rather than ethical; Clarke’s view being that the apparently
arbitrary particularity in the constitution of the cosmos is really
only explicable by reference to creative free-will. In the ethical
discussion of Shaftesbury and sentimental moralists generally
this question drops naturally out of sight; and the cautious
Butler tries to exclude its perplexities as far as possible from the
philosophy of practice. But since the reaction, led by Price and
Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated
in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the
intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact,
it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill
desert which these writers give as an essential element in their
analysis of the moral consciousness. An irresistible motive, it is
forcibly said, palliates or takes away guilt; no one can blame
himself for yielding to necessity, and no one can properly be
punished for what he could not have prevented. In answer to
this argument some necessarians have admitted that punishment
can be legitimate only if it be beneficial to the person punished;
others, again, have held that the lawful use of force is to restrain
lawless force; but most of those who reject free-will defend
punishment on the ground of its utility in deterring others from
crime, as well as in correcting or restraining the criminal on
whom it falls.
In the preceding sketch we have traced the course of English
ethical speculation without bringing it into relation with contemporary
European thought on the same subject.
And in fact almost all the systems described, from
Hobbes downward, have been of essentially native
French influence
on English ethics.
growth, showing hardly any traces of foreign influence.
We may observe that ethics is the only department in which this
result appears. The physics and psychology of Descartes were
much studied in England, and his metaphysical system was
certainly the most important antecedent of Locke’s; but
Descartes hardly touched ethics proper. So again the controversy
that Clarke conducted with Spinoza, and afterwards
with Leibnitz, was entirely confined to the metaphysical region.
Catholic France was a school for Englishmen in many subjects,
but not in morality; the great struggle between Jansenists and
Jesuits had a very remote interest for them. It was not till near
the close of the 18th century that the impress of the French
revolutionary philosophy began to manifest itself in England;
and even then its influence was mostly political rather than
ethical. It is striking to observe how even in the case of writers
such as Godwin, who were most powerfully affected by the
French political movement, the moral basis, on which the new
social order of rational and equal freedom is constructed, is
almost entirely of native origin; even when the tone and spirit
are French, the forms of thought and manner of reasoning are
still purely English. In the derivation of Benthamism alone—which,
it may be observed, first becomes widely known in the
French paraphrase of Dumont—an important element is supplied
Helvetius.
by the works of a French writer, Helvetius; as
Bentham himself was fully conscious. It was from
Helvetius that he learnt that, men being universally and solely
governed by self-love, the so-called moral judgments are really
the common judgments of any society as to its common interests;
that it is therefore futile on the one hand to propose any standard
of virtue, except that of conduciveness to general happiness,
and on the other hand useless merely to lecture men on duty and
scold them for vice; that the moralist’s proper function is rather
to exhibit the coincidence of virtue with private happiness;
that, accordingly, though nature has bound men’s interests
together in many ways, and education by developing sympathy
and the habit of mutual help may much extend the connexion,
still the most effective moralist is the legislator, who by acting
on self-love through legal sanctions may mould human conduct
as he chooses. These few simple doctrines give the ground plan
of Bentham’s indefatigable and lifelong labours.
So again, in the modified Benthamism which the persuasive exposition of J. S. Mill afterwards made popular in England, the influence of Auguste Comte (Philosophie positive, 1829–1842, and Système de politique positive, 1851–1854) appears as the chief modifying element. This influence, so far as it has affected Comte. moral as distinct from political speculation, has been exercised primarily through the general conception of human progress; which, in Comte’s view, consists in the ever-growing preponderance of the distinctively human attributes over the purely animal, social feelings being ranked highest among human attributes, and highest of all the most universalized phase of human affection, the devotion to humanity as a whole. Accordingly, it is the development of benevolence in man, and of the habit of “living for others,” which Comte takes as the ultimate aim and standard of practice, rather than the mere increase of happiness. He holds, indeed, that the two are inseparable, and that the more altruistic any man’s sentiments and habits of action can be made, the greater will be the happiness enjoyed by himself as well as by others. But he does not seriously trouble himself to argue with egoism, or to weigh carefully the amount of happiness that might be generally attained by the satisfaction of egoistic propensities duly regulated; a supreme unquestioning self-devotion, in which all personal calculations are suppressed, is an essential feature of his moral ideal. Such a view is almost diametrically opposed to Bentham’s conception of normal human existence; the newer utilitarianism of Mill represents an endeavour to find the right middle path between the two extremes.
It is to be observed that, in Comte’s view, devotion to humanity is the principle not merely of morality, but of religion; i.e. it should not merely be practically predominant, but should be manifested and sustained by regular and partly symbolical forms of expression, private and public. This side of Comte’s system, however, and the details of his ideal reconstruction of society, in which this religion plays an important part, have had but little influence either in England or elsewhere. It is more important to notice the general effect of his philosophy on the method of determining the particulars of morality as well as of law (as it ought to be). In the utilitarianism of Paley and Bentham the proper rules of conduct, moral and legal, are determined by comparing the imaginary consequences of different modes of regulation on men and women, conceived as specimens of a substantially uniform and unchanging type. It is true that Bentham expressly recognizes the varying influences of climate, race, religion, government, as considerations which it is important for the legislator to take into account; but his own work of social construction was almost entirely independent of such considerations, and his school generally appear to have been convinced of their competence to solve all important ethical and political questions for human beings of all ages and countries, without regard to their specific differences. But in the Comtian conception of social science, of which ethics and politics are the practical application, the knowledge of the laws of the evolution of society is of fundamental and continually increasing importance; humanity is regarded as having passed through a series of stages, in each of which a somewhat different set of laws and institutions, customs and habits, is normal and appropriate. Thus present man is a being that can only be understood through a knowledge of his past history; and any effort to construct for him a moral and political ideal, by a purely abstract and unhistorical method, must necessarily be futile; whatever modifications may at any time be desirable in positive law and morality can only be determined by the aid of “social dynamics.” This view extends far beyond the limits of Comte’s special school or sect, and has been widely accepted.
When we turn from French philosophy to German, we find
the influence of the latter on English ethical thought almost
insignificant until a very recent period. In the 17th
century, indeed, the treatise of Pufendorf on the Law of
Nature, in which the general view of Grotius was restated
German influence
on English ethics.
with modifications, partly designed to effect a
compromise with the doctrine of Hobbes, seems to have been
a good deal read at Oxford and elsewhere. Locke includes it
among the books necessary to the complete education of a gentleman.
But the subsequent development of the theory of conduct
in Germany dropped almost entirely out of the cognizance of
