world. Many moralists, no longer confiding in Ideas, in the necessary relations and fitnesses of things, sought to balance the morality founded upon mere bodily Sense, by a morality founded upon a principle, nominally indeed a Sense, but really an element opposed to sense—a Sense of the moral beauty and goodness of actions as a peculiar quality. These assertors
are conveyed in a vague and confused shape
before they are expressed in a definite and lucid form.”
To assert the existence of a Moral Faculty more clearly and positively than had yet been done, without encumbering himself with too systematic a description or definition of its nature, was the merit of Butler, at the period when Hutcheson was publishing his assertion of the Moral Sense. All truths are seen dimly before they are seen clearly;—are conveyed in a vague and confused shape before they are expressed in a definite and lucid form. The analysis of bodies into their elements employed many generations, and was for centuries most obscurely and imperfectly apprehended; and yet, during these centuries, philosophers were traveling towards the truth, and were at every point obtaining positive truths of great importance. The analysis of the mind, like the analysis of matter, may be imperfect, and yet valuable. It is no proof of an absence of worth and importance in the doctrine of a Moral Faculty, that at first, the boundaries of such a Faculty seem vague, and even its independence questionable. It is of far more importance to prove the reality of its office, and to show that its existence gives a consistent and satisfactory account of those moral rules and convictions which the doctrine of consequences cannot explain.
In order to do this without making any superfluous assumption, Butler appears purposely to have shunned any appearance of technical names for the elements of our moral constitution on which he speculated; and to have studiously varied his phrases. Thus he speaks of man’s being a law to
But the course thus taken by Butler had inconveniences as well as advantages. Clarke adopted the received and metaphysical phraseology of his times, which, so far as moral philosophy was concerned, was not well adapted for tracing out his doctrines in a forcible and clear manner. Butler avoided this error; but Was, in this manner, constantly driven to periphrastic and indirect modes of expression which blunt the point and obscure the aim of his reasonings. Hence, though he lays down his arguments in a dear and orderly manner, in good plain language, and with sufficient detail of steps and circumstances, he has always been found, by common readers, a difficult and obscure writer. And this was the opinion entertained of him in his own time by men of the world. “The bishop of Durham,” says Horace Walpole, “had been wafted to that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it.”
Joseph Butler, of whom I speak, was educated for the ministry of the dissenters, but was brought over to the episcopal church by his conviction of its valid claims. When yet young, and unknown, the interest which he took in speculations such as those of Clarke, had led him to enter into a correspondence with that divine, in which he displayed great acuteness and ability. This correspondence is published at the end of the later editions of the Discourse on the Being and Attributes of God. Butler soon after became Preacher at the Rolls Chapel (in 1718), and his sermons preached there were published a few years later. It is in these sermons particularly that his moral doctrines are to be found.
I will only make two or three remarks. In the first place, I observe that Butler does really and effectively assert the principles which are the foundation of Independent Morality, more decidedly than he may at first reading be thought to do; his assertions being, as I have said, somewhat blunted, and apparently mitigated, by the generality of the language which he uses, and by his avoidance of technical terms. That he really does rest his moral system upon ideas, altogether distinct from consequences, will appear when we recollect how sedulously he insists upon the propositions, that among our principles of action there is a difference of kind as well as a difference of degree;—that to certain of our faculties belongs, by their nature, an authority and supremacy above others, and that this appears by a mere contemplation of the ideas of those faculties. Thus, when he puts the question (Serm. II.) “Which is to be obeyed, appetite or reflection?” he replies (p. 41), “Would not the question be intelligibly and fully answered by saying that the principle of reflection or conscience, being compared with the various appetites, passions, and affections in man, the former is manifestly superior and chief, without regard to strength, and how often soever the latter happen to prevail it is mere usurpation? The former remains in nature superior, and every instance of such prevalence of the latter is an instance of breaking in upon and violation of the constitution of man.”
These notions so steadily adhered to,—of a difference of
There is another principle repeatedly employed by Butler, and which is, I think, worthy of more notice than has been given to it in general. In his view of the constitution of man, he considers the various affections and passions which belong to this constitution, not only as actual parts of our nature, which we must govern and control as virtue directs, but also as elements inserted by our Creator with peculiar purposes, and for definite moral ends; and he conceives that we may discover what is the true regulation of such affections by tracing the moral purpose which they are fitted to answer. Thus he says (p. 35), “Since then our inward feelings, and the perceptions we receive from our external senses, are equally real; to argue from the former to human life and conduct is as little liable to exception, as to argue from the latter to absolute speculative truth. A man can as little doubt that his eyes were given him to see with, as he can doubt the truth of the science of Optics, deduced from ocular experiments. And allowing the inward feeling, shame, a man can as little doubt whether it was given him to prevent his doing shameful actions as he can doubt whether his eyes were given him to guide his steps.”
* We may recollect that the same train of thought has already come before us in previous writers on this side; as in the case of Henry More, whom we have seen adopting the Platonic notion that appetite provides for the needs of man’s nature and anger for its defence, both in subservience to the governing power of reason.
Butler pursued this view of the irascible part of our nature somewhat further. He distinguished Resentment, the name by which he describes this element, into sudden Resentment, which is given us as a Protector which acts with energy before Reflection has time to rouse herself into action, and whose office is to repel harm, without regard to its being wrong as well as harm;—and settled Resentment, which is naturally directed against vice and wickedness. “The one stands in our nature for self-defence, the other for the administration of justice.” It is by considerations such as these that the Idea, which at first appears so wide and barren, of a certain undefined Constitution of man, is traced by Butler into special moral duties. The proper office of each of the principles of our nature assists us also to determine their limits, and to lay down rules for their direction, control, or restraint.
I have already observed that while, among the defenders of Independent Morality, Clarke, in stating his moral opinions, entangled himself by adopting the terms of the prevalent metaphysical system, Butler too often perplexed his readers by trying to avoid all systematic metaphysics. But this mode of treating the subject does not answer the needs of those who pursue it as a speculative study. For short technical expressions, when they are familiar to us, enable us to avoid much labour of the intellect which we must otherwise incur; and to fix our attention at once upon the critical part of each proposition and argument. If there shall be found to be introduced afterwards a technical classification of the faculties and operations of the human mind, which shall be consistent with the truths asserted by Butler, the business of understanding his arguments will be much simplified. We may conceive that, in his enquiries, he was doing that which,
Of the three principles of morality included in the Syncretism of Warburton, Right Reason—the Moral Sense—and Divine Command, we may now consider the third; which brings us nearer to the domain of Theology.
I have hitherto considered Butler and his contemporaries (for, as I have said, Hutcheson’s Inquiry and Butler’s Sermons were published about the same time:
* Butler’s Sermons, 1726; Hutcheson’s Inquiry, third edition, 1729; the Dedication, to the second edition, is dated 1725.
The system of Clarke, according to which Morality is derived by rigorous deduction from right reason, and the doctrine of the Shaftesbury school, that virtue is the object of a peculiar Sense or Taste, each gave to virtue a kind of independence, which seemed to make extraneous support superfluous. And hence the enemies of revealed religion saw with pleasure, and its friends with pain, the probability of an attack upon it from this side; which accordingly took place. I have already said that Shaftesbury had been looked upon, and we must regret to say, with incontestable justice, as an enemy of Christianity. (
And he allows that a belief in a future state of reward and punishment may support and preserve a man wavering between right and wrong; may even restore and repair the moral constitution when by evil practice it has been debauched and perverted (p. 61); and may make virtue, which was at first pursued for its consequences, to be loved for its own sake (p. 62).
“In the same manner, where instead of regard or love, there is rather an aversion to what is good and virtuous, (as, for instance, where lenity and forgiveness are despis’d, and revenge highly thought of and belov’d) if there be this consideration added, ‘That lenity is, by its rewards, made the cause of a greater self-good and enjoyment than what is found in revenge’; that very affection of lenity and mildness may come to be industriously nourish’d,
But this was so grudgingly allowed, so limited with conditions, and balanced with attendant dangers, that it was hardly to be wondered at that those who had trained their minds to think it man’s duty to do all with reference to his great Master and Judge, were dissatisfied, and found that the language of the Characteristics was harsh and dissonant to their feelings. Of this we may take as an example the expressions of Bishop Berkeley, a man allowed by all his contemporaries of all parties to be one of the most amiable of men. In his Vindication of his Theory of Vision, p. 5, he says, “What availeth it in the cause of Virtue and Natural Religion, to acknowledge the strongest traces of wisdom and power, throughout the structure of the universe, if this wisdom is not employed to observe, nor this power to recompense our actions; if we neither believe ourselves accountable, nor God our Judge?
“All that is said of a vital principle of Order, Harmony, and Proportion; all that is said of the natural decorum and fitness of things; all that is said of taste and enthusiasm, may well consist and be supposed, without a grain even of Natural Religion, without any notion of Law or Duty, any belief of a Lord or Judge, or any religious sense of a God; the contemplation of the mind upon the ideas of Beauty, and Virtue, and Order, and Fitness, being one thing, and a sense of Religion another. So long as we admit no principle of good actions but Natural Affection, no reward but Natural Consequences; so long as we apprehend
Sir James Mackintosh in speaking of this passage (History of Ethics, p. 158) says, that here “this most excellent man sinks for a moment to the level of a railing polemic.” But this expression is, I think it must be allowed, far too strong. How adverse the influence of Shaftesbury had been to the real belief in religion, was well and generally known. And no thoughtful Christian could be ignorant how baseless and hollow is a scheme of rules for human conduct which has no sanction beyond the beauty of virtue, and the existence of a moral sense. However much such a sense may aid us in discovering the rules of our duty, and even our relation to the Supreme Legislator and Judge, it is only when its indications are pursued in that upward direction, that we obtain such prospects are requisite to support and animate us in our progress. We may have such faculties, such a sense if you will, as is sufficient to enable us to find our way through the wilderness; but except this is accompanied with a firm belief in the beauty of the promised land, our wanderings may still be devious, perverse and interminable. It was natural that Christian divines should grieve to see the internal light which exists in the mind of man employed to bewilder instead of direct him;—spoken of as if it were the end not the guide of this path;—as if he had to walk to it not by it.
But the Clarkian school, sincere and earnest Christians
But then, this very identification of Reason and Command was urged by others as rendering one of the two superfluous. The opportunity of pressing the attack on this ground was taken by Dr. Matthew Tindal, a Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, who had all his life been known as a writer against the Church of England and her Clergy, but who in 1730, at an advanced age, published a work in which all revelation was aimed at. The title of the book was, Christianity as old as the Creation, Tindal’s two principal works against the Church and against Morals are referred to by Pope:
But art thou one, whom new opinions sway,
One who believes as Tindal leads the way,
Who Virtue and a Church alike disowns.
Thinks that but words, and this but brick and stones?
Fly then, on all the wings of wild Desire,
Admire whatever the maddest can admire.
His professed object was to show that Christianity, being the external revelation of the will of God, must agree with natural religion, which is the internal revelation of the same will; and the inference which was insinuated was, that Christianity
I have said that this attack was in some measure occasioned by the doctrines which Dr. Clarke had recently published. Accordingly an argument founded upon these was urged in the work, and was by some supposed to have a formidable aspect. Balguy, whom I have already mentioned as a supporter of Clarke’s views, wrote an answer to Tindal, entitled A Second Letter to a Deist (the first letter to a Deist was the answer to Shaftesbury) concerning a late book entitled ‘Christianity as old as the Creation,’ more particularly that chapter which relates to Dr. Clarke. In this letter, it appears that Balguy’s correspondent had proposed to him divers questions on the subject of Tindal’s book: one of which was, “Has not the author, in his last chapter, plainly proved Dr. Clarke inconsistent with himself: and that one part of his Lectures clashes with another?”
The contradiction is, that the Law of Nature is asserted to be complete, and again asserted to be insufficient; and to this the author answers very triumphantly: “In setting forth the obligations of morality, Dr. Clarke everywhere speaks of the Law of Nature in the highest and most advantageous terms. He considers it as arising necessarily and invariably from the true natures, reasons, and relations of things. He represents it as a system of eternal, universal, and unchangeable truths; as a perfect Rule of Action; as a Law independent of, and antecedent to, all other laws and obligations whatever. He declares, that all rational creatures are obliged to govern themselves, in all their actions, by the eternal Rule of Reason; and that it is not only a law to creatures, but to God himself, who is pleased to make it the unalterable rule of his actions in the government of the world. These, and many
“Has then Dr. Clarke advanced anything afterwards in contradiction hereto! Has he anywhere denied the troth or perfection of this sacred rule? Has he, in any part of his book, expressed himself in derogation from it, or diminution of it? Not one syllable can I find to any such purpose. What then has he done? Why, he has brought a charge against mankind, of ignorance, negligence, perverseness, stupidity. He has affirmed, that they are such weak, frail, corrupt creatures, that sometimes they cannot, and, very often, will not understand, of themselves, what belongs to their duty. He has represented men, even the wisest of them, as invincibly ignorant, without Revelation, of some points of the utmost consequence. And as to the generality, he has shown, that they stand in need, upon many accounts, of more light, and better instruction, than either their own reason, or that of the ablest philosophers, could ever afford them. Whether these be facts, or mistakes, I desire to know where lies the inconsistency? On the one hand, we find excellent truths; a complete rule; a most Divine law: on the other hand, men corrupt; faculties neglected; understandings depraved. I have brought these doctrines close together, to give you, Sir, a fairer opportunity of discovering that opposition which your author pretends to find between them. But who can find it besides himself! Will any man say, that the reality, or perfection of a rule, depends upon the skill or disposition of the agent? Can the eternal truth and reason of things be disannulled, or any way altered, by the ignorance or frowardness of mankind? Why then so much pains taken to bring in Dr. Clarke as an evidence against himself! Why so many passages produced, in order
Balguy adds (p. 277) another illustration to retort the edge of the argument, that the law of nature is perfect, that all men are capable of discovering it, and that therefore the Gospel is not needed. “Let it be granted,” he says, “that temperance and exercise constitute a complete rule of health, and that all men are capable of discovering this. Does it then follow that physic and physicians are useless?” And thus it is that the completeness of the moral rule, even if it be complete, only proves more entirely how much our human nature requires something more than a rule. The end of our Ethics conducts us to the beginning of our Gospel. The place which the rules of morality hold in all sound systems of the philosophy of man, is that which St. Paul assigns to them. The wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men; but still these men hold this truth, this revelation of conscience, in unrighteousness; and thus it becomes necessary that the Gospel Revelation should supply the needs which the revelation of Conscience only discovers. The Gentiles have a law in their hearts, as the Jews have on the tables of stone; but what is the place which this great doctrine holds in the high argument into which the apostle introduces it! Neither more nor less than this, to prove, of Jews and of Gentiles alike, that they are all under sin.
Thus the systems of ethics which found morality upon original and independent principles, not deducing our rules of action from commands and consequences merely, but assigning to them an inherent and essential value, do not in any way really trench upon the domains of religion, or interfere with the teaching of Christianity. Yet the pain and controversy
Lecture IX. Warburton, Law, Jackson, Rutherforth, Waterland
Warburton, as I have said, attempted to combine, in his view of the true foundations of morality, the three principles of Right Reason, the Moral Sense, and the Divine Command. But in doing this, he did not avoid the sections which lie against each, as I must briefly show.
1. By speaking of the Moral Sense as an Instinct (following Hutcheson, as we have seen), he has put the assertion of such a sense in the most obnoxious and objectionable form. When asserted in this shape, it is difficult or impossible to find any unquestionable proofs of its existence. It is difficult to discover any instincts which are moral, or which cannot be resolved into such as are not moral;—which cannot be traced into such instincts as are subservient to self-preservation; or such as those by which families are formed and held together. When the moral sense is asserted in this form, separate from all reflex operation of the mind, or rational insight into the connections and motives of actions, the usual arguments so often brought against its existence assume a very formidable front, and can hardly be opposed by any satisfactory replies, without, in some measure, changing the ground of the controversy.
