On the question of the Will, his views have been given at length.
Disinterested Sentiment is, in origin, self-regarding; for, pitying others, we imagine the like calamity befalling ourselves. In one place, he seems to say, that the Sentiment of Power is also involved. It is the great defect of his system that he takes so little account of the Social affections, whether natural or acquired.
III.—His Theory of Happiness, or the Summum Bonum, would follow from his analysis of the Feelings and Will. But Felicity being a continual progress in desire, and consisting less in present enjoyment than in assuring the way of future desire, the chief element in it is the Sense of Power.
IV.—A Moral Code is minutely detailed under the name of Laws of Nature, in force in the Natural State under Divine Sanction. It inculcates all the common virtues, and makes little or no departure from the usually received maxims.
V.—The relation of Ethics to Politics is the closest imaginable. Not even Society, as commonly understood, but only the established civil authority, is the source of rules of conduct. In the civil (which to Hobbes is the only meaning of the social) state, the laws of nature are superseded, by being supposed taken up into, the laws of the Sovereign Power.
VI.—As regards Religion, he affirms the coincidence of his reasoned deduction of the laws of Nature with the precepts of Revelation. He makes a mild use of the sanctions of a Future Life to enforce the laws of Nature, and to give additional support to the commands of the sovereign that take the place of these in the social state.
Among the numberless replies, called forth by the bold speculations of Hobbes, were some works of independent ethical importance; in particular, the treatises of Cumberland, Cudworth, and Clarke. Cumberland stands by himself; Cudworth and Clarke, agreeing in some respects, are commonly called the Rational moralists, along with Wollaston and Price (who fall to be noticed later).
RICHARD CUMBERLAND. [1632-1718.]
Cumberland's' Latin work, De Legibus Naturae, disquisitio philosophica contra Hobbium instituta, appeared in 1672. The book is important as a distinctly philosophical disquisition, but its extraordinarily discursive character renders impossible anything like analysis. His chief points will be presented in a fuller summary than usual.
I.—The STANDARD of Moral Good is given in the laws of Nature, which may all be summed up in one great Law—Benevolence to all rational agents or the endeavour to the utmost of our power to promote the common good of all. His theory is hardly to be distinguished from the Greatest Happiness principle; unless it might be represented as putting forward still more prominently the search for Individual Happiness, with a fixed assumption that this is best secured through the promotion of the general good. No action, he declares, can be called 'morally good that does not in its own nature contribute somewhat to the happiness of men.' The speciality of his view is his professing not to make an induction as regards the character of actions from the observation of their effects, but to deduce the propriety of (benevolent) actions from, the consideration of the character and position of rational agents in nature. Rules of conduct, all directed to the promotion of the Happiness of rational agents, may thus be found in the form of propositions impressed upon the mind by the Nature of Things; and these are then interpreted to be laws of Nature (summed up in the one great Law), promulgated by God with the natural effects of actions as Sanctions of Reward and Punishment to enforce them.