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 AKBUCKLE AND THE MOLESWORTH-SHAFTESBURY SCHOOL. 207 science. The vices of mankind are "infectious to such a degree" that they depress the individual and make him doubtful of his right to his own approbation, yet, upon con- sideration, the man who has fashioned for himself a thoroughly beautiful life cannot but be conscious of it, for ''there issues from Conscience to the mind its own picture, pure and unspotted," * and this essentially aesthetic consolation is reinforced by the religious one of man's relation to the moral government of God. 2 The slightness of Arbuckle's references to Conscience suffi- ciently differentiates him from Shaftesbury and, especially, from Hutcheson. Nowhere in the Letters does the ex- pression " moral sense" occur. In fact, Arbuckle's general point of view is exclusive of a moral sense. With him Beauty, though fundamentally the same, has two species the one created (as in Nature) and the other creative or pro- ductive (as in Art, Literature and Morals). Postponing for the present the discussion of the psychological character of the appreciation of Beauty, Arbuckle's position may be sum- marised as presenting points of contact with and divergence from that of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in his earlier works, who held such appreciation to be a reflex feeling. Now, if Arbuckle distinguished his Conscience (in the sense of Hutcheson's moral sense) from the appreciation of the Beautiful in Art, it would become a further reflex act, that is the reflex of an already reflex state. To Arbuckle, it would appear, man is ethically an artist, whose work is his own life, which he views as he would a picture he had painted, and approves it, according to canons of artistic excellence to modify an expression of Aristotle's, Virtue is aperr/ rov ev /3t&> KaXov Kayadov. Such an artistic " taste," however, is oppressed by a latent " dialectic ". The artist in conduct feels there should be an inevitableness in the sequence of Happiness upon Virtue. Yet " no one virtuous action is its own sufficient reward "... and the solution is found by invoking the Deity as a Deus ex machina, because, " though Virtue be indeed the direct and natural road to Happiness, yet it frequently fails of actually being so, and, for that reason, stands in need of some superior power to strengthen us in the constant practice of it ". 3 Beauty. It therefore follows that Beauty, being of the greatest importance to Arbuckle more so than to Shaftes- bury or Hutcheson deserves a more thorough investigation 1 Hibemicutfs Letters, i., 220. 2 Cf. Butler, Analogy, ch. ii., iii. 3 Hibernicus's Letters, ii., p. 325.