There may be a state of society in which it becomes *the duty of good citizens to assume an illegal attitude, and to perform illegal acts, in the interest of law and order*. If those who are legally intrusted with executive and judicial offices are openly, notoriously, and persistently false to their trusts, to such a degree as to derange and subvert the social order which it is their function to maintain, good citizens, if they have the power, have undoubtedly the right to displace them, and to institute a provisional government for the temporary emergency. A case of this kind occurred a few years ago in San Francisco. The entire government of the city had for a series of years been under the control of ruffians and miscreants, and force and fraud had rendered the ballot-box an ineffectual remedy. No law-abiding citizen deemed his life or property safe; gross outrages were committed with impunity; and thieves and murderers alone had the protection of the municipal authorities. Despairing of legal remedy, the best citizens of all parties organized themselves under the direction of a Committee of Safety, forcibly deposed the municipal magistrates and judges, brought well-known criminals to trial, conviction, and punishment, reestablished the integrity of suffrage, and resigned their power to functionaries lawfully elected, under whom and their successors the city has enjoyed a degree of order, tranquillity, and safety at least equal to that of any other great city on the continent.

*The right of revolution* undoubtedly is inherent in a national body politic; but it is an extreme right, and is to be exercised only under the most urgent necessity. Its conditions cannot be strictly defined, and its exercise can, perhaps, be justified only by its results. A constitutional government can seldom furnish occasion for violent revolutionary measures; for every constitution has its own provisions for legal amendment, and the public sentiment ripe for revolution can hardly fail to be strong enough to carry the amendments which it craves, through the legal processes, which, if slow and cumbrous, are immeasurably preferable to the employment of force and the evils of civil war. On the other hand, a despotic or arbitrary government may admit of abrogation only by force; and if its administration violates private rights, imposes unrighteous burdens and disabilities, suppresses the development of the national resources, and supersedes the administration of justice or the existence of equitable relations between class and class or between man and man, the people—the rightful source and arbiter of government—has manifestly the right to assert its own authority, and to substitute a constitution and rulers of its own choice for the sovereignty which has betrayed its trust. Under similar oppression, the same right unquestionably exists in a remote colony, or in a nation subject by conquest to a foreign power. If that power refuses the rights and privileges of subjects to a people over which it exercises sovereignty, and governs it in its own imagined interests, with a systematic and persistent disregard to the well-being of the people thus governed, resistance is a right, and may become a duty. In fine, the function of government is the maintenance of just and beneficent order; a government forfeits its rights when it is false to this function; and the rights thus forfeited revert to the misgoverned people.



Chapter XIII.

CASUISTRY.

Casuistry is the application of the general principles of morality to individual cases in which there is room for question as to duty. The question may be as to the obligation or the rightfulness of a particular act, as to the choice between two alternative courses, as to the measure or limit of a recognized duty, or as to the grounds of preference when there seems to be a conflict of duties. A large proportion of these cases disappear under any just view of moral obligation. Most questions of conscience have their origin in deficient conscientiousness. He who is determined to do the right, the whole right, and nothing but the right, is seldom at a loss to know what he ought to do. But when the aim is to evade all difficult duties which can be omitted without shame or the clear consciousness of wrong, and to go as close as possible to the boundary line between good and evil without crossing it, the questions that arise are often perplexing and complicated, and they are such as, in the interest of virtue, may fittingly remain unanswered. There are always those whose aim is, not to attain any definite, still less any indefinitely high, standard of goodness, but to be saved from the penal consequences of wrong-doing; and there are even (so-called) religious persons, and teachers too, with whom this negative indemnity from punishment fills out the whole meaning of the sacred and significant term salvation. It must be confessed that questions which could emanate only from such minds, furnish a very large part of the often voluminous and unwieldy treatises on casuistry that have come down to us from earlier times, especially of those of the Jesuit moralists, whose chief endeavor is to lay out a border-path just outside the confines of acknowledged wrong and evil.

Yet there are *cases in which the most conscientious persons may be in doubt as to the right*. We can here indicate only the general principles on which such cases are to be decided, with a very few specific illustrations.

*The question of duty is often a question*, not of principle, but *of fact*. It is the case, the position and relations of the persons or objects concerned, that we do not fully understand. For instance, when a new appeal is made for our charitable aid, in labor or money, the question is not whether it is our duty to assist in a work of real beneficence, but whether for the proposed object, and under the direction of those who make the appeal, our labor or money will be lucratively invested in the service of humanity. There are, certainly, benevolent associations and enterprises for the very noblest ends, whose actual utility is open to the gravest doubt. It is sometimes difficult even to determine a question of justice or equity, simply because the circumstances of the case, so far as we can understand them, do not define the right. Instances of this class might be multiplied; but they are all instances in which there is no obscurity as to our obligation or duty, and therefore no question for moral casuistry. We are, however, obviously bound, by considerations of fitness, to seek the fullest information within our power in every case in which we are compelled to act, or see fit to act; nor can we regard action without knowledge, even though the motive be virtuous, as either safe or blameless.

*The measure or limit of duty* is with many conscientious persons a serious question. Here an exact definition is hardly possible, and a generous liberty may be given to individual taste or judgment; yet considerations of fitness set bounds to that liberty. Thus direct and express self-culture is a duty incumbent on all, yet in which diversity of inclination may render very different degrees of diligence equally fitting and right; but all self-centred industry is fittingly limited by domestic, social, and civic obligations. Thus, also, direct acts of beneficence are obviously incumbent on all; but the degree of self-sacrifice for beneficent ends need not, nay, ought not to be the same for every one; and while we hold in the highest admiration those who make the entire surrender of all that they have and are to the service of mankind, we have no reason to scant our esteem for those who are simply kind and generous, while they at the same time labor, spend, or save for their own benefit. Indeed, the world has fully as much need of the latter as of the former. Were the number of self-devoting philanthropists over-large, a great deal of the necessary business and work of life would be left undone; and did self-denying givers constitute a very numerous body, the dependent and mendicant classes would be much more numerous than they are; while the withdrawal of expenditure for personal objects would paralyze industrial enterprise, and arrest the creation of that general wealth which contributes to the general comfort and happiness, and the accumulation of those large fortunes which are invaluable as safety-funds and movement-funds for the whole community.

