Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/124

70 some important topics. I shall confine myself to a single example, which I select in preference to others, as it bears directly on the most interesting of all questions connected with the theory of morals. “If we scan,” says he, “the particular nature, and search into the original causes of the several kinds of naughty dispositions in our souls, and of miscarriages in our lives, we shall find inordinate self-love to be a main ingredient, and a common source of them all; so that a divine of great name had some reason to affirm,—that original sin (or that innate distemper from which men generally become so very prone to evil, and averse to good), doth consist in self-love, disposing us to all kinds of irregularity and excess.” In another passage, the same author expresses himself thus: “Reason dictateth and prescribeth to us, that we should have a sober regard to our true good and welfare; to our best interests and solid content; to that which (all things being rightly stated, considered and computed) will, in the final event, prove most beneficial and satisfactory to us; a self-love working in prosecution of such things, common sense cannot but allow and approve.”

Of these two opposite and irreconcilable opinions, the latter is incomparably the least wide of the truth; and accordingly Mr Locke, and his innumerable followers, both in England and on the Continent, have maintained, that virtue and an enlightened self-love are one and the same. I shall afterwards find a more convenient opportunity for stating some objections to the latter doctrine, as well as to the former. I have quoted the two passages here, merely to shew the very little attention that had been paid, at the era in question, to ethical science, by one of the most learned and profound divines of his age. This is the more remarkable, as his works everywhere inculcate the purest lessons of practical morality, and evince a singular acuteness and justness of eye in the observation of human character. Whoever compares the views of Barrow, when he touches on the theory of morals, with those opened about fifty years afterwards by Dr Butler, in his Discourses on Human Nature, will be abundantly satisfied, that, in this science, as well as in others, the progress of the philosophical spirit during the intervening period was not inconsiderable.

The name of Wilkins, (although he too wrote with some reputation against the Epicureans of his day), is now remembered chiefly in consequence of his treatises concerning a universal language and a real character. Of these treatises, I shall hereafter have occa-