Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/121

105 refers in general terms to the supposed original compact between ruler and subjects: "The case for monarchy is placed entirely upon historical grounds" (ibid.). The treatment of Cumberland is also rather misleading in parts. For example, it is said: "but in one vital point Cumberland coincides with his predecessor, and that is that, in building up any political or social theory, the individual must be the starting point" (p. 29). To one not acquainted with the De legibus naturae, this would convey a totally wrong impression. Cumberland goes further than any other English moralist before Shaftesbury in denying that there can be any purely individual good. In a well-known passage in the introduction, he says: "The happiness of each individual … is derived from the best state of the whole system, as the nourishment of each member of an animal depends upon the nourishment of the whole mass of blood diffused through the whole." To be sure, the writer of this section of the pamphlet admits that "Cumberland's individual is not entirely atomistic"; but the reason given is that "he has within him a universalistic element, right reason." This would seem to indicate that Cumberland's partial escape from the difficulties of individualism, was by employing the rationalistic method. Nothing could be further from the truth. He will hear nothing of 'innate ideas,' and his employment of 'right reason' is vague in the extreme. He is the most naïve of realists, and simply assumes that we can see the nature of things as it is. What really separates him from individualism is his fundamental assumption, that man is essentially a social, as opposed to an anti-social, being. If he ever seems to speak as an individualist, in the proper sense of the word, it is because he often attempts to answer Hobbes on his own ground. Space forbids further criticism of the section on Cumberland, but the following (hardly consistent) passages speak for themselves: "The explanation of the fact that Cumberland regards the good of the whole as something more than the sum of the individual goods, goes back to his mediæval system of thought" (p. 43); "But in the history of the development of thought, Cumberland's importance lies, not in the fact that he tried to prove that the golden rule is the dictate of God to man, but in that he tried to prove it by the most advanced scientific methods of his day" (p. 44).

The remainder of the essay is devoted to Locke. This is much more satisfactory than the sections on Hobbes and Cumberland. No attempt is made to reduce Locke's various utterances to a coherent system; but this forbearance was wholly the part of wisdom. The writer's point of view is well indicated by the following passage: '"Locke, as the champion of civil and religious liberty, may properly be said to present the final outcome of the seventeenth century's evolution of individuality, while his other work gave the inspiration for that freedom of thought and introspective analysis which made the individual of the eighteenth century so interesting to himself that society often seemed of minor importance" (p. 46).

E. A.