they might be systematically and successfully defended. He did not hesitate at once to collect and unite forces of various kinds, so far as they could be made subservient to a common purpose. It was no longer now a time, he conceived, when it was wise or fit to insulate the various bodies of genuine moralists;-to separate those who founded morality on the relations of things, and those who derived it from the will of God. The history of the subject had shown the evil of this. The old Platonic moralists, such as Cudworth and More, had been abandoned by their brethren; and their little host, insulated from the rest, seemed to have crumbled away. The independent moralists who still remained, as Clarke and Butler, could be upheld only, Warburton thought, by surrounding them by a line of more robust combatants. And along with these, he was willing to accept as allies that other class of moralists, who had lately assumed a distinct shape, and who ascribed to man what they called a Moral Sense; the school, as we shall see, of Shaftesbury. Warburton considered Shaftesbury as one of the adversaries whom he had to oppose, since his writings were directed against the Christian religion but this did not prevent him from adopting the Moral Sense, in the most distinct and positive manner, as one of his principles. The first books of the Divine Legation of Moses, in which this was done, appeared in 1738. Warburton's basis of the defence of morality, is a combination, or as such a system is sometimes termed by writers on the History of Philosophy, a syncretism, of all the principles on which immoral writers and mere sensual moralists had been previously opposed: namely the Moral Sense,-the Eternal Differences of Actions,and the Will of God (p. 136). He shows great skill in asserting and maintaing the coexistence and relative offices of these three principles. "God," he says, "graciously respecting the imbecility of man's nature, the slowness of his reason, and the violence of his passions,

hath been pleased to afford three different excitements to the practice of virtue ;-something that would hit men's palate, satisfy their reason, or subdue their will." He complains that "this admirable provision for the support of virtue hath been in great measure defeated by its pretended advocates, who, in their eternal squabbles about the true foundation of morality and the obligation of its practice, have sacrilegiously untwisted this Threefold Cord; and each running away with the part he esteemed the strongest, hath affixed that to the throne of God, as the golden chain that is to unite and draw all unto it." He then proceeds, with great dexterity, to play off these three sects against each other.

The advocates

of the MORAL SENSE, he says, (pointing at Shaftesbury) hold the essential differences in human actions "to be nothing but words, notions, cisions, the empty regions and shadows of philosophy: the possessors of them are moon-blind wits; and Locke himself is treated as a schoolman. And to talk of reward and punishment consequent on the will of a superior, is to make the practice of virtue mercenary and servile." He then speaks of those who adopt the ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCES of things as the ground of morality: and according to these, he says, "God and his Will have nothing to do in the matter." And the third, he says, "who proposes to place morality on the WILL OF A SUPERIOR, which is its true bottom, acts yet on the same exterminating model. He takes the other two principles to be merely visionary: the moral sense is nothing but the impression of education; the love of the species, romantic, and invented by crafty knaves to dupe the young, the vain, and the ambitious." He proceeds with still more ingenuity, to find a recognition of this threefold aspect of virtue in S 'aul: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just: Τὸ λοιπὸν ἀδελφοὶ, ὅσα ἐστὶν ἀληθῆ, ὅσα σεμνά, ὅσα δίκαια; ἀληθῆ evidently relating to the essential dif

ference of things, σeuvd, (implying something of worth, splendour, dignity) to the moral sense which men have of this difference; and dikata, just, is relative to will or law." In the same manner he distributes "pure, lovely, of good report," into the three pigeon holes of his theory, "dyva, pure, referring to abstract truth; poopiλñ, lovely, amiable, to

He again

innate or instinctive honesty; and evpnua, of good report, reputable, to the observation of will or law." makes a similar attempt on the concluding words of the passage, although they do not form a triad. It is easy to see that if they had been these, "if there be any virtue, if there be any wisdom, if there be any praise," he would have been most triumphant: that is, he would have said,-if I may venture to complete what he has said, "if the moral sense can make the practice of morality a virtue; if the essential differences of things" [can render it conformable to reason;] if obedience to a superior will can make it matter of praise; think of these things. But though we cannot fail to admire the ingenuity with which Warburton thus constructed and illustrated his system, it is difficult for the genuine moral philosopher to maintain it in precisely that form which he assigned to it. In his desire to engage in his service all the strongest supports of morals which he could discover, he has hardly sufficiently attended to the nature of each, and to their mutual relations. If these three elements are to be united in order to obtain a basis for our system of morals, this must be done, not by arbitrarily and forcibly twisting them together, but by combining them in their proper relations, so as to form an organic and living whole. That Warburton has not done so, it is not difficult to show. But before I show this, I must consider more in detail the history of the elements which he here attempts to combine. This I shall proceed to do in the next Lecture.

LECTURE VII.

SHAFTESBURY-HUTCHESON-BALGUY-SOUTII.

IN

my

last Lecture, I stated that when the general prevalence of licentious speculative opinions respecting morality had become very alarming, of which state of things the publication of the Fable of the Bees and similar works was an indication, Warburton tried to put the cause of sound morals in a better condition for defence, by combining all the principles which had been employed by his predecessors against the doctrines of the sensual school. The principles which he thus associated were, I stated, these: Right Reason, the Moral Sense, and the Divine Command. Of the first of these doctrines and its features, I have already given an account in several Lectures. I must now trace the rise and progress of the other two forms of opinion; and first the Moral Sense.

In a former Lecture, I endeavoured to explain how the controversy between the school of independent morality, and the school of the morality of consequences, was affected by the new metaphysical opinions to which Locke's essay gave currency and authority. It appeared that those who had, till then, maintained that moral rectitude consists in eternal and immutable relations recognizable by the reason of man, had their arguments weakened and perplexed by the analysis. of the human mind which was now generally admitted, and by the limits within which the province of the reason was now circumscribed. Such doctrines as those of Cudworth and Clarke, though still asserted by some, began now to be considered as remnants of a past philosophy;-propositions antiquated before they were published;-traditionary asser

tions, repeated only because those who uttered them did not perceive how great a revolution the import of their terms had undergone, or how much the views of philosophers had changed, concerning the region in which truth resided, and the road by which her votaries were to travel to her. A few short phrases of weariness and contempt were considered by the world as answer enough to the most acute and laborious works which breathed the old Platonic strain.

Yet in this, as in other cases, when a great controversy is thrown into confusion by a change in the speculative opinions which its terms imply, after a season of vacillation and misunderstanding, the antagonist parties again form themselves, and stand, as before, with opposite fronts, though, it may be, with new watchwords on each side. From the time of Locke, the morality of consequences appeared to prevail over the morality of a priori principles; but still the spirit of independent morality was alive, and soon found a garb in which it could claim the respect of men.

Though moralists no longer found the common voice of mankind respond to them, when they declared that virtue and vice were founded upon eternal and immutable distinctions, apprehended by the reason, there were still many who could not be content with such a representation of man's nature, as that which assigns to him no higher motives than the love of pleasure and the aversion to pain. And these persons sought in various quarters, and under various forms, the principles of genuine morality, and the faculties by which we apprehend those principles. One such principle, thus ascribed to human nature, was a general benevolence and sociality,-a love of his kind,-which man possesses, it was held, in addition to his regard for his individual pleasure and interest. This doctrine was at this time very commonly maintained by moralists and jurists throughout Europe, having been made by Grotius and Puffendorf the basis of their systems. Cum