IV. CHAP. it unless we love the sin for its own sake; for almost every possible case of lending money will be found by his limitations of the rule to justify the taking a profit for the loan.* His casuistry about selling goods is of the same description: a man must take no advantage of the scarcity of the commodity, unless there should be just reason to raise the price, which he admits to be often the case in a scarcity. He concludes by observing that, in this, as in other well ordered nations, it would be a happy thing to have a regulation of prices. He decides, as all the old casuists did, that a promise extorted by a robber is binding. Sanderson was the most celebrated of the English casuists. His treatise, De Juramenti Obligatione, appeared in 1647. Selden, De Jure Naturali juxta Hebræos. 25. Though no proper treatise of moral philosophy came from any English writer in this period, we have one which must be placed in this class, strangely as the subject has been handled by its distinguished author. Selden published in 1640 his learned work, De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebræorum.+ The object of the author was to trace the opinions of the Jews on the law of nature and nations, or of moral obligation, as distinct from the Mosaic law; the former being a law to which they held all mankind to be bound. This theme had been of course untouched by the Greek and Roman philo *Hall's Works, (edit. Pratt) vol. viii. p. 375. Juxta for secundum, we need hardly say, is bad Latin: it was however very common, and is even used by Joseph Scaliger, as Vossius mentions in his treatise, De Vitiis Sermonis. sophers, nor was much to be found upon it in modern writers. His purpose is therefore rather historical than argumentative; but he seems so generally to adopt the Jewish theory of natural law that we may consider him the disciple of the rabbis as much as their historian. CHAP. IV. theory of natural law 26. The origin of natural law was not drawn Jewish by the Jews, as some of the jurists imagined it ought to be, from the habits and instincts of all animated beings, quod natura omnia animalia docuit, according to the definition of the Pandects. Nor did they deem, as many have done, the consent of mankind and common customs of nations to be a sufficient basis for so permanent and invariable a standard. Upon the discrepancy of moral sentiments and practices among mankind Selden enlarges in the tone which Sextus Empiricus had taught scholars, and which the world had learned from Montaigne. Nor did unassisted reason seem equal to determine moral questions, both from its natural feebleness, and because reason alone does not create an obligation, which depends wholly on the command of a superior.* But God, as the ruler of the universe, has partly implanted in our minds, partly made known to us by exterior revelation, his own will, which is our law. These positions he illustrates with a superb display of erudition, especially oriental, and certainly with more prolixity, and less regard to opposite reasonings, than we should desire. * Selden says, in his Table Talk, that he can understand no law of nature but a law of God. He might mean this in the sense of Suarez, without denying an in- CHAP. IV. cepts of the sons of Noah. 27. The Jewish writers concur in maintaining that certain short precepts of moral duty were Seven pre- orally enjoined by God on the parent of mankind, and afterwards on the sons of Noah. Whether these were simply preserved by tradition, or whether, by an innate moral faculty, mankind had the power of constantly discerning them, seems to have been an unsettled point. The principal of these divine rules are called, for distinction, The Seven Precepts of the Sons of Noah. There appears however to be some variance in the lists, as Selden has given them from the ancient writers. That most received consists of seven prohibitions ; namely of idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, theft, rebellion, and cutting a limb from a living animal. The last of these, the sense of which, however, is controverted, as well as the third, but no other, are indicated in the ninth chapter of Genesis. Character of Selden's work. 28. Selden pours forth his unparalleled stores of erudition on all these subjects, and upon those which are suggested in the course of his explanations. These digressions are by no means the least useful part of his long treatise. They elucidate some obscure passages of Scripture. But the whole work belongs far more to theological than to philosophical investigation; and I have placed it here chiefly out of conformity to usage; for undoubtedly Selden, though a man of very strong reasoning faculties, had not greatly turned them to the principles of natural law. His reliance on the testimony of Jewish writers, many of them by no means ancient, for those primæval IV. traditions as to the sons of Noah, was in the CHAP. character of his times, but it will scarcely suit the more rigid criticism of our own. His book however is excellent for its proper purpose, that of representing Jewish opinion, and is among the greatest achievements in erudition that any English writer has performed. Hobbes. 29. The moral theories of Grotius and Hobbes Grotius and are so much interwoven with other parts of their philosophy, in the treatise De Jure Belli and in the Leviathan, that it would be dissecting those works too much, were we to separate what is merely ethical from what falls within the provinces of politics and jurisprudence. The whole must therefore be deferred to the ensuing sections of this chapter. Nor is there much in the writings of Bacon or of Descartes which falls, in the sense we have hitherto been considering it, under the class of moral philosophy. We may therefore proceed to another description of books, relative to the pas sions and manners of mankind, rather than, in a strict sense, to their duties, though of course there will frequently be some intermixture of subjects so intimately allied. Wisdom. 30. In the year 1601, Peter Charron, a French Charron on ecclesiastic, published his Treatise on Wisdom. The reputation of this work has been considerable; his countrymen are apt to name him with Montaigne; and Pope has given him the epithet of "more wise" than his predecessor, on account, as Warburton expresses it, of his "moderating every where the extravagant Pyrrhonism of his friend." It is admitted that he has copied freely from the CHAP. Essays of Montaigne; in fact, a very large portion IV. of the Treatise on Wisdom, not less, I should conjecture, than one fourth, is extracted from them with scarce any verbal alteration. It is not the case that he moderates the sceptical tone which he found there; on the contrary, the most remarkable passages of that kind have been transcribed; but we must do Charron the justice to say that he has retrenched the indecencies, the egotism, and the superfluities. Charron does not dissemble his debts. "This," he says in his preface, "is the collection of a part of my studies; the form and method are my own. What I have taken from others, I have put in their words, not being able to say it better than they have done.” In the political part he has borrowed copiously from Lipsius and Bodin, and he is said to have obligations to Duvair.* The ancients also must have contributed their share. It becomes therefore difficult to estimate the place of Charron as a philosopher, because we feel a good deal of uncertainty whether any passage may be his own. He appears to have been a man formed in the school of Montaigne, not much less bold in pursuing the novel opinions of others, but less fertile in original thoughts, so that he often falls into the common-places of ethics; with more reading than his model, with more disciplined habits as well of arranging and distributing his subject, as of observing the sequence of an argument; but on the other hand with far less of ingenuity in thinking and of sprightliness of language. # Biogr. Universelle. |