2. The doctrine of essential differences in things, apprehended by the Reason alone, does not establish a genuine moral character of actions, as I have already observed in speaking of Clarke’s view of morality. Whatever of fitness or unfitness for certain ends, of agreement or disagreement with certain ideas, there be in this or that course of willing
3. Warburton thus made the assertion of the moral sense too coarsely definite, and that of eternal differences too barely rational. This arose from his separating too violently, from these elements, that idea which gives them their moral character: and this idea, thus injuriously insulated, he perverted. This was the idea of Obligation. This idea is really involved in the very conception of all moral rule and moral relation. That is right which we ought to do. If our moral faculty approves of a deed, we are under an obligation to perform it. The obligation may be evaded or disobeyed, but we cannot help recognizing it, by the very mental act by which we recognize the action as good. When our conscience tells us that we do wrong, we can have do doubt that we have violated an obligation.
This appears plain enough, but with this Warburton was not content. He laid it down as an axiom (Div. Leg. B. I. Sect. iv. p. 141) that “Obligation necessarily implies an Obliger”;—that the will can only be bound by an external Lawgiver. That the sanctions of a Divine Government are necessary to induce corrupted man to discharge the duties of Morality, we shall all agree. But that, in metaphysical analysis, there is no other basis of Obligation, appears to be quite inconsistent with the best ideas we can apply to the subject. We cannot but estimate actions as
4. This notion of Obligation, however, was not taken up gratuitously by Warburton, but for the purposes of his argument, or at least in harmony with those purposes. He had formed the project of placing the Alliance between Morality and Religion on a new basis. In the old form of argument, it had been urged in favour of Religion, that she distinctly teaches that future retribution which Morality anticipates and requires. But he inverted the argument, and stated it thus;—that Morality does indeed require a state of Divine Government, and that therefore, if, while all other Religions assume this as future, one does not, such a Religion must have been able to point to this Divine Government as present: and this he applied to the ancient history of the Jewish Religion. And having taken this course, not content with the conclusion at which mere
5. It is due to Warburton, and to the subject, to state, that however little we may be disposed to assent to his argument in favour of the Divine Character of the Jewish dispensation (as in fact I believe that argument has not been very generally assented to), his representation of the relation between Natural and Revealed Morality is really very instructive and valuable. He remarks (Book iii. Sect. v. p. 536), that previous writers had either tried to prove the reasonableness of Christianity, by showing that the best pagan philosophers had arrived at moral rules and a doctrine of future retribution approaching to those which Christianity teaches: or else they have denied to the pagans a knowledge of such doctrines, in order to prove the necessity of revelation:—But that either way the argument was capable of being reversed; the infidel who ascribed these doctrines to the pagans, inferring revelation to be unnecessary; and he who could find no such truths in the conclusions of the natural understanding, declaring Christianity to be unreasonable. To both these views Warburton opposes his own. “The only view of antiquity which gives a solid advantage to the Christian cause, is such a one as shows natural reason to be clear enough to perceived truth, and the necessity of its deductions when proposed, but not generally strong enough to discover it, or to draw right deductions from it.”
“Having of late seen,” he afterwards says, “several excellent treatises of morals, delivered on the principles of natural religion, which disclaim, or at
He adds an illustration, drawn from the history of science, which appears to be of a perfectly justifiable, and very instructive nature, making some allowances. “I cannot,” he says, “better illustrate the state and condition of the human view before revelation than by the following instance. A summary of the Atomic Philosophy is delivered in the Theaetetus of Plato: yet being given without its principles, when Plato’s writings at the revival of learning came to be studied and commented upon, this summary remained absolutely unintelligible; for there had been an interruption in the succession of that school for many ages; and neither Marsilius Ficinus nor Serranus could give any reasonable account of the matter. But as soon,” he says, “as Descartes had revived that philosophy by excogitating its principles anew, the mist removed, and everyone saw clearly (though Cudworth, I think, was the first who took notice of it) that Plato had given us a curious and exact account of that excellent physiology. And Descartes was thought by
In our assent to this comparison, we must, as I have said, make some allowances:—we must recollect the disposition which prevails, to believe that great physical truths, even of the most recent discovery, may be found anticipated in ancient authors of renown;—we must recollect also the triumphant position then occupied by the atomic theory, which at that period had met with no check from men of science; and we must bear in mind the current admiration for Descartes, which even then had not faded away. It is true in morals, not only as much, but very far more than in physics, that the greatest truths, when once promulgated, are profoundly persuasive and convincing by their own evidence. It is true in morals, as well as in physics, that truths which multitudes of the most sagacious of men had laboured for ages without discovering, when discovered, are held to be obvious and self-evident. It is true, even in physics, that we cannot analyze or explain the process by which great discoveries suddenly dart their light over the earth, truth taking the place of error, and knowledge, once shed abroad, operating upon and modifying men’s thoughts without their being aware whence their new and clear insight proceeds. So far we may perhaps, with no irreverent feeling, assent to Warburton’s comparison. But the burning up of the torch of science from time to time is a most imperfect image of the sunrise of the Gospel. The
I now purposely turn away, as the course of my subject requires me to do, from the consideration of revealed morality, to resume the history of the discussions concerning the natural foundations of our duties.
Warburton’s system naturally exercised a great influence upon the theologians and moralists of this country. His peremptory analysis of the idea of obligation into the commands of a superior, appeared to simplify the subject, and was very generally accepted. For it resolved that element of a moral law which, though essential to it, requires a
Among the persons who inclined to such views was Edmund Law, afterwards bishop of Carlisle, who held tho Professorship in virtue of which I am now addressing you, from 1760 to 1769. He was previously a Fellow of Christ’s College, in this University; a college, as we have already seen, most fertile in moralists. His Notes on Archbishop King’s Origin of Evil were published (with his translation of the work) in 1732, and therefore before the Divine Legation. And accordingly he does not in these Notes go to the lengths of Warburton. He says that he does not place the obligation of virtue in the mere will of God (
As the Cambridge men in general thus rejected the fitness of things, they were also indisposed to admit the Moral Sense. Though Warburton, as we have seen, was willing to accept the Moral Sense as a part of the forces belonging to the cause of virtue, the Cambridge moralists looked upon this new ally with suspicion, as incapable of being entirely reconciled to their philosophy. This feeling appears from a work in which the doctrine of the Moral Sense was noticed, and which shows that the opposite system was becoming a part of the habitual teaching of this place. I speak of an Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue, published in 1744, by Dr. Rutherforth, Fellow and Tutor of St. John’s College. It is dedicated to one of his former pupils, Anthony Thomas Abdy, Esq., of Lincoln’s Inn; to whom he says, “There is little in the following sheets which you have not heard me explain, upon different occasions, while you were under my care at the University.” In this work he argues strenuously against Hutcheson’s opinions. “The common and ordinary feelings of mankind, the senses and perceptions which are uppermost in the human constitution and are most attended to, plainly direct to private good, and instruct each individual to provide for himself in the best manner he can. But some of the later moralists,” he says, “think they have discovered another sense in man, as natural to him as these are, though less observed—an appetite for doing good; a sense which has virtue for its object, and gives a disinterested approbation of all her dictates; an affection which
This is teaching which undoubtedly is true as far as it goes; and which would perhaps do little harm in practice, so long as it was employed on the side of good morals. But its inherent defectiveness cannot be concealed; for how does Our obedience to God on this view differ from our obedience to an arbitrary tyrant invested with superior power, or from the service which the idolater renders to an impure and cruel deity? Undoubtedly no one can charge such writers as I have noticed with making any such monstrous confusion. But what I wish to remark is, that they do not give the distinction its due place in the foundation of their system, where it ought to appear.
It is evident that the consideration which makes the difference between the cases is, that we have a moral esteem for the character and the law of the true God, as well as an obedience governed by his promises. We believe our Divine Ruler to be supremely holy, just, and good; and therefore we obey him with joy and love, as well as hope. But this distinction necessarily implies that we can form an idea of moral goodness, justice, holiness, quite other than obedience
Lecture X. Gay, Tucker, Paley
Edmund Law’s reasonings rather referred to the previous than to the succeeding aspect of moral speculation. He was rather of importance as confuting opinions till then prevalent, than as anticipating doctrines afterwards generally accepted. But there was prefixed to his translation of King’s Origin of Evil a dissertation which has a more manifest affinity with the succeeding course of Cambridge morality. This was a Dissertation concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality, anonymous, but written by Mr. Gay, of Sidney College. This piece has been referred to by Mackintosh and others as entertaining an anticipation of the opinions afterwards put forwards by Hartley, respecting the results of the principle of the Association of Ideas; and in that point of view, it has an important place in the history of the speculations upon that subject, to which Hartley’s doctrines led, in Scotland and elsewhere: but I here consider Gay with reference to his place in the history of Cambridge moralists rather than metaphysicians. Law, in his notes on The Origin of Evil, rejected the Clarkian doctrine of absolute relations, as the foundations of Right and Wrong, and made a considerable advance towards the morality founded merely upon the pleasure and pain resulting from actions. Law’s speculations however were of the nature of the work on which he commented, mixed up with discussions concerning the a priori arguments respecting the being of God, and the most abstract considerations which the human mind can attain to, respecting space and time, cause and effect, good
The course which I have pursued has led me to the writers by whom the scheme of morality which has been taught in this University for the last century was framed, and I shall at present go on to describe the further steps of the development and fixation of this system. I may afterwards, if the time allow, resume the consideration of the progress of moral speculation among other classes of English writers from the time of Warburton, downwards. The views of Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and Hartley, were pursued into many interesting and instructive speculations by Reid, Stewart, and Brown, and Mackintosh himself. But our Cambridge moralists employed themselves rather in constructing a system of morals on the selfish principle, than in metaphysical analysis. For the latter task, an indifference or distaste seems to have grown up in England about the time of which I speak. There was no wish to move onwards. The Scotch school of metaphysicians engaged with great assiduity in the analysis of man’s faculties and principles, and endeavoured to advance further and further in this wide speculation. But the English moralists shunned rather than sought such inquiries. Cambridge men had taken their stand upon Locke in metaphysics, as they had taken their stand upon Newton in mathematics. They were weary of constantly changing their ground, and seeking new modes of defence against the enemies of morality.
I have already compared the attack of Hobbes and his followers upon the old defences of morality, to the assault of Home by the Gauls. The readers of Livy will recollect that after that calamity the Romans deliberated whether they should migrate in a body to Veii; and that while they still doubted, a centurion who had marched his company
The morality of general consequences, in the naked and harsh form in which it has prevailed here, would, I do not doubt, have been modified and purified, as was done in other places, if it had not been for its singular felicity in finding an expounder, who at the same time systematized it, and set
Gay, of whom I have already spoken as the author of the Dissertation prefixed to the translation of Archbishop King, was, I believe, John Gay who took the degree of B.A. at Sidney College in 1721, and was afterwards Fellow of the College. I will quote one or two passages of Gay, that you may see how near he comes to Paley in his leading views. He says: “Now it is evident from the Nature of God, viz. his being infinitely happy in himself from all eternity, and from his goodness manifested in his works, that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness; and therefore he wills their happiness; therefore, the means of their happiness: therefore, that my behaviour, as far as it may be a means of the happiness of mankind, should be such. Here then we are got one step further, or to a new criterion: not to a new criterion of Virtue immediately, but to a criterion of the Will of God. For it is an answer to the enquiry, How shall I know what the Will of God in this particular is I Thus the Will of God is the immediate criterion of Virtue, and the happiness of mankind the criterion of the Will of God; and therefore the happiness of mankind may be said to be the criterion of Virtue, but once removed.”
You may recollect Paley’s expression, “there are many ends besides the far end.” So Gay, “As therefore happiness
Gay’s definition of Virtue is wider than Paley’s: “Virtue is the conformity to a rule of life, directing the actions of all rational creatures with respect to each other’s happiness; to which conformity every one in all cases is obliged: and every one that does so conform, is, or ought to be approved of, esteemed, and loved for so doing.”
The interval from 1731 and 1756, the date of the publications I have mentioned by Gay, Law, and Rutherforth, to the publication of Paley’s Principles of Morality and Politics in 1785, is considerable; but I am not aware of any events belonging to the intermediate time, and holding very important position in the history of moral studies in this place. In 1765 Paley had obtained one of the Bachelors’ Essay Prizes, for a comparison between the Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. He had, as was natural with his habits of mind, taken the Epicurean side. This was not an effusion hastily and thoughtlessly flung from his pen, for it was accompanied with elaborate notes in English, and is still recollected for a genuine vivacity of thought and expression which gave a promise of his future style; as, for instance, when he called the Stoics “those Pharisees in philosophy”; which however he probably had from Taylor’s Civil Law, where the comparison
* Law, the son of the Edmund Law, Professor of Casuistry, Master of Peterhouse, and afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, whom I have already mentioned, was his coadjutor in the tuition.
We also find Paley mentioning with great praise another work, The Light of Nature pursued, by Edward Search, Esq, really however written by Abraham Tucker, of Betchworth Castle, near Dorking. The first three volumes of his work were published in 1768; the four last after his death, which took place in 1774.
This work cannot, I think, be looked upon as occupying any very important place in the progress of Moral Philosophy; but there is in it an original unsystematic freedom of thinking, and a temperate good sense and virtuous moral feeling, which are peculiarly English. There is, moreover, and this is the quality which has most struck the notice of its admirers, a fertility and brilliance of illustration which are almost unrivaled, and which make it a mine of thought for its speculative readers. This merit has so often been noticed, that it may, I think, be interesting to give an example of it. I take for this purpose his modification of an image of Plato’s, which is, as Mackintosh says, “of characteristic
“The metaphor employed by Plato was that of a charioteer driving his pair of horses, by which latter he allegorized the concupiscible [sic] and irascible passions: but as we have nowadays left off driving our own chariots, but keep a coachman to do it for us, I think the mind may be more commodiously compared to a traveller riding a single horse, wherein reason is represented by the rider, and imagination with all its train of opinions, appetites and habits, by the beast. everyone sees the horse does all the work; the strength and speed requisite for performing it are his own; he carries his master along every step of the journey, directs the motion of his own legs in walking, trotting, galloping, or stepping over a rut, makes many by-motions, as whisking the flies with his tail or playing with his bit, all by his own instinct; and if the road lie plain and open, without bugbears to affright him or rich pasture on either hand to entice him, he will jog on although the reins were laid upon his neck, or in a well-acquainted road take the right turnings of his own accord. Perhaps sometimes he may move startish [sic] or restive, turning out of the way or running into a pond to drink, maugre [sic] all endeavours to prevent him; but this depends greatly upon the discipline he has been used to. The office of the rider lies in putting his horse into the proper road and the pace most convenient for the present purpose, guiding and conducting him as he goes along, checking him when too forward or spurring him when too tardy, being attentive to his motions, never dropping the whip nor losing the reins, but ready to interpose instantly whenever needful, keeping firm in his seat if the beast behaves unruly, observing what passes in the way, the condition of the ground and bearings of the country, in order to take directions therefrom for his proceeding. But
I cannot refrain from adding some of his remarks on selfishness: “Persons deficient in this quality [benevolence] endeavour to run it down, and justify their own narrow views by alleging that it is only selfishness in a particular form: for if the benevolent man does a good-natured thing for his own
Mackintosh has considered Tucker principally as to his views of that analysis of our moral judgments, which was the leading point of speculation of the Scotch school. But as connected with the main subject of the present course of Lectures, we have to look principally at his views of the obviously belongs to the school who rest the obligation of duties upon the consequences, in the way of pleasure and pain, to which they lead. He states this view in many parts of his work. For example, he has a chapter entitled “Ultimate Good”; he informs his reader that he intends this phrase as a translation of the summum bonum of the ancient schools of moralists. Nor can it be questioned that this translation far more truly brings before us the import of those ancient controversies than any of the more usual ways of rendering the phrase, as the ‘chief good’. “For,” he says, “the enquiry was not to ascertain the degree of goodness in objects, to determine what possessed it in the highest pitch beyond all others: but since the goodness of things depends upon their serviceableness towards procuring us something we want, to discover what was that one thing intrinsically good which contented the mind of itself, and rendered all others desirable in proportion as they tended directly or remotely to produce it” (
The same embarrassment in the management of his principle of mere satisfaction, or utility, occurs to him, as it must occur to all virtuous moralists, when he comes to the best defined cases of moral duties. Thus he says in pursuance of his general principle, that justice is to be measured by utility, and that an extreme case of inconvenience arising from a common precept of justice, nullifies the rule for that case. But yet he adds (p. 305), that “if a righteous man be asked why he fulfills his engagements though to his own manifest detriment, he will answer, Because it would have been unjust to have failed in them; for he wants no other motive to induce him: and if the querist [sic] be righteous too, he will want no other reason to satisfy him.” And after supposing the inquiry to be still prosecuted, he adds, “But could it be made appear that injustice in some single instance was to the general” [observe the general] “advantage,
It is not my purpose to give a general analysis of Tucker’s work, which, indeed, from its prolix, devious, and unsystematic character, would be no easy task; and which its place in the history of philosophy does not render necessary. But I may remark, that the author extends his speculations to the philosophy of religion as well as of morality, treats of the connexion of the two subjects, and supplies the deficiencies of the one by the other. Thus in the former part of his work, on Morality, he refers to the case of Regulus, the ancient stock example of the schools for the statement of the question between virtue and pleasure. He decides that upon his principles, so far as he has
“Therefore now we may do ample justice to Regulus, whom we left under a sentence of folly for throwing away life with all its enjoyments for a phantom of honour. For he may allege that he had not a fair trial before, his principal evidence being out of the way, which having since collected in the course of this second Book, he moves for a rehearing. For he will now plead that it was not a fantastic joy in the transports of rectitude, nor the Stoical rhodomontade of a day spent in virtue containing more enjoyment than an age of bodily delights, nor his inability to bear a life of general odium and contempt, had his duty so required, which fixed him in his resolution: but the prudence of the thing upon a full and calm deliberation. Because he considered himself as a citizen of the universe, whose interests are promoted and maintained by the particular members contributing their endeavours towards increasing the quantity of happiness, wherever possible, among others with whom they have connexion and intercourse.
