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 204 ENGLISH ETHICS. good of the species, promotes at the same time his own good. All actions spring from self-love, which, guided at first by an immediate instinct, and later, by reason devel- oped through experience, extends itself over ever widening spheres. We love ourselves in our relatives, in our friends, further still, in our country, finally, in humanity, so that self-love and social love coincide, and we are impelled to virtue by the combined motives of interest and duty. This is an ethic of common sense from the standpoint of the cultured man of the world — which at the proper time has the right, no doubt, to gain itself a hearing. Meanwhile Shaftesbury's ideas had impressed Hutcheson and Butler, according to the peculiarities of each. Both of these writers deem it necessary to explain and correct the distinction between the selfish and the benevolent affections by additions, which were of influence on the ethics of Hume ; both devote their zeal to the new doctrine of feelings of reflection or moral taste, in which the former gives more prominence to the aesthetic, merely judging factor, the latter to the active or mandatory one. Francis Hutcheson* (died 1747), professor at Glasgow, in his posthumous System of Moral Philosophy, I755» which had been preceded by an Inquiry concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725, pursues the double aim of showing against Hobbes and Locke the originality and disinterestedness both of benevolence and of moral approval. Virtue is not exercised because it brings advan- tage to the agent, nor approved on account of advantage to the observer. (i) The benevolent affections are entirely independent of self-love and regard for the rewards of God and of man, nay, independent even of the lofty satisfaction afforded by self-approbation. This last, indeed, is vouchsafed to us only when we seek the good of others without personal aims : the joy of inward approval is the result of virtue, not the motive to it. If love were in reality a concealed egoism, it would yield to control in cases where it promises advan- tage, which, as experience shows, is not the fact. Benev- olence is entirely natural, and as universal in the moral •Cf. Fowler's treatise, cited p. 199. — Tr.