“ He thinks it ill-advised to build the doctrines of natural religion and morality on a hypothesis which many philosophers, both Gentile and Christian, had rejected, and which could not be proved against Epicureans, the principal impugners of the existence of laws of nature. He cannot assume, he says, that such ideas existed from eternity in the divine mind, but must start from the data of sense and experience, and thence by search into the nature of things discover their laws. It is only through nature that we can rise to nature’s God. ”

“ He argues that all that we see in nature is framed so as to avoid and reject what is dangerous to the integrity of its constitution; that the human race would be an anomaly in the world had it not for end its conservation in its best estate; that benevolence of all to all is what in a rational view of the creation is alone accordant with its general plan; that various peculiarities of man’s body indicate that he has been made to co-operate with his fellow men and to maintain society ”

“ The virtues as means to happiness seemed to him to be such laws. They precede civil constitution, which merely perfects the obligation to practise them. He expressly denied, however, that “they carry with them an obligation to outward acts of obedience, even apart from civil laws and from any consideration of compacts constituting governments.” And many besides Hobbes must have felt dissatisfied with the definition. It is ambiguous and obscure. In what sense is a law of nature a “proposition”? ”

“ Feeling that the most forcible method of attacking Hobbes was to assert the opposite in the same form, he maintained that the whole-hearted pursuit of the good of all contributes to the good of each and brings personal happiness; that the opposite process involves misery to individuals including the self. If, then, Hobbes went to the one extreme of postulating selfishness as the sole motive of human action, Cumberland was equally extravagant as regards Benevolence. ”

“ Its main design is to combat the principles which Hobbes had promulgated as to the constitution of man, the nature of morality, and the origin of society, and to prove that self-advantage is not the chief end of man, that force is not the source of personal obligation to moral conduct nor the foundation of social rights, and that the state of nature is not a state of war. The views of Hobbes seem to Cumberland utterly subversive of religion, morality and civil society, and he endeavours, as a rule, to establish directly antagonistic propositions. ”

“ He would not even oppose the doctrine of innate ideas, because it looked with a friendly eye upon piety and morality. He granted that it might, perhaps, be the case that ideas were both born with us and afterwards impressed upon us from without.
Cumberland’s ethical theory (see Ethics) is summed up in his principle of universal Benevolence, the one source of moral good. “No action can be morally good which does not in its own nature contribute somewhat to the happiness of men.” The theory is important in comparison (1) with that of Hobbes, and (2) with modern utilitarianism. ”

“ Nor does it look merely to the lower pleasures, the pleasures of sense, for the constituents of good, but rises above them to include especially what tends to perfect, strengthen and expand our true nature. Existence and the extension of our powers of body and mind are held to be good for their own sakes without respect to enjoyment. Cumberland’s views on this point were long abandoned by utilitarians as destroying the homogeneity and self-consistency of their theory ”

“ The testimony of history shows, prima facie at least, that both motives have operated throughout, and just as self-interest has been increasingly modified by conscious benevolence, so benevolence alone does not explain all personal virtue nor love to God. ”

“ He may be regarded as the founder of English utilitarianism, but his utilitarianism is distinct from what is known as the selfish system; it goes to the contrary extreme, by almost absorbing individual in universal good. ”

“ About this period he was depressed by apprehensions respecting the growth of Popery; but his fears were dispelled by the Revolution, which brought along with it another material change in his circumstances. One day in 1691 he went, according to his custom on a post-day, to read the newspaper at a coffee-house in Stamford, and there, to his surprise, he read that the king had nominated him to the bishopric of Peterborough. ”