TH

CHAPTER XIII

THE ETHICS OF NATURE IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

HE problem of the connection between morality and Nature, which was left unsolved by seventeenthcentury rationalism, was taken up again in the eighteenth, and presented in a variety of forms in England, France, and Germany.

The English Moralists.

Like the Cambridge Platonists, Berkeley, our greatest metaphysician, regarded philosophy as the handmaid of theology, concluding The Principles of Human Knowledge with the avowal that it was written the better to dispose his readers" to reverence and embrace the salutary truths of the Gospel, which to know and practise is the highest perfection of human nature." For him the Gospel was the foundation of the highest morality. He comes forward as an advocate of the Christian way of life, seeking to remove one obstacle to its acceptance by thinking men, not as professing a new theory of morals. The question whether Berkeley's idealism is competent to support a system of morals, Christian or otherwise, is an interesting one for philosophers to discuss, but it was not one proposed by Berkeley himself. He had no thought of laying any other foundation for morals than that which had been laid. What he did attempt to do was to disabuse men's minds of a prejudice against the Christian view, a prejudice accentuated by the Deists, who believed that, having banished God from the world, they could give a rational account of "Nature."

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Berkeley saw that the Deist view of the transcendence of God and their hypostatising of "Nature" were alike fatal to Christian morality. God and "Nature" not independent. "Nature" has no meaning apart from God. "If by Nature is meant some being distinct from God, as well as from the laws of Nature and things perceived by sense, I must confess that the word is to me an empty sound, without any intelligible meaning annexed to it. Nature in this acceptation is a vain chimera introduced by those heathens who had no just notions of the omnipotence and infinite perfection of God." 1

But the Deists and many others who came under the influence of the Enlightenment were not prepared to acquiesce in this subordination or sublimation of "Nature." God they regarded as far away from the world He had once created, but "Nature" was ever present. She at least seemed very real, accessible, and knowable. So in the vanity of their minds the men of the eighteenth century for the most part let go the substance and rejoiced in the shadow. The phantom goddess remained on her imaginary pedestal and men bowed the knee to her.

It is curious what a strong fascination the idea of "Nature" had for the eighteenth century. Religion and morality were subordinated to it. The chief recommendation and best guarantee of religion was that it was natural. Four years before the opening of the century John Toland had endeavoured to show that there was nothing mysterious about Christianity; and in 1730 Matthew Tindal revealed the thoughts which were in many minds, when he maintained that Christianity was simply a republication of "Natural" religion and as old as Creation. This idea of Christianity as merely a restatement of the principles of Nature led some of the Deists into a very uncritical and arbitrary method of treating the New Testament records, Lord 1 Principles, p. 135.

Bolingbroke, for example, regarding the Pauline form of Christianity as spurious and that of Jesus Christ Himself as a complete and plain system of natural religion. Such a way of thinking led not only to the impoverishment of Christianity but to the vulgarising of Nature. Minds that were insensitive to the mystery of the Christian religion soon lost the sense of the mystery of Nature. Everything became mean and commonplace. The religion of Jesus was misinterpreted, and morality was kept within the limits of Nature as arbitrarily defined. Men spoke of "Nature" as though they knew all about her. Even a man so far removed from the Deists as the Puritan Baxter had anticipated this way of regarding Nature, which became so common in the eighteenth century. The truths of natural religion, he held, were better established than those of revealed religion. Nature was something easily apprehended and a religion based upon it sure and immutable.

This confident and familiar attitude to the mysteries. of Nature was due mainly to that "little learning," which Alexander Pope, one of the best representatives of a superficial age, declared was "a dangerous thing." Men thought they knew so much and really knew so little. Lord Morley's picture of " very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at convivial supper parties discussing and settling with complete assurance the conditions of primitive man,' was true of English as well as of French society. It admirably describes the spirit of the

age.

With that spirit the philosophers, who turned their attention to ethics, were in agreement. They start from the idea of Nature, either the nature of things or the nature of man, primitive or civilised.

The attempt to deduce morality from the nature of things took two very similar forms, the one the more logical and the other the more mathematical. Wollaston may be taken as an example of the first type, and Samuel

1 Rousseau, p. 155.

Clarke of the second. To Wollaston immoral conduct was a violation of the laws of thought. It was logical inconsistency or untruthfulness, and as Nature was a rational order such conduct was unnatural. It was unnatural for a man to injure his brother, because it was a practical denial of the truth, that he was his brother. It is easy enough to parody this reduction of all unnatural conduct to the vice of lying; and many generations of College students have smiled at Leslie Stephen's banter: Thirty years of profound meditation had convinced Wollaston that the reason why a man should abstain from breaking his wife's head was that it was a way of denying that she was his wife." 1 But Plato and the Stoics would perhaps have found a little more in Wollaston's contention than Leslie Stephen seems to have done, and they would probably have changed the illustration.

Samuel Clarke, whom Wollaston looked up to as a teacher, thought of natural conduct after the analogy of mathematics. He held that just as the mind naturally gave its assent to the truths of geometry so it would. discern right and wrong in actions. Morality was involved in the very nature of things. But "the nature of things " is a very vague phrase, and as Sir James Macintosh pointed out, a criminal may have regard to the natural relations of things in the prosecution of his base designs. To act morally is to act in accordance with a moral and not merely natural scheme of things. And this throws us back again upon the initial questions, whether there is a moral scheme of things as contrasted with the natural, and wherein the distinction consists. The abstract universe of the mathematician or of the logician can never reveal to us the presence, still less the meaning, of moral facts. Moral relations are not merely quantitative, and good conduct is something more than correct thinking. "It is quite impossible," as Selby-Bigge said, "to deduce a moral category from any 1 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, I. p. 130

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consideration of the nature of things." The intellectualists of the eighteenth century failed to do this; and the wiser among them, like Clarke, saw that thinking was not enough, and that morality was something more than the acknowledgment of true propositions. In mathematics the mind necessarily and inevitably gives its assent to truth, but it is otherwise in morals. The will may withhold its assent and stultify the best efforts of the intellect. Men had therefore to recognise that the will had an important place in ethics, and the way was prepared for the advent of a philosopher who would remove morals from the sphere of Nature considered as a logical or mathematical system.

But another line had yet to be explored. Appeal was made to Nature in a second sense, not as the general scheme of things, but as the particular nature of man. "The proper study of mankind is man." Shaftesbury and Butler may be selected as illustrating this appeal to human nature.

In opposition to Hobbes both regarded the nature of man as essentially social and the different affections or faculties as constituting a system, in the one case of a more sentimental and in the other of a more rational order. Both sought for the justification of the moral life within the constitution of man.

Butler's scheme in particular has been specially esteemed, because of the more thorough way in which he worked out the idea of human nature as a system with a hierarchy of powers at the head of which stands conscience. It is a permanent contribution to the psychology of ethics. On its own ground it has indeed sometimes been felt to be inadequate, and Butler's admirers have pointed out the apparent discrepancy between his varying accounts of self-love and conscience in the Sermons and in the Dissertation on Virtue. As a reply to the sensationalistic and selfish view of human nature propounded by Hobbes it has been held in the highest esteem. The presence

1 British Moralists, p. xxii.