Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/625

609 certainty in consciousness. Hooker and his successors, the rational theologians of the next century, men like Hales, Chillingworth, and Taylor, were in the direct line of development from theology to psychology, by virtue of their reliance on the sole authority of conscience; yet their protest was made primarily against oppression theological rather than moral. They asserted freedom of conscience against authority in matters of belief, but did not raise the question of the ultimate authority of reason in matters ethical. Conscience was to them a revealer of an objective order. Yet the effect of this movement was to concentrate attention on the organ of belief, and gradually neglect its object. There was needed a scientific skepticism to effect the transition. A skepticism of this character, in a writer of an earlier age and another country, had already produced this result in a developed doctrine of conscience. Charron's advocacy of the primacy of reason and the independence of morality, is stronger and clearer than that of any other writer for at least a century after his time. His skepticism is such, however, and the need for veiling it so strong, that we are unable to determine exactly his position; yet there is no doubt that he makes man, and not his environment, the source of moral authority.

We might expect to find in Bacon another exception to the ontological tendency, but such is not the case. Bacon's experience-philosophy reaches no further than externals. Ultimates are his abhorrence. Everything of value or meaning is turned over to theology, and science is left with the mechanical. Hence the question of obligation goes the same road, and ethics as scientific has only the task of formulating rules for conduct, taking its ideals and its ground from the higher and unsearchable sphere.

It is not till we reach Hobbes that the gradually growing problem of authority definitely takes shape. It is a commonplace in the history of thought to say that the opposition to him shaped the character of all English ethical writing for a century; yet the nature of this influence has not always been clearly understood. Hobbes has been too often treated as the