intelligible to them, there must be found another mode of interpreting right reason. For the time being, the boniform faculty must be disregarded, and an appeal be made to the intellect.
There are certain fundamental principles of morality which are incapable of proof, and which are in no need of it.[1] Into them all moral reasoning may be resolved. Even a bad man must assent to them with the intellectual part of his nature; and, since they are as delightful as if they proposed no good save the pleasing, once let them be presented to him, and he must embrace them. These principles, since they are the prints of the faculty called νοῦς, are known as moral 'noemata.' More mentions twenty-three of them. The seventeenth and eighteenth, which are chosen at random merely as examples, read as follows: "(17) That is good for a man which enables him to live well and happily; (18) If if is good that one man should be supplied with the means of living well and happily, it follows, by certain and plain mathematical analogy, that it is doubly good for two men to be supplied, triply good for three, a thousand times for a thousand, and so on." Evidently, these two noemata, as, in fact, is the case with all the others, presuppose an appreciation of right and wrong. 'Good' and 'well' always mean the moral 'good' and 'well,' and a man's concern in the affairs of his neighbors is taken for granted.
The most obscure and perhaps the most important point in this portion of More's ethics is the relation between right reason and the boniform faculty. The latter is evidently neither more nor less than conscience; but it is constantly spoken of as if it had something intellectual about it, and so were a part of right reason. The writers who have given More's system a brief notice—e.g., Jodl[2]—speak of both attributes only as they appear in the virtuous man. So long as a man is in a state of grace, right reason and the boniform faculty have their separate functions, and there is no conflict between them. But when he falls from his exalted condition, how is he to be taught moral truth, and by what means does he perceive it? More's