“He saw that his business lay with his fellow-creatures of the same species, among whom a strict attachment to faith and honour was the principal bulwark of order and happiness, that a shameful conduct in his present conflict would tend to make a general weakening of this attachment, which might introduce disorders, rapines, violences and injuries among multitudes, to far greater amount than his temporary
I have with the less unwillingness given these long extracts from Tucker, since we have few English writers of any merit to occupy this interval, and the vivacity of his style makes it an ungrateful task to reduce him to mere abstract assertions. Moreover, his influence upon the subsequent progress of the subject was far from trifling; for as I have said, he was the favourite author of Paley. This latter moralist, so important from the place he has long held among us, I have already begun to speak of, and I now proceed with the further notice of the reception and effect of his system.
Paley’s ethical work is mainly employed in deducing arguments for our duties, and rules for deciding critical cases, from the principle of general utility. If this undertaking had been kept in its due place, moralists of all shades
But Paley chose to give proofs of his principles; and in doing this, he both fell into false philosophy, and assumed a tone and temper unsuited to the occasion. The doctrine of ultimate utility as the measure and ground of moral rules had been so long current, almost uncontradicted, among English writers, that those who were formed in this school could not conceive the possibility of its being rationally opposed, and could not avoid treating with contempt and ridicule those who rested on any other principle. Hence we find that Paley cannot speak of the opinion which represents the soul to be superior to the body, the rational to the animal part of our constitution, without calling such views “much usual declamation.” In like manner, his account of the Law of Honour is rather like the language of a poignant satirist, than a moralist gravely and calmly stating an extensive principle of human action. “The Law of Honour is a system of rules constructed by people of fashion, and calculated
The fact is that Paley had no taste, and therefore we may be allowed to say that he had little aptitude for metaphysical disquisitions. In this there would have been no blame, if he had not entered into speculations, which, if they were not metaphysically right, must be altogether wrong. We often hear persons declare that they have no esteem for metaphysics, and intend to shun all metaphysical reasonings; and this is usually the prelude to some specimen of very bad metaphysics: for I know no better term by which to designate the process of misunderstanding, and confounding those elements of truth which are supplied by the relations of our own ideas. That Paley had no turn or talent for the reasoning which depends on such relations, is plain enough. His examination of the question of the moral sense throughout proves this. For example, he states as an argument against the doctrine of a moral sense, this consideration: If such a principle of action were implanted in man, it could not subsist except there were implanted also the ideas which it includes; and thus we are led to innate ideas. The argument is well worthy notice; so also is the reply: “The argument,” it is replied, “bears against all instincts, and against their existence in brutes as well as in men, but these certainly
We may remark, however, in justice to Paley on this subject, that the habit of speaking of the Moral Faculty as an Instinct, and of calling it the Moral Sense, which practices were common in preceding writers, naturally led a person whose mind like his, had altogether a practical and not a metaphysical turn, to embody this supposed Instinct or Sense in a particular hypothetical instance, as he does in the story of Caius Toranius. And thus this mode of putting the question of the Moral Faculty, which has justly been blamed as unphilosophical and irrelevant, is not entirely to be charged upon Paley only.
In like manner a logical objection may be made to his definition of Virtue,
* “Virtue is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”
It is a still more remarkable example of this want of Obligation, which Warburton, and, after him, the Cambridge moralists, had already degraded from an internal element of a duty to an external and material constraint; and degrades
Leaving then this part of Paley’s work, which deals with the analysis of ideas, and the establishment of the foundations of morality, as by no means deserving of confidence or admiration; I turn for an instant to the super-structure, in order to make a single remark. I have already said that his general principle being assumed, his application
To this I reply, that in systems so constructed the unmanageable nature of one fundamental assumption is remedied by another assumption. The moralist assumes that human conduct is to be determined by the consideration of the total consequent pleasure. But this consideration is incapable of being developed in finite terms;—(if I may be here allowed a mathematical expression). The moralist then assumes another principle:—that the consideration of consequences is to be applied by means of general rules:—that all like actions are to be forbidden:—that to violate a general rule is itself an evil:—that this evil is so great as
I speak of this as an assumption: for the supreme principle of the system cannot supply a rigorous proof of the assumption. The supreme principle of the system of which I speak is, the happiness resulting from each action. General rules therefore are good, only because, and so far as, they are subservient to happiness. We have no right, on such principles, to demand for them any greater generality, any greater rigour, than we can establish by showing such a subservience. But in constructing such system of morality we do demand more. We demand so much more, that we make their very generality a ground for rejecting perceived consequences. We do not limit the generality by the utility, by its tendency to produce benefits of known kinds; we declare the generality to be a new kind of utility. (
This assumption does in fact, if acted upon, bring the two systems of morality, the dependent and the independent, into very close proximity as to their results. For as soon as it is held that rules must be universal, we can have little doubt what the rules are to be. It cannot, on any principles of morals, be generally indifferent whether we tell the truth or tell a lie: and we must have a rule of universal validity:—therefore “Tell the truth,” which must be the general rule, must be the universal rule. And thus the system of dependent morality, from this point, may be made to assume a form as firm and solid as if it had for its base the essential distinctions of things.
I may observe that this is very much like what has taken place in other branches of science. In many branches of science there have been controversies whether the principles of the science are necessarily true, or are known by
Thus this assumption of the necessary generality of our propositions makes the procedure nearly alike, after a certain point, of those who cultivate the science asserting it to rest upon independent foundations in the nature of our ideas, and of those who refer it entirely to empirical grounds. And this is the case in morals as it is in mathematics.
A moral projector might come to the casuist, asserting that he was in possession of a falsehood which it would be of the greatest service to mankind to promulgate as a truth. What would the casuist say? “It never can be right to promulgate falsehood.” If he were a moralist of expedience, if the question had been proposed to Paley, he would have said: “It must in the long run do more harm than good to put about your lie.” But the projector pleads that he has calculated the good and the harm, and that the good immensely predominates. The moralist has not calculated; how can he know?—Does the moralist hesitate at this? Not an instant. He says, “You violate a general rule. No other good can compensate for the mischief of this.” And thus he nobly leaps over his barrier of calculated consequences, and places himself at one bound, in defiance of his theory, upon the solid basis of rules by their nature universal. And thus it is that there is no inevitable divergence in the results of the different, or even opposite schools of moralists, as to rules of conduct: and in those of them who accept the light of religion, even as a collateral aid, there is the most remarkable coincidence, notwithstanding the different courses they at first seem to pursue.
Yet it is still true, that the different spirit of these different schools continues to pervade them, even in their
In the same way, although general rules, if they are of supreme importance in morals, must be allowed also to be of great value in government, the consideration of these appears to be laid aside when it ought to be recollected most. Thus Paley says: “This principle [of expediency] being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Hence he appears to have left out of the account the immense mischief of violating that long-tried and approved system of rules which we call the Constitution, of which he might easily say, with as much truth as of any system of moral rules, that not to violate it is a salutary caution, the advantage so gained rarely compensating the violation of the rule.
It is not my intention to discuss at present Paley’s views with regard to special duties. I shall have a few remarks to make on the reception which his principles met with in this University and this country; and with these I shall conclude the historical sketch which I have thus attempted.
Lecture XI. Paley, Gisborne
In order to make more complete our account of the reception of Paley’s work in general, and especially in this place, let us go back a few years. The works of Rutherforth I conceive we may take as representing the teaching common at Cambridge in the middle of the last century. Besides the Essay which I have mentioned, he published in 1754 and 1756, as I have said, his Institutes of Natural Law, being the substance of a Course of Lectures on Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis, read in St John’s College, Cambridge. The work consists of two volumes; the first being on the Rights and Obligations of Mankind, considered as Individuals; the second, on the Rights and Obligations of Mankind, considered as Members of Civil Societies. His work was, I believe, in common use in the University, till that of Paley was introduced. Although it professes to be a Course of Lectures on Grotius, neither the basis of the system, nor its arrangement, have any close resemblance with those of Grotius. The work of Grotius holds a very important place in the history of Moral Philosophy; but in order to adhere to my plan of pursuing at present the history of this Philosophy in England only, I do not attempt to speak of it now. I will only remark (as I believe I have already done), that the fundamental doctrines of Grotius are very nearly the same as those of Cumberland; a general principle of sociality, or regard to the good of humankind, being the main basis of their morality.
This principle in Cumberland, as we then said, was emphatically declared to be something far higher and wider than a regard to private good. But the leading English
We find, in the works of Rutherforth, examples of the modes of procedure which, from this time, were commonly pursued by our moralists for this purpose; these are, for the most part, attempts to deduce special duties in detail, by tracing the special evils which arise from the neglect of them. Thus, in his Essay, insobriety and other sensual indulgences are vices, because they prevent our doing all the good we might, by disturbing our health, occupying our time, distracting our attention. We cannot help seeing how low and lax is the morality to which we should thus be led. It is true that purer precepts, borrowed from holier sources, are constantly operating among Christian moralists, to correct and elevate the perverse and debased conclusions which low and poor principles entailed upon them; but then, in proportion as their moral systems were made in this way practically harmless, they were made theoretically worthless. The bright and firm precepts of Christianity, like new pieces on an old garment, shone here and there the more conspicuously for the sordid and flimsy ground on which they were placed; but though, for the moment, they might serve to conceal the nakedness of the wearers, they tended rather to tear the theorists robe into tatters, than to render it a lasting and suitable vesture.
From the time of which I speak, up to that of Paley, I am not aware that any material alteration took place in the nature of the Ethical Philosophy generally received here.
I come now to the further consideration of Paley’s ethical work, and of the reception which it met with, and especially its reception in this University. Indeed, it is much more my purpose at present to consider the manner in which the book was received, and the place which it holds in the progress of moral speculation in England, than further to discuss the solidity or the weakness of the principles on which it rests. Some indication of the arguments bearing upon this latter question will be requisite for my purpose: for the place of a work in the history of philosophy, cannot be exhibited without showing, in some measure, how far it tended to promote truth, and how far to propagate error. And among the criticisms delivered by objectors to such a work, those only will demand our notice, which contain or illustrate some of the principles intimately involved in the establishment of sound moral doctrines. So far, therefore, as the selection of such criticisms goes, I cannot avoid at present delivering some judgment with respect to Paley’s moral system. But any direct and complete examination of the work, beyond that which an historical view thus requires, I must reserve for future occasions.
You will recollect that Paley’s work was but the summing up of a system of teaching which had long been current in the University, not a newly-introduced subject or system. Moral Philosophy had never ceased to be habitually taught in Cambridge; and the current discussions upon that subject always excited a strong interest among the speculators who were nourished here. The great controversy respecting the a priori evidence of the fundamental principle of Theology and Morality had been zealously carried on in this University at the beginning of the seventeenth century, John Balguy being the main combatant on the a priori side. In 1732, the translation of King’s Origin of Evil, with Gay’s Dissertation and Law’s Notes, showed that the
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, or, as it was originally entitled, The Principles of Morals and Politics, was first published in 1785. It was very favourably received by the public, and was almost immediately adopted into the course of teaching in this University. Mr. Jones, then senior tutor of Trinity College, who discharged the duty of Moderator in 1786 and 1787, introduced it as a standard book in the disputations which were then held in the schools upon a moral question, along with the mathematical disputations: and also in the subsequent examination for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. In fact, as we have already seen, the principle upon which Paley’s book is based, the doctrine that actions are good in as far as they tend to pleasure, and obligatory in as far as they are commanded by a powerful master, had already long been taught in this University, and had undoubtedly taken a strong hold of the minds of men. They had accustomed themselves to look upon it as the only rational and tenable doctrine; and one which was as superior in these respects to the vague and empty doctrines, of loftier sound, which had preceded the time of Locke, as the philosophy of Newton was to that of Aristotle. Hence it seemed to them
But though Paley’s system was received with favour by a large part of the public, and especially by those who, in this place, had long held the opinions which he had systematised with so much clearness and good sense, there were not wanting, from the first, persons who protested against its doctrines as false and immoral.
Such objections to Paley’s doctrines were urged not only
Now it is well known to those who have attended to he history of this science, that in the course of the last century a principle termed the Principle of Least Action, was propounded as a mode of determining the course which a body would follow moving from point to point under the influence of external agents. The import of the principle was, that the body would select such a path, and move in such a manner, that the total action which took place in consequence of the body’s motion would be smaller than if the body had moved in any other line or in any other manner.
Maupertuis, the philosopher who first asserted this principle, conceived that he could establish it as a universal truth by reasonings drawn from the nature of the Deity and the rules of His operation. And if true, it undoubtedly embraced all cases of motion under all circumstances, and promised to give the solution of all mechanical problems whatever.
The truth and the meaning of this principle were the object of a long and angry controversy; and, as is usual in such controversies, the meaning of the principle was so modified as to ensure its truth. For what is quantity of action? Many different meanings might be given to such a word: but it was found that one very simple meaning might be assigned to it, which would make the Principle include many mechanical truths. And in the sequel, it was proved by Lagrange, that, with the definition which had been adopted, the principle was a universal and necessary truth in all possible combinations of bodies and motions.
Thus then the Principle of Least Action was allowed and proved to be true. But how far was it adopted as a means of solving special problems? Did it supersede other methods
If a mathematician of Maupertuis’ time had set about solving a simple problem, or almost any problem, by means of the principle of Least Action, as the best way of obtaining the solution, he would have been very unwise. The principle then was precarious; for every mechanical principle is precarious so long as it rests upon metaphysical reasoning alone, though these may, perhaps, convert known truths into necessary truths:—the principle was of doubtful meaning if true, for its real meaning was only established when its universal truth was proved. But, dismissing these objections, the method was a bad method of solution, as being superfluously and extravagantly general and complex;—introducing the consideration of very many indefinite and entangled elements, in a case which really required but few and simple considerations. And this is not the less the case, now that the principle is demonstrably confirmed. If any mechanical calculator were to attempt to trace the path of a projectile or a planet by Maupertuis’ principle of Least Action, he would be looked upon with a smile of pity by all good mathematicians. He might perhaps excite admiration in some novice, enthusiastic in his love of generalities; but the probability is, that he would fail in his attempt, and be lost in the labyrinth of symbols into which he had so unadvisedly and unnecessarily rushed.
