Section V.: Controversies Concerning the Moral Faculties and the Social Affections.

cumberland—cudworth—clarke—shaftesbury—bossuet—fenelon—leibnitz—malebranche—edwards—buffier.

Dr. Richard Cumberland, raised to the See of Peterborough after the Revolution of 1688, was the only professed answerer of Hobbes. His work On the Laws of Nature still retains a place on the shelf, though not often on the desk. The philosophical epigrams of Hobbes form a contrast to the verbose, prolix, and languid diction of his answerer. The forms of scholastic argument serve more to encumber his style, than to insure his exactness. But he has substantial merits. He justly observes, that all men can only be said to have had originally a right to all things, in a sense in which “right” has the same meaning with “power.” He shows that Hobbes is at variance with himself, inasmuch as the dictates of Right Reason, which, by his own statement, teach men for their own safety to forego the exercise of that right, and which he calls “laws of Nature,” are coeval with it; and that mankind perceive the moral limits of their power as clearly and as soon as they are conscious of its existence. He enlarges the intimations of Grotius on the social feelings, which prompt men to the pleasures of pacific intercourse, as certainly as the apprehension of danger and of destruction urges them to avoid hostility. The fundamental principle of his system of Ethics is, that “the greatest benevolence of every rational agent to all others is the happiest state of each individual, as well as of the whole.” The happiness accruing to each man from the observance and cultivation of benevolence, he considers as appended to it by the Supreme Ruler; through which He sanctions it as His law, and reveals it to the mind of every reasonable creature. From this principle he deduces the rules of Morality, which he calls the “laws of Nature.” The surest, or rather the only mark that they are the commandments of God, is, that their observance promotes the happiness of man: for that reason alone could they be imposed by that Being whose essence is Love. As our moral faculties must to us be the measure of all moral excellence, he infers that the moral attributes of the Divinity must in their nature be only a transcendent degree of those qualities which we most approve, love, and revere, in those moral agents with whom we are familiar. He had a momentary glimpse of the possibility that some human actions might be performed with a view to the happiness of others, without any consideration of the pleasure reflected back on ourselves. But it is too faint and transient to be worthy of observation, otherwise than as a new proof how often great truths must flit before the Understanding, before they can be firmly and finally held in its grasp. His only attempt to explain the nature of the Moral Faculty, is the substitution of Practical Reason (a phrase of the Schoolmen, since become celebrated from its renewal by Kant) for Right Reason; and his definition of the first, as that which points out the ends and means of action. Throughout his whole reasoning, he adheres to the accustomed confusion of the equality which renders actions virtuous, with the sentiments excited in us by the contemplation of them. His language on the identity of general and individual interest is extremely vague; though it be, as he says, the foundation-stone of the Temple of Concord among men.

It is little wonderful that Cumberland should not have disembroiled this ancient and established confusion, since Leibnitz himself, in a passage where he reviews the theories of Morals which had gone before him, has done his utmost to perpetuate it.—“It is a question,” says the latter, “whether the preservation of human society be the first principle of the law of Nature. This our author denies, in opposition to Grotius, who laid down sociability to be so;—to Hobbes, who ascribed that character to mutual fear; and to Cumberland, who held that it was mutual benevolence; which are all three only different names for the safety and welfare of society.” Here the great philosopher considered benevolence or fear, two feelings of the human mind, to be the first principles of the law of Nature, in the same sense in which the tendency of certain actions to the well-being of the community may be so regarded. The confusion, however, was then common to him with many, as it even now is with most. The comprehensive view was his own. He perceived the close resemblance of these various, and even conflicting opinions, in that important point of view in which they relate to the effects of moral and immoral actions on the general interest. The tendency of Virtue to preserve amicable intercourse was enforced by Grotius; its tendency to prevent injury was dwelt on by Hobbes; its tendency to promote an interchange of benefits was inculcated by Cumberland.