Various

“ The substantial good of the universe, in Aristotle’s view, is the pure activity of universal abstract thought, at once subject and object, which, itself changeless and eternal, is the final cause and first source of the whole process of change in the concrete world. And both he and Plato hold that a similar activity of pure speculative intellect is that in which the philosopher will seek to exist, though he must, being a man, concern himself with the affairs of ordinary human life, a region in which his highest good will be attained by realizing perfect moral excellence. ”

“ Thus, though incidentally there is much to be learned from Nietzsche, especially from his criticism of the ethics of pessimism, or from the strictures he passes upon the negative morality of extreme asceticism or quietism, his system inevitably provides its own refutation. For no philosophy which travesties the real course of history and distorts the moral facts is likely to commend itself to the sober judgment of mankind however brilliant be its exposition or ingenious its arguments. ”

“ These ideas compose a whole or inseparable unity, but we are able in a dim way to think of them as a system logically arranged. Thus the highest idea is that of goodness; things are, only if they are good; being without well-being is naught. Essence participates in goodness—that which is good has being, and is therefore to be regarded as a species of good. Life, again, is a species of essence, wisdom a species of life, and so on, always descending from genus to species in a rigorous logical fashion. ”

“ But even if we consider the moral consciousness merely as a particular kind of pleasurable emotion, there is an obvious question suggested by Hume’s theory, to which he gives no adequate answer. If the essence of “moral taste” is sympathy with the pleasure of others, why is not this specific feeling excited by other things beside virtue that tend to cause such pleasure? On this point Hume contents himself with the vague remark that “there are a numerous set of passions and sentiments, of which thinking rational beings are by the original constitution of nature the only proper objects.” ”

“ The realization of reason, or of human wills so far as rational, thus presents itself as the absolute end of duty; and we get, as a new form of the fundamental practical rule, “act so as to treat humanity, in thyself or any other, as an end always, and never as a means only.” We may observe, too, that the notion of freedom connects ethics with jurisprudence in a simple and striking manner. The fundamental aim of jurisprudence is to realize external freedom by removing the hindrances imposed on each one’s free action through the interferences of other wills. ”

“ With Taylor’s presentation of the difficulties with which morality is expected to grapple probably few would be found seriously to disagree, though they might consider it unduly pessimistic. But when he turns what is in effect a statement of certain forms of moral difficulty into an attack upon the logical and coherent character of morality itself, he is not so likely to command assent. For the difficulty all men meet with in realizing goodness, or in being moral, is not in itself evidence of an inherent contradiction in the nature of goodness as such. ”

“ No one approaches Etheredge in delicate touches of dress, furniture and scene; he makes the fine airs of London gentlemen and ladies live before our eyes even more vividly than Congreve does; but he has less insight and less energy than Congreve. Had he been poor or ambitious, he might have been to England almost what Molière was to France, but he was a rich man living at his ease, and he disdained to excel in literature. ”

“ In their speculative hints respecting the soul and a future state, we find another important deviation from Judaism, and the explanation of their asceticism. They held that the body is mortal, and its substance transitory; that the soul is immortal, but, coming from the subtlest ether, is lured as by a sorcery of nature into the prison-house of the body. At death it is released from its bonds, as from long slavery, and joyously soars aloft. ”

“ His fundamental principle and supreme “Law of Nature” is thus stated: “The greatest possible benevolence of every rational agent towards all the rest constitutes the happiest state of each and all, so far as depends on their own power, and is necessarily required for their happiness; accordingly Common Good will be the Supreme Good.” It is, however, important to notice that in his “good” is included not merely happiness but “perfection”; and he does not even define perfection so as to exclude from it the notion of absolute moral perfection and save his theory from an obvious logical circle. ”

