wise 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 quality 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 * "Whoever determines his Judgment and his Will by Right Reason, must agree with all others who judge according to Right Reason in the same matter." Ibid. cap. ii. § 8. This is in one sense only a particular instance of the identical proposition, that two things which agree with a third thing must agree with each other in that, in which they agree with the third. But the difficulty entirely consists in the particular third thing here introduced, namely, "Right Reason," the nature of which not one step is made to explain. The position is curious, as coinciding with "the universal categorical imperative," adopted as a first principle by Kant. † Leib. Op. pars iii. 271. The unnamed work which occa 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. CUDWORTH.* Cudworth, one of the eminent men educated or promoted in the English Universities during the Puritan rule, was one of the most distinguished of the Latitudinarian, or Arminian, party who came forth at the Restoration, with a love of Liberty imbibed from their Calvinistic masters, as well as from the writings of antiquity, yet tempered by the experience of their own agitated age; and with a spirit of religious toleration more impartial and mature, though less systematic and professedly comprehensive, than that of the Independents, the first sect who preached that doctrine. Taught by the errors of their time, they considered Religion as consisting, not in vain efforts to explain unsearchable mysteries, but in purity of heart exalted by pious feelings, and manifested by virtuous con sioned these remarks (perhaps one of Thomasius) appeared in 1699. How long after this Leibnitz's Dissertation was written, does not appear. * duct. The government of the Church was placed in their hands by the Revolution, and their influence was long felt among its rulers and luminaries. The first generation of their scholars turned their attention too much from the cultivation of the heart to the mere government of outward action: and in succeeding times the tolerant spirit, not natural to an establishment, was with difficulty kept up by a government whose existence depended on discouraging intolerant pretensions. No sooner had the first sketch of the Hobbian philosophy † been privately circulated at Paris, than Cudworth seized the earliest opportunity of sounding the alarm against the most justly odious of the modes of thinking which it cultivates, or forms of expression which it would introduce t;-the prelude to a war which occupied the remaining forty years of his life. The Intellectual System, his great production, is directed against the atheistical opinions of Hobbes: it touches ethical questions but occasionally and incidentally. It is a work of stupendous erudition, of much more acuteness than at first appears, of frequent mastery over diction and illustra * See the beautiful account of them by Burnet (Hist. of His Own Time, i. 321. Oxford, 1823), who was himself one of the most distinguished of this excellent body; with whom may be classed, notwithstanding some shades of doctrinal difference, his early master, Leighton, Bishop of Dunblane, a beautiful writer, and one of the best of men. The earliest account of them is in a curious contemporary pamphlet, entitled, "An Account of the new Sect of Latitude-men at Cambridge," republished in the collection of tracts, entitled " Phoenix Britannicus." Jeremy Taylor deserves the highest, and perhaps the earliest place among them but Cudworth's excellent sermon before the House of Commons (31st March, 1647) in the year of the publication of Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying, may be compared even to Taylor in charity, piety, and the most liberal toleration. : † De Cive, 1642. Birch's "Dantur boni et mali rationes æternæ et indispensabiles :' Thesis for the degree of B. D. at Cambridge in 1644. Life of Cudworth, prefixed to his edition of the Intellectual System (Lond. 1743), i. 7. tion on subjects where it is most rare; and it is distinguished, perhaps beyond any other volume of controversy, by that best proof of the deepest conviction of the truth of a man's principles, a fearless statement of the most formidable objections to them; - a fairness rarely practised but by him who is conscious of his power to answer them. In all his writings, it must be owned, that his learning obscures his reasonings, and seems even to oppress his powerful intellect. It is an unfortunate effect of the redundant fulness of his mind, that it overflows in endless digressions. which break the chain of argument, and turn aside the thoughts of the reader from the main object. He was educated before usage had limited the naturalisation of new words from the learned languages; before the failure of those great men, from Bacon to Milton, who laboured to follow a Latin order in their sentences, and the success of those men of inferior powers, from Cowley to Addison, who were content with the order, as well as the words, of pure and elegant conversation, had, as it were, by a double series of experiments, ascertained that the involutions and inversions of the ancient languages are seldom reconcileable with the genius of ours; and that they are, unless skilfully, as well as sparingly introduced, at variance with the natural beauties of our prose composition. His mind was more that of an ancient than of a modern philosopher. He often indulged in that sort of amalgamation of fancy with speculation, the delight of the Alexandrian doctors, with whom he was most familiarly conversant; and the Intellectual System, both in thought and expression, has an old and foreign air, not unlike a translation from the work of a later Platonist. Large ethical works of this eminent writer are extant in manuscript in the British Museum.* One posthumous volume on Morals was published by * A curious account of the history of these MSS. by Dr. Kippis, Dr. Chandler, Bishop of Durham, entitled "A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality."* But there is the more reason to regret (as far as relates to the history of Opinion) that the larger treatises are still unpublished, because the above volume is not so much an ethical treatise as an introduction to one. Protagoras of old, and Hobbes then alive, having concluded that Right and Wrong were unreal, because they were not perceived by the senses, and because all human knowledge consists only in such perception, Cudworth endeavours to refute them by disproving that part of their premises which forms the last-stated proposition. The mind has many conceptions (vonμara) which are not cognisable by the senses; and though they are occasioned by sensible objects, yet they cannot be formed but by a faculty superior to sense. The conceptions of Justice and Duty he places among them. The distinction of Right from Wrong is discerned by Reason; and as soon as these words are defined, it becomes evident that it would be a contradiction in terms to affirm that any power, human or Divine, could change their nature; or, in other words, make the same act to be just and unjust at the same time. They have existed eternally, in the only mode in which truths can be said to be eternal, in the Eternal Mind; and they are indestructible and unchangeable like that Supreme Intelligence.† What * 8vo. Lond. 1731. see, "There are many objects of our mind which we can neither hear, feel, smell, nor taste, and which did never enter into it by any sense; and therefore we can have no sensible pictures or ideas of them, drawn by the pencil of that inward limner, or painter, which borrows all his colours from sense, which we call Fancy:' and if we reflect on our own cogitations of these things, we shall sensibly perceive that they are not phantastical but noematical: as, for example, justice, equity, duty and obligation, cogitation, opinion, intellection, volition, memory, verity, falsity, cause, effect, genus, species, nullity, contingency, possibility, impossibility, and innumerable others." Ibid. 140. We have here an anticipation of Kant. |