at all." The difficulty of showing the harmony of these diverse tendencies in human nature led Shaftesbury, and still more his successors, Hutcheson, and Butler, "to revert to empirical arguments in order to demonstrate the harmony of virtue and interest, and to prove to the individual that his own happiness consists in the exercise of the social affections." "It is therefore not difficult to understand the judgment of Schleiermacher that 'the English school of Shaftesbury, with all their talk about virtue, are really given up to pleasure.'" The criticism is strictly, however, as Mr. Sorley remarks, unjust, since it neglects the Ideological element so prominent in the school, and especially in Shaftesbury and Butler. "On the whole," he concludes, " it would appear that the psychological ethics worked out by Shaftesbury and his followers occupies an insecure position between the view discussed in the two preceding chapters and that which sees in the spiritual nature of man something more than a reaction to sense-presentation, and assigns to reason a function in the formation of objects of desire."
In the chapter on "Nature as the Moral Standard," Mr. Sorley proceeds to take account of "the way in which, independently of the doctrine of evolution, the course of nature has been appealed to as the standard of morality," or what he calls "objective Naturalism" in its preëvolutionary form. In the course of a very interesting and illuminating discussion, he traces the various forms of a Naturalism like that attributed by Plato to the Sophists in Hobbes, Butler, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. He has already found in Butler a prominent idealistic element; but "it is when the appeal is made to nature as contrasted with spirit, or to instinct as against reason, that the influence of a different view, allied to 'naturalism,' may be traced. The old contrast between 'nature' and 'convention' easily passes into an opposition between the natural and the reflective." The double sense of 'Nature' is especially interesting in the case of Adam Smith, who holds that man 'is by nature directed to correct, in some measure, that distribution of things which she herself would otherwise have made.' This doctrine of the antithetic relation of morality to nature is reaffirmed in Mill's statement that 'nearly every respectable attribute of humanity is the result not of instinct, but of a victory over instinct,' and that 'Nature is a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by man.' "And, for similar reasons, Huxley contended 'that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.'"
On rereading, after twenty years, the discussion of the ethical sig-