What the Principle of Least Action is in Mechanics, the Principle of Greatest resulting Good is in Morals. No one questions its truth: every investigation has more and more firmly established its reality. But then, how hard to fix its precise meaning? What is Good? Our judgments of the nature of Good change, as our views of the tendency of
But it will perhaps be said that we have no better means of solving the moral problem of our being; it will be demanded what other rule can be proposed for determining the good or evil of our actions than the consideration of their consequences. If such a question were asked, we should have to reply, in the first place, that this is not the matter under consideration. Our business at present is to weigh the value of the theory of morals which
The science of Mechanics was not deduced, nor could have been deduced, as we have seen, from the general Principle of Least Action, though that Principle is indisputably true. How then was this province of human knowledge so demonstrably proved, and made into so solid and extensive a system of truths, general and particular? The answer is plain. It was by the consideration, in the first place, of special problems, reasoned upon by means of principles which, in those narrower applications at least, were self-evident; and—in proportion as these limited principles were clearly seen and steadily possessed—by passing from these to others which were true because they included the partial truths at first discovered; and which were applicable to more comprehensive and complex cases:—universal principles which include all possible cases, being arrived at only through these intermediate ones:—and these very general truths being dimly and vaguely apprehended at first; and never becoming,
Now so far as this general description goes, I do not think it at all extravagant to expect that the history of the Science of Mechanics may be a type of the genuine course of real progress in other sciences, even in those which deal with the internal world of thought and feeling, as well as in those that regard only the external world of matter and motion. But the further prosecution and development of this view, if it is permitted to me to trace it to its consequences, must be the work of future years, and of a maturer study of the subject. At present I have ventured to refer to it, only because I would not seem to criticize existing systems, without any steady belief that a better may be found; or to declare a mode of proceeding to be wrong, without knowing which way to look for the right. I shall now return to the reception of Paley’s system among English readers.
Lecture XII. Gisborne, Pearson, Price, Robert Hall
Besides the argument against the doctrine of expediency, derived from the impossibility of applying it, Mr. Gisborne stated other objections to Paley’s ethical system. He urged that since actions are asserted to be blameable only so far as their consequences are injurious, and since, of the probable consequences, each man is for himself the judge; it follows that, if a man be persuaded that any action, of those which are by the world called crimes, would produce an overweight of good over bad consequences, it ceases to be in him a crime, and becomes a duty: and thus rapine, hypocrisy, perjury, murder, may be entitled to highest rewards of virtue.
With regard to this argument, it goes to prove the untenable character of Paley’s pretended analysis of moral obligation, and has already been considered in substance when I spoke of that subject. I may observe, however, that in stating this argument, Mr. Gisborne has anticipated the answer sometimes made to it;—that all moral rules most be applied in virtue of the conviction of the agent, and by means of his judgment; and that therefore the difficulty arising from this circumstance, whatever it amount to, is no argument against Paley’s principles more than against other system of morals. Mr. Gisborne replies, that the system of general utility is not upon an equal footing with other systems in this respect. The teachers of positive independent morality obtain general definite rules; as, not to take what belongs to another—to perform what we promise—and the
Mr. Gisborne further urged, that Paley’s rule is irreconcilable with the Scriptures, which enjoin us not to do evil that good may come: and he condemned, with a very natural severity, a passage to which I have already referred, in which Paley dilutes and almost nullifies this serious command, by terming it a caution, salutary for the most part, the advantage seldom compensating for the violation of the rule.
Mr. Gisborne was not the only assailant of the Paleian system on its introduction into this University, Dr. Pearson, afterwards the Master of Sidney College, also published two pamphlets (in 1800 and 1801), one directed against the theoretical, and the other against the practical part of Paley’s ethical work. Some of Dr. Pearson’s principal objections were aimed at some of the defects of the work in system and reasoning, which its most ardent admirers could hardly deny; as in the case of the confusion (already noticed) which is to be found in Paley’s definition of virtue. Dr. Pearson’s own definition of Virtue is, Voluntary obedience to the will of God. But he contends that the will of God may be ascertained in
In 1797 a defence of Paley’s Moral Philosophy against its assailants was attempted by Dr. Croft, of Birmingham, formerly of University College, Oxford. But this work was not of a nature to throw much new light upon the subject: and at that period Paley’s book was too firmly established as a standard work on morals to need such a defender. It had become a constant and prominent part of the teaching and the examinations carried on in this University, and both by the hold it thus obtained upon the minds of many young men of good ability and good condition, by its own merits of style and execution, and by its congruity with the principles and feelings of a large portion of English society, its views and reasonings had pervaded the whole mass of English thought. Every attempt at general abstract reasoning on moral subjects was made after the manner of the reasonings in Paley’s works, and generally, upon the same fundamental principles; and thus, besides the direct operation of the work, there was an indirect influence exerted which, in time, tinged the habits of thinking, reasoning and expression in
Besides those who thus objected to Paley’s doctrine, and those who defended it, there was another class who gladly accepted the principle of morality founded upon consequences, and of right and wrong regulated by the bearing of actions upon general utility: and who accepted it only to carry it very much farther than Paley or any of his predecessors had done, and to strip it of all the cautions and limitations by which he had endeavoured to render it salutary.
This body of speculators did not intermediately show itself upon the appearance of Paley’s book, nor even directly after its general reception and establishment here. But when, by being constantly employed in this University as the basis of our moral teaching, the principles of which I speak had become firmly fixed in men’s minds, and recognized by a great part of the nation as the true grounds of human conduct and judgment, it was natural that persons with very different views from Paley should try whether their system might not be built on his foundations. His system embodied in itself the Christian belief, recommended the usually acknowledged virtues, and was, for the most part, opposed to changes in the state of society and government. But persons who wished for a system without such ingredients, found that they could easily employ the doctrine of general utility so as to obtain their own most cherished conclusions. For this end, they held that the principle of the greatest happiness required to be followed out more rigidly, more resolutely, more purely, than Paley had done it: and there were not wanting persons who performed this task with joy and exultation, and then very naturally called upon their countrymen, and especially those of Paley’s school, to admire what they had done, and to give it its practical effect.
I am not now going to discuss any further the speculations
Having thus considered the Moral and Political Philosophy of Paley, and its reception, I have a very few words to add. The doctrine of Paley was accepted, as we have seen, in this University, and among the moralists of the English Church in general. It might seem that there is something congenial to the mental habits of Englishmen in a philosophy of this kind, which, assuming peremptorily an ultimate point of analysis, receives with some impatience and some contempt all endeavours to analyse further. “Obligation is the command of a Master who can reward and punish.” This was a maxim which was all the more easy to assent to, because it spared men the effort of really understanding what Obligation means. “Actions are right which tend to increase human happiness.” Here, again, was a principle which supplied the means of stating arguments in favour of all commonly-received duties; and though from the same principle, arguments might be deduced against many of these duties; and though the principle supplied no means of weighing one side against the other, the Paleians rested in security on the repugnance and disfavour with which they knew that their hearers in general would receive the reckoning of the pleasure produced by vice, when put forwards as a moral element. The usual mode of argumentation was simple. When men spoke of right and wrong as independent qualities,the English moralist demanded definitions, or shrugged his shoulders, and declared that he could not understand the phrases:—when men doubted whether vice might not sometimes produce an overplus of pleasure, the
The Englishman who turned his thoughts towards morals was willing to take the dignity and complacency, but not the labour and risk, of philosophizing;—willing to reason, but not willing to confine himself to precise ideas, so that his reasonings should be conclusive;—willing to reason in favour of virtue, but not willing to weigh the reasons of her adversaries. Through all his pretences at theorizing, he was, in fact, guided by his practical understanding. He handled for a little while the ancient Gordian knots of metaphysical controversy, and then cut them across with the hard sharp weapons which he used in daily life. If he were taxed with this inconsistency, he would perhaps reply that to tie and untie what was so weak a bond in practice, could be little gain. Yet he might be reminded that this process brings as its reward all the gain that man s speculative nature looks for;—the preservation of a coherent and continuous thread of thought and reason, through all the windings of human life and action. When the strong man’s sword alone divides this complicated line, it presents to us nothing but detached fragments and unconnected ends, in which the rational principle sees only contradiction and absurdity; and by which the heart, so far as its views are enlightened by the reason, is disturbed and discontented.
But though in England men dealt so impatiently with the great moral controversies and systems, these controversies still went on, and these systems were still matters of interest, in other parts of the empire. I will give an instance or two of this before quitting the subject.
It was assumed in this place, as proved, that men have not a peculiar Moral Faculty; but elsewhere this Moral Faculty and its analysis were the main subject of discussion.
“But it [crime] consists in certain moral relations, discovered by reason, in the same manner as we discover, by reason, the truths of Geometry or Algebra. But what are the relations, I ask, of which you here talk? In the case stated above, I see first, goodwill and good offices in one person; then ill-will and ill-offices in the other. Between these, there is the relation of contrariety. Does the crime consist in that relation? But suppose a person bore me ill-will, or did me ill-offices; and I, in return, were indifferent towards him, or did him good offices. Here is the same relation of contrariety; and yet my conduct is often highly laudable. Twist and turn this matter as much as you will, you can never rest the morality on relation; but must have recourse to the decisions of sentiment.
“When it is affirmed that two and three are equal to the half of ten; this relation of equality I understand perfectly. I conceive that if ten be divided into two parts, of which one has as many units as the other; and if any of these parts be compared to two added to three, it will contain as many units as that compound number. But when you draw thence a comparison to moral relations, I own that I am altogether at a loss to understand you. A moral action, a crime, such as ingratitude, is a complicated object. Does the morality consist in the relation of its parts to each other? How? After what manner? Specify the relation,
Hutcheson the Irishman, and Hume the Scotchman, thus seemed to trample on the very ruins of the old fortress of immutable morality, which English moralists had abandoned. But a champion, and a very able one, soon issued from Wales, and did no little to restore the fortunes of the fight. I speak of Dr. Price, the son of a dissenting minister in Glamorganshire, himself also an eminent dissenting minister. He published, in 1757, a volume of Essays (republished in 1787), in which the foundations of morals are discussed; and in this work there are, perhaps, the germs of a greater change in the prevalent philosophy of the subject than has yet taken place. He undertook the then unpopular cause of Immutable and Eternal Morality, And in him we find that which gives a new aspect to the controversy; the apprehension of the imperfection of Lockers philosophy, as being the ground of the moral fallacy. Price saw that the dogma, that all our ideas are derived from Sensation and Reflection, was not readily reconcilable with our apprehension of Moral Good and Evil; which, it had appeared by the course of speculation in this century, cannot be traced to either of these sources. But then, he turns round and asks, are these the only Ideas which we cannot refer to these asserted fountains of all Ideas? Far from it. All our knowledge of all universal truths involves Ideas which, as much as these, are irreducible to sensation and reflection. Whence,
I shall not pursue this subject further at present. I will only observe that these views of Price seem to me to be capable of being developed into a very valuable corrective of the errors of his contemporaries. You will not be surprised to find that he expressed a strong disapprobation of the doctrine of Paley. In 1787 he published a new edition of his work, and in this he inserted a Note upon Paley’s work. After giving his statement of some of Paley’s principles (p. 485), he says, “Never have I met with a theory of morals which has appeared to me more exceptionable.” He then makes objections to some of Paley’s special conclusions, and adds, “I am very sensible of the merit of many parts of this work. But these parts of it (those to which he had referred) I have read with surprise, and also with a concern, the pain of which has been much increased by the reflection that they contain principles which have been inculcated many
Under present circumstances, it does not appear to me that I could with advantage to you, my audience, pursue the history of Moral Philosophy among succeeding writers. I have not shunned to declare my conviction that the system of morals which is now taught among us is unworthy of om: descent and office; and it will be my endeavour in future years, as far as my powers and opportunities allow, further to point out, and, if possible, to remedy the defects which I lament. That they are lamented by others also, by a great body of the well-wishers to our common country, I do not doubt; and I shall not hesitate to conclude by a passage expressive of this feeling, written by a great preacher of our own time, though not of our own Church. (
“Here I cannot forbear remarking a great change which has taken place m the whole manner of reasoning on the topics of morality and religion, from what prevailed in the last century, and, as far as my information extends, in any preceding age. This, which is an age of revolutions, has also produced a strange revolution in the method of viewing these subjects, the most important by far that can engage the attention of man. The simplicity of our ancestors, nourished by the sincere milk of the word, rather than by the tenets of a disputatious philosophy, was content to let morality remain on the firm basis of the dictates of conscience and the will of God. They considered virtue as something ultimate, as bounding the mental prospect. They never supposed for a moment there was anything to which it stood merely in the relation of a means, or that within the narrow confines of this momentary state anything great enough could be found to be its end or
“They arranged these things in the following order:—Religion, comprehending the love, fear, and service of the Author of our being, they placed first; social morality founded on its dictates, confirmed by its sanctions, next; and the mere physical good of society they contemplated as subordinate to both. Everything is now reversed. The pyramid is inverted: the first is last, and the last first. Religion is degraded from its preeminence, into the mere handmaid of social morality; social morality into an instrument of advancing the welfare of society; and the world is all in all. Nor have we deviated less from the example of antiquity than from that of our pious forefathers. The philosophers of antiquity, in the absence of superior light, consulted with reverence the permanent principles of nature, the dictates of conscience, and the best feelings of the heart, which they employed all the powers of reason and eloquence to unfold, to adorn, to enforce; and thereby formed a luminous commentary on the law written on the heart. The virtue which they inculcated grew out of the stock of human nature; it was a warm and living virtue. It was the moral man, possessing in every limb and feature, in all its figure and movements, the harmony, dignity, and variety which belong to the human form; an effort of unassisted nature to restore that image of God which sin had mutilated and defaced. Imperfect, as might be expected, their morality was often erroneous; but in its great outlines it had all the
“How is it, that on a subject on which men have thought deeply from the moment they began to think, and where consequently, whatever is entirely and fundamentally new, must be fundamentally false, how is it, that in contempt of the experience of past ages, and of all precedents human and divine, we have ventured into a perilous path which no eye has explored, no foot has trod; and have undertaken, after the lapse of six thousand years, to manufacture a morality of our own, to decide by a cold calculation of interest, by a ledger-book of profit and of loss, the preference of truth to falsehood, of piety to blasphemy, and of humanity and justice to treachery and blood?
“In the science of morals we are taught by this system to consider nothing as yet done; we are invited to erect a fresh fabric on a fresh foundation. All the elements and sentiments which entered into the essence of virtue before are melted down and cast into a new mould. Instead of appealing to any internal principle, every thing is left to calculation, and determined by expediency. In executing this plan, the jurisdiction of conscience is abolished, her
“Everything, without exception, is made an affair of calculation, under which are comprehended not merely the duties we owe to our fellow-creatures, but even the love and adoration which the Supreme Being claims at our hands. His claims are set aside, or suffered to lie in abeyance, until it can be determined how far they can be admitted on the principles of expediency, and in what respect they may interfere with the acquisition of temporal advantages. Even here, nothing is yielded to the suggestions of conscience, nothing to the movements of the heart: all is dealt out with a sparing hand, under the stint and measure of calculation. Instead of being allowed to love God with all our heart, and all our strength, the first and great commandment, the portion of love assigned him is weighed out with the utmost scrupulosity, and the supposed excess more severely censured than the real deficiency.”
To this I can only say,
Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli.
On us the shame
That we must bear and not refute the blame.
Lecture XIII. Bentham: His Biography, His Style of Discussion
In order to complete our view of the progress of Moral Philosophy in England in recent times, I will give some account of Jeremy Bentham and his speculations on the subjects with which we are here concerned: for no moralist has been placed so high by his admirers, or has been more resolute and comprehensive in applying his principles to practical policy and legislation. The school of Bentham, for a time, afforded as near a resemblance as modern times on show, of the ancient schools of philosophy, which were formed and held together by an almost unbounded veneration for their master, and in which the disciples were content to place their glory in understanding and extending the master’s principles. And though, to the general public, the Benthamite doctrines bad an exceedingly harsh and repulsive aspect, and were made formidable by the sweeping purposes of reform with which they were connected; yet Bentham’s real acuteness in discussion, his laborious perseverance, his exhibitions of complete and exhaustive systems of analysis and reasoning on many of the largest political questions; gave him great weight with many statesmen both at home and abroad. Perhaps few moral and political writers have exercised a greater influence upon their generation than he has done; and to us he is especially interesting as manifesting in a more complete and consistent form the results of that scheme of morality, which, in a less resolute manner, was put forwards by Paley.
