(ii) Natural-rational principles are also divine. This follows from the whole course of Berkeley's philosophy. Nature consists of divine symbols, and its general laws are simply the arbitrary but not capricious volitions of God. "Nature is nothing but a series of free actions, produced by the best and wisest agent."[1]
(iii) Nature with its laws constitutes a system. 'The Law of Nature is a system of such laws and precepts as that if they be all of them at all times in all places and by all men observed, they will necessarily promote the well-being of mankind."[2] Now moral rules are natural laws, and all the characteristics of natural laws belong to moral laws. Hence the same order and regularity which we perceive in the natural world exists also in the moral realm. But the moral and natural spheres are only partly coincident. The moral realm is necessarily natural, but the natural world is not necessarily moral. Vegetable existence possesses all the attributes of the natural, but we cannot predicate morality of it. But the moral world, as we find it existing among self-conscious beings, is a realm of ends, in which man living according to nature considers himself not as an isolated and independent individual, but as "a part of a whole, to the common good of which he ought to conspire."[3]
Tendency to promote or thwart happiness is the criterion of good and evil. It is a natural principle that we consider things in the light of happiness. Good is that which augments happiness, and evil that which impairs it. The summum bonum consists in happiness, and duty lies in the effort to attain the good and avoid the evil. It is the will of God that men should seek, not private pleasure merely, but the happiness of mankind as a whole. Berkeley draws a sharp distinction between pleasures of sense and pleasures of reason, but his view of the relative value of these undergoes a marked change between his earlier and his middle period. In the Commonplace Book (1705-1708), he does not recognize pleasures of reason at all. "Sensual