“ But to Butler’s more cautious mind the completeness of this harmony did not seem sufficiently demonstrable to be taken as a basis of moral teaching; he has at least to contemplate the possibility of a man being convinced of the opposite; and he argues that unless we regard conscience as essentially authoritative—which is not implied in the term “moral sense”—such a man is really bound to be vicious; “since interest, one’s own happiness, is a manifest obligation.” Still on this view, even if the authority of conscience be asserted, we seem reduced to an ultimate dualism of our rational nature. ”

“ For morality implies a power in the individual of rising above the interests of his own narrower self and identifying himself in the pursuit of a universal good with the true interests of all other selves. Similarly the conception of the self as a moral unity arises naturally out of the impossibility of finding the summum bonum in a succession of transient states of consciousness such as hedonism for example postulates. Good as a true universal can only be realized by a true self, and both imply a principle of unity not wholly expressible in terms of the particulars which it unifies. ”

“ In the mind of Erasmus there was no metaphysical inclination; he was a man of letters, with a general tendency to rational views on every subject which came under his pen. His was not the mind to originate, like Calvin, a new scheme of Christian thought. He is at his weakest in defending free will against Luther, and indeed he can hardly be said to enter on the metaphysical question. He treats the dispute entirely from the outside. It is impossible in reading Erasmus not to be reminded of the rationalist of the 18th century. Erasmus has been called the “Voltaire of the Renaissance.” ”

“ Though common sense will admit that virtues are the best of goods, it still undoubtedly conceives practical wisdom as chiefly exercised in providing those inferior goods which Aristotle, after recognizing the need or use of them for the realization of human well-being, has dropped out of sight; and the result is that, in trying to make clear his conception of practical wisdom, we find ourselves fluctuating continually between the common notion, which he does not distinctly reject, and the notion required as the keystone of his ethical system. ”

“ The strict technical meaning of “an estate” is an interest in lands, and this conception lies at the root of the English theory of property in land. “The first thing that the student has to do,” says Joshua Williams (Law of Real Property) , “is to get rid of the idea of absolute ownership. Such an idea is quite unknown to the English law. No man is in law the absolute owner of lands. He can only hold an estate in them.” That is, the notion of tenure, of holding by a tenant from a lord, prevails. The last lord of all from whom all land was ultimately held was the king. ”

“ For even in the physical or non-rational man, as originally constituted, we may see clear indications of the divine design, which it belongs to his rational will to carry into conscious execution; indeed, in the first stage of human life, before reason is fully developed, uncorrupted natural impulse effects what is afterwards the work of reason. Thus the formula of “living according to nature,” in its application to man as the “rational animal,” may be understood both as directing that reason is to govern, and as indicating how that government is to be practically exercised. ”

“ Faith is the substantial basis of all Christian morality, but without love—the essential form of all the Christian virtues—it is “formless” (informis) . Christian love is conceived (after Augustine) as primarily love to God (beyond the natural yearning of the creature after its ultimate good) , which expands into love towards all God’s creatures as created by him, and so ultimately includes even self-love. But creatures are only to be loved in their purity as created by God; all that is bad in them must be an object of hatred till it is destroyed. ”

“ In explaining how Plato was led to answer this question, it will be well to notice that, while faithfully maintaining the Socratic doctrine that the highest virtue was inseparable from knowledge of the good, he had come to recognize an inferior kind of virtue, possessed by men who were not philosophers. It is plain that if the good that is to be known is the ultimate ground of the whole of things, it is attainable only by a select and carefully trained few. ”

“ He had been born with the hopes of the Renaissance, with its anticipation of a new Augustan age, and had seen this fair promise blighted by the irruption of a new horde of theological polemics, worse than the old scholastics, inasmuch as they were revolutionary instead of conservative. Erasmus never flouted at religion nor even at theology as such, but only at blind and intemperate theologians. ”

“ Only, therefore, to those philosophers who believe in the existence of a criterion of morality, i.e. a universal test such as that of pleasure, happiness and the like, by which we can judge of the worth of actions, will Green’s position seem absurd; since, on the contrary, such conceptions as those of “self-development” or “self-realization” seem to have a definite and positive value if they call attention to the metaphysical implications of morality and accurately characterize the moral facts. What ambiguity they possess arises from the ambiguity of morality itself. ”