There are cases in which there is manifestly a *conflict of duties*. This most frequently occurs between prudence and beneficence. Up to a certain point they coincide. No prudent man will suffer himself to contract unsocial, or selfish, or miserly habits, or to neglect the ordinary good offices and common charities of life. But is one bound to transcend the limits of prudence, and, without any specific grounds of personal obligation, to incur loss, hardship, or peril, in behalf of another person? One is no doubt bound to do all that he could reasonably expect from another, were their positions reversed; but is it his duty to do more than this? In answer, it must be admitted that he who in such a case suffers prudence to limit his beneficence has done all that duty absolutely requires; but, in proportion to the warmth of his benevolence and the loftiness of his spirit and character, he will find himself constrained to transcend this limit, and to sacrifice prudence to beneficence. Thus—to take an instance from a class of events by no means infrequent—if I see a man in danger of drowning, it is obviously my duty to do all that I can do for his rescue without putting my own life in jeopardy. But I owe him no more than this. My own life is precious to me and to my family, and I have a right so to regard it. I shall not deserve censure or self-reproach, if I decline exposing myself to imminent peril. Yet if I have the generosity and the courage which belong to a truly noble nature, I shall not content myself with doing no more than this,—I shall hazard my own safety if there is reason to hope that my efforts may have a successful issue; and in so doing I shall perform an act of heroic virtue. The same principle will apply to exposure, danger, and sacrifice of every kind, incurred for the safety, relief, or benefit of others. We transgress no positive law of right, when we omit doing for others more than we could rightfully expect were we in their place. Prudence in such a case is our right. But it is a right which it is more noble to surrender than to retain; and the readiness with which and the degree in which we are willing to surrender it, may be taken as a fair criterion of our moral growth and strength.

Under the title of *Justice*, with the broad scope which we have given to it, there may be an apparent conflict of duties, and there are certain obvious laws of precedence which may cover all such cases. We should first say that our obligations to the Supreme Being have a paramount claim above all duties to inferior beings, had we not reason to believe that God is in no way so truly worshipped and served as by acts of justice and mercy to his children. The Divine Teacher has given us to understand, not that there is no time or place too sacred for charity, but that holy times and places have their highest consecration in the love to man which love to God inspires.

Toward men, it hardly needs to be said that justice (in the limited and ordinary acceptation of the word) *has the precedence of charity*. Indeed, were it not for the prevalence of injustice—individual, social, and civic—there would hardly be any scope for the active exercise of charity. Want comes almost wholly from wrong. Were justice universal, that is, were the rights and privileges which fitly belong to men as men, extended to and made available by all classes and conditions of men, there would still be great inequalities of wealth and of social condition; but abject and squalid poverty could hardly exist. In almost every individual instance, the withholding or delay of justice tends more or less directly toward the creation of the very evils which charity relieves. No amount of generosity, then, can palliate injustice, or stand as a substitute for justice.

As regards the persons to whom we owe offices of kindness or charity, it is obvious that *those related to us by consanguinity or affinity have the first ** claim*. These relations have all the elements of a natural alliance for mutual defence and help; and it is impossible that their essential duties should be faithfully discharged and their fitnesses duly observed, without creating sympathies that in stress of need will find expression in active charity. In the next rank we may fittingly place our benefactors, if their condition be such as to demand a return for their kind offices in our behalf. Nearness in place may be next considered; for the very fact that the needs of our neighbors are or may be within our cognizance, commends them especially to our charity, and enables us to be the more judicious and effective in their relief. Indeed, in smaller communities, where the dwellings of the rich and of the poor are interspersed, a general recognition of the claims of neighborhood on charity would cover the field of active beneficence with an efficiency attainable in no other way, and at a greatly diminished cost of time and substance. There is yet another type of neighborhood, consecrated to our reverent observance by the parable of the Good Samaritan. There are from time to time cases of want and suffering brought, without our seeking, under our immediate regard,—cast, as it were, directly upon our kind offices. The person thus commended to us is, for the time, our nearest neighbor, nay, our nearest kinsman, and the very circumstances which have placed him in this relation to us, make him fittingly the foremost object of our charity.

The question sometimes presents itself *whether ** we shall bestow an immediate, yet transient benefit, or a more remote, but permanent good*. If the two are incompatible, and the former is not a matter of absolute necessity, the latter is to be preferred. Thus remunerative employment is much more beneficial than alms to an able-bodied man, and it is better that he suffer some degree of straitness till he can earn a more comfortable condition, than that he be first made to feel the dependence of pauperism. Yet if his want be entire and urgent, the delay of immediate relief is the part of cruelty. On similar grounds, beneficence which embraces a class of cases or persons is to be preferred to particular acts of kindness to individuals. Thus it seems harsh to refuse alms to an unknown street beggar; but as such relief gives shelter to a vast amount of fraud, idleness, and vice, it is much better that we should sustain, by contributions proportioned to our ability, some system by which cases of actual need, and such only, can be promptly and adequately cared for, and that we then—however reluctantly—refuse our alms to applicants of doubtful merit.



Chapter XIV.

ANCIENT HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

The numerous *ethical systems* that have had currency in earlier or later times, may be divided into two classes,—the one embracing those which make virtue a means; the other, those which make it an end. According to the former, virtue is to be practised for the good that will come of it; according to the latter, for its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence. These classes have obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the selfish and the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of God. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two classes respectively.

It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of *the history of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome*, or rather, in Greece; for Rome had no philosophy that was not born in Greece.

*Socrates* was less a moral philosopher than a preacher of virtue. Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and irony principally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors define right and obligation from the nature of things as presented to their own consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever a moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart of the case, and drawing thence the response as from a divine oracle.

*Plato* held essentially the same ground, as may be seen in his identifying the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; but it is impossible to trace in his writings the outlines of a definite ethical system, whether his own, or one derived from his great master.

The three *principal schools of ethical philosophy in Greece* were the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic.

