LITERATURE
The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's Sermons, and Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my Theory of Good and Evil.
[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.
[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (Treatise, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' (Ibid. vol. ii. p. 311.)
[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal God, but never without Metaphysic, i.e. a theory about the ultimate nature of things.
[4] Tennyson's Wages.
[5] The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is 'Cum possit Deus omnia efficere quae esae possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant, omnipotens merito dicitur.' (Summa Theol., Pars I. Q. xxv. art. 8.)
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