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Rh of "extra-rational" considerations. The majority of Theists base their belief upon ethical considerations.

It has been pointed out by Rationalists, in the first place, that the reasoning of such apologists as Mr. Balfour and Mr. Mallock assumes a fund of stupidity on the part of the "vulgus," about whose moral fate they are anxious, which can hardly be admitted. An argument founded solely upon the unsatisfactory results of "naturalism" would hardly satisfy even our very easily-satisfied bourgeoisie. To say that there is no speculative proof that God exists, but that the moral law will not be reverenced unless people believe he does, is a reasonable position to take up. But to go on to infer that he does exist, because of these evil consequences of disbelief, is a curious intellectual feat, though the argument is not a discovery of Mr. Balfour's; it is many centuries old in scholastic authors. The people at large would soon perceive this Theism of their anxious philosophers to be a fictio juris, no less than a trick to keep them moral, and would quickly nullify it. Unless, therefore, the Theist argues as Kant and Newman do—that is, that the moral law speculatively considered as a phenomenon points to the existence of God—his reasoning will not stand the test of time. On this point it is that the history of the operations of Rationalists in the domain of ethics is of profound importance, and we proceed at once to its narration. It will be impossible to give a full description of the ethical systems which have appeared during the century. We confine ourselves to those features of them which are most relevant to the main thesis of the progress of Rationalism.

The nineteenth century closes the Deistic controversy, and opens with the struggle between the new Rationalism, empirical Agnosticism, and the orthodox theologians. In ethics the Rationalists oppose utilitarianism to orthodox juridical morality. The germs of the new system are, as usual, discovered in the old Greek controversies. Socrates, rising in an age of universal scepticism, and sceptical himself on most speculative questions, even on the immortality of the soul, made a vigorous stand for moral tradition. From Socrates sprang two widely-divergent ethical schools, the Cyrenaic and the Stoic. Aristippus, the leader of the Cyrenaics, taught that the end of moral action, the only criterion of the morality of acts, was the pleasure of the