The *Peripatetics* derived their philosophy from Aristotle, and their name from his habit of walking up and down under the plane-trees of the Lyceum. According to him, virtue is conduct so conformed to human nature as to preserve all its appetites, proclivities, desires, and passions, in mutual check and limitation. It consists in shunning extremes. Thus courage stands midway between cowardice and rashness; temperance, between excess and self-denial; generosity, between prodigality and parsimony; meekness, between irascibility and pusillanimity. Happiness is regarded as the supreme good; but while this is not to be attained without virtue, virtue alone will not secure it. Happiness requires, in addition, certain outward advantages, such as health, riches, friends, which therefore a good man will seek by all lawful means. Aristotle laid an intense stress on the cultivation of the domestic virtues, justly representing the household as the type, no less than the nursery, of the state, and the political well-being of the state as contingent on the style of character cherished and manifested in the home-life of its members.

There is reason to believe that *Aristotle's personal character* was conformed to his theory of virtue,—that he pursued the middle path, rather than the more arduous route of moral perfection. Though much of his time was spent in Athens, he was a native of Macedonia, and was for several years resident at the court of Philip as tutor to Alexander, with whom he retained friendly relations for the greater part of his royal pupil's life. Of his connection with the Macedonian court and public affairs, there are several stories that implicate him dishonorably with political intrigues, and though there is not one of these that is not denied, and not one which rests on competent historical authority, such traditions are not apt so to cluster as to blur the fair fame of a sturdily incorruptible man, but are much more likely to cling to the memory of a trimmer and a time-server.

*Epicurus,* from whom the Epicurean philosophy derives its name, was for many years a teacher of philosophy in Athens. He was a man of simple, pure, chaste, and temperate habits, in his old age bore severe and protracted sufferings, from complicated and incurable disease, with singular equanimity, and had his memory posthumously blackened only by those who—like theological bigots of more recent times—inferred, in despite of all contemporary evidence, that he was depraved in character, because they thought that his philosophy ought to have made him so.

He represented *pleasure as the supreme good*, and its pleasure-yielding capacity as the sole criterion by which any act or habit is to be judged. On this ground, the quest of pleasure becomes the prime, or rather the only duty. "Do that you may enjoy," is the fundamental maxim of morality. There is no intrinsic or permanent distinction between right and wrong. Individual experience alone can determine the right, which varies according to the differences of taste, temperament, or culture. There are, however, some pleasures which are more than counterbalanced by the pains incurred in procuring them, or by those occasioned by them; and there are, also, pains which are the means of pleasures greater than themselves. The wise man, therefore, will measure and govern his conduct, not by the pleasure of the moment, but with reference to the future and ultimate effects of acts, habits, and courses of conduct, upon his happiness. What are called the virtues, as justice, temperance, chastity, are in themselves no better than their opposites; but experience has shown that they increase the aggregate of pleasure, and diminish the aggregate of pain. Therefore, and therefore alone, they are duties. The great worth of philosophy consists in its enabling men to estimate the relative duration, and the permanent consequences, as well as the immediate intensity, of every form of pleasure.

Epicurus specifies *two kinds of pleasure*, that of rest and that of motion. He prefers the former. Action has its reaction; excitement is followed by depression; effort, by weariness; thought for others involves the disturbance of one's own peace. The gods, according to Epicurus, lead an easy, untroubled life, leave the outward universe to take care of itself, are wholly indifferent to human affairs, and are made ineffably happy by the entire absence of labor, want, and care; and man becomes most godlike and most happy, therefore most virtuous, when he floats through life, unharming and unharmed, idle and useless, self-contained and self-sufficing, simple in his tastes, moderate in his requirements, frugal in his habits.

It may be doubted *whether Epicurus denoted by pleasure,*(*18*)* mere physical pleasure alone*. It is certain that his later followers regarded the pleasures of the body as the only good; and Cicero says that Epicurus himself referred all the pleasures of the intellect to the memory of past and the hope of future sensual gratification. Yet there is preserved an extract of a letter from Epicurus, in which he says that his own bodily pains in his years of decrepitude are outweighed by the pleasure derived from the memory of his philosophical labors and discoveries.

*Epicureanism numbered among its disciples*, not only *men of approved virtue*, but not a few, like Pliny the Younger, of a more active type of virtue than Epicurus would have deemed consistent with pleasure. But in lapse of time it became the pretext and cover for the grossest sensuality; and the associations which the unlearned reader has with the name are only strengthened by conversance with the literature to which it gave birth. Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable barriers of grammar and dictionary.

While Epicureanism thus generated, on the one hand, in men of the world laxity of moral principle and habit, on the other hand, in minds of a more contemplative cast, it *lapsed into atheism*. From otiose gods, careless of human affairs, the transition was natural to a belief in no gods. The universe which could preserve and govern itself, could certainly have sprung into uncaused existence; for the tendencies which, without a supervising power, maintain order in nature, continuity in change, ever-new life evolved from incessant death, must be inherent tendencies to combination, harmony, and organization, and thus may account for the origin of the system which they sustain and renew. This type of atheism has its most authentic exposition in the "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius. He does not, in so many words, deny the being of the gods,—he, indeed, speaks of them as leading restful lives, withdrawn from all care of mortal affairs; but he so scoffs at all practical recognition of them, and so jeers at the reverence and awe professed for them by the multitude, that we are constrained to regard them as rather the imagery of his verse than the objects of his faith. He maintains the past eternity of matter, which consists of atoms or monads of various forms. These, drifting about in space, and impinging upon one another, by a series of happy chances, fell into orderly relations and close-fitting symmetries, whence, in succession, and by a necessity inherent in the primitive atoms, came organization, life, instinct, love, reason, wisdom. This poem has a peculiar value at the present day, as closely coincident in its cosmogony with one of the most recent phases of physical philosophy, and showing that what calls itself progress may be motion in a circle.

The *Stoics*, so called from a portico(19) adorned with magnificent paintings by Polygnotus, in which their doctrines were first taught, owe their origin to Zeno, who lived to a very great age, illustrious for self-control, temperance, and the severest type of virtue, and at length, in accordance with a favorite dogma and practice of his school, when he found that he had before him only growing infirmity with no hope of restoration, terminated his life by his own hand.