“ But since the reaction, led by Price and Reid, against the manner of philosophizing that had culminated in Hume, free-will has been generally maintained by the intuitional school to be an essential point of ethics; and, in fact, it is naturally connected with the judgment of good and ill desert which these writers give as an essential element in their analysis of the moral consciousness. An irresistible motive, it is forcibly said, palliates or takes away guilt; no one can blame himself for yielding to necessity, and no one can properly be punished for what he could not have prevented. ”

“ This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence. This characteristic, however, is the key to the chief differences between Epicureanism and the more naïve hedonism of Aristippus. ”

“ We may notice, in the first place, that the conception of morality as a code which, if not in itself arbitrary, is yet to be accepted by men with unquestioning submission, tends naturally to bring into prominence the virtue of obedience to authority; just as the philosophic view of goodness as the realization of reason gives a special value to self-determination and independence (as we see more clearly in the post-Aristotelian schools where ethics is distinctly separated from politics) . ”

“ But man we must and do consider in relation to a larger system of which he forms a part, and so we call him “good” only when his impulses and dispositions are so balanced as to tend towards the good of this whole. And again we do not attribute goodness to him merely because his outward acts have beneficial results. When we speak of a man as good, we mean that his dispositions or affections are such as tend of themselves to promote the good or happiness of human society. ”

“ And so, when we pass from the ontology to the ethics of Platonism, we find that, though the highest life is only to be realized by turning away from concrete human affairs and their material environment, still the sensible world is not yet an object of positive moral aversion; it is rather something which the philosopher is seriously concerned to make as harmonious, good and beautiful as possible. ”

“ The originality of Epicurus lay in his theory that the highest point of pleasure, whether in body or mind, is to be attained by the mere removal of pain or disturbance, after which pleasure admits of variation only and not of augmentation; that therefore the utmost gratification of which the body is capable may be provided by the simplest means, and that “natural wealth” is no more than any man can earn. When further he teaches that the attainment of happiness depends almost entirely upon insight and right calculation, fortune having very little to do with it ”

“ Hence if we ask why it is reasonable for any individual to observe the rules of social behaviour that are commonly called moral, the answer is obvious that this is only indirectly reasonable, as a means to his own preservation or pleasure. It is not, however, in this, which is only the old Cyrenaic or Epicurean answer, that the distinctive point of Hobbism lies. It is rather in the doctrine that even this indirect reasonableness of the most fundamental moral rules is entirely conditional on their general observance, which cannot be secured apart from government. ”

“ Thus, on the whole, the impressive earnestness with which Clarke enforces the doctrine of rational morality only rendered more manifest the difficulty of establishing ethics on an independent philosophical basis; so long at least as the psychological egoism of Hobbes is not definitely assailed and overthrown. Until this is done, the utmost demonstration of the abstract reasonableness of social duty only leaves us with an irreconcilable antagonism between the view of abstract reason and the self-love which is allowed to be the root of man’s appetitive nature. ”

“ The exclusion of private happiness from the ends at which it is a duty to aim contrasts strikingly with the view of Butler and Reid, that man, as a rational being, is under a “manifest obligation” to seek his own interest. The difference, however, is not really so great as it seems; since in another part of his system Kant fully recognizes the reasonableness of the individual’s regard for his own happiness. Though duty, in his view, excludes regard for private happiness, the summum bonum is not duty alone, but happiness combined with moral worth ”

“ But in fact a numerical equation of any order whatever has always a numerical root, and thus numbers (in the foregoing sense, number = quantity of the form α + βi) form (what real numbers do not) a universe complete in itself, such that starting in it we are never led out of it. There may very well be, and perhaps are, numbers in a more general sense of the term (quaternions are not a case in point, as the ordinary laws of combination are not adhered to) , but in order to have to do with such numbers (if any) we must start with them. ”