Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/630

614 rather its defective conception of the nature of the self, as pointed out by Cumberland and the moral sense writers. The human nature in which Hobbes vests the authority of moral law, is shewn to be defective and partial in that it contains no recognition of the social impulses in man. Man does not always act from a regard to selfish pleasure, they claim, but has altruistic impulses which are as natural as the selfish. The existence of these was demonstrated beyond question in the half century following the publication of the Leviathan, and a deal of acute and profitable psychological analysis was called out, yet without touching the position held by Hobbes. The very repetition of the attacks proved that their authors were not quite certain of their success. After all the fine writing, and after the most complete demonstration of the social nature of man, when they come to ask the question, "Why then does man obey the law?" their answer is, "Because of the resultant pleasure either in this life or the next."

This is the meaning of Cumberland's definition of natural law as "a practical proposition with rewards and punishments annexed, promulgated by competent authority." So, too, his appeal to the will of God is made in order to render our happiness more sure, as when he says that obligation arises from our discovery that the laws of nature are from God, "upon whose pleasure depends the whole happiness of all, and consequently our own, concerning which we are naturally most solicitous." This is also the reason for the unexpected change of front in Shaftesbury's Enquiry, when, having made the nature of virtue to consist in disinterested affection toward the good of the whole, or in the just balance of the selfish and social affections, he opens the second book with the query as to "what obligation there is to virtue; or what reason to embrace it?" So far as virtue is considered as the result of merely actual tendencies in human nature, considered as facts, its authority or obligation must be sought beyond those facts in order to give them the preeminence necessary to morality.