According to the Stoic philosophy, *virtue is the sole end of life*, and virtue is the conformity of the will and conduct to universal nature. Virtue alone is good; vice alone is evil; and whatever is neither virtue nor vice is neither good nor evil in itself, but is to be sought or shunned, according as it is auxiliary to virtue or conducive to vice,—if neither, to be regarded with utter indifference. Virtue is indivisible. It does not admit of degrees. He who only approximates to virtue, however closely, is yet to be regarded as outside of its pale. Only the wise man can be virtuous. He needs no precepts of duty. His intuitions are always to be trusted. His sense of right cannot be blinded or misled. As for those who do not occupy this high philosophic ground, though they cannot be really virtuous, they yet may present some show and semblance of virtue, and they may be aided in this by precepts and ethical instruction.(20) It was for the benefit of those who, on account of their lack of true wisdom, needed such direction, and were at the same time so well disposed as to receive and follow it, that treatises on practical morality were written by many of the later Stoics, and that in Rome there were teachers of this school who exercised functions closely analogous to those of the Christian preacher and pastor.

Stoicism found *its most congenial soil* in the stern, hardy integrity and patriotism of those Romans, whose incorruptible virtue is the one redeeming feature of the declining days of the Republic and the effeminacy and coarse depravity of the Empire. Seneca's ethical writings(21) are almost Christian, not only in their faithful rebuke of every form of wrong, but in their tender humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel master, beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years, only to be driven into exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty, exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been already said, to annihilation as the goal of life, he maintained a spirit so joyous, and has left in his writings so attractive a picture of a soul serenely and supremely happy, that he has given support and consolation to multitudes of the bravest and best disciples of the heaven-born religion, which he can have known—if at all—only through its slanderers and persecutors. Marcus Aurelius, in a kindred spirit, and under the even heavier burdens of a tottering empire, domestic dissensions, and defeat and disaster abroad, maintained the severest simplicity and purity of life, appropriated portions of his busiest days to devout contemplation, meditated constantly on death, and disciplined himself to regard with contempt alike the praise of flatterers and the contingency of posthumous fame. We have, especially in Nero's reign, the record of not a few men and women of like spirit and character, whose lofty and impregnable virtue lacked only loving faith and undoubting trust in a fatherly Providence to assimilate them to the foremost among the Apostles and martyrs of the Christian Church.

*The Sceptical school of philosophy* claims in this connection a brief notice. Though so identified in common speech with the name of a single philosopher, that Pyrrhonism is a synonyme for Scepticism, it was much older than Pyrrho, and greatly outnumbered his avowed followers. It was held by the teachers of this school that objective truth is unattainable. Not only do the perceptions and conceptions of different persons vary as to every object of knowledge; but the perceptions and conceptions of the same persons as to the same object vary at different times. Nay, more, at the same time one sense conveys impressions which another sense may negative, and not infrequently the reflective faculty negatives all the impressions derived from the senses, and forms a conception entirely unlike that which would have taken shape through the organs of sense. The soul that seeks to know, is thus in constant agitation. But happiness consists in imperturbableness of spirit, that is, in suspense of judgment; and as it is our duty to promote our own happiness, it is our duty to live without desire or fear, preference or abhorrence, love or hatred, in entire apathy,—a life of which Mohammed's fabled coffin is the fittest symbol.

The *New Academy*, whose philosophy was a hybrid of Platonism and Pyrrhonism, while it denied the possibility of ascertaining objective truth, yet taught that on all subjects of speculative philosophy probability is attainable, and that, if the subject in hand be one which admits of being acted upon, it is the duty of the moral agent to act in accordance with probability,—to pursue the course in behalf of which the more and the better reasons can be given. There are moral acts and habits which seem to be in accordance with reason and the nature of things. We may be mistaken in thinking them so; yet the probability that they are so creates a moral obligation in their favor. The New Academy professed a hypothetical acquiescence in the ethics of the Peripatetic school, maintaining, therefore, that the mean between two extremes is probably in accordance with right and duty, and that virtue is probably man's highest good, yet probably not sufficient in itself without the addition of exterior advantages.

*Cicero* considered himself as belonging to the New Academy. His instincts as an advocate, often induced by professional exigencies to deny what he had previously affirmed, made the scepticism of this school congenial to him; while his love of elegant ease and luxury and his lack of moral courage were in closer harmony with the practical ethics of the Peripatetics than with the more rigid system of the Stoics. At the same time, his pure moral taste and his sincere reverence for the right brought him into sympathy with the Stoic school. His "De Officiis" is an exposition of the Stoic system of ethics, though by the professed disciple of another philosophy. It is as if a Mohammedan, without disclaiming his own religion, should undertake an exposition of the ethics of Christianity, on the ground that, though Mohammed was a genuine prophet, there was, nevertheless, a higher and purer morality in the New Testament than in the Koran.



Chapter XV.

MODERN HISTORY OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

*For several centuries after the destruction of the Western Empire*, philosophy had hardly an existence except in its records, and these were preserved chiefly for their parchment, half-effaced, covered by what took the place of literature in the (so called) Dark Ages, and at length deciphered by such minute and wearisome toil as only mediaeval cloisters have ever furnished. For a long period, monasteries were the only schools, and in these the learned men of the day were, either successively or alternately, learners and teachers, whence the appellation of Schoolmen. The learned men who bear this name were fond of casuistry, and discussed imagined and often impossible cases with great pains (their readers would have greater); but, so far as we know, they have left no systematic treatises on moral philosophy, and have transmitted no system that owes to them its distinguishing features. Yet we find among them a very broad division of opinion as to the ground of right. The fundamental position of the Stoics, that virtue is conformity to nature, and thus independent of express legislation,—not created by law, human or divine, but the source and origin of law,—had its champions, strong, but few; while the Augustinian theology, then almost universal, replaced Epicureanism in its denial of the intrinsic and indelible moral qualities of actions. The extreme Augustinians regarded the positive command of God as the sole cause and ground of right, so that the very things which are forbidden under the severest penalties would become virtuous and commendable, if enjoined by Divine authority. William of Ockham, one of the most illustrious of the English Schoolmen, wrote: "If God commanded his creatures to hate himself, the hatred of God would be the duty of man."