Bentham lived in our own time (he died in 1832), and by
It may be worth our while to notice some circumstances connected with the earlier period of Bentham’s literary and personal history. He was born in London in 1748. His father was a prosperous attorney, extremely desirous of the worldly prosperity of his son, whose precocious talents promised to gratify the paternal wish. He was sent to Queen’s College, Oxford, at the unusually early age of twelve; and took his degree, not only of B.A. but of M.A. before he was of full man’s age. Many of his school and college
He appears to have been unhappy at Oxford, and to have learnt little there: but in later life, he was accustomed to refer to this period his adoption of his favourite universal principle of Morals and Politics (
Bentham, from this time, was engaged in following out his principle; but how far it assumed additional value in his hands we may afterwards have to examine. He also then or soon afterwards assumed the office, which he repeatedly exercised at subsequent periods, of a severe and pungent critic of current doctrines and their authors. The disposition to such criticism gave rise to his first considerable publication, A Fragment on Government. This subject was probably suggested to him in an especial manner by his residence at Oxford; for the work was a critique of certain portions of the Commentaries of Blackstone, whom, as I have said, he had himself heard lecturing. The Commentaries on the Laws of England, then recently published, had been received with great general favour, and acquired at once the reputation they still, I believe, retain. Yet probably there are few persons who, looking at the work carefully, will hold that it is composed in a very philosophical spirit, or that the general reasonings which are introduced, and those on Government in particular, are rigorous and blameless. Probably most of the admirers of the work, looking to it for merit of quite other kinds—a clear and connected exposition of the existing law of England—would not think the goodness or badness of logic and philosophy of the author’s general preliminary reflections, a matter of much consequence. Not such was the temper of Bentham. A fallacy, a sophism, or what he thought such, was to him an inevitable provocation to a vehement attack; and on this as on other occasions, he rushed upon such things as his prey, with something of the instinctive keenness with which a cat springs upon a mouse. I think we may allow that many of his objections to Blackstone’s loose general talk are reasonable, though we may
In this work he introduced Utility as the fundamental principle of political morality;—as the test, for instance, when resistance to government is allowable. Thus Ch. iv. art. xx. “It is the principle of utility accurately apprehended and steadily applied, that affords the only clew to guide a man through these straights.” And Art. xxi. “It is then, we may say, and not till then, allowable to, if not incumbent on, every man, as well on the score of duty as of interest, to enter into measures of resistance, when, according to the best calculation he is able to make, the probable mischiefs of resistance (speaking with respect to the community in general) appear less to him than the probable mischiefs of submission” (
It does not appear that at this time Bentham had learnt to consider the term utility as a far more imperfect expression of his favourite principle, than the greatest good of Us greatest number, which he afterwards much preferred. We
This passage, in the second edition, is a specimen of the impossibility, under which Bentham soon began to labour, of seeing anything but falsehood, fraud, and self-seeking greediness,
The reception of the Fragment on Government was not
He had turned aside from the practice of the law, in which his father had tried to involve him; he now gave himself entirely to his political and moral speculations, and was soon looked upon by his friends as an acute and powerful thinker, and a great master of political and jurisprudential philosophy;—of course of the most liberal cast. He was employed upon a work On the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which was already printed in 1781, though not published till 1789. In his Preface to the second edition,—a most amusing piece of autobiography,—he narrates, (Art. xii.) that Lord Shelburne got into his hands the unpublished treasure of wisdom, and could not be withheld from reading it to the ladies at the breakfast-table; and that, inasmuch as all the great springs of human action were distinctly referred to, this occasioned some embarrassment.
But this Preface is most curious as illustrating what I have already said, that Bentham could not conceive that those who dissented from him in any degree, were not actuated by some selfish view and some fraudulent purpose. He
But Bentham had already, as I have said, gone on from the Fragment, to the composition and printing of his Principles of Moral and Legislation. His friends already called him “the Newton of legislation,” and undoubtedly he expected that the publication of his work would make the world regard him in that light. Why he delayed so long the publication of the work already printed, I do not know: but a little later he was induced by various causes to travel into Russia, (1784.) During the time that he was there, Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was published, in 1785; and Bentham’s friends could not fail to see in how great a degree this anticipated his system. His correspondent, George Wilson, gives him this account. “There is a Mr. Paley, a parson and archdeacon of Carlisle, who has written a book called Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, in quarto, and it has gone through two editions with prodigious applause. It is founded entirely on utility, or, as he chooses to call it, the will of God as declared by expediency, to which he adds, as a supplement, the revealed will of God. But notwithstanding this, and
In reply to this, Bentham writes in a strain of grotesque pleasantry: “I had ordered horses for England to take triumphant possession of the throne of legislation, but finding it full of Mr. Paley, I ordered them back into the stable. Since then I have been torturing myself to no purpose, to find any blind alley in the career of fame, which Mr. Paley’s magnanimity may have disdained.” And again, in the same letter, “To speak seriously of Parson Paley, I should not have expected so much from him, etc. People were surprised to see how green my eyes were for some time after I received
It may seem superfluous to notice misstatements so gross and partiality so blind: but without at all wishing to deny great merit to some of Bentham’s labours, (as I shall soon have to show), I am obliged to say that such misrepresentations and such unfairness are the usual style of controversy of him and his disciples; and it is fit that we, in entering upon the consideration of their writings, should be aware of this, I conceive it was more to Paley’s credit to “leave the utilitarian
Lecture XIV. Bentham: His Principles of Morals and Legislation
Before I notice any of Bentham’s more peculiar merits, I must again illustrate the extravagant unfairness to adversaries which was habitual in him.
The Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation appeared before the public in 1789. The first chapter of this work is “On the Principle of Utility”; the second, “On Principles adverse to that of Utility.” These adverse principles are stated to be two: The Principle of Asceticism, and the Principle of Sympathy. The Principle of Asceticism is that principle which approves of actions in proportion as they tend to diminish human happiness, and conversely, disapproves of them as they tend to augment it. (ch. ii. § iii.) The Principle of Sympathy (§ xii.) is that which approves or disapproves of certain actions, “merely because a man finds himself disposed to approve or disapprove of them, holding up that approbation or disapprobation as a sufficient reason for itself, and disclaiming the necessity of looking out for any extrinsic ground.” And these two Principles are, it seems, according to Bentham’s view, the only Principles which are, or which can be, opposed to the Principle of Utility!
Now it is plain that these are not only not fair representations of any principles ever held by moralists, or by any persons speaking gravely and deliberately, but that they are too extravagant and fantastical to be accepted even as caricatures of any such principles. For who ever approved of actions because they tend to make mankind miserable? or
But who then are the ascetic school who are thus ridiculed? We could not, I think, guess from the general description thus given; but from a note, it appears, that he had the Stoical Philosophers and the Religious Ascetics in his mind. With regard to the Stoics, it would of course be waste of time and thought to defend them from such coarse buffoonery as this, which does not touch their defects, whatever those may be. With regard to the Religious Ascetics, I may notice a further trait in Bentham’s account of them, in order to show how strongly the spirit of satire grew upon him. He says that the principle of following certain courses of action, because they make men miserable, has been extensively pursued by men in their treatment of themselves, but only rarely in their treatment of others, and particularly in matters of government;—that saints have often “voluntarily yielded themselves a prey to vermin; but though many persons of this class have wielded the reins of empire, we read of none who have set themselves to work and made laws on purpose with a view of stocking the body politic with the breed of highwaymen, housebreakers, and incendiaries. If at any time they have suffered the nation to be preyed upon by swarms of idle pensioners, or useless placemen, it has rather been from negligence and imbecility than from any settled plan of oppressing and plundering of the people.” This might appear,
And so much for the ascetic principle according to Bentham; for you will recollect that at present, I am not discussing his doctrines, but pointing out his habits of thought and expression;—a task which will not be without its value in enabling us to estimate his doctrines and his arguments.
Perhaps, however, in order to show the effect produced by this mode of arguing, if arguing it is to be called, I may quote one of Mr. Bentham’s disciples, who at a later period (in 1832) published the Dentology of his master, and added some remarks of his own. “The ascetic principle,” he says, “received a mortal wound from Mr. Bentham, by his exposure of it in the Introduction to Morals and Legislation. No man is, perhaps, now to be found who would contend that the pursuit of pain ought to be the great object of existence.” It is marvellous to find a man who had so entirely confined his attention to Bentham’s writings, as to suppose that there ever were such people, merely because Bentham had said so, in what I must be allowed to call his buffoonery.
But this is not a solitary instance of the kind of worship with which Bentham was treated. Every farcical representation which he gave of his opponents was considered
This may be seen in the case of the other Principle, adverse to that of Utility, which Bentham mentions—the Principle of Sympathy. For who ever asserted that he approved or disapproved of actions merely because he found himself disposed to do so, and that this was reason sufficient in itself for his moral judgments? Or what advantage can be gained to moral philosophy by such misrepresentations as this, whatever it be which is thus misrepresented? which is a point, here, as in the other case, quite obscure, in consequence of the reckless extravagance of the misrepresentation. In a note however, again, we learn that the philosophers who are all included in this account are Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Beattie, Price, Clarke, Wollaston, and many others. And as a further example of Bentham’s mode of dealing with such matters, I may notice what he says of one class of these. “One man says he has a thing made on purpose to tell him what is right and what wrong: and that it is called a moral sense, and then he goes to work at his ease, and says, such a thing is right, and such a thing is wrong. Why? ‘Because my moral sense tells me so.’” And after treating various other classes of moralists with the like fairness, he has suitably led the way to the last class which he mentions. “The fairest and openest of all is the sort of man who speaks out and says, I am of the number of the Elect: now God himself takes care to inform the Elect what is right: etc. etc. If therefore a man wants to know what is right and what is wrong, he has nothing to do but to come to me.”
Extravagant as this ridicule is—for I should try in vain to conceal my opinion that it is nothing better than extravagant ridicule—it has been accepted in perfectly good faith and humble admiration by Mr. Bentham’s followers. The editor of the Deontology says with the greatest gravity (i. 321), “The antagonist to the felicity-maximising principle is the ipse-dixit principle.” And he considers this as so settled a matter that he proposes to use the derivatives of this term, and to speak of ipse-dixitists and ipse-dixitism. Certainly, if there have ever been, in modern times, persons who have quoted the words of their master with a deference equal to that which in ancient times gave rise to the phrase ipse dixit, the disciples of Mr. Bentham are peculiarly and eminently ipse-dixitists.
But wild as this mode of dealing with adverse moralists is (and we have seen that it is used towards all the most eminent moralists of the preceding century), Bentham appears to have soon come to think that it was too good for them. The Principle of Sympathy and Antipathy, was, he began to think, too tolerant a designation for the doctrine of those who had recognized any other basis of morality than Utility. In 1789, he added to his work a note in which he said that the Principle ought rather to be styled the Principle of Caprice. It is evident that such an expression could only mean that the person using it could not, or would not, understand the reasons given by those whom he thus called capricious. And so far, no doubt, it had a meaning. It is easy for two opposite and opinions, to call each other capricious, as it is to call each other by any other condemnatory term; but it is plain this shows nothing but the incapacity for arguing, in those who use such terms. When men have written long and careful and acute trains of reasoning and speculations, as the moralists have whom Bentham condemns, a man must have
The same note contains another very curious example of the incredible confidence in himself, and carelessness of what was urged by others, with which Bentham disposed of doctrines which he rejected. He says that many maxims of law have derived their authority merely from the love of jingle—which he further illustrates by some laborious pleasantry about Orpheus and Themis: and he gives, as his examples, Delegatus non potest delegare, and Servitus Servitutis non datur.
I may notice, too, as examples of the boldness for which we must be prepared in dealing with his doctrines, the imperious manner in which he rejects and alters the significations of words. Thus, in illustrating the Principle of Antipathy (§ xiv. note), he says that it is on this principle that certain acts are reprobated, as being unnatural—for instance the practice of exposing children. No, he says, this language is not to be allowed. Unnatural when it means anything, means unfrequent; and here it is not the unfrequency, but the frequency of the act of which you complain. It is curious that he should have thought he could prevent men from calling, as they use to do, acts unnatural, which are contrary to those natural and universal feelings which all men recognize as the proper guides of life. But that was precisely the ground of his displeasure with the word. It recognized, in parental affection, a natural and acknowledged guide of human action; and this recognition was to be contradicted. This however leads us to the doctrines themselves, which we are not here discussing.
At a later period Bentham became quite wanton and reckless in his innovations in language; but even at the
Again he says, (c. v. i.) “Pains and pleasures may be called by one word, interesting perceptions:” which they may, only if we disregard the ordinary meaning of the word.
I might point out, as examples of Bentham’s self-complacent boldness, his extraordinary misstatements with regard to the classical languages and their literature; for instance, his ascribing the doctrine of the four cardinal virtues to Aristotle; and the equally extraordinary confusion which prevails in his attempt to arrange the sciences, a confusion which necessarily resulted from his complete ignorance of the subject. But it is our more special business to regard him as a moralist.
In considering Bentham’s system of Morality, I by no means wish to make it my sole business to point out the errors and defects of it. On the contrary, it will be very important to my purpose to show what amount of truth there resides in it; since by so doing, I shall both account for the extensive acceptance which it has found, and shall be advancing towards that system which contains all that is true in all preceding systems: and that is plainly the system at which we of this day ought to aim.
Of Bentham’s system, indeed, we have in a great measure spoken, in speaking of Paley’s: for as I have said, the two systems are in principle the same; and the assertions
Can this be done? Has Bentham done this? If he is, is it not really a valuable task performed? These questions naturally occur.
In reply, I may say that the task would undoubtedly be a valuable one, if it were possible; but that, so far as the moral value of actions is concerned, it is not possible, for reasons which I will shortly state; that even for the appropriation of punishment in the construction of laws,—the
Let it be taken for granted, as a proposition which is true, if the terms which it involves be duly understood, that actions are right and virtuous in proportion as they promote the happiness of mankind; the actions being considered upon the whole, and with regard to all their consequences. Still, I say, we cannot make this truth the basis of morality, for two reasons: first, we cannot calculate all the consequences of any action, and thus cannot estimate the degree in which it promotes human happiness;—second, happiness is derived from moral elements, and therefore we cannot properly derive morality from happiness. The calculable happiness resulting from actions cannot determine their virtue; first, because the resulting happiness is not calculable; and secondly, because the virtue is one of the things which determines the resulting happiness.
These assertions are, I think, tolerably evident of themselves; but we may dwell upon them a little longer. First, I say the amount of happiness resulting from any action is not calculable. If we ask whether a given action will increase or diminish the total amount of human happiness,
But the disciples of Bentham will perhaps urge that falsehood is wrong, even if it produce immediate pleasure, because the violation of a general rule is an evil which no single pleasurable consequence can counterbalance; and because, by acts of falsehood, we weaken and destroy oar own habit of truth. And the like might be said in the other case. Now when men speak in this manner, they are undoubtedly approaching to a sound and tenable morality. I say approaching to it; for they are still at a considerable distance from a really moral view, as I shall have to show. But though when men speak in this manner, they are approaching to sound morality, they are receding from the fundamental principle of Bentham. For on that principle, how does it appear that the evil, that is the pain, arising from violating a general rule once, is too great to be over-balanced by the pleasurable consequences of that single violation? The actor says, I acknowledge the general rule;
But let us look at the other reason against an act of falsehood, that by such acts we weaken and destroy our habit of truth. To this, the person concerned might reply, that a habit of truth, absolute and unconditional, is, on Bentham’s principles, of no value; that if there be cases in which the pleasure arising from falsehood is greater than the pleasure arising from truth, then, in these cases, falsehood is virtuous and veracity is vicious; that, on these principles, the habit to be cultivated is not a habit of telling truth always, but a habit of telling truth when it produces pleasure more than pain. To this I do not know what our Benthamite could reply, except that a habit of telling truth so limited, is not a habit of veracity at all; that the only way to form a habit of veracity is, to tell truth always, and without limiting conditions; that is, to tell truth if we tell anything; not to tell falsehood. This again is teaching
The other branch of the argument will be pursued in the next Lecture.
