Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/630

Rh 608 ETHICS Free- persistently controverted by writers of the intuitional school, who (unlike Hartley) have usually thought that this derivation of moral sentiments from more primitive feelings would be detrimental to the authority of the former. The chief argument against this theory has been based on the early period at which these sentiments are manifested by children, which hardly allows time for association to produce the effects ascribed to it. This argument has been met in recent times by the application to mind of the physiological theory of heredity, according to which changes produced in the mind (brain) of a parent, by association of ideas or otherwise, tend to be inherited by his offspring ; so that the development of the moral sense or any other faculty or susceptibility of existing man may be hypothetically carried back into the prehistoric life of the human race, without any change in the manner of derivation supposed. At present, however, the theory of heredity is usually held iu conjunction with Darwin s theory of natural selection; according to which different kinds of living things in the course of a series of generations come gradually to be endowed with organs, faculties, and habits tending to the preservation of the individual or species under the condi tions of life iu which it is placed. Thus we have a new zoological factor in the history of the moral sentiments ; which, though in no way opposed to the older psychological theory of their formation through coalescence of more primitive feelings, must yet be conceived as controlling and modifying the effects of the law of association by pre venting the formation of sentiments other than those tending to the preservation of human life. The influence of the Darwinian theory, moreover, has extended from historical psychology to ethics, tending to substitute &quot; pre servation of the race under its conditions of existence &quot; for &quot; happiness &quot; as the ultimate end and standard of virtue. Before concluding this sketch of the development of English ethical thought from Hobbes to the; present time, it will be well to notice briefly the views held by different moralists on the question of free-will, so far, that is, as they have been put forward as ethically important. We must first distinguish three meanings in which &quot; freedom &quot; is attributed to the will or &quot; inner self &quot; of a human being, viz., (1) the general power of choosing among different alternatives of action without a motive, or against the resultant force of conflicting motives; (2) the power of choice between the promptings of reason and those of appetites (or other non-rational impulses) when the latter conflict with reason ; (3) merely the quality of acting rationally in spite of conflicting impulses, however strong, the non posse peccare of the mediaeval theologians. 1 It is ob vious that &quot; freedom &quot; in this third sense is in no way incom patible with complete determination ; and, indeed, is rather an ideal state after which the moral agent ought to aspire than a property which the human will can be said to possess. In the first sense, again, as distinct from the second, the assertion of &quot; freedom &quot; has no ethical signifi cance, except in so far as it introduces a general uncertainty into all our inferences respecting human conduct. Even in the second sense it hardly seerns that the freedom of a man s will can be an element to be considered in examining what it is right or best for him to do (though of course the clearest convictions of duty will be fruitless if a man has not sufficient self-control to enable him to act on them); it is rather when we ask whether it is just to punish him for wrong doing that it seems important to know whether he could have done otherwise. But in spite of the strong interest taken in the theological aspect of 1 It may be observed that in the view of Kant and others (2) and (3) are somewhat confusingly blended. this question by the Protestant divines of the 17th century, it does not appear that English moralists from Hobbes to Hume laid any stress on the relation of free will either to duty generally or to justice in particular. Neither the doctrine of Hobbes, that deliberation is a mere alternation of competing desires, voluntary action imme diately following the &quot; last appetite,&quot; nor the hardly less decided Determinism of Locke, who held that the will is always moved by the greatest present uneasiness, appeared to either author to require any reconciliation with the belief in human responsibility. Even in Clarke s system, where Indeterminism is no doubt a cardinal notion, its importance is metaphysical 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 philosophiz- ingthathad 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 Lave admitted that punish ment can only be legitimate if it be beneficial to the person punished ; others, again, have held that the law ful 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 Fre English ethical speculation without bringing it into relation infl with contemporary European thought on the same subject. ?. n , And in fact almost all the systems described, from Hobbes e t} r downward, have been of essentially native growth, showing hardly any traces of foreign influence. We may observe that ethics is the only department in which this result ap pears. 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 con troversy that Clarke conducted with Spinoza, and afterwards with Leibnitz, was entirely confined to the metaphysical region. Catholic France was a school for Englishmen iu many subjects, but not in morality ; the great struggle between Jansenists and Jesuits had a very remote interest for us. It was not till near the close of the 18th century that the impress of the French revolutionary philosophy begins to manifest itself on this side the channel ; and even then its influence is 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, or t 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 become widely known in the French paraphrase of Dumont an important element is supplied by the works of a French writer, Helvetius ; as Bentham himself was fully conscious. Ilel It was from Helvetius that he learnt that, men being t iui