The *earliest modern* theory of morals that presented striking peculiarities was that of *Hobbes* (A. D. 1588-1679), who was indebted solely to the stress of his time, alike for his system and for whatever slender following it may have had. He was from childhood a staunch royalist, was shortly after leaving the University the tutor of a loyal nobleman, and, afterward, of Charles II. during the early years of his exile; and the parliamentary and Puritan outrages seemed to him to be aimed at all that was august and reverend, and adapted to overturn society, revert progress, and crush civilization. According to him, men are by nature one another's enemies, and can be restrained from internecine hostility only by force or fear. An instinctive perception of this truth in the infancy of society gave rise to monarchical and absolute forms of government; for only by thus centralizing and massing power, which could be directed against any disturber of the peace, could the individual members of society hold property or life in safety. The king thus reigns by right of human necessity, and obedience to him and to constituted authorities under him is man's whole duty, and the sum of virtue. Might creates right. Conscience is but another name for the fear of punishment. The intimate connection of religion with civil freedom in the English Commonwealth no doubt went far in uprooting in Hobbes all religious faith; and while he did not openly attack Christianity, he maintained the duty of entire conformity to the monarch's religion, whatever it might be, which is of course tantamount to the denial of objective religious truth.(22)

Hobbes may fairly be regarded as *the father of modern ethical philosophy*,—not that he had children after his own likeness; but his speculations were so revolting equally to thinking and to serious men, as to arouse inquiry and stimulate mental activity in a department previously neglected.

The gauntlet thus thrown down by Hobbes was taken up by *Cudworth* (A. D. 1617-1688), the most learned man of his time, whose "Intellectual System of the Universe" is a prodigy of erudition,—a work in which his own thought is so blocked up with quotations, authorities, and masses of recondite lore, that it is hardly possible to trace the windings of the river for the debris of auriferous rocks that obstruct its flow. The treatise with which we are concerned is that on "Eternal and Immutable Morality." In this he maintains that the right exists, independently of all authority, by the very nature of things, in co-eternity with the Supreme Being. So far is he from admitting the possibility of any dissiliency between the Divine will and absolute right, that he turns the tables on his opponents, and classes among Atheists those of his contemporaries who maintain that God can command what is contrary to the intrinsic right; that He has no inclination to the good of his creatures; that He can justly doom an innocent being to eternal torments; or that whatever God wills is just because He wills it.

*Samuel Clarke* (A. D. 1675-1729) followed Cudworth in the same line of thought. He was, it is believed, the first writer who employed the term fitness as defining the ground of the immutable and eternal right, though the idea of fitness necessarily underlies every system or theory that assigns to virtue intrinsic validity.

*Shaftesbury* (A. D. 1671-1713) represents virtue as residing, not in the nature or relations of things, but in the bearing of actions on the welfare or happiness of beings other than the actor. Benevolence constitutes virtue; and the merit of the action and of the actor is determined by the degree in which particular affections are merged in general philanthropy, and reference is had, not to individual beneficiaries or benefits, but to the whole system of things of which the actor forms a part. The affections from which such acts spring commend themselves to the moral sense, and are of necessity objects of esteem and love. But the moral sense takes cognizance of the affections only, not of the acts themselves; and as the conventional standard of the desirable and the useful varies with race, time, and culture, the acts which the affections prompt, and which therefore are virtuous, may be in one age or country such as the people of another century or land may repudiate with loathing. Las Casas, in introducing negro slavery into America, with the fervently benevolent purpose of relieving the hardships of the feeble and overtasked aborigines, performed, according to this theory, a virtuous act; but had he once considered the question of intrinsic right or natural fitness, a name so worthily honored would never have been associated with the foulest crime of modern civilization.

According to *Adam Smith* (A. D. 1723-1790), moral distinctions depend wholly on sympathy. We approve in others what corresponds to our own tastes and habits; we disapprove whatever is opposed to them. As to our own conduct, "we suppose ourselves," he writes, "the spectators of our own behavior, and endeavor to imagine what effect it would in this light produce in us." Our sense of duty is derived wholly from our thus putting ourselves in the place of others, and inquiring what they would approve in us. Conscience, then, is a collective and corporate, not an individual faculty. It is created by the prevalent opinions of the community. Solitary virtue there cannot be; for without sympathy there is no self-approval. By parity of reason, the duty of the individual can never transcend the average conscience of the community. This theory describes society as it is, not as it ought to be. We are, to a sad degree, conventional in our practice, much more so than in our beliefs; but it is the part of true manliness to have the conscience an interior, not an external organ, to form and actualize notions of right and duty for one's self, and to stand and walk alone, if need there be, as there manifestly is in not a few critical moments, and as there is not infrequently in the inward experience of every man who means to do his duty.

*Butler* (A. D. 1692-1752), in his "Ethical Discourses," aims mainly and successfully to demonstrate the rightful supremacy of conscience. His favorite conception is of the human being as himself a household [an economy],—the various propensities, appetites, passions, and affections, the members,—Conscience, the head, recognized as such by all, so that there is, when her sovereignty is owned, an inward repose and satisfaction; when she is disobeyed, a sense of discord and rebellion, of unrest and disturbance. This is sound and indisputable, and it cannot be more clearly stated or more vividly illustrated than by Butler; but he manifestly regards conscience as legislator no less than judge, and thus fails to recognize any objective standard of right. It is evident that on his ground there is no criterion by which honestly erroneous moral judgments can be revised, or by which a discrimination can be made between the results of education or involuntary prejudice, and the right as determined by the nature of things and the standard of intrinsic fitness.

Of all modern ethical writers since the time of Cudworth and Clarke, none so much as approaches the position occupied by *Richard Price* (A. D. 1723-1791), a London dissenting divine, a warm advocate of American independence, and the intimate friend of John Adams. He maintained that right and wrong are inherent and necessary, immutable and eternal characteristics, not dependent on will or command, but on the intrinsic nature of the act, and determined with unerring accuracy by conscience, whenever the nature of the case is clearly known. "Morality," he writes, "is fixed on an immovable basis, and appears not to be in any sense factitious, or the arbitrary production of any power, human or divine; but equally everlasting and necessary with all truth and reason." "Virtue is of intrinsic value and of indispensable obligation; not the creature of will, but necessary and immutable; not local and temporary, but of equal extent and antiquity with the Divine mind; not dependent on power, but the guide of all power."(23)

*Paley* (A. D. 1743-1805) gives a definition of virtue, remarkable for its combination of three partial theories. Virtue, according to him, is "the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness." Of this definition it may be said, 1. The doing good to mankind is indeed virtue; but it is by no means the whole of virtue. 2. Obedience to the will of God is our duty; but it is so, because his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would lose none of its obligation. Epictetus led as virtuous a life as if heaven had been open to his faith and hope.—Paley's system may be described in detail as Shaftesbury's, with an external washing of Christianity; Shaftesbury having been what was called a free-thinker, while Paley was a sincere believer in the Christian revelation, and contributed largely and efficiently to the defence of Christianity and the illustration of its records. The chief merit of Paley's treatise on Moral Philosophy is that it clearly and emphatically recognizes the Divine authority of the moral teachings of the New Testament, though in expounding them the author too frequently dilutes them by considerations of expediency.