Lecture XV. Bentham: Objections to His System
In the last Lecture, I stated that the Benthamite scheme of determining the morality of actions by the amount of happiness which they produce, is incapable of being executed for two reasons; first, that we cannot calculate all the pleasure or pain resulting from any one action; and next, that the happiness produced by actions depends on their morality. I have attempted to illustrate the former argument. I now proceed to the latter.
In the last lecture I tried to show that the Benthamite doctrine, that acts arc virtuous in proportion as they calculably produce happiness,—that is, again, according to the Benthamite analysis, pleasure,—cannot be made the basis of morality, because we cannot for such purposes calculate the amount of pleasure which acts produce: and if we attempt to remedy the obvious defects of calculations on such subjects, by taking to account rules and habits, we run away from the declared fundamental principle altogether.
To shew further how impossible it is to found morality on the Benthamite basis, I now proceed to observe that we cannot derive the moral value of actions from the happiness which they produce, because the happiness depends upon the morality. Why should a man be truthful and just? Because acts of veracity and justice, even if they do not produce immediate gratification to him and his friends in other ways, (and it may easily be that they do not,) at least produce pleasure in this way;—that they procure him his own approval and that of all good men. To us, this language is intelligible and significant; but the Benthamite
This consideration of virtue itself as one of the sources of pleasure,—one of the elements of happiness,—is a point at which, as appears to me, the Benthamite doctrine loses all the clearness which, in its early steps, it so ostentatiously puts forward. Considering the pretensions of the system to rigorous analysis, I cannot but think there is something robustly rude in the mode in which these matters of self-approval and approval from others are disposed of. That self-approval, and the approbation of neighbours, are pleasures, cannot be denied. Accordingly, they are reckoned by
That Bentham really does recur to Public Opinion, however loose and insecure a foundation that may be, for the basis of Morality, is indeed abundantly evident from the general course of his discussion of the subject. Among the Sanctions by which the laws of human conduct are enforced, he puts in a prominent place, and constantly and emphatically refers to, what he calls the Popular or Moral Sanction; that is his often-repeated phrase,—the Popular or Moral Sanction,—as an enforcing power, which stands side by side with legal punishment, physical pain, and the like. Popular and Moral with him, then, are, in this application at least, synonymous, or coincident. He cannot tell us what is moral, except he first know what is popular. Popular Opinion is, with him, an ultimate fact, upon which Morality depends. He cannot correct Popular Opinion in any authoritative manner, for it supplies one of his ruling principles; namely, one of the pleasures by which he determines what is right and what is wrong. If murder, sensuality, falsehood, oppression, be in any cases popular, this popularity tends to make them virtues, for it gives them the reward of virtue; and his virtue looks only to reward, and to such reward among others. True,—he may, in certain cases, say that the pain produced by such acts overweighs the pleasure, even including the pleasure of popular applause. But then, if the applause bestowed by popular opinion be strong enough, if the pleasure which it gives becomes still greater, the opposite pain may thus be overbalanced, and those acts are still virtues. That murder, sensuality, falsehood, oppression, may, by many men, be practised as virtues, on account of such applause, is, no doubt, true; but it cannot but sound strange to us, to hear that doctrine called Morality, which approves of them on this account. All mankind include in their notion of moral rules this condition;—that such rules, when delivered by a person who, being a moralist,
Of course, we too know that such names have their influence, and that, a very powerful one. We know that the popular voice on subjects of morality produces a mighty effect upon men. We rejoice in this influence, when it is on the side of true morality. We rejoice, too, to think that in general it is so;—that truth, kindness, justice, purity, orderliness, are generally approved by men; and that, in general, the popular voice enforces the moralist’s precepts. But we do not take from the popular voice our judgment as to what actions are truthful, kind, just, pure, orderly, Bentham might perhaps reply, but neither does he thus form,
But it may be asked, does not the popular judgment of certain classes of actions as right, and certain others as wrong, depend upon an apprehension, however obscure and confused, that the former class are advantageous to the community, the latter disadvantageous! To this I reply, that if by advantage be meant external tangible advantage, independent of mental pleasures, I conceive that they do not so depend: and if we take in mental pleasures, we are brought back to that independent moral element which the utilitarians wish to exclude. By if it be alleged that this (namely, general advantage) is the ground of the public opinion of the rightness and wrongness of actions, let it be shown that it is so. Let the Benthamite begin by analysing public opinion into such elements; and let him use, in his system, those elements, and not the unanalysed opinion in that compound concrete form in which he calls it “the popular or moral sanction.” If Morality depend upon external advantage, both directly, and through the popular apprehension of it, let this advantage be made, once for all,
But again: It may be said that the public opinion of men, and of communities, as to what is right and wrong, is a fact in man’s nature, and an important fact; of which all moralists must recognize the influence: and it may be asked whether Bentham ascribes to it more influence than justly belongs to it. And to this I reply, that the public opinion as to what is right and wrong is undoubtedly a very important fact in man’s nature; and that the most important lesson to be learnt from it appears to be this:—that man cannot help judging of actions, as being right or wrong; and that men universally reckon this as the supreme difference of actions;—the most important character which they can have. I add, that this characteristic of human nature marks man as a moral being; as a being endowed with a
As I have said, the real importance of the great fact of the universal and perpetual judgments of mankind concerning actions, as being right and wrong, is, that such judgments are thus seen to be a universal property of human nature: a constant and universal act, which man performs as being man. And it is because man does thus perpetually and universally form such judgments, that he is a moral creature, and that his actions are the subjects of morality; not because he is susceptible of pleasure and pain. And this is the reason why animals are not the subjects of morality;—they have no idea of right and wrong;—their acts are neither moral nor immoral. Animals may be indeed the objects of morality. We may treat them with kindness or with unkindness; and cruelty to animals is a vice, as well as cruelty to men. But cruelty to animals and cruelty to men stand upon a very different footing in morality. The pleasures of animals are elements of a very different order from the pleasures of men. We are bound to endeavour to augment the pleasures of men, not only because they are pleasures, but because they are human pleasures. We are bound to men by the universal tie of humanity, of human brotherhood. We have no such tie to animals. We are to be humane to them, because we are human, not because we and they alike feel animal pleasures. The Morality which depends upon the increase of pleasure alone would make it our duty to increase the pleasures of pigs or of geese rather than those of men, if we were sure that the pleasure we could give them were greater than the pleasures of men.
Such is the result of the doctrine which founds Morality upon the increase of pleasure. Such is a fair deduction from Bentham’s principles. Do you think this an exaggerated
This appears to me a very remarkable passage, for the light which it throws upon Bentham’s doctrine, as he found himself bound by the nature of his principle to accept it, when logically unfolded. When he had not only made pleasure his guide, but rejected all that especially made it human pleasure, allowing no differences but those of intensity and duration; he had, and could have, no reason for stopping at the pleasures of man. And thus his principle became, not the greatest amount of human happiness,—as
I say nothing further of Mr. Bentham’s assumption in the above passage, that because a child cannot yet take care of itself, and cannot converse with us, its pleasures are therefore of no more import to the moralist than those of a kitten or a puppy. We hold that there is a tie which binds together all human beings, quite different from that which binds them to cats and dogs;—and that a man, at any stage of his being, is to be treated according to his human capacity, not according to his mere animal condition. It would be easy to show what strange results would follow from estimating the value of children in men’s eyes by Mr. Bentham’s standard as here stated; but I shall not pursue the subject.
There is another remark which I wish to make on Mr. Bentham’s mode of proceeding, which is exemplified in this passage, among many other places. Mr. Bentham finding in the common judgments and common language of men a recognition of a supreme distinction of right and wrong, which does not yield to his analysis, is exceedingly disposed to quarrel with the terms which imply this distinction; while at the same time he cannot really exclude this distinction from his own reasonings; (as no man can;) nor avoid using the terms which imply it, and which he so vehemently
† So, Principles, Ch. xviii. Art. i. Classes of Offenses, Art. i. “It is necessary at the outset to make a distinction between such acts as are or may be, and such as ought to be offenses.”
So, same Chap. Art. xxv. note, he would call the person benefitted by a trust, the beneficiendary, [sic] “to put it more effectually out of doubt that the party meant was the party who ought to receive the benefit, whether he actually receives it or no.”
So, same Chap. Art. xxvii. text and note: “The trust is either of the number of those which ought by law to subsist…or is not.” “What articles ought to be created [property], etc.” The whole page and note swarms with oughts.
(So, same Chap. Par. xlii. “Whether any and what modes of servitude ought to be established and kept on foot?” Again, Par. xlvi, lix.
Perhaps it may be worthwhile considering for a moment what may appear to be the reason for the extraordinary manner in which Bentham and the Benthamites have been in the habit of treating their opponents; for their perpetual assertions that the opponents, principles are unmeaning—are mere assumptions—perpetual beggings of the question—ipse dixits—vicious rounds of baseless reasons:—for this is their usual mode of speaking of opponents. They rarely quote them; and appear to conceive that men so extremely in error could not have injustice done them;—that any assertion might be made about them, for their absurdity was so broad that the most random shot must hit it. This appears to be the mood in which Bentham speaks of all opposing moralists. Now you may ask, whether any probable reason can be given why he should allow himself such liberties;—why he should be so incapable of seeing any sense or reason in any previous scheme of ethics. I do not pretend to explain the matter: but I think we may go as far as this:—That his mind was so completely possessed by his own system of thought, that he could not see any sense or reason in any differing system: and that it was this want of any sense or reason apparent to him in the opinions of others which raised him into his strange mood of arrogance, his intoxication of self-complacent contempt for adverse systems and arguments, which his admiring disciples held to be so overwhelming to all opponents. I think we may go further. We may see a little nearer why it was that he found no meaning in opposite systems. It appears to me to have been thus. He had set himself to discover and lay down a general principle of human action by which all rules of action must be determined. His principle was, that we must aim at a certain external end:—at happiness, as it is first stated:—but happiness is plainly not altogether external; happiness depends upon the mind itself. Divest, then, the object of this condition; make it
In quitting these general considerations, and turning to detail, it would be unjust to Bentham not to allow that in that portion of Ethics in which his principle is really applicable, there is a great deal of felicity, and even of impressiveness, in the manner in which he follows out his doctrine. I speak of the virtues and duties which depend directly upon Benevolence. He enjoins kindness, gentleness, patience, meekness, good humour, in a manner which makes him conspicuous among the kindlier moralists. He has for instance such precepts as this: “Never do evil for mere ill
Lecture XVI. Bentham: Classification of Offenses
I have found myself obliged to speak with so much dispraise of Bentham’s arrogance and unfairness, and of the narrow and erroneous basis of his moral philosophy, that you may perhaps not expect me to find in him anything which is valuable. This however is far from being the case. He laboured assiduously to reduce jurisprudence to a system; and such an attempt, if carried through with any degree of consistency, could hardly fail to lead to valuable results. In a body of knowledge so wide and various, all system-making must bring into view real connexions and relations of parts; and even if the basis of the system be wrong, the connexions and relations which it points out will admit of being translated into the terms of a truer philosophy. As Bacon says, truth emerges from error, sooner than from confusion. But Bentham’s principle, of general advantage as the standard of good in actions, is really applicable to a very great extent in legislation; and covers almost the whole of the field with which the legislature is concerned. Almost, I say, not quite the whole: and even this almost applies only to the material and external limitation of advantage, to which Bentham professes and endeavours to confine himself. If we make such advantage the absolute and uncorrected standard of law, we shall find that we cannot advance to the highest point of good legislation. But still the consideration of general utility, as the object of laws, extends so far, that an arrangement of the whole field of law, formed on this principle, will not fail to be interesting and instructive in a very high degree. Accordingly, the parts of Bentham’s writings where
I will now give some account of that Chapter of Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation which is entitled Division of Offenses. I shall consider it in some measure with reference
His first division of Offenses is into five Classes, which are,
1. Private Offenses, detrimental to assignable individuals.
2. Semi-Public Offenses, detrimental to a class or circle of persons, but not to assignable individuals.
3. Self-regarding Offenses against a mane’s self.
4. Public Offenses, against the whole community.
5. Multiform Offenses, (1) Offenses by Falsehood, (2) Offenses against Trust.
We already see the incongruity of the character of the fifth Class, as compared with the other four; we see that the difficulty of a homogeneous and symmetrical classification has not been overcome by Bentham; and this he fairly acknowledges. And notwithstanding this defect, we may allow that the classification is so far, good, simple, and convenient. Bentham subdivides these classes according to the interests which are affected; and thus he finds as Divisions of Class 1,
Offenses against, 1, Person; 2, Property; 3, Reputation; 4, Condition; 5, Person and Reputation; 6, Person and Property.
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You will recollect that our Divisions of Rights were those of, 1, Person; 2, Property; 3, Contract; 4, Family; and 5, Government.
And to see how far these are parallel with the classification of Bentham, we may observe that Offenses against the rights of Contract are relegated by Bentham into another general class, that of Multiform Offenses, by an arrangement which he allows to be anomalous; while both kinds of Rights in our scheme, those of Family and those of Government, are violated by Offenses against Condition: the term Condition being used by Bentham in a very wide sense, to include the Rights of Master and Servant, Guardian and Ward, Parent and Child, Husband and Wife. On this we may remark, that some of these conditions are rather expressed by Rights of Contract than by anything requiring a separate class. Thus the Rights of Master and Servant are, in this country at least. Rights of that kind of Contract called Hiring and Service; while the principal conditions, as Parent and Child, Husband and Wife, are evidently expressed by Rights of Family: and though it may perhaps be true that other conditions, as Guardian and Ward, are not strictly included in the Rights of Family, still they may be classed with those of Family, as consequences, extensions, and analogous conditions. Other conditions again, as those of Patron and Client, may be more properly arranged with the Rights of Government. And it is plain, in fact, that the transition from the relations of Family to those of Government, that is, constitutional relations, must be gradual in most societies, and various in all, according to their history.
Proceeding further with the subdivision of the system, we come to what Mr. Bentham calls the Genera of Class 1.
* Genera of Private Offenses
Offenses against Person.
1 Simple corporal injuries.
2 Irreparable corporal injuries.
3 Simple injurious restraiment without confinement, banishment, robbery, extortion.
4 Simple injurious compulsion, without confinement, banishment, robbery, extortion.
5 Wrongful confinement.
6 Wrongful banishment.
7 Wrongful homicide.
8 Wrongful menacement.
9 Simple mental injuries.
Offenses against Reputation.
1 Defamation.
2 Vilification.
Offenses against Property.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Property.
2 Wrongful interception of Property.
3 Wrongful divestment of Property.
4 Usurpation of Property.
5 Wrongful investment of Property.
6 Wrongful withholding of Services.
7 Wrongful destruction or endamagement.
8 Insolvency.
9 Wrongful obtainment of Services.
10 Wrongful imposition of Expense.
11 Wrongful imposition of Services.
12 Wrongful occupation.
13 Wrongful detention.
14 Wrongful disturbance of proprietary Rights.
15 Theft.
16 Embezzlement.
17 Defraudment.
18 Extortion.
Offenses against Person and Reputation.
1 Corporal insults.
2 Insulting menacement.
3 Seduction.
4 Rape.
5 Forcible Seduction.
6 Simple lascivious injuries.
This laborious and complex analysis of the possible forms of offenses is not without its interest. It is not however made, and I think cannot be made, the groundwork of a code of:
* Offenses against Person and Property.
1 Forcible (wrongful) interception of property.
2 Forcible divestment of property.
3 Forcible usurpation.
4 Forcible investment.
5 Forcible destruction or endamagement.
6 Forcible occupation of moveables.
7 Forcible entry (immovables).
8 Forcible detainment of moveables.
9 Forcible detainment of immoveables.
10 Robbery.
Offenses against Condition.
a. Of Legal Institution.
