ARBUCKLE AND THE MOLESWORTH- SHAFTESBURY SCHOOL. 213 to Arbuckle and Hutcheson, while from the latter it found its way into the system of Adam Smith. When the popu- larity of Shaftesbury in France is remembered, it is easy to see how the same principle results in the conclusions of the Physiocrats, under different commercial conditions. In the second place, it is to be noticed that the help Arbuckle receives from Shaftesbury's principle of Benevolence in dealing with the practical needs of his time impairs the consistency of his ^Esthetic Ethics. Theoretically, Virtue is the Beautiful life : whereas, in dealing with government and economics, Beauty disappears, and the conclusions are deduced from Shaftesbury's Benevolence. ARBUCKLE'S EELATION TO SHAFTESBURY AND HUTCHESON. Shaftesbury's system gives a double equation for Virtue on the one side as identical with social good, on the other with Beauty. But he fails to establish any connexion be- tween these two synonyms for Virtue. Obviously Beauty is the wider term of the two, but, in as much as he admits that some Benevolent actions are not virtuous (and there- fore not beautiful), it is also true that, in some cases, Benevolence must overlap Beauty. Shaftesbury, like every thinker who has exerted any influence upon the course of philosophical development, had " incomplete " followers, who make apparent his concealed inconsistencies. This may even be seen in Hutcheson's first work, published in the same year (1725) as the first thirty- nine numbers of the Letters, in which the two subjects mentioned, Beauty and Benevolence, are isolated, and each is treated in a separate treatise. Shaftesbury himself never seems to have decided whether to make Virtue Beauty or Benevolence ; and we find Hutcheson, in his early works, developing the Benevolent aspect, by maintaining that Virtue was Benevolence, and that anything not benevolent is not virtuous. 1 While Arbuckle represents the opposite tendency, holding that Virtue is fundamentally of the same nature as the Beautiful in Art : but, precisely as with Hutcheson, Beauty is isolated from Benevolence, and the latter is reintroduced to explain practical needs. With both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, what is called Beauty is rather rational symmetry to make it cesthetic Beauty or Beauty proper, it wants action or movement and colour, upon which Arbuckle insists. It is thus that we find Hutcheson speaking of the " beauty of theorems," and 1 Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil, 3.
