that may “use the strength and means of all” to enforce on all
the observance of rules tending to the common benefit. On the
other hand Hobbes yields to no one in maintaining the paramount
importance of moral regulations. The precepts of good
faith, equity, requital of benefits, forgiveness of wrong so far as
security allows, the prohibition of contumely, pride, arrogance,—which
may all be summed up in the formula, “Do not that to
another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself” (i.e. the
negative of the “golden rule”)—he still calls “immutable and
eternal laws of nature”—meaning that, though a man is not
unconditionally bound to realize them, he is, as a reasonable
being, bound to desire that they should be realized. The
pre-social state of man, in his view, is also pre-moral; but it is
therefore utterly miserable. It is a state in which every one has
a right to everything that may conduce to his preservation;[1]
but it is therefore also a state of war—a state so wretched that
it is the first dictate of rational self-love to emerge from it
into social peace and order. Hence Hobbes’s ideal constitution
naturally comes to be an unquestioned and unlimited—though
not necessarily monarchical—despotism. Whatever the government
declares to be just or unjust must be accepted as such,
since to dispute its dictates would be the first step towards
anarchy, the one paramount peril outweighing all particular
defects in legislation and administration. It is perhaps easy to
understand how, in the crisis of 1640, when the ethico-political
system of Hobbes first took written shape, a peace-loving
philosopher should regard the claims of individual conscience
as essentially anarchical, and dangerous to social well-being;
but however strong might be men’s yearning for order, a view
of social duty, in which the only fixed positions were selfishness
everywhere and unlimited power somewhere, could not but
appear offensively paradoxical.
There was, however, in his theory an originality, a force, an apparent coherence which rendered it undeniably impressive; in fact, we find that for two generations the efforts to construct morality on a philosophical basis take more or less the form of answers to Hobbes. From an ethical point of view Hobbism divides itself naturally into two parts, which by Hobbes’s peculiar political doctrines are combined into a coherent whole, but are not otherwise necessarily connected. Its theoretical basis is the principle of egoism; while, for practically determining the particulars of duty it makes morality entirely dependent on positive law and institution. It thus affirmed the relativity of good and evil in a double sense; good and evil, for any individual citizen, may from one point of view be defined as the objects respectively of his desire and his aversion; from another, they may be said to be determined for him by his sovereign. It is this latter aspect of the system which is primarily attacked by the first generation of writers that replied to Hobbes. This attack, or rather the counter-exposition of orthodox doctrine, is conducted on different methods by the Cambridge moralists and by Cumberland respectively. Cumberland is content with the legal view of morality, but endeavours to establish the validity of the laws of nature by taxing them on the single supreme principle of rational regard for the “common good of all,” and showing them, as so based, to be adequately supported by the divine sanction. The Cambridge school, regarding morality primarily as a body of truth rather than a code of rules, insist on its absolute character and intuitive certainty.
Cudworth was the most distinguished of the little group of thinkers at Cambridge in the 17th century, commonly known as the Cambridge Platonists (q.v.). In his treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality his main aim is to maintain the “essential and eternal distinctions of good and evil” as independentThe Cambridge moralists, Cudworth. of mere will, whether human or divine. These distinctions, he insists, have an objective reality, cognizable by reason no less than the relations of space or number; and he endeavours to refute Hobbism—which he treats as a “novantique philosophy,” a mere revival of the relativism of Protagoras—chiefly by the following argumentum ad hominem. He argues that Hobbes’s atomic materialism involves the conception of an objective physical world, the object not of passive sense that varies from man to man, but of the active intellect that is the same in all; there is therefore, he urges, an inconsistency in refusing to admit a similar exercise of intellect in morals, and an objective world of right and wrong, which the mind by its normal activity clearly apprehends as such.
Cudworth, in the work above mentioned, gives no systematic exposition of the ethical principles which he holds to be thus intuitively apprehended. But we may supply this deficiency from the Enchiridion Ethicum of Henry More, another thinker of the same school. More gives a list More. of 23 Noemata Moralia, the truth of which will, he says, be immediately manifest. Some of these admit of a purely egoistic application, and appear to be so understood by the author—as (e.g.) that goods differ in quality as well as in duration, and that the superior good or the lesser evil is always to be preferred; that absence of a given amount of good is preferable to the presence of equivalent evil; that future good or evil is to be regarded as much as present, if equally certain, and nearly as much if very probable. Objections, both general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of formulating man’s natural pursuit of self-interest; but the serious controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism related not to such principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a (real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows. Such are the evangelical principle of “doing as you would be done by”; the principle of justice, or “giving every man his own, and letting him enjoy it without interference”; and especially what More states as the abstract formula of benevolence, that “if it be good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it is mathematically certain that it is doubly good that two should be so supplied, and so on.” The question, however, still remains, what motive any individual has to conform to these social principles when they conflict with his natural desires. To this Cudworth gives no explicit reply, and the answer of More is hardly clear. On the one hand he maintains that these principles express an absolute good, which is to be called intellectual because its essence and truth are apprehended by the intellect. We might infer from this that the intellect, so judging, is itself the proper and complete determinant of the will, and that man, as a rational being, ought to aim at the realization of absolute good for its own sake. In spite, however, of possible inferences from his definition of virtue, this does not seem to be really More’s view. He explains that though absolute good is discerned by the intellect, the “sweetness and flavour” of it is apprehended, not by the intellect proper, but by what he calls a “boniform faculty”; and it is in this sweetness and flavour that the motive to virtuous conduct lies; ethics is the “art of living well and happily,” and true happiness lies in “the pleasure which the soul derives from the sense of virtue.” In short, More’s Platonism appears to be really as hedonistic as Hobbism; only the feeling to which it appeals as ultimate motive is of a kind that only a mind of exceptional moral refinement can habitually feel with the decisive intensity required.
It is to be observed that though More lays down the abstract principle of regarding one’s neighbour’s good as much as one’s own with the full breadth with which Christianity inculcates it, yet when he afterwards comes to classify virtues he is too much under the influence of Platonic-Aristotelian thought to Cumberland. give a distinct place to benevolence, except under the old form of liberality. In this respect his system presents a striking contrast to Cumberland’s, whose treatise De Legibus Naturae
- ↑ In spite of Hobbes’s uncompromising egoism, there is a noticeable discrepancy between his theory of the ends that men naturally seek and his standard for determining their natural rights. This latter is never Pleasure simply, but always Preservation—though on occasion he enlarges the notion of “preservation” into “preservation of life so as not to be weary of it.” His view seems to be that in a state of nature most men will fight, rob, &c., “for delectation merely” or “for glory,” and that hence all men must be allowed an indefinite right to fight, rob, &c., “for preservation.”