*Jeremy Bentham* (A. D. 1747-1832) is Paley minus Christianity. The greatest good of the greatest number is, according to him, the aim and criterion of virtue. Moral rules should be constructed with this sole end; and this should be the pervading purpose of all legislation. Bentham's works are very voluminous, and they cover, wisely and well, almost every department of domestic, social, public, and national life. The worst that can be said of his political writings is that they are in advance of the age,—literally Utopian;(24) for it would be well with the country which was prepared to embody his views. But, unfortunately, his principles have no power of self-realization. They are like a watch, perfect in all other parts, but without the mainspring. Bentham contemplates the individual man as an agency, rather than as an intellectual and moral integer. He must work under yoke and harness for ends vast and remote, beyond the appreciation of ordinary mortals; and he must hold all partial affections and nearer aims subordinate to rules deduced by sages and legislators from considerations of general utility. Bentham's influence on legislation, especially on criminal law, has been beneficially felt on both sides of the Atlantic. In the department of pure ethics, there are no essential points of difference between him and other writers of the utilitarian school.(25)

* * * * *

In *France* there has been a large preponderance of sensualism, expediency, and selfishness in the ethical systems that have had the most extensive currency. There was a great deal of elaborate ethical speculation and theory among the French philosophers of the last century; but among them we cannot recall a single writer who maintained a higher ground than Bentham, except that Rousseau—perhaps the most immoral of them all—who was an Epicurean so far as he had any philosophy, sometimes soars in sentimental rhapsodies about the intrinsic beauty and loveliness of a virtue which he knew only by name.

*Malebranche* (A. D. 1638-1714), whose principal writings belong to the previous century, represents entirely opposite views and tendencies. He hardly differs from Samuel Clarke, except in phraseology. He resolves virtue into love of the universal order, and conformity to it in conduct. This order requires that we should prize and love all beings and objects in proportion to their relative worth, and that we should recognize this relative worth in our rules and habits of life. Thus man is to be more highly valued and more assiduously served than the lower animals, because worth more; and God is to be loved infinitely more than man, and to be always obeyed and served in preference to man, because he is worth immeasurably more than the beings that derive their existence from him. Malebranche ascribes to the Supreme Being, not the arbitrary exercise of power in constituting the right, but recognition, in his government of the world and in his revealed will, of the order, which is man's sole law. "Sovereign princes," he says, "have no right to use their authority without reason. Even God has no such miserable right."

At nearly the same period commenced the ethical controversy between *Fenelon* (A. D. 1651-1715) and *Bossuet* (A. D. 1627-1704), as to the possibility and obligation of disinterested virtue. Fenelon and the Quietists, who sympathized with him, maintained that the pure love of God, without any self-reference, or regard for one's own well-being either here or here-after, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that nothing below this—nothing which aims or aspires at anything less than this—deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended the selfish theory of virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist with unconscionable severity and bitterness, and succeeded in obtaining from the court of Rome—though against the wishes of the Pope—the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet. The Pope remarked, with well-turned antithesis, that Fenelon might have erred from excess in the love of God, while Bossuet had sinned by defect in the love of his neighbor.

Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished names are those of *Jouffroy* and *Cousin*, who—each with a terminology of his own—agree with Malebranche in regarding right and wrong as inherent and essential characteristics of actions, and as having their source and the ground of their validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin's well-known treatise on "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good," is purely ethical, and the work is designed to identify the three members of the Platonic triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite Being,—attributes which, virtually one, have their counterpart and manifestation in the order of nature and the government of the universe.

* * * * *

In *Germany*, the necessarian philosophers of the Pantheistic school ignore ethics by making choice and moral action impossible. Man has no distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the universe (anima mundi), but in reality no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul, the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-conscious, freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, in those human members through which alone he attains to some fragmentary self-consciousness.

According to *Kant*, the reason intuitively discerns truths that are necessary, absolute, and universal. The theoretical reason discerns such truths in the realm of ontology, and in the relations and laws that underlie all subjects of physical inquiry. In like manner, the practical reason intuitively perceives the conditions and laws inherent in the objects of moral action,—that is, as Malebranche would have said, the elements of universal order, or, in the language of Clarke, the fitness of things. As the mind must of necessity contemplate and cognize objects of thought under the categories intuitively discerned by the theoretical reason, so must the will be moved by the conditions and laws intuitively discerned by the practical reason. This intuition is law and obligation. Man can obey it, and to obey it is virtue. He can disobey it, and in so doing he does not yield to necessity, but makes a voluntary choice of wrong and evil.

* * * * *

It will be perceived from the historical survey in this and the previous chapter, that—as was said at the outset—*all ethical systems resolve themselves into the two classes of which the Epicureans and the Stoics furnished the pristine types,*—those which make virtue an accident, a variable, subject to authority, occasion, or circumstance; and those which endow it with an intrinsic right, immutableness, validity, and supremacy. On subjects of fundamental moment, opinion is of prime importance. Conduct results from feeling, and feeling from opinion. We would have the youth, from the very earliest period of his moral agency, grounded in the belief that right and wrong are immutable,—that they have no localities, no meridians,—that, with a change of surroundings, their conditions and laws vary as little as do those of planetary or stellar motion. Let him feel that right and wrong are not the mere dicta of human teaching, nay, are not created even by revelation; but let their immutable distinction express itself to his consciousness in those sublime words which belong to it, as personified in holy writ, "Jehovah possessed me from the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by Him." This conception of the Divine and everlasting sacredness of virtue, is a perennial fountain of strength. He who has this does not imagine that he has power over the Right, can sway it by his choice, or vary its standard by his action; but it overmasters him, and, by subduing, frees him, fills and energizes his whole being, ennobles all his powers, exalts and hallows all his affections, makes him a priest to God, and a king among men.



