Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/621

Rh ETHICS 599 maintain, that the fundamental rules of morality are independent of arbitrary will, whether divine or human. But in his general view of ethical principles as being, like mathematical principles, essentially truths of relation, Clarke is quite in accordance with Locke ; while of the four fundamental rules that he expounds, Piety, Equity, Benevolence, and Sobriety (which includes self-preservation), the first is obtained, just as Locke suggests, by &quot; comparing the idea &quot; of man with the idea of an infinitely good and wise being on whom he depends ; and the second and third are axioms self-evident on the consideration of the equality or similarity of human individuals as such. The second axiom of equity that &quot; whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me, that by the same I declare reasonable or unreasonable that I in the like case should do for him,&quot; is merely a formal statement of the golden rule of the gospel. 1 We may observe that, in stating the principle of benevolence, &quot;since the greater good is always most fit and reasonable to be done, every rational creature ought to do all the good it can to its fellow-creatures,&quot; Clarke avowedly follows Cumber land, from whom he quotes the further sentence that &quot; universal love and benevolence is as plainly the most direct, certain, and effectual means to this good as the flowing of a point is to produce a line.&quot; The quota tion may remind us that the analogy between ethics and mathematics ought to be traced further back than Locke; in fact, it results from the influence exercised by Cartesianism over English thought generally, in the latter half of the 17th century. It must be allowed that Clarke is misled by the analogy to use general ethical terms (&quot; fitness,&quot; &quot; agreement&quot; of things, &c.), which overlook t he essential distinction between what is and what ought to be ; and even in one or two expressions to overleap this distinction extravagantly, as (e.g.) in saying that the man who &quot; wilfully acts contrary to justice wills things to be what they are not and cannot be.&quot; What he really means is less paradoxically stated in the general proposition that &quot; originally and in reality it is natural and (morally speak ing) necessary that the will should be determined in every action by the reason of the thing and the right of the case, as it is natural and (absolutely speaking) necessary that the understanding should submit to a demonstrated truth.&quot; Here no doubt Clarke is opposed to Locke ; and even goes beyond the Platonists in affirming the immediate abso lute determination of will by reason. But though it is an essential point in Clarke s view that what is right is to be done as such, apart from any consideration of pleasure or pain, it is to be observed that he is not prepared to apply this doctrine in its unqualified form to such a creature as man, who feels as well as reasons. At least when he comes to argue the preferability of virtue to vice in refer ence to actual human choice, he does not make more than the very moderate claim that &quot; virtue deserves to be chosen for its own sake, and vice to be avoided, though a man was sure for his own particular neither to gain nor lose anything by the practice of cither.&quot; He fully admits that the ques tion is altered when vice is attended by pleasure and profit to the vicious man, virtue by loss and calamity ; and even that it is &quot; not truly reasonable that men by adhering to virtue should part with their lives, if thereby they deprived themselves of all possibility of receiving any advantage from their adherence.&quot; The truth is that the impressive earnestness with which Clarke enforces the doctrine of rational morality only ren ders more manifest the difficulty of establishing ethics on an independent philosophical basis; so long at least as the 1 Even Hobbes accepts the golden rule in its negative application ( &quot;Do not uiito others,&quot; &c.) as summarizing bis &quot; law of nature.&quot; psychological egoism of Hobbes is not definitely as sailed and overthrown. Until this is done, the utmost demonstration of the abstract reasonableness of social duty only leaves us with an irreconcilable antagonism between the view of abstract reason and the self-love which is allowed to be the root of man s appetitive nature. Let us grant that there is as much intellectual absurdity in acting unjustly as in denying that two and two make four; still, if a man has to choose between absurdity and unhappiness, he will naturally prefer the former ; and Clarke cannot maintain that such preference is irrational. 2 It remains to adopt another line of reasoning ; instead of presenting the principle of social duty as abstract reason, liable to conflict to any extent with natural self-love, we may try to exhibit the naturalness of man s social affections, and demonstrate a normal harmony between these and his self-regarding impulses. This is the line of thought which Shaftesbury (1671-1713) may be said to have initiated. Shaftee- Not, of course, that he is original in insisting on the actual bury, fact of natural affections binding men to their fellows ; Cumberland, to say nothing of earlier writers, had dwelt on this at some length. But no moralist before Shaftesbury had made this the cardinal point in his system ; no one had undertaken to distinguish clearly, by careful analysis of experience, the disinterested and self- regarding elements of our appetitive nature, or to prove inductively their per fect harmony. He begins by attacking the egoistic inter pretation of good which Hobbes had put forward, and which, as we have seen, was not necessarily excluded by the doctrine of moral intuitions. This interpretation, he says, would be only true if we considered man as a wholly unrelated individual. Such a being we might doubtless call &quot; good,&quot; if his impulses and dispositions were harmonized and adapted to the attainment of his own felicity. But man we must and do consider in relation to a larger system of which he forms a part, and so we only call him &quot; good &quot; when his impulses and dispositions are so graduated and balanced as to tend towards the good of this whole. And observe, he adds, we do not attribute good ness to him merely because his outward acts have this tendency ; the worst of men may be chained from harm, and lashed into usefulness by the fear of punishment. When we speak of a man as &quot; morally &quot; good, we mean that his dispositions or affections are such as tend of themselves to promote the good or happiness of human society. Hobbes s moral man, who, if let loose from governmental constraint, would straightway spread ruin among his fellows, is not what we commonly agree to call such. Moral goodness, then, involves disinterested affections, whose direct object is the good of others ; but Shaftesbury does not mean (as he has been misunderstood to mean) that only such bene volent social impulses are good, and that these are always good. On the contrary, he is careful to point out, first, that immoderate social affections defeat themselves, miss their proper end, and are therefore bad ; secondly, that as an individual s good is part of the good of the whole &quot; self- affections&quot; existing in a duly limited degree are morally good. The moral ideal, in short, consists in due com bination of both sorts of &quot; affections, &quot; tendency to promote general good being taken as the criterion of the right mixture or balance. This being established, the main aim of Shaftesbury s argument is to prove that the same balance and blending of private and social affections, which tends naturally to public good, is also conducive to the happiness of the individual in whom it exists. Taking the different impulses in detail, he first shows bow the prove that most principles are binding independently of Divine ap pointment, he is no less concerned to show that morality requires the practical support of revealed religion.
 * It should be observed that, while Clarke is sincerely anxious to