Yet let us not be too hasty in deciding thus. Let us not despair of the fortunes of the course which leads from Ideas to Truth. The voyage is yet far from finished: it is hardly begun. Who knows what changes the successive time may still have in store. Perhaps the newer system, while it thus bounds on with bending mast and swelling canvass, may be suffering a strain which its texture is too frail to resist. Perhaps its parting sides may admit the surrounding flood, ever ready to whelm such adventures in its unfathomable depths. Perhaps the rising storm may soon bring to light the superior security of the stronger forms of ancient building; perhaps the direction of the wind may change; perhaps from that other shore, lighter galleys, fitted for modern times, may advance to relieve their comrade. Or, once more, perhaps it may be found that both paths, rightly pursued, lead to the same end: and persevering and skilful navigators, who have taken their departure from the remotest positions of the Intellectual Globe, may still meet in some common point, to which their course is tending; may find and recognise each other as fellow-labourers on some shore as yet undiscovered; may rejoice together in the bright sunshine of the unknown Islands of the Blest, which they sought so long in mist and twilight, ever mistaking each other, and missing of their aim.

Such a point of union we may consistently hope there will be found. We know from the history of all the most clear and undoubted portions of our knowledge, that except we are rightly guided by Ideas, Truth is not to be found. From the physical sciences themselves, the great boast of the philosophy of experience, we know that experience cannot lead to solid knowledge, except so far as it is combined with a careful investigation of the ideas which knowledge must involve. We know that the attempts to reject these fundamental elements of truth involve us in endless change,

obscurity, and doubt. We know, in short, that we must look for no Science of Morals, as we find no Science of any other kind, except we can discern the region where the truths taught by Cudworth and by Locke are united: where the eternal and the immutable beams through the outward veil of the actual and visible: where experience gives reality to Ideas, and Ideas give universality to the truths which we gather from experience.

LECTURE V.

LOCKE. CLARKE.

THE Philosophy of Morals is closely connected with the Philosophy of Mind. New views respecting the human understanding cannot fail to produce new views of the foundations of duty: for in Psychology, we cannot define the powers and operations of the Understanding without treating of the Affections and the Will; and in Ethics, it is not enough to consider the office of the Will, we must also trace its dependence upon the Understanding.

The historical sketch, which I have endeavoured in previous lectures to give, of the progress of the controversy concerning the Foundation of Morals, so far as English writers are concerned in it, has brought us to the well-known name of John Locke; who is commonly considered the author of a great revolution in the metaphysical system prevalent in England. To his place in our argument we must therefore now turn our attention. His celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding was first published in 1689, and therefore, in point of time, is very little later than the works of which we have already spoken. But still, in the tone and spirit of his writings he belongs to a newer school; for Cudworth, and Clarendon, and Harrington, and even Cumberland, were disciples of the philosophy which prevailed in England before the civil wars; but Locke was deeply and decidedly formed by the opinions which came into vogue towards the end of that stirring period. He is commonly looked upon, indeed, as the founder and master of the New Philosophy which then succeeded the Old; but I think it will be acknowledged, by any one who carefully looks into the literary his

tory of the subjects on which he wrote, that he originated little or nothing. All the distinctive opinions which he maintained had already been asserted, and very widely entertained. They form the main substance of the system of Hobbes, and of the concessions made by the less resolute portion of his opponents. Locke's office was not that of a discoverer, but one which more commonly places a man at the head of a school of philosophers, the office of bringing together into a system, tenets which others have taught in a less connected form, and for which the time is ripe; of proposing safeguards by which their obvious dangerous consequences are seemingly averted; and of expounding them in a lucid and persuasive manner, generally intelligible to common readers. Such, I believe it will be found, were Locke's functions in the history of English philosophy. But my business with him, at present, is not in this wider aspect, as the supposed author of a new system of metaphysics; but as a writer, who having great authority among his contemporaries, delivered his opinions upon the question of the Foundations of Morals, and both directly and indirectly influenced the fortunes of this great controversy. It is at once obvious, in his case, that he belongs to the school of moralists who reject the independence of morality, and reduce moral good to a dependence on something else, namely, the pleasure which it produces. This he plainly asserts. "Good or evil are nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us. Moral good and evil thus is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law whereby good or evil is drawn on us by the will and power of the Law-maker; which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending our observance or breach of the law, by the decree of the Law-maker, is that we call reward and punishment *." And what, perhaps, even more tends to make him a conspicuous figure on

* Essay, Book II. ch. xxviii. § 5.

this side of the controversy, is, his arguments against innate practical principles, in the beginning of this Essay; not, it is to be observed, his assertion that man has not innate ideas; for the doctrine of the existence of such ideas is in no way necessary to the support of independent moral truth, any more than of independent geometrical truth. But the mode in which Locke prosecuted the war against innate ideas, led him to adduce, as important and instructive facts, all the wretched and disgusting instances of human degradation and depravity, which tend to show how far man may lose his moral nature. To dwell upon such cases has always been a favourite mode of reasoning of those who hold that moral judgments are merely artificial and conventional; and however we may justify Locke's adoption of this course, by the demands of the argument in which he had engaged himself, the effect upon his disciples was likely to be, and was, to lead them to reject all notion of actions being right or wrong in themselves.

Moreover, the general scope and leading principles of Locke's system had the same tendency. All our ideas, he holds, are derived from Sensation and Reflexion. The latter term, Reflexion, is so vague that it allows his disciples to make of his doctrines what they please. The meaning of this term may be extended, as it has been extended by the more temperate philosophers and genuine moralists of his school, in all times, and especially in recent times, so as to save the interests of morality for practical purposes, and to avoid, I might say to evade, all glaringly offensive consequences. But on the other hand, the term 'Reflexion' may be so limited and restricted as almost to lose its effect in the general proposition, and to leave the doctrine much the same as if it had asserted ideas to arise from sensation only. When a term so wide and vague, or so complex and multifarious, so thin and shadowy, or so ponderous and un