Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/582

568 .'" Is not this to say that, in such a being as man, virtue is simply natural, and vice unnatural; and is not that, in essence and in outline, the theory of Butler? Hutcheson is too comprehensive a moralist to be adequately described by any of the recognized school-names. But, for our present purpose, he is best described as the founder, in Scotland at least, of Scottish Intuitionism in ethics. How carefully this Intuitionism is distinguished by him from the doctrine of 'Innate Ideas,' we have already seen.

Hume's quarrel is with the rationalists rather than with the Egoists, with Cudworth and Clarke rather than with Hobbes and Mandeville. To these upholders of an "abstract theory of morals" it had seemed that morality belonged to the nature of things, that ethical propositions were no less demonstrable than mathematical, that the distinction between virtue and vice was as eternal and immutable as the distinction between truth and falsehood. "There has been an opinion very industriously propagated by certain philosophers, that morality is susceptible of demonstration; and tho' no one has ever been able to advance a single step in those demonstrations, yet 'tis taken for granted that this science may be brought to an equal certainty with geometry or algebra." The issue lies between this rationalistic view of morality and the theory of a moral sense. "There has been a controversy started of late … concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgements of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species." Both in the Treatise and in the Enquiry, Hume adopts unhesitatingly the latter view. " Reason is wholly