entrusted to the care of reason. There is a natural law which is also a spiritual. This law is not an arbitrary enactment, but a rule of fitness for the attainment of an end.[1] Hooker is thus the father of all that is best in later English rationalists. His system is the product of the best scholastic interpretation of Aquinas and Aristotle. It is objective and teleological. The question of obligation is not yet expressly raised. So, too, with the Cambridge moralists. They can hardly be called modern thinkers, so much are they busied with the older problems of the Greek philosophy. They are intensely ontological. They look at the moral law as an order fixed in the nature of things, rather than as an order finding expression in the nature of man. Although their polemic against Hobbes forces them to examine the organ for knowing this law, and in so far to share the modern psychological tendency, yet in their ethics they remain Greek. Their subject is still the Good, not its obligation upon man.
The second aspect of the twofold problem of modern ethics was that which may be called the question of moral authority. It is by no means a distinct problem, but is the result of a deeper consciousness of the meaning of the earlier question. The independence of ethics had at first found expression chiefly in an appeal from revealed to natural law, without further inquiry as to the authority of the latter. In all the earlier moralists, reason had been presupposed as the complement of the objective order. The knowledge of the law had carried with it a natural tendency to its realization. Perhaps through the influence of a widely diffused, though largely unconscious, Stoicism, man had been conceived as essentially a rational creature. Reason was active in his life, and its headship was not yet disputed. It had not yet been identified with the understanding. This is clearly illustrated by Grotius's celebrated definition of natural law as "the dictate of right reason indicating that any act from its agreement or disagreement with the rational nature of man, has in it a moral turpitude or a moral necessity."
- ↑ Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. I, ii, 1.