Master.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Mastership.
2 Wrongful interception of Mastership.
3 Wrongful divestment of Mastership.
4 Usurpation of Mastership.
5 Wrongful investment of Mastership.
6 Wrongful abdication of Mastership.
7 Wrongful detrectation of Mastership.
8 Wrongful imposition of Mastership.
9 Abuse of Mastership.
10 Disturbance of Mastership.
11 Breach of duty in Servants.
12 Elopement of Servants.
13 Servant-stealing.
Servant.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Servantship.
2 Wrongful interception of Servantship, etc.
9 [sic] Abuse of Mastership.
10 Disturbance of Mastership.
11 Breach of duty in Servants.
12 Elopement.
13 Servant-stealing.
Guardian.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Guardianship.
2 Wrongful interception of Guardianship.
For the law is naturally led to describe offenses directly the loss or damage which they occasion, without
3 Wrongful divestment of Guardianship.
4 Usurpation of Guardianship.
5 Wrongful investment of Guardianship.
6 Wrongful abdication of Guardianship.
7 Detrectation of Guardianship.
8 Wrongful imposition of Guardianship.
9 Mismanagement of Guardianship.
10 Desertion of Guardianship.
11 Dissipation in prejudice of Wardship.
12 Peculation in prejudice of Wardship.
13 Disturbance of Guardianship.
14 Breach of Duty to Guardians.
15 Elopement from Guardians.
16 Ward-stealing.
17 Bribery in prejudice to Ward.
Ward.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Wardship.
2 etc. Parallel to the other.
b. Of Natural Origin.
Parent.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Parentality.
2 Wrongful interception of Parentality.
3 Wrongful divestment of Parentality.
4 Usurpation of Parentality.
5 Wrongful investment of Parentality,
6 Wrongful abdication of Parentality.
7 Wrongful detrectation of Parentality,
8 Wrongful imposition of Parentality.
9 Mismanagement of parental Guardianship.
10 Desertion of parental Guardianship.
11 Dissipation in prejudice of filial Wardship.
12 Peculation in prejudice of filial Wardship.
13 Abuse of parental Power.
14 Disturbance of parental Guardianship.
15 Breach of duty to Parents.
16 Elopement from Parents.
17 Child-stealing.
18 Bribery in prejudice of parental Guardianship.
Child.
1 Wrongful non-investment of Filiation (filiality).
2 etc. Parallel to the other.
distinguishing with any exactness the relation which is violated: as Bentham himself allows, when he has run to the dregs this head of Offenses against Condition. Thus (¶ 55) he says, “If a baker sells bad bread for the price of good it is” (not an offense against his condition of baker,) “but a kind of fraud upon the buyer: and perhaps an injury of a simple corporal kind done to the health of an individual or a neighbourhood.” “So if a man be disturbed in his trade, the offense will probably be a wrongful interception of the profit he might have been presumed to be in a way to make by it.” These are obvious considerations, and show, among other things, how little is gained for legislation by Bentham’s
Husband.
1 Wrongful non-investment of marital condition.
2 Wrongful interception of marital condition.
3 Wrongful divestment of marital condition.
4 Wrongful usurpation of marital condition.
5 Polygamy.
6 Wrongful investment of marital condition.
7 Wrongful abdication of marital condition.
8 Wrongful detrectation of marital condition.
9 Wrongful imposition of marital condition.
10 Mismanagement of marital Guardianship.
11 Desertion of marital Guardianship.
12 Dissipation in prejudice of marital Guardianship.
13 Peculation in prejudice of marital Guardianship.
14 Abuse of marital power.
15 Disturbance of marital Guardianship.
16 Wrongful withholding of connubial services.
17 Adultery.
18 Breach of duty to Husbands.
19 Elopement from Husband.
20 Wife-stealing.
21 Bribery in prejudice of marital service.
1 etc. Parallel to the other.
Uncontiguous Relations (Uncle, Nephew, etc.)
Rank.
Profession.
Copyright, Patentright.
classification of offenses, and especially by his class of Offenses against Condition.
Indeed the whole matter appears to me to become much simpler by the establishment of a Division of Rights of Contrast, coordinate with the Rights of Property, and a Division of Offenses consisting of violations of these Rights, such as Fraud, Breach of Contract, and the like. As I have already said, Bentham puts Falsehood in an anomalous appendix at the end of his larger classes of offenses, allowing that he thus runs athwart the general division of the four other classes, but asserting that the incongruity rights itself in the sequel; which however it does not appear to me to do.
But let us look at that part of Bentham’s system in which we may expect to find offenses of this kind:—his head of Offenses by Falsehood, one of the two divisions of his class of Multiform Offenses.
He takes Personation, Forgery and Perjury, as each obviously distinguished from other modes of Falsehood by certain special circumstances; and calls all other cases Simple Falsehood. But he attempts no subdivision of these cases, observing only that they may affect (¶23) person, property, reputation, or condition, and thus run over the same ground which is occupied by the preceding classes (¶24). And thus, we do not find among the offenses which he enumerates, any definite place for a vast body of cases, which constitute a large and very definite part of ordinary Jurisprudence, namely, Contracts and their kinds—as buying and selling—breaches of such Contracts, evidence of such Contracts, Fraud, Debt, and the like; nor do we find any distribution of Forgery into special cases. And as there is no discussion of Contracts concerning Transfer of property, so is there no discussion of the rules and conditions of Delivery of property so contracted for, or of what is called in English Law Bailment.
The incompleteness and inconvenience of Bentham’s proceeding
The other kind of Multiform Offenses are Offenses against Trust (¶25); on which subject however he allows that Falsehood and Trust are not coordinate, but altogether disparate (¶30). Let us consider in what relation these offenses stand to his system and to ours. It may occur, he justly observes (¶26), that a Trust is sometimes spoken of as a property, and sometimes as a condition, but it is really different from both. To which we may add, that Private Trusts approach nearer to Contracts than to either; while Public Trusts are a kind of Office, and therefore their Rights may rank with Rights of Government.
Thus the Trustees of a Marriage Settlement accept the Trust, and by so doing, contract to pay the annual proceeds of the Trust to the married pair, and to keep the principal from being dissipated. This is plainly a Contract between the Trustors, the Trustees, and the Beneficiary pair. On the other hand, the Trustees of a School or of a Charity, who are to bestow the funds upon indefinite persons, coming under the conditions, may be considered as Officers of the State for that purpose: the Founder having been allowed by the State to elect such an Office, and the State undertaking to enforce the Founder’s will. It would seem at first sight that Mr. Bentham might arrange such an Office among his Conditions, and make Offenses against Public Trust Offenses against Condition. But as he justly says, “The idea presented by the words Public Trust is clear and unambiguous: it is but an obscure and ambiguous garb that that idea could be expressed in by the words public condition.” Indeed, the more we consider Mr. Bentham’s group which he calls Offenses against Condition, the more does it appear to be ill-defined and inconvenient; including many incongruous cases, as Offenses against Family Rights, and Offenses against Rights of Rank or Profession; and separating cases very close to each other, as Offenses against the Rights of a Profession and against those of a Trade. We, on the other hand, must grant that some of his Conditions, as, for instance, those of Guardian and Ward, are not rigorously included in either the Rights of Family or those of Government. But still, they will stand between the two, and nearer to the one or the other, according to circumstances:thus, a Guardian appointed by Will is an extension of the Rights of Family; a Guardian appointed by a Court of Justice is an application of the Rights of Government. In the consideration of such cases I find nothing but what confirms our general division of Rights.
I will make one other remark bearing upon the general value of Mr. Bentham’s scheme of classification.
Mr. Bentham puts it forward (¶59) as one of the advantages of his method, that by it “the very place which any offense is made to occupy suggests the reason of its being put there.” And he observes (¶35, note) that “Usury which, if it must be an offense, is an offense committed with consent, that is, with the consent of the party supposed to be injured, cannot merit a place in the catalogue of offenses, unless the consent were either unfairly obtained or unfreely; in the first case it coincides with defraudment, in the second with extortion.” Mr. Bentham afterwards wrote a work strongly condemning Usury Laws; and his disciples are in the habit of appealing to the indication of the absurdity of Usury Law afforded by the remark I have just quoted, (that they have no place in the systematic catalogue) as a triumphant evidence of the value of Bentham’s system. But it is plain that the account which he has given of them is altogether different from that which has been entertained by the legislators who have enacted such laws. It is not as the remedy of wrong on the borrower, but as a part of the general guardianship of the State, that they are introduced. The State will not enforce contracts which are, on the whole, means of encouraging prodigality and gambling. There may or may not be, on such grounds, reason for Usury Laws. But there is no more difficulty in finding a place in a coherent system, for laws in protection of needy persons with precarious expectations, than in finding a place for laws in protection of minors or persons of imbecile understanding.
In order to assign the ground of my system, in a point in which it differs from his, I observe also, that Reputation, one of the heads of Mr. Bentham’s primary classes of Rights, is excluded from our primary division, as too factitious a right.
We are led then to the persuasion, by this examination of Mr. Bentham’s system, that our general arrangement of Rights, as Rights of the Person, of Property, of Contract, of Family, and of Government, with an Appendix for Rights of Reputation, is more symmetrical and complete than Bentham’s arrangement of Offenses, into Offenses against Person, Property, Reputation, and Condition, with an Appendix for Offenses of Falsehood, and Offenses against Trust.
Lecture XVII. Bentham: Method, Punishment, Civil and Penal Law, Influence of Time and Place
I have been considering Mr. Bentham’s classification of offenses: the primary classes of that arrangement, Private Offenses, Semi-Public, Public, and Self-regarding Offenses, with an Appendix for Offenses of Falsehood and Offenses against Trust: and I have considered the Divisions of the First Class, according to his Heads, of Person, Property, Reputation and Condition. As I have already said, it appears to me that the Head of Condition, introduced by him, is not really very useful; being included in other relations, especially those of Family and Government; and that the Head of Contract, which he omits, is really necessary; and thus we were led to prefer, to this arrangement of Offenses, the one which we have given, of Offenses against Person, Property, Contract, Rights of Family, and Rights of Government.
This disposes of Bentham’s First Class, Private Offenses, or Offenses against Individuals. I have already said that his leading division. Private Offenses, Semi-Public, Public, and Self-regarding, is a good and convenient one. Each of these classes will undergo subdivision, according to the Heads already noted for Private Offenses; namely. Person, Property, etc. But not any very large number of these genera require separate treatment,or indeed are really exact. A few examples only need be noted. The scheme is given below:
Semi-Public Offenses
I. Against Person.
a. Through Calamity produced by imprudence or omission.
1 Pestilence or Contagion.
2 Famine, etc.
3 Neglect of Idiots, Maniacs, Infants.
4 Beasts of Prey, etc.
5 Collapsion [sic] of walls, earth, etc.
6 Inundation.
7 Tempest.
8 Blight.
9 Conflagration.
b. Through mere Delinquency.
1 Offensive Trades. Poisoning springs, destroying fences, etc., as by threats for joining or forcing to join in illuminations, acclamations, undertakings, processions, etc.
2 Simple Injurious restraint as by threats for joining or forcing to join in illuminations, acclamations, undertakings, processions, etc.
3 Simple Injurious compulsion as by threats for joining or forcing to join in illuminations, acclamations, undertakings, processions, etc.
4 Confinement by spoiling roads, bridges, ferries, pre-occupying carriages or inns, etc.
5 Banishment by spoiling roads, bridges, ferries, pre-occupying carriages or inns, etc.
6 Menacement against particular denominations, as Jews, Catholics, Protestants.
7 Distressful, horrifying, obscene, blasphemous exposures.
II. Against Property.
1 Wrongs against Property of a Corporate Body.
2 Bubbles.
III. Person and Reputation.
None.
IV. Person and Property.
1 Incendiarism.
2 Criminal Inundation.
V. Condition in Marriage.
Falsehoods or offenses against Classes of Marriages.
Self-Regarding Offenses
I. Person.
1 Fasting. On Continence. Self-torture.
2 Gluttony, etc.
3 Suicide.
II. Reputation.
1 Female Incontinency.
2 Incest.
III. Person and Property.
1 Idleness.
2 Gaming.
3 Prodigality.
IV. Person and Reputation.
1. Sacrifice of virginity.
2. Indecencies not public.
V. Marriage.
Improvident marriage.
With regard to Public Offenses, Mr. Bentham takes a wider range, and makes an independent arrangement (in a note to Par. liv.)
I. Offenses against the external security of the State.
1 Treason.
2 Espionage in favour of foreigners.
3 Injuries to foreigners (Piracy).
4 Injuries to privileged foreigners (as ambassadors).
II. Offenses against Justice.
1 Against Judicial Trust, non-investment, interception, etc.
(as before).
Breach of Judicial Trust. But “the offences are too multifarious and too ill-provided with names to be examined here.”
Evils resulting from these offenses.
III. Offenses against the Preventive Branch of the Police.
1 Against phthano-paranomic trust.
2 Against phthano-symphoric trust.
IV. Offenses against the Public Force.
1 Offenses against the military trust, desertion, etc.
2 Offenses against the management of muniments of war polemo-tamieutic trust.
V. Offenses against the Positive Increase of the National Felicity
1 Against Epikuro-threptic trust: Agatho-poieutic trust.
2 Against Eupaedagogue trust.
3 Against Noso-comiall trust.
4 Against Moro-comial trust.
5 Against Ptocho-comial trust.
6 Against Antembletic trust.
VI. Offenses against the Public Wealth.
1 Non-payment of forfeitures.
2 Non-payment of taxes.
3 Evasion of taxes.
4 Offenses against fiscal trust.
5 Offenses against demosio-tamieutic trust.
VII. Offenses against Population.
1 Emigration.
2 Suicide.
3 Procurement of impotence or barrenness.
4 Abortion.
5 Unprolific coition.
6 Celibacy.
VIII. Offenses against the National Wealth.
1 Idleness.
2 Breach of the regulations made in the view of preventing the application of industry to purposes less profitable, etc.
3 Offenses against ethno-plutistic trust.
IX. Offenses against the Sovereignty.
1 Offenses against Sovereign trust.
X. Offenses against Religion.
1 Offenses tending to weaken the force of the religious sanction.
2 Offenses tending to misapply the force of the religious sanction.
3 Offenses against religious trusts.
XI. Offenses against the National Interest.
1 Immoral Publications.
2 Offenses against the trust of an ambassador.
3 Offenses against the trust of a privy counsellor.
4 Prodigality on the part of persons who are about the sovereign.
5 Excessive gaming on the part of the same persons.
6 Taking presents from rival powers without leave.
(Value of Classification of Offenses.) Of the value of a complete systematic arrangement of Offenses in a natural order, there can be no doubt. As Bentham himself says on this point, “The particular uses of method are various, but the general one is, to enable men to understand the things that are the subject of it.” And he mentions at the end of chap. xviii. (¶57) the reason why he calls his a Natural Method, and the advantages which it procures:—namely, 1. That it assists the apprehension and memory. 2. That it makes general propositions possible. (It is curious that Bentham should have stumbled upon that which is given by the best natural historians, Cuvier for instance, as the condition and mark of a natural method.) 3. That the place of an offense
(General Propositions respecting Classes of Offenses.) Bentham then proceeds to illustrate further his assertion that this natural method makes general propositions possible, by giving some of the leading distinctions of the Classes of Offenses. Thus the First Class (Private Offenses) when consummated, produce primary mischief (pain,) as well as secondary (alarm and danger;) they affect assignable individuals; they admit of compensation; of retaliation; they produce obvious mischief; are generally and constantly obnoxious to the censure of the world; are little able to require different descriptions in different countries and ages, etc. etc. The Second Class (Semi-public Offenses) produce no primary mischief; do not affect assignable individuals; do not admit of compensation or retaliation; the mischief produced is tolerably obvious, more so than that of Public Offenses; they require, in a greater degree than private offenses, different descriptions in different ages and countries; there may be grounds for punishing them when they do not occasion any mischief to any individual; satisfaction to an individual is not a ground for remitting punishment. And in like manner characters may be given of the other classes, Public Offenses, and Self-regarding Offenses.
