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 OBLIGATION

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OBLIGATION

subdue it was a training in philosophy. But the first principle of the Stoics was: "life according to nature". That was the "becoming", the "proper" thing, whether it brought pleasure or pain, which the Stoic philosopher indeed reckoned of no importance, and af- fected to despise. This philosophy appealed power- fully to the native sternness of the Roman character, and it was considerably influenced and developed by the ideas of Roman jurisjjrudcnce. Thus the treatise of PaniBtius, a Stoic of the second century before Christ, "On the Things That Are Becoming", was paraphrased by Cicero in the next century, and be- came his well-known treatise "On Duties". Cicero remarks, and the remark is significant, that Panietius had not given a definition of what duty is. According to Cicero it has reference to the end of good actions, and is expressed in precepts to which the conduct of life can be conformed in all its particulars (De officiis, I, iii). The working out of the doctrine concerning the law of nature is due to a large extent to the Roman lawyers, and Costa Rosetti, a recent Austrian writer on ethics, could find no words more suited to sum up the common Catholic teaching on the point than a passage from Cicero's "De republica" (III, xxii). We cannot do better than give a translation of the passage here, as it will show clearly how fully the doc- trine of a law of nature imposing a moral obligation on man had been developed before it was adopted by the Fathers (Lactantius, "Dediv. inst.", VI, viii):

"Right reason is a true law, agreeing with nature, infused into all men, unchanging, eternal, which sum- mons to duty by its commands, deters from wrong by forbidding it, and which nevertheless neither commands and forbids the good in vain, nor prevails with the bad by commanding and forbidding them. It is not permitted to abrogate this law, nor is it al- lowed to derogate from it in anything, nor is it possible to abrogate it wholly. We can neither be released from this law by popular vote, nor should another be sought for to gloss and interpret it. It is not one thing at Rome, another at Athens; one thing now, and another afterwards; but one, eternal and immutable law will govern all men for ever, and there will be one, the common master and ruler of all, God. He it was that proposed and carried this law, and whoever does not yield obedience to it will revolt against himself, and by offering an affront to the nature of man he will thereby suffer the greatest penalties, even if he avoids other supposed sanctions."

The Stoic indeed understood this doctrine in a pan- theistic sense. His god was the universal reason of the world, of which a particle was bestowed on man at his birth. It only needed the Christian doctrine of a personal God, the Creator and Lord of all things. Who in many ways manifests His law to man, but more especially through and in the voice of conscience, to turn it into the Catholic doctrine of moral obliga- tion which has been analysed above. In the teaching of Christ, right conduct is summed up in the observ- ance of the commandments. Those commandments constitute the law of God, which He came not to de- stroy but to fulfil. He required their observance un- der the most terrible sanctions. St. Paul, of course, only preached the doctrine of his Master. The legalism which he rejected was the ceremonial and the merely outward observance of the Pharisees, not the internal and the external observance of the moral law. Al- though the Gentile had not the moral law written on tablets of stone, yet he had it written on the fleshy tablets of his heart, and his conscience bore witness to it, as did that of the Jew (Rom., ii, 14). This is the doctrine still taught in the Catholic Church. It de- rives straight from Christ and His Apostles, though it is often expressed in the language of Stoicism, inter- preted according to the exigences of Christian doc- trine. Since the Reformation it has been the fashion with many to reject it as legalism in favour of what

is called Christian liberty. Christian liberty, how- ever, interpreted by private judgment, developed into various systems of so-called independent morality.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is justly regarded as one of the chief pioneers of modern thought. Accord- ing to Hobbes, man in the state of nature seeks noth- ing but his own selfish pleasure, but such individual- ism naturally leads to an internecine war in which every man's hand is against his neighbour. In pure self-interest and for self-preservation men entered into a compact by which they agreed to surrender part of their natural freedom to an absolute ruler in order to preserve the rest. The State determines what is just and unjust, right and wrong; and the strong arm of the law provides the ultimate .sanction for right conduct. The .same fundamiiital principles form the groundwork of the empirical pliilosophy of Locke and a long train of followers down to the present day. Some of these followers indeed denied that all the motives that influence man's conduct are .selfish; they insist on the existence of sympathetic and social feel- ings in men, but whether selfish or social, all are rooted in a sensist philosophy. The hneal descent of these views may be traced from Hobbes and Locke, through Hume, Paley, Bentham, the two Mills, and Bain, to H. Spencer and the Evolutionists of our own day. This sensist philosophy, of course, has had its opponents. Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists strove to de- fend the essential and eternal distinction of good and evil by reviving Platonism. Butler insisted on the claims of conscience, while the Scotch school, Price, Reid, and Dugald Stewart, postulated a moral sense analogous to the sense of beauty, which infallibly in- dicates the right course of conduct. In Germany, Kant formulated his ethical system to counteract the scepticism of Hume. Moral obligation, accord- ing to him, is derived from the categorical impera- tive of the autonomous reason. Kant's philosophy, through Fichte and Schelling, gave birth to the pan- theism of Hegel. A small but influential school of English Hegelians, represented by such men as T. H. Green, Bradley, Wallace, Bosanquet, and others, re- gard conscience as the voice of man's true self, and man's true self as ideally one with God. English philosophic thought is thus divided into the schools of Materialism and Pantheism, much as Epicureanism and Stoicism divided the ancient world. Pragma- tism, a product of American thought, may without in- justice be compared to the scepticism of the Athenian Academy. Each and all of these systems contain grave errors about the nature of man and about his position in the world, and so it is no wonder that they fail to account for moral obligation. (See Deter- minism; Duallsm; Duty; Ethics; Fatalism; Free Will; Hedonism; Kant, Philosophy of; Law; Pan- theism; Positivism.)

Obligations, PROFEssioNAL.^The office of a judge, inasmuch as he is appointed by public authority to administer justice according to the laws, demands in the first place competent knowledge of the laws which are to be admiiiistcrod. Not Ic.ss important in a judge is a lofty sense of justice and an upright char- acter which cannot be deflected from the pathof duty by either fear or favour. The ju<lge, too, must em- ploy at least ordinary diligence in the conduct of the cases that come before him, so that as far as possible a just sentence may be arrived at. He must not transgress the limits of his authority, and he must ob- serve the rules of procedure laid down for his guidance. These obligations of a judge follow from the nature of his oflnce, and he binds himself implicitly to fulfil them when he accepts that oflire. .Judges also usually take an o.alli by which they expressly bind themselves to administer justice uprightly, without fear or favour. Selling justice for bribes is rightly regarded as a hei- nous ofTence in a judge, and besides being liable to se- vere punishment, it involves the obligation of making