Such eternal and immutable Verities, then, the moral distinctions of Good and Evil are, in the pauses of the general argument, declared to be. They, 'as they must have some certain natures which are the actions or souls of men,' are unalterable by Will or Opinion. 'Modifications of Mind and Intellect,' they are as much more real and substantial things than Hard, Soft, Hot, and Cold, modifications of mere senseless matter—and even so, on the principles of the atomical philosophy, dependent on the soul for their existence—as Mind itself stands prior in the order of nature to Matter. In the mind they are as 'anticipations of morality' springing up, not indeed 'from certain rules or propositions arbitrarily printed on the soul as on a book,' but from some more inward and vital Principle in intellectual beings, as such whereby these have within themselves a natural determination to do some things and to avoid others.
The only other ethical determinations made by Cudworth may thus be summarized:—Things called naturally Good and Due are such as the intellectual nature obliges to immediately, absolutely, and perpetually, and upon no condition of any voluntary action done or omitted intervening; things positively Good and Due are such as are in themselves indifferent, but the intellectual nature obliges to them accidentally or hypothetically, upon condition, in the case of a command, of some voluntary act of another person invested with lawful authority, or of one's self, in the case of a specific promise. In a positive command (as of the civil ruler), what obliges is only the intellectual nature of him that is commanded, in that he recognizes the lawful authority of him that commands, and so far determines and modifies his general duty of obedience as to do an action immaterial in itself for the sake of the formality of yielding obedience to lawfully constituted authority. So, in like manner, a specific promise, in itself immaterial and not enjoined by natural justice, is to be kept for the sake of the formality of keeping faith, which is enjoined.
Cudworth's work, in which these are nearly all the ethical allusions, gives no scope for a summary under the various topics.
I.—Specially excluding any such External Standard of moral Good as the arbitrary Will, either of God or the Sovereign, he views it as a simple ultimate natural quality of actions or dispositions, as included among the verities of things, by the side of which the phenomena of Sense are unreal.
II.—The general Intellectual Faculty cognizes the moral verities, which it contains within itself and brings rather than finds.
III.—He does not touch upon Happiness; probably he would lean to asceticism. He sets up no moral code.
IV.—Obligation to the Positive Civil Laws in matters indifferent follows from the intellectual recognition of the established relation between ruler and subject.
V.—Morality is not dependent upon the Deity in any other sense than the whole frame of things is.
SAMUEL CLARKE. [1675-1729.]
Clarke put together his two series of Boyle Lectures (preached 1704 and 1705) as 'A Discourse, concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation,' in answer to Hobbes, Spinoza, &c. The burden of the ethical discussion falls under the head of the Obligations of Natural Religion, in the second series.