In all this, there is much that belongs to a true philosophical method. The main defect of Bentham’s scheme is the anomaly which he has himself noticed, of making a class determined by the instrument of the offense. Falsehood, coordinate with other Classes determined by the persons hurt by the Offense;—to which I add, as already stated, the further defect, connected in some degree with the former one, which arises from taking the term Condition so widely as he does; so widely, for instance, as to include Contracts of Hiring and Serving (Condition of Master and Servant): the only Conditions
The methodical division and arrangement of Offenses, when once established, would of course be of use in various ways in legislation; mainly, it is probable, in suggesting and regulating the language in which laws are enunciated. Such an arrangement would thus be a means of establishing a clear relation between offense and punishment; and with a view to this purpose it was, that Bentham laboured so assiduously at this task of arrangement.
(Punishment.) We are not to imagine, however, that there is or can be a Scale of Punishments, which will stand side by side with the Scale of Offenses, and correspond, article by article, with the list of offenses. Bentham has not pretended to establish any such parallelism as this, although the assignation of punishment to offense, is the main object of the work of which I am now speaking. He, more wisely, takes Punishment by itself, and attempts to classify its kinds and properties, according to the nature of the thing itself. This part of his labours also is pointed to with great admiration by his disciples; but its merit appears to me to consist far more in a few pointed suggestions, than in anything which depends on the general method. He points out, as the objects of punishment—to prevent offenses—to prevent the worst —to keep down the mischief—and to act at the least expense; and is thus led to various Rules concerning punishment. And though making the repression of the mischief of offenses the sole object of punishment, and thus not recognizing the moral quality of the act as any ground for punishment, he is still led—by that natural connexion of moral and social evil, which tends constantly to obliterate the sharp distinctions of opposite moral theories—to present the moral character of actions as one of their most important aspects.
As an example of his mode of dealing with this part of his subject (Punishment,) we may look at Chap. xvii. “Of the Properties to be given to a lot of Punishment,” These Properties he states to be: 1 Variability, 2 Equability, 3 Commensurability, 4 Characteristicalness, [sic] 5 Exemplarity, 6 Frugality (in the amount of punishment), 7 Subserviency to Reformation, 8 Efficacy in disabling the offender from repetition, 9 Compensation, 10 Popularity, 11 Remissibility.
* To these he afterwards (see Principles of Civil Code) added another quality, Simplicity of Discipline.
It is noted by Dumont upon this passage, that Montesquieu had put forward, as the proper attributes of punishment, that they should be drawn from the nature of the crimes, should be moderate, should be proportional to the crime, and should be modest: and that Beccaria requires that punishment should be analogous to the crime,exemplary, gentle, proportional; and also certain, prompt, and inevitable. Howard also had continually in view the amendment of delinquents.
(Other Works.) I have hitherto spoken principally of the early work in English, the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Bentham afterwards pursued the subject during the whole of a long life: but all the main points of his general doctrines are, I think, to be found in this earlier production. Several of the works by which Bentham became
(Civil and Penal Law.) I have used the terms Civil and Penal Law, and I must now notice, what I think is one of the best attempts at definition and distinction which we find in Bentham’s works; namely, his view of the relation of the Civil and the Penal Law. It occurs in the first place, in a note at the end of the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He observes that there is nowhere to be found a State which has had a Civil Code and a Penal Code, each complete. He asks how, if complete, these Codes would be distinguished: whether the civil code would consist entirely of civil laws, and the penal code entirely of penal laws. He answers that they would not: this would not be the relation. And he gives his own account thus:
Laws depend on Offenses. Offenses are forbidden by being Offenses. This is the imperative part of each Law. But besides that, there must be an expository part of the law, explaining the terms in which the offenses are described. Thus, stealing is an offense. But what is stealing? We may say, “The taking a thing which is another’s by one who has no Title to it, and is conscious of having none.” Here we are thrown upon the description of Titles, which requires laws enumerating how Titles may be acquired, and how they may be lost.
Now this being understood, the Penal Code contains the Command with the Punishment; the Civil Code mainly the masses of expository matter. We may express this perhaps more pointedly by saying that Wrongs are punished by the Penal Law, and Rights defined by the Civil Law.
This distinction is probably as good a one as can be briefly given, and falls in very well with most of the purposes for which the distinction of Civil and Penal Law is commonly referred to. (
But further: not only the Heads of the Penal Law, which are the starting points of the expository matter, of which the Civil Law consists, are strongly tinged with popular looseness of idea, and in some measure, with national differences of thought: but still more, all the Terms in which the exposition is given will, at every step almost, contain references to popular and national habits of thought, and to the primary events of the national history, including, of course, the history of its jurisprudence. You have seen this in the definition which I gave of Theft that definition takes you at once to the term Title. Now the very term Title implies certain settled habits of possessing property and of justifying the possession of it, which exist in very different degrees and forms in different parts of the world. And when we come to enumerate, (as I observed we must have to do in order to carry out our exposition) the modes of acquiring Title to property; as Descent, Purchase, Prescription, and the like; we come to a series of events which have different aspects in different countries; and in many cases must, in order to be intelligible, and applicable to actual cases, be described by different terms of a new order; and thus, give to the Civil Law of each country a national form and aspect.
(Historical Element.) And thus the Civil Law of each
I conceive it to have been one of the great defects,— errors, I should venture to say—of Mr. Bentham, that he was not well aware of this principle. He imagined that, to a certain extent, his schemes of Law might be made independent of Local Conditions. Thus, in speaking of the advantage of his classification of offenses, (C. xviii.) he says) (¶56), “The analysis, as far as it goes, is as applicable to the legal concerns of one country as of another; and where, if it had descended into further details it would have ceased to be so, there I have taken care always to stop.” And he says further, (¶60) that “this natural arrangement, governed as it is by a principle which is recognized by all men, will serve alike for the jurisprudence of all nations. In a system of proposed law, framed in pursuance of such a method, the language will serve as a glossary by which all systems of positive law might be explained; while the matter serves as
It is very true that Bentham does propose to consider the historical or national aspect of laws. He says in the passage just quoted (V 56), “That the legal interests of different ages and countries have nothing in common, and that they have everything, are suppositions equally distant from the truth.” But still, he desires, as appears by what I have quoted, to make his plan independently of all national habits and histories. He would not place the national historical element at the basis of the system, where, however, it must be. He has written an Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation; and in this, he gives many examples of the way in which local habits and circumstances modify the reasons for laws. But he applies the maxims which he thus gathers to the case in which laws are transplanted from one country to another: and, taking as his example the transfer of the English Law to Bengal, he is led rather to employ himself in vigorous sarcasms, both against the Law itself and against its effects as transferred, than in any discussions which can be considered as adding anything to the philosophy of the subject. There is, in this Essay, a good deal of the dogmatism and depreciation of adverse views, in which he so habitually indulges. There is however, it must also be said, much condemnation of dogmatism, and acknowledgement of the necessity and wisdom of doubt and hesitation in such matters; and several passages of considerable force and beauty. Thus, Chap. ii.
The question, whether legislation is to be improved by framing a systematic code, or by proceeding with the elements of law which the national history supplies, has been much discussed in modern times, especially in Germany; and the two opposite Schools, the historical and the systematic, have each had adherents and assertors of great name. The question is a highly interesting and important one; and it may hereafter be very proper for us to pursue the discussion by the aid of the best lights which the literature of the subjects, both foreign and domestic, have furnished; but at present, looking at it only as it regards Bentham, I need not pursue it further. I have sufficiently indicated that I conceive one of his great defects is to be found in his neglect or misapprehension of the true place of historical legislation in Jurisprudence.
I may take the liberty of remarking that I have treated of this subject, the necessary existence and place of the historical element in legislation in the Elements of Morality including Polity, B. iv. (Jus) Chap. i. (Rights in general.)
Lecture XVIII. Bentham: Object of Law, Marriage, Divorce
Having thus noticed one great defect and error in Bentham’s system, his depreciation of historical law, I must now notice another point in which I think him also altogether defective and erroneous; namely in not fully recognizing the moral object of Law. According to our views, Law has for its object to promote, not merely the pleasure of man, but his moral nature;—not merely to preserve and gratify, but to teach him:—not to enable him to live a comfortable animal life, but to raise him above mere animal life: in short, to conform to his nature as man:—not merely a sentient, not merely a gregarious, not merely a social creature, but a moral creature;—a creature to whose moral being and agency all mere material possessions, enjoyments, and advantages, are instruments, means and occasions. Punishment is to be, not merely a means of preventing suffering, but is also to be a moral Lesson (Morality, Art. 988). Bentham, on the other hand, professes to make the promotion of human happiness—such happiness as can be resolved into mere pleasure or absence of pain—the sole object of punishment. On this view, there is no difference between laws restraining men in consequence of some calamity in which they are involved with no fault of theirs, and punishments for crime. Quarantine is not distinguishable from imprisonment for theft. Restraints imposed on those afflicted with contagious diseases are punishments, as much as restraints on those who try to break into a house. Now this is contrary to all common notions, and to all real jural philosophy. But the fact is, that such a view cannot be consistently carried through. And Bentham himself is obliged to defend laws which have no solid ground except their moral tendency;—their effect in teaching men good morality.
As an example of the results of Bentham’s attempt to exclude morality, as such, in his legislation, let us look at what he says respecting the Laws of Marriage.
On this subject he argues strongly in favour of a liberty of Divorce by common consent. He condemns the law which makes marriages indissoluble, in the strongest terms: he calls it cruel and absurd: he says this law “surprizes the contracting parties in the tenderness of their youth, in the moments which open all the vistas of happiness. It says to them, ‘you unite in the hope of being happy, but I tell you, you only enter a prison whose door will be closed against you. I shall be inexorable to the cries of your grief, and when you dash yourselves against your fetters I shall not permit you to be delivered.’” And as decisively condemnatory of this policy he says “The government which interdicts them [divorces] takes upon itself to decide that it understands the interests of individuals better than they do themselves.” (Civil Code, Pt. iii. c. v.)
Now upon this we may remark, that undoubtedly, in this and in many other cases, government, both in its legislation and administration, does assume that it understands the interests of individuals, and the public interest as affected by them, better than they do themselves. What is the meaning of restraints imposed for the sake of public health, cleanliness and comfort? Why are not individuals left to do what they like with reference to such matters? Plainly because carelessness, ignorance, indolence, would prevent their doing what is most for their own interest. Is there anything strange in assuming that legislation, looking at all the consequences of marriage to the individuals and to society, to their comfort, fortune, and moral being, should judge better of the conditions under which it ought to be contracted than the parties in that delirium of feeling which Mr. Bentham describes? Does not indeed almost the whole of law suppose the government to understand men’s interests on many points better than they do themselves? Mr. Bentham is
But is Mr. Bentham ready to apply consistently the principle which he thus implies, that in such matters individuals are the best judges of their own interests ! Will he allow divorce to take place whenever the two parties agree in desiring it? As I understand him, he would not. Indeed such a facility of divorce as this, leaves hardly any difference possible between marriage and concubinage. If a pair may separate when they please, why does the legislator take the trouble to recognize their being together? Such an extension of Divorce seems to be inconsistent with the existence of Families. Accordingly it does not appear that Mr. Bentham would carry divorce so far as this; although, for aught I can see, his argument just mentioned would. But he has other arguments on the other side (
So far, good. But Mr. Bentham having carried his argument so far, does not go on with it. What conclusion are we to suppose him to intend? This arrangement would be very general without law, therefore the legislator should pass a law to make it universal?—This is not at all like his usual style of reasoning. The more general it would be without the law, the less need of the law, it would seem; and Mr. Bentham, of all persons, is the last to deem constraint a good when it is not needed. Or shall we supply an additional step in the argument, and say that the general tendency of men to make the marriage contract a contract for life, shows that such a contract is most for their happiness?—This, again, is not in the usual style of Bentham’s reasoning. He is not wont
But suppose that one party wish for a separation while the other does not? Shall divorce then be permitted? Not, it would seem, without the consent of the other. But suppose the consent to be obtained by ill-treatment. Suppose the stronger party to maltreat the weaker for this very purpose. Is it fit that the legislator should aid him in carrying his purpose into effect? Is it fit that he should liberate the man because he has by cruelty, or fear, or importunity, induced the woman to allow him to abandon her?
Mr. Bentham’s answer to this case shows, it seems to me, how difficult it is for any writer, however strictly he may try to follow out the results of a theory—to get rid of the ordinary
Of course, no one can deny that such cases as this, and many other cases, are questions of great difficulty: nor do we say that the indissolubility of marriage is a rule which, on mere human grounds, must necessarily be the best. But we say that no good rule can be established on this subject without regarding the marriage union in a moral point of view; without assuming it as one great object of the law to elevate and purify men’s idea of marriage;—to lead them to look upon it as an entire union of interests and feelings, enjoyments and hopes, between the two parties. With this view, the law prohibits polygamy, denies rights to concubines and illegitimate children, invests the Family with honours and advantages; and with the same view, it only in cases of extreme necessity allows Divorce. (
But let us consider Bentham’s argument against divorce on one-sided application a moment longer. He says that such a law as he proposes would prevent the husband who wishes for a divorce from ill treating the wife; he would try to get her consent by fair means. But what I urge is, that if he fails in this, he has just the same reason to complain, which, on Bentham’s grounds, both parties have who wish for a divorce and are not allowed by the law to obtain one. It is no fault of his that he is not odious to his wife, and that he tries in vain to make himself so.
In truth, I believe Bentham in this case, as in some others, to have been seduced by the apparently happy thought of finding an appropriate punishment for an offense, and thus, turning the edge of an adverse argument.
Indeed this part of Bentham’s writings—the discovery of appropriate and effective punishments—the Rationale of
I have said that Bentham’s system of law is defective in not giving due prominence to the moral purpose of laws. Still, we must not forget that his principle, that the promotion of human happiness is the object of good laws, is really in almost every case a valuable guide to legislation, even in its direct Benthamite interpretation, where happiness is understood as consisting merely of pleasures. The legislator, though not the moralist, may take this principle for his guide. The legislator will hardly be wrong if he makes his laws with an intelligent and comprehensive regard to the promotion of general happiness and the prevention of misery; though the moralist is very likely to be understood as teaching a low and scanty morality, if he tell men they must always aim solely at their own happiness. This I say on the Benthamite analysis of happiness. But if we take that wider sense of happiness, which agrees with the common feeling of mankind, and into which our Utilitarians have a perpetual tendency to slide—the happiness which includes moral elements—the happiness which arises from knowing that we neither do nor suffer wrong—the happiness which arises from the promotion of virtue in ourselves and others the happiness of kindness, justice, honesty, veracity, purity, order—then indeed happiness becomes a perfect and unerring guide—if only we can discover which way her guidance points. But then, we invert the Benthamite analysis, and make happiness depend upon virtue, rather than virtue upon happiness. Yet to this way of understanding
Here we find that the good to be aimed at has taken a moral tinge, and derives all its force from that. Friendship, innocence, repose in the bosom of order, rest for the emotions of the soul; the calamities of rivalry, passion, suspicion, mistrust, enmity, revenge; and finally, the opinion of female purity, are put forwards as the grounds of such a rule. I do not say that, even in this form, they appear to me to give a sufficient basis for his views; and still less when he carries them into detail. But they show, and especially the last phrase, how large a share moral considerations must have in such questions; as, in truth, such considerations must enter into the view of the moralist at one point or other. If morality is not to be a direct object of the law, it must still
I have thus again brought my views of Bentham’s morality to the same point to which I formerly conducted them; and this is, I conceive, the principal view which it behoves us to take of Bentham’s morality. I shall not now think further consideration of this celebrated writer necessary.
.
William Whewell, D.D.
1794–1866
English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, historian of science.
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge;
Fellow, Royal Society; Co-founder, British Association for the Advancement of Science
Reference
Whewell, William. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England. London: John W. Parker and Son; Cambridge: John Deighton, 1862. This work is in the Public Domain.