tions and opinions, as well as for what is generally called 'prejudice of education.'
We should now recognize, I suppose, that even from the empirical point of view the phenomena to which Gay refers would have to be explained, not merely by 'association,' but partly by heredity and partly by what we can hardly avoid calling the 'instinct of imitation.' Such considerations at once add plausibility to the hedonistic aspect of Gay's system, and suggest the important limitations of the principle of 'association,' which he inclines to regard as all-sufficient. Perhaps it was from a certain parental tenderness for the infant principle of 'association' that Gay neglected to press an argument which might have threatened to prove a two-edged sword.
The Dissertation was so distinctly a new departure that it is difficult to avoid remarking at once upon Gay's relation to subsequent ethical theory. How completely his position was adopted by Tucker and Paley, will be evident to anyone acquainted with those writers who has carefully followed the above. Here, however, we must rather attempt to show the relation of the author of the Dissertation to those of his predecessors who had been either directly or indirectly concerned with the development of the Utilitarian principle.
Cumberland had seemed to make both 'the greatest happiness of all' and 'the perfection of body and mind' the moral end, and this without suspecting any difficulty in so doing; while Locke, though deeply interested in Ethics on the theological and practical side, and, in the general sense of the word, a hedonist, could hardly be said to have a coherent ethical system of his own. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, on the other hand, had done much for the development of English ethical theory, but their relation to hedonism was only indirect. In Gay's Dissertation we have, in its complete and unmistakable form, what we later shall have to recognize as the first characteristic phase of English Utilitarianism.[1]
- ↑ It is important to remember that, while Hume, who published his ethical system in its first form only nine years after the Dissertation, was incomparably
