Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/230

214 and Hobbes and the materialists of the eighteenth century, or we may consider the race as itself an organism, apart from which the individual is unintelligible, and look upon human nature as having become what it now is through a long process of interaction between organism and environment, in which social as well as psychical and physical factors have influenced the result. This is the view to the elaboration of which Comte and Darwin and Spencer have in different ways contributed."

The book is accordingly divided into two parts, dealing respectively with "The Individualistic Theory" and "The Theory of Evolution." The latter is the longer, and, it will be generally considered, the more important. The former deals, in two chapters, with the hedonistic theory, first in its egoistic and then in its utilitarian form, and is devoted to a discussion, on lines now familiar, of psychological hedonism and its ethical consequences. The author then passes, in Chapters IV and V, to the consideration of the non-hedonistic, but still preëvolutionary, form of the naturalistic theory represented by the school of Shaftesbury, which he characterizes as, like the egoistic, "subjective naturalism," and that represented by those who, like Butler himself, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, waver between the Stoic or idealistic and a properly 'naturalistic' interpretation of 'Nature.' As regards the former tendency, "it may be thought that the constitution of man contains in itself a means of distinguishing the moral value of its various elements, or of the actions to which they lead, and thus furnishing a moral standard or end for conduct. This purpose seems to have been to some extent, though not quite clearly, kept in view by the writers who, in the eighteenth century, contended against the selfish theory of action set forth by Hobbes. They attempted to show that selfishness was not the only, nor even the most prominent, principle of action; and, from the system of diverse principles which they found implanted in human nature, they endeavored to work out a theory of conduct." The leader of this school of thought was Shaftesbury, whose position is here restated in view of the fresh light thrown upon it by the recent publication of the Philosophical Regimen. "Virtue, he holds, is natural and consists in living according to nature; but 'nature' is not for him what it is for the 'naturalists'; it is the 'order and appointment of supreme reason.' Besides this 'moral sense' or 'sense of right and wrong,' however, there is another principle in human nature upon which ethics is based, namely, 'natural affection,' whose object is 'the good of the public,' as distinguished from self-affections, 'which lead only to the good of the private,' and from 'unnatural' affections which lead to no good