nomenal) actions and words of others as signs of thought and will in them. In like manner, we may interpret phenomena generally as signs of eternal thought and will, as manifestations of eternal mind: we in fact daily see, hear, and know God, if our spiritual faculties are open, together with our senses. From the foregoing it seems to follow that there are among phenomena no real causes : real causes are hyperphenomenal, God, or finite spirits. Purely mechanical philosophy knows not true causes, but rather mere signs and things signified, forming, as it were, a "rational discourse," evincing by the regularity of connection between sign and thing signified an intelligent primal cause. It is concerned merely with phenomena and their laws, which are but the rules of the operation of spirit. These rules constitute a grammar to the understanding of nature and the prevision of effects. It is not, however, a rational necessity that the rules should always remain the same, though it be a rational necessity that there be rules. The phenomenal world is a world in which "reason is immersed in matter," and intellect is merely latent in sense: it is a world of " blemishes and defects" (which, however, "have a use, in that they make an agreeable sort of variety, and augment the beauty of the rest of creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlightened parts"). Pure reason is pure causality. It is not known by means of the grammar of the understanding, but only in moral and spiritual intuition and trust. "There is no sense nor sensory, nor anything like sense or sensory, in God. Sense implies an impression from some other being, and denotes a dependence in the soul that hath it. Sense is a passion [passivity], and passions imply imperfection. God knoweth all things as pure mind or intellect; but nothing by sense, nor in nor through a sensory." - The two great principles of morality are the being of God and the freedom of man.

Result.- Locke, we saw, left the external world (matter), the self, and God in the doubtful position of being only

ENGLISH MORALISTS,—SHAFTESBURY.

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(quasi-) knowable: Berkeley, we have just seen, drops matter, as an irrational notion. By so doing, he begins the development of the Lockean doctrine towards its legitimate result. Berkeley is a pure idealist, and one of the very few empiricists who have been so. His idealism is, however, at least in its best-known form, as a factor in the history of philosophy, only an empirical idealism.

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English Moralists. - The several next following thinkers, including Hume (who, however, has an independent position in the history of philosophy) are commonly known as the English Moralists of the Eighteenth Century. They are (besides Hume) Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, Clarke, Price, Adam Smith, Paley. They are perhaps more important in the history of thought than in themselves regarded, though not insignificant in this respect.

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Anthony Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury1 (1671-1713). — Shaftesbury, who was grandson of the celebrated statesman of the same title, was educated by a private tutor, acting under Locke's direction, at a private school, and at the Grammar School of Winchester. His education was supplemented by several years' travel on the Continent, which gave a cosmopolitan flavor to his thinking. He was possessed by an ardent liking for the ancient classics, and became so fully imbued with the thought and spirit of them that he never afterwards could accommodate himself fully to the modern "Christian" temper and view of things. He succeeded his father, the second Earl of Shaftesbury, as a (Whig) member of the House of Lords. On account of ill-health he was obliged, after a few years in Parliament, to retire to private life. He made visits to Holland and Italy on account of ill-health. Personally Shaftesbury

1 See "Shaftesbury," by Thomas Fowler, M.A., LL.D. (" English Philosophers Series "); Shaftesbury's "Characteristics."

was characterized by a spirit of benevolence which, it is said, practically benefited not a few people. He was particularly fond of stimulating and assisting ambitious, intelligent young men. He was of a religious temperament, but no believer in dogmas. He is known, however, to have had little sympathy with the Deistic movement.

Works. Shaftesbury's works are "Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times" (1711), a collection of essays (some of which are not strictly philosophical) on various topics; "Letters written by a Nobleman to a Young Man at the University." His ethical views are to be found chiefly in an essay (among those of the "Characteristics") entitled an "Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit." The essay "The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody," contains his metaphysical doctrines.

Philosophy. The motive impulse of Shaftesbury's thinking is to be found, like that of the Cambridge Platonists (whom he seems to have esteemed), in hostility to the views of Hobbes and the dogmatic theologians.