INDEX.

Abstinence, when to be preferred to temperance, 175

Academy, the New, 205

Action, defined, 1 springs of, 10 governing principles of, 30

Affections, the, 22

Anger, 26

Anonymous publications, 123

Appetites, the, 10

Aristotle, character of, 197

Beneficence, 143

Bentham, Jeremy, 215

Bossuet, controversy of, with Fenelon, 217

Brotherhood, human, in its ethical relations, 56

Butler, 212

Capital punishment, 66

Casuistry, 187

Children, duties of, 121

Christianity, a source of knowledge, 55 exhibiting moral perfection in the person of its Founder, 68 compared, as to its ethics, with other religions, 59 as a motive power, 81

Cicero, philosophical relations of, 206

Clarke, Samuel, 210

Conscience, a judicial faculty, 41 educated by use, 44 relation of knowledge to, 45

Contracts, 128

Courage, defined, 158 physical, 159 moral, 160

Cousin, 218

Cudworth, 209

Desire, defined, 12 of knowledge, 13 of society, 15 of esteem, 17 of power, 18 of superiority, 19

Duties, conflict of, 190

Duty, limit of, 189

Enemies, love of, possible, 149

Envy, 27

Epictetus, character of, 203

Epicureanism, 198

Example, ethical value of, 111

Expediency, an insufficient rule of conduct, 31 when to be consulted, 33

Extreme cases in morals, 125

Falsehood, 151

Family, duties of the, 118

Fenelon, controversy of, with Bossuet, 217

Fitness, the ground of right, 36

Foreknowledge, Divine, consistent with human freedom, 8

Freedom of the will, arguments for, 2 objections to, 4

Government, the essential function of, 180 obedience to, how limited, 182 when to be opposed, 184

Gratitude, 24

Habit, 84

Hatred, 28

Hobbes, 208

Home-life, order requisite in, 169

Homicide, justifiable, 64

Honesty, 134

Horace, the poet of Epicureanism, 200

Ignorance, sins of, 39

Immortality, ethical relations of, 57

Intemperance, 170

Jouffroy, 218

Justice, 113

Kant, ethical system of, 219

Kindness, 25

Knowledge, attainment of, a duty, 102

Law, the result of experience, 50 an educational force, 51

Liberty, the right to, 69

Love, 22

Lucretius, philosophy of, 201

Malebranche, 216

Manners, a department of morals, 177

Marcus Aurelius, character of, 204

Marriage, 120

Measure, duties appertaining to, 170

Military service, 68

Moral philosophy, defined, 34

Motive, 79

Oaths, 129

Observation, a source of ethical knowledge, 46

Order, 164

Paley, 215

Pantheism, ethics of, 218

Parents, duties of, 121

Passion, 82

Patience, 152

Pauperism, 144

Peripatetics, the, 193

Piety toward God, 113

Pity, 25

Place, duties appertaining to, 168

Plato, as a teacher of ethics, 193

Politeness, 178

Positive duties, 117

Price, Richard, 214

Promises, 126

Prudence, 98

Punctuality, 167

Resentment, 27

Revenge, 28

Reverence, 23

Revolution, when justifiable, 185

Right, the, 35 absolute and relative, 37

Rights, defined, 61 how limited, 62 personal, 64 of property, 72 of reputation, 76

Sabbath, the, 16

Sceptical school of philosophy, 204

Schoolmen, ethics of the, 207

Self-control, 106

Self-culture, moral, 109

Self-preservation, 99

Seneca, writings and character of, 203

Shaftesbury, 210

Slavery, 70

Smith, Adam, 211

Socrates, as a teacher of ethics, 195

Speculation in business, when legitimate, 138 when dishonest, 140

Spinoza, 209

Stoics, philosophy of the, 201 eminent Roman, 203

Submission, 155

Sympathy, 25

Taxation, 75

Temperance, 173

Time, duties appertaining to, 165

Usury, 142

Veracity, 122

Virtue, defined, 88 connection of, with piety, 91

Virtues, the, 94 cardinal, 96

Worship, public, 115

Zeno, character of, 202



FOOTNOTES

1 Compassion ought from its derivation to have the same meaning with sympathy; but in common usage it is synonymous with pity.

2 "Ignorantia legis neminem excusat."

3 The theory that Seneca was acquainted with St. Paul, or had any direct intercourse with Christians in Rome or elsewhere, has no historical evidence, and rests on assumptions that are contradicted by known facts.

4 Virtutes leniores, as Cicero calls them.

5 The duty of society to inflict capital punishment on the murderer has been maintained on the ground of the Divine command to that effect, said to have been given to Noah, and thus to be binding on all his posterity. (Genesis ix. 5.) My own belief—founded on a careful examination of the Hebrew text—is, that the human murderer is not referred to in this precept, but that it simply requires the slaying of the beast that should cause the death of a man,—a precaution which was liable to be neglected in a rude state of society, and was among the special enactments of the Mosaic law. (Exodus xxi. 38.) If, however, the common interpretation be retained, the precept requires the shedding of the murderer's blood by the brother or nearest kinsman of the murdered man, and is not obeyed by giving up the murderer to the gallows and the public executioner. Moreover, the same series of precepts prescribes an abstinence from the natural juices of animal food, which would require an entire revolution in our shambles, kitchens, and tables. If these precepts were Divine commandments for men of all times, they should be obeyed in full; but there is the grossest inconsistency and absurdity in holding only a portion of one of them sacred, and ignoring all the rest.

6 Latin, virtus, from vir, which denotes not, like homo, simply a human being, but a man endowed with all appropriate manly attributes, and comes from the same root with vis, strength. The Greek synonyms of virtus, ἀρετή, is derived from Ἀρης, the god of war, who in the heroic days of Greece was the ideal man, the standard of human excellence, and whose name some lexicographers regard—as it seems to me, somewhat fancifully—as allied through its root to ἀνήρ, which bears about the same relation to ἄνθρωπος that vir bears to homo.

7 In the languages which have inherited or adopted the Latin virtus, it retains its original signification, with one striking exception, which yet is perhaps an exception in appearance rather than in reality. In the Italian, virtu is employed to signify taste, and virtuoso, which may denote a virtuous man, oftener means a collector of objects of taste. We have here an historical landmark. There was a period when, under civil despotism, the old Roman manhood had entirely died out on its native soil, while ecclesiastical corruption rendered the nobler idea of Christian manhood effete; and then the highest type of manhood that remained was the culture of those refined sensibilities, those ornamental arts, and that keen sense of the beautiful, in which Italy as far surpassed other lands, as it was for centuries inferior to them in physical bravery and in moral rectitude.

8 It is obviously on this ground alone that we can affirm moral attributes of the Supreme Being. When we say that he is perfectly just, pure, holy, beneficent, we recognize a standard of judgment logically independent of his nature. We mean that the fitness which the human conscience recognizes as its only standard of right, is the law which he has elected for his own administration of the universe. Could we conceive of omnipotence not recognizing this law, the decrees and acts of such a being would not be necessarily right. Omnipotence cannot make that which is fitting wrong, or that which is unfitting right. God's decrees and acts are not right because they are his, but his because they are right.

9 From cardo, a hinge.

10 It is virtually Cicero's division in the De Officiis.

11 The points at issue with regard to sabbatical observance hardly belong to an elementary treatise on ethics. I ought not, however, to leave any doubt as to my own opinion. I believe, then, the rest of the Sabbath a necessity of man's constitution, physical and mental, of that of the beasts subservient to his use, and, in some measure, even of the inanimate agents under his control, while the sequestration of the day from the course of ordinary life is equally a moral and religious necessity. The weekly Sabbath I regard as a dictate of natural piety, and a primeval institution, re-enacted, not established, by Moses, and sanctioned by our Saviour when he refers to the Decalogue as a compend of moral duty, as also in various other forms and ways. As to modes of sabbatical observance, the rigid abstinences and austerities once common in New England were derived from the Mosaic ceremonial law, and have no sanction either in the New Testament or in the habits of the early Christians. I can conceive of no better rule for the Lord's day, than that each person so spend it as to interfere as little as possible with its fitting use by others, and to make it as availing as he can for his own relaxation from secular cares, and growth in wisdom and goodness.

12 It was the malignity displayed toward the children of divorced wives by the women who succeeded them in the affections and homes of their husbands, that in Roman literature attached to the name of a stepmother (noverca) the most hateful associations, which certainly have no place in modern Christendom, where the stepmother oftener than not assumes the maternal cares of the deceased wife as if they were natively her own.

13 When Jesus forbids swearing by heaven, because "it is God's throne," and by the earth, because "it is his footstool," the inference is obvious that, for still stronger reasons, all direct swearing by God himself is prohibited. The word μήτε, which introduces the oaths by inferior objects specified in the text under discussion, not infrequently corresponds to our phrase not even. With this sense of μήτε, the passage would be rendered, "But I say unto you, Swear not at all, not even by heaven," etc.

I find that some writers on this subject quote in vindication of oaths on solemn occasions the instances in the Scriptures in which God is said to have sworn by Himself. The reply is obvious, that no being can swear by himself, the essential significance of an oath being an appeal to some being or object other than one's self. Because God "can swear by no greater," it is certain that when this phraseology is used concerning Him, it is employed figuratively, to aid the poverty of human conceptions, and to express the certainty of his promise by the strongest terms which human language affords. In like manner, God is said by the sacred writers to repent of intended retribution to evil-doers, not that infinite justice and love can change in thought, plan, or purpose, but because a change of disposition and feeling is wont to precede human clemency to evil-doers.

14 The odious meaning of excessive interest, as attached to usury, is of comparatively recent date. In the earlier English, as in our translation of the Bible, it denotes any sum given for the use of money.

15 In this country usury laws are fast yielding to the growth of intelligence in monetary affairs. Wherever they exist in their severer forms, they only enhance the rate of interest paid by the major portion of the class of borrowers, as the lender must be compensated, not only for the use of his money, and for the risk of his creditor's inability to repay it, but also for the additional risk of detection, prosecution, and forfeiture.

16 The reader need not be told that patience and passion are derived from different participles of the same verb. Patience comes from the present participle, and fittingly denotes the spirit in which present suffering should be met; while passion comes from the perfect or past participle, and as fittingly denotes the condition ensuing upon any physical, mental, or moral affection, induced from without, which has been endured without protest or resistance.

17 From punctum, a point.

18 Ἡδονή.

19 Στοά.

20 The words employed by the Stoics to indicate specific duties, as presented to the common understanding, recognize intrinsic fitness as the ground of right. These duties are termed in Greek, καθήκοντα, that is, be-fitting, and in Latin, officia, from ob and facio, that which is done ob aliquid, for some assignable reason.

21 How far Seneca's character was represented by his philosophy is, we believe, a fairly open question. That the beginning and the close of his career were in accordance with his teachings, is certain. That as a courtier, he was in suspicious proximity to, if not in complicity with, gross scandals and crimes, is equally certain. The evidence against him is weighty, but by no means conclusive. He may have lingered in the purlieus of the palace in fond memory of what Nero had been in the promise of his youth, and in the groundless hope of bringing him again under more humane influences. This supposition is rendered the more probable by the well-known fact, that during his whole court life, and notwithstanding his great wealth, Seneca's personal habits were almost those of an anchorite.

22 Spinoza's ethical system was closely parallel to that of Hobbes. He denied the intrinsic difference between right and wrong; but he regarded aristocracy as the natural order of society. With him, as with Hobbes, virtue consists solely in obedience to constituted authority; and so utterly did he ignore a higher law, that he maintained it to be the right of a state to abjure a treaty with another state, when its terms ceased to be convenient or profitable.

23 Price's theory of morals is developed with singular precision and force in one of the Baccalaureate Addresses of the late President Appleton, of Bowdoin College.

24 Εὐτόπος.

25 The reader who is conversant with the literature of ethics in England and America will miss in this chapter many names which merit a place by the side of those that have been given. But within the limits proposed for this manual, the alternative was to select a few writers among those who have largely influenced the thought of their own and succeeding times, and to associate with each of them something that should mark his individuality; or to make the chapter little more than a catalogue of names. The former is evidently the more judicious course. Nothing has been said of living writers,—not because there are none who deserve an honored place among the contributors to this department of science, but because, were the list to be once opened, we should hardly know where to close it.

THE END