Richard Price.

About the same time with the celebrated work of Smith, but with a popular reception very different, Dr. Richard Price, an excellent and eminent non-conformist minister, published A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals;—an attempt to revive the intellectual theory of moral obligation, which seemed to have fallen under the attacks of Butler, Hutcheson, and Hume, and before that of Smith. It attracted little observation at first; but being afterwards countenanced by the Scottish school, it may seem to deserve some notice, at a moment when the kindred speculations of the German metaphysicians have effected an establishment in France, and are no longer unknown in England.

The Understanding itself is, according to Price, an independent source of simple ideas. “The various kinds of agreement and disagreement between our ideas, spoken of by Locke, are so many new simple ideas.” “This is true of our ideas of proportion, of our ideas of identity and diversity, existence, connection, cause and effect, power, possibility, and of our ideas of right and wrong.” “The first relates to quantity, the last to actions, the rest to all things.” “Like all other simple ideas, they are undefinable.”

It is needless to pursue this theory farther, till an answer be given to the observation made before, that as no perception or judgment, or other unmixed act of Understanding, merely as such, and without the agency of some intermediate emotion, can affect the Will, the account given by Dr. Price of perceptions or judgments respecting moral subjects, does not advance one step towards the explanation of the authority of Conscience over the Will, which is the matter to be explained. Indeed, this respectable writer felt the difficulty so much as to allow, “that in contemplating the acts of moral agents, we have both a perception of the understanding and a feeling of the heart.” He even admits, that it would have been highly pernicious to us if our reason had been left without such support. But he has not shown how, on such a supposition, we could have acted on a mere opinion; nor has he given any proof that what he calls “support” is not, in truth, the whole of what directly produces the conformity of voluntary acts to Morality.