The

Metaphysics: God. - Shaftesbury professedly detests technical "metaphysics" and "system-making." metaphysicians, he says, by their attempt to demonstrate everything," renounce daylight and extinguish, in a manner, the bright, visible, outside world." "The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system. True philosophy is the study of happiness." One need "know only so much metaphysics as will teach him that there is nothing in it." But Shaftesbury has, nevertheless, his metaphysics, and talks not a little about "system." He regards virtue as a sort of harmony with the "universal system" of things, and the good as happiness, all things working together for the best. From what he terms the "mutual dependency of things," the "order, union, and coḥerence of the whole," the universal system, “the coherent scheme of things," he infers the existence of a universal mind, a wise and benevolent God. He combats the Lockean notion that matter could (by God) have

been made to think or produce thought, and finds in the superiority of thought to matter evidence of the eternity of thought. God is related to the world as the soul to the body; he directs and manages all the operations of nature as the soul does those of the body.

Ethics: Moral Beauty (Virtue). — That harmony which characterizes the "universal system as such appears also in man, in himself, and "his relations to the world." In himself, in the sum of his thoughts and affections, he is like a musical instrument, no one of the strings of which can be overstrained without damage to the instrument as a whole. As a part of the universal human whole, he is good only as he acts for the public good, is possessed by the spirit of benevolence. As a sort of harmony, virtue is a species of beauty: it is moral beauty, or beauty of action and characters, instead of mere objects. Moral beauty is not an object or product of reason, nor is it a merely conventional thing. It is an object and product of a faculty of "taste," a moral sense. The moral sense is as natural to us as the faculty of feeling itself. Its operation is immediate, and when the sense is educated, decisive: what is good, presents itself to it at once as the "amiable and the agreeable, and hence right." The criterion of right and wrong is, in general, the public good: to love the public, "to study universal good, and to promote the interest of the whole world as far as lies within our power, is surely the height of goodness, and makes that temper which we call divine." On the other hand, "since it is impossible that the public good, or good of the system, can be preserved without the affection towards private good, a creature wanting in these is in reality wanting in some degree to goodness and natural rectitude, and may thus be esteemed vicious and defective." But the otherregarding sentiments cannot, Shaftesbury maintains (in opposition to Hobbes), be deduced from the merely selfregarding. As regards the relation of reason and the will,

as it is the "affectionate part" of human nature (the

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"heart") rather than the reason that apprehends the right or the good, so it is the appetite rather than reason that determines action: appetite gives the initiative of action, reason merely guides it. The sanction of virtue is twofold: a sanction of conscience combined with the “love and reverence of a beneficent, just, and wise God." As to the fear of "future punishment" and hope of "future reward" (the only "sanctions" recognized by Locke), these "cannot be of the kind called good affections such as are acknowledged the spring and source of actions truly good." These affections can at most only help to prepare the way towards the cultivation of a moral disposition. A will or decree of God, or supreme goodness, must necessarily be unintelligible to a being who does not know what goodness is.

Esthetics: Beauty. The constituent elements of beauty are harmony and proportion. There are three orders of beauty: (1) "dead forms," or external objects; (2) "forms that form" or "have intelligence, action, or operation;" (3) the "form which fashions all other forms, both dead and living, viz., the Divine Mind." "Whatever is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable; whatever is harmonious and proportionable is true; what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good."

Result. In the philosophy of Shaftesbury we have an assertion of the rights of "internal sense," or feeling against the purely discursive faculty or activity of thought. Instead of a mechanical relation of part to part and to whole (as in the system of Hobbes), we have here (i.e., in the principles of benevolence) an immediate living, or felt, relation instead of an individualistic, egoistic ethics, we have a universalistic, altruistic one. Since sense, and not reason, is the norm of truth in this system, the system is not rationalistic; but since sense here is internal and in a measure reflective, the system is intuitional rather than empirical. The system of Shaftesbury is pantheistic.—