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275 appeal to Right Reason is necessary, or desirable. But, "since there are some men who have lost all sense of God and divine things, and recognize no fixed rule in their faculties," these "must be approached in another way," i.e., by Right Reason. The author therefore draws from this store "certain principles immediately true, and in need of no proof, but from which almost all moral reasoning (as mathematical demonstrations from common axioms) may be clearly and easily deduced." These he calls 'Noemata.'

An examination of these 'Noemata' at once shows that we no longer have to do with the intellectualism of Cudworth. The first twelve 'Noemata' treat of our duty toward ourselves, and might fairly be termed 'maxims of prudence.' The good is here defined (not quite adequately for the system) as that "which to any perceptive life, or stage of such life, is grateful, pleasing, and suitable, and connected with the preservation of the percipient." The remaining eleven 'Noemata' concern our duties to God and to other men. Two of these would seem quite distinctly to point in the direction of Universalistic Hedonism. "That good which you prefer for yourself in given circumstances, you ought to prefer for another in the same circumstances, so far as it is possible without injury to any third person." And again, "If it is good that one man should be supplied with means to live well and happily, it follows by a sure and wholly mathematical analogy that it is twice as good for two men to be supplied, three times for three, a thousand times for a thousand," etc. It might very well seem as if, in More, we had already found an exponent of the Utilitarian principle; but this is certainly not the case. The system is one of the most perplexed in the whole history of English Ethics, but on the point just referred to, at least, the author does not leave us in doubt. Even in the 'Scholia' appended to the chapter in which the 'Noemata' are treated, we find a significant statement of the author's position. Referring to previous attempts to find some one