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of systems so founded. property, exist only because they are expedient. We reply, as before, that Rights are founded on the whole nature of man, in such a way that he cannot have a human existence without them. He is a moral being, and must have Rights, because Morality cannot exist where Rights are not. Rights are expedient for man, just as it is expedient for man that his blood should circulate. If it do not, he soon ceases to

For, it may be said, Rights, such as

be man.

Thus it will be seen that according to our view, Morality is founded upon the whole nature of man, as containing Desires and Affections, and as subject to a Rule which must govern his whole being. The Reason is employed both in giving to the objects of the Desires and Affections a more general and ideal character, and in discerning the manner in which they may be controlled and directed so as to conform to Rule, and to the Supreme Rule which all other Rules necessarily imply. We thus assent to those who say that it is the office of Reason to govern the Desires and Affections; and we add that Reason, by its nature, must tend to govern them so that they may be right. We assent to those who say that Virtue consists in acting conformably to man's Nature; meaning that his nature is a moral nature, and necessarily implies a Rule of rightness. We assent to Butler when he speaks of man as having a determinate mental constitution; meaning thereby a constitution in which the Desires and Affections must be controlled by Rules, and therefore governed by Reason. We assent to those who speak of man as having a moral Faculty, meaning that he has the Faculty of seeing the necessity of such Rules and of referring actions to them. We do not speak of man as having a Moral Sense; because the discovery of the conformity of actions to a Moral Rule is a process entirely different from the operation of any sense. We speak with

reverence of Conscience, meaning by Conscience the judgment which we form of our actions, as being right or wrong: and we are willing to assert the authority of Conscience, meaning thereby that our judgment of our actions as right or wrong, is a ground of action superior to any other view of them; but we do not speak of the authority of Conscience as supreme, meaning that what we judge to be right is necessarily right, and what we judge to be wrong necessarily wrong. For our judgment on these points may be erroWe may have wrongly conceived or wrongly applied the supreme Rule of human action; and thus our erroneous Conscience may require to be enlightened and instructed by a better use of our rational Faculty.

neous.

We do not rest our Rules of action upon the tendency of actions to produce the Happiness of others, or of mankind in general; because we cannot solve a problem so difficult as to determine which of two courses of action will produce the greatest amount of human happiness and we see a simpler and far more satisfactory mode of deducing such Rules; namely, by considering that there must be such Rules; that they must be Rules for man; for man living among men ; and for the whole of man's being. Since we are thus led directly to moral Rules, by the consideration of the internal conditions of man's being, we cannot think it wise to turn away from this method, and to try to determine such Rules by reference to an obscure and unmanageable external condition, the amount of Happiness produced. But we do not doubt of the truth of this doctrine, that right action does produce the greatest amount of human happiness; and we conceive that happiness must be so apprehended and so understood as to be consistent with this general truth.

We do not deduce our Rules of action directly from the tendency of actions to produce our own happiness, in the way of reward; because we do not sufficiently know, on

independent grounds, the Laws according to which our Judge will administer his rewards. We believe that He will reward what is right and punish what is wrong: but we believe that He intends us to use our rational and moral faculties in discovering what is right and what is wrong. He has given us other helps in the task, but He has not superseded these. We cannot be content to make our Morality depend, as Paley does, on these two steps;—that God wishes the happiness of mankind, and that therefore he will reward what we do for the promotion of that happiness; for we conceive that to determine in what sense human happiness is to be understood, when we say that God wishes it and wishes us to promote it, is far more difficult, than it is to determine God's will by seeking for it in the Supreme Rule of human action besides which, even if we could determine what this happiness is, we might still be unable to discern the best means of promoting it. But we do not doubt that the Supreme Rule of human action, the rule which requires action to be right, is identical with the Will of God; and that His Will is the highest and strongest sanction by which any Rule can be enforced.

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Though, as we have already said, our Morality does not depend upon actually existing human Laws, nor even upon the necessary existence of Law; yet will Morality, and the Laws which necessarily exist in human society, rest upon the same foundation, the moral nature of man. And in tracing this fundamental basis of Law and of Morality into a system of each, there may be, and naturally will be, a correspondence between certain general provinces and divisions of the one and of the other, of Law and of Morality. And thus as we have five leading kinds of Rights, we have also five leading kinds of Duty and of Virtue. These five are Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity, and Wisdom; which last, reckoned by Aristotle and others as an intellectual virtue,

(in distinction to the others, which are termed moral virtues) may be called Order; since it manifests itself both in the discovery of right Rules and of means for upholding them. Without pressing too much upon the parallelism between these five kinds of Virtue and the five kinds of Rights respectively, we may venture to say that these five Virtues may be regarded as a convenient division of Virtue, so far as virtue is divisible and these may deserve to be termed the Cardinal Virtues, far better than that ancient quaternion which moralists have so often assumed, of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence. And as this is a division of Virtues, which are habits of action, so is it a division of Duties, which are occasions of such actions; and we have Duties of Benevolence, of Justice, of Truth, of Purity and of Order.

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Duty is a term which especially belongs to Morality, not to Law. The term Obligation is used in both subjects: we speak of the legal Obligation of paying our debts, and the moral Obligation of relieving the distressed. It would produce some convenience if the term were confined to the former meaning; but at any rate the two senses ought not to be confounded. We ought not to speak, as Paley does, of obliged and ought as synonymous terms; seeing that men are often obliged to do what they ought not to do.

Nor again, ought the habit of such phraseology to lead us to suppose that because legal obligations are always obligations to some person, therefore moral obligations are also always due to some person. Duties to others, as they are sometimes termed, are much better spoken of as Duties simply for they are to be performed not only out of regard to others, as what they ought to have, but far more, from regard to ourselves and what we ought to be.

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To every (Legal) Obligation which we contract or have, corresponds a Right which another person requires or has :

but to our Duties correspond no Rights of others. If however we wish for a correlative term to Duties, we may use the phrase Moral Claim; we may say that a poor man in distress has a Moral Claim on his rich neighbour, even if the law do not give him a legal Right.

And many of our Duties which regard our special relations to particular persons, and which we may therefore term Relative Duties, may be conveniently arranged and treated of according to those Relations.

Having these views of the most convenient way of using the term Obligation, we should avoid using such terms as perfect and imperfect Obligation, which have been common among Moralists. Such phrases have the inconvenience of implying that no Obligations are perfect but those which the law imposes, and that all our Duties are of the nature of Debts, only less perfect in degree.

It may be asked how we can apply these general heads of our System to particular actions and to special moral questions, such as Moralists are expected to decide: and it may be urged that some reference to the results of actions and to some external object of action is requisite for such purposes. But it will be found that this is not so, and that a consideration of the ideas of Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity and Order, determined in the way in which we have determined them, combined with a regard to the various relations in which men stand to each other, will enable us to draw out a complete scheme of human duties. And we conceive that this is not only a possible mode of proceeding, but that it is the way in which men do naturally and spontaneously endeavour to decide for themselves such moral questions as come before them. If the doubt be what course of action Justice, or Truth, requires, and if they reason morally on the question, they do not generally so much consider what will come of each course,-what they will gain or lose by it